Shaltiel Abrahavner was expelled from the Jewish institution

The expulsion of Shaltiel Abravanel from the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency turns a political break into a lasting erasure: the record preserves his removal, but obscures both the arguments that led to it and the dissenting vision he sought to advance. Pieced together from a small newspaper notice, the accounts of Gershom Wald and Atalia, and the absence of sealed or destroyed documents, the episode shows how a dissenting position on partition and Jewish-Arab coexistence becomes a stigma that follows Abravanel into solitude.

The dissent behind the expulsion

Abravanel’s disagreement was not, as the novel insists, a renunciation of Zionism. Atalia explains that he continued to believe Jews had a right to build a home in the Land of Israel, but concluded that the home must be shared with Arabs. His ideas had set him apart from his colleagues over time: in the 1920s he began doubting the assumption that Jewish settlement could proceed without dispossessing anyone, and in the 1930s he foresaw the two peoples moving toward a bloody collision in which one might not be able to remain. For years he swallowed his doubts, observed institutional discipline, and spoke publicly in the expected voice of a representative of Jerusalem’s Sephardic elite. His occasional calls for dialogue with the neighboring people and criticism of violent methods drew little interest.

By the 1940s, he sometimes voiced his dissent inside meetings of the Jewish Agency’s leadership and the Zionist Executive. In 1947, he opposed the United Nations partition plan and the establishment of an independent Jewish state, arguing for a historical compromise between the peoples living in the land. The disagreement concerned both the immediate political choice and the cost of pursuing it: Abravanel feared that the chosen course would lead to bloody war, with the lives of the Jewish population in the Land of Israel at stake, while he believed some possibility of compromise remained. He was thus not portrayed as rejecting a Jewish home, but as challenging the form it would take and the consequences of building it through partition and war.

A newspaper trace and an institutional silence

Shmuel Ash encounters the episode not in a full account but in scattered newspaper notices. At the National Library’s reading room at Givat Ram, he works through nine monthly volumes of Davar, from June 1947 to February 1948, searching for references to Abravanel. In a small item dated June 18, 1947, he finds that Abravanel had asked to appear before the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine to present an individual opinion on the conflict between Jews and Arabs and offer an original solution for peace. The Agency’s leadership rejected his request, insisting that the Agency and the Zionist Executive speak to the committee with one voice rather than issue contradictory positions. Abravanel considered appearing independently, but ultimately complied with the majority’s discipline, possibly because he had been warned that doing otherwise would cost him his place in the leading institutions of Jewish society. Shmuel copies the notice and keeps it in his shirt pocket.

A second brief report, dated December 21, 1947, says that Abravanel had been removed from his offices in the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency the day before, following disagreements with colleagues in both institutions. The report notes that he declined to answer the journalist’s question about the reasons. It nevertheless conveys his view that the course chosen by David Ben-Gurion and others led inevitably toward a bloody war between the two peoples, with no certain victor, and that a historic compromise was still possible. It identifies Abravanel as a well-known lawyer and Arabist who had been at the head of the two institutions for nearly nine years. The notice is tucked at the bottom of an inside page, beneath a Haganah call for owners of cargo vehicles to register with the National Guard; its physical placement mirrors the marginal position of the dissent it records.

The surviving public trace cannot settle the full circumstances. Shmuel finds no evidence that Abravanel publicly debated the matter or appealed to either the Jewish or Arab community. Later, Sheindelevitch tells him that the Zionist Executive’s documentation is available at the Zionist archive, but its meetings were public and the records consist of speeches. The Jewish Agency’s secret meeting protocols, by contrast, are classified for another forty years. The difference between a public newspaper notice and sealed deliberations leaves the expulsion legible as an outcome but not fully recoverable as an institutional process.

Resignation, removal, and the missing letter

Gershom Wald’s recollection makes the distinction between resignation and expulsion explicit. Abravanel did not leave because he had ceased to be a Zionist; he believed his colleagues had abandoned the movement’s path and followed Ben-Gurion into political madness. Wald recalls that Abravanel was given twenty-four hours to choose between placing a resignation letter on Ben-Gurion’s desk and being formally expelled, unanimously and with dishonor, from both institutions. Atalia gives the ultimatum a different duration, recalling that he was allowed two hours. The accounts agree on the coercive choice, while differing on its stated deadline.

Abravanel wrote a reasoned letter of resignation, but it was hidden, and no newspaper agreed to publish it. Years later, Atalia went to the Zionist archive seeking the letter or a copy. She returned empty-handed; officials did not say it was lost, but claimed it had never existed. The record therefore contains the brief announcement of his removal while withholding the document in which he had set out his case. The novel leaves open whether the letter’s disappearance reflects deliberate suppression or another kind of institutional silence, but it emphasizes the consequence: Abravanel’s own account could not enter the public record.

His exclusion also acquired a name. When Shmuel asks whether the man being discussed was Atalia’s father, Wald answers that Abravanel was a traitor. That judgment recurs in the accounts of his isolation: his former colleagues rejected him, and the friends he had among the Arabs were left beyond new borders or expelled from their homes in Katamon, Abu Tor, and Baka. As the war approached, Atalia says, there was little prospect that anyone would listen to ideas like his. The label did more than describe a political dispute; it marked him as outside the community whose future he had tried to influence.

From public dissent to private confinement

The expulsion is followed by a retreat that Atalia later describes as voluntary house arrest. Abravanel stopped answering letters and the telephone, did not leave the courtyard, and ceased speaking with Wald and Atalia about the founding of the state, victory in the war, the displacement of Arabs, the arrival of Jewish immigrants, or the bloodshed at the new borders. He treated these changes as if they had happened on another planet. Only once, at the kitchen table, did he break his silence to predict that the new order might endure only a few years, or two or three generations at most.

His solitude was also a consequence of personal bereavement. On April 2, Mija was killed. Atalia recalls that she had not slept through a night in more than ten years, reliving his death on the rocky slope of a pine-covered hillside. After Mija’s death, she, Abravanel, and Wald lived together as if shut inside a submarine; the men who had once disputed every point no longer argued. The loss left them silent, and the political rupture that had already isolated Abravanel became part of a larger domestic enclosure.

Abravanel’s daily routine continued within that enclosure. He read Davar, passed it silently to Atalia and then Wald, walked for an hour or more in his room or in the garden, and moved a chair to follow the shade of the courtyard fig tree. After lunch he rested, then read and wrote at the desk into the evening. Yet after his death, Atalia found no notes or manuscripts. She believed he tore his papers into small pieces and flushed them down the toilet over many days. The destruction of his private archive, together with the missing resignation letter and sealed meeting records, leaves his political thought recoverable only in fragments and recollection.

Death and the contested meaning of traitor

Two years after the war, Abravanel died alone in the kitchen, as he had often sat there alone with coffee and a newspaper. Atalia describes his head falling onto the table, tipping the cup; the right lens of his glasses broke, and the coffee soaked the newspaper, his clothes, and the oilcloth. In Wald’s account, he died hated, reviled, and perhaps even by himself. The ordinary objects of his routine become the last surviving image of a man whose public arguments and private writings have largely disappeared.

Shmuel and Wald later challenge the certainty of the word traitor without denying the cost of Abravanel’s dissent. Shmuel argues that those willing to change are called traitors by people afraid of change, and treats the label as a possible honorific for the person who dares to depart from consensus. Wald broadens the point by recalling how figures across history have been condemned for acts that challenged prevailing loyalties, and connects the charge against Abravanel to the more enduring Christian association between Judas and treachery, which has often been extended to Jews as a people. Their discussion does not prove Abravanel right in every political judgment; it reveals instead how a group’s naming of dissent can replace engagement with the dissent itself. In the novel, his expulsion is therefore both a specific institutional act and the beginning of a longer silencing: a political opponent is removed, called a traitor, separated from former allies, and ultimately left with no surviving archive to speak in his own voice.