Shaltiel Abravanel and David Ben-Gurion’s political opposition

Shaltiel Abravanel and David Ben-Gurion’s political opposition is the novel’s conflict between a proposed Arab-Jewish partnership and the determination to establish and defend a Jewish state. Abravanel argued that agreement with the Arabs remained possible if the Zionist leadership relinquished the state project; Ben-Gurion’s political realism prevailed, and Abravanel was removed from the leadership. The opposition also divides the people closest to them: Gershom Wald backed Ben-Gurion, while the death of his son Mija left him haunted by the political and personal costs of that choice.

The dispute over a shared future

Abravanel’s position is introduced through Shmuel Ash’s hesitant recollection of a Jerusalem figure from the 1940s: a member of the Jewish Agency leadership or National Council, perhaps a jurist or Arabist, who was remembered as the lone opponent of statehood or of Ben-Gurion’s policy. Shmuel asks Atalia whether her family name connects her to this man. Atalia answers simply that Abravanel was her father, making a political name in Shmuel’s historical inquiry suddenly intimate and present.

The opposition was not merely a dispute over leadership or tactics. As Wald recounts it, Abravanel believed that, with the British departure approaching, Jews and Arabs could still reach an agreement to establish a condominium, provided the Jews gave up the idea of a Jewish state. He tried to persuade Ben-Gurion in 1948, but without success. Wald says that Abravanel was consequently expelled from the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency leadership, which functioned as the unofficial Jewish government at the end of the British Mandate. His dissent was therefore both a political proposal and a challenge to the direction of the institutions making decisions about the future.

Their opposing readings of political reality

Wald presents the two positions as a choice between Abravanel’s proposals, which he calls unfounded, and Ben-Gurion’s uncompromising realism, on whose side he admits he stood. In his account, Ben-Gurion understood that the Arabs would not readily accept Jewish presence or share territory and power, that political promises would not secure acceptance, and that no outside power would necessarily defend the Jews. Wald connects this judgment to Ben-Gurion’s long conversations with Arab leaders in the 1930s and to his conclusion that what Jews could not obtain for themselves would not simply be given to them.

Shmuel challenges the political language that turns national ambition into sacred destiny. He describes Ben-Gurion as a leader who had become the head of a nationalist, sanctimonious state and criticized his language of restoration and fulfilled prophecy as empty biblical rhetoric. He also warns that, without peace, the Arabs may eventually defeat the Jews, and argues that they will not forget their defeat in 1948 or the intrigues involving Britain and France three years earlier. The disagreement thus remains active in the household’s conversations: Wald’s emphasis on self-reliance and political necessity meets Shmuel’s insistence on the consequences of dispossession and continuing hostility.

A conflict carried into the household

Abravanel’s opposition did not end with his expulsion from leadership. Wald says that he had argued with Abravanel, while Abravanel continued to call himself a Zionist—indeed, one of the few Zionists not intoxicated by nationalism. He knew Arabic, spent long periods talking with Arab friends in cafés in the Old City, and maintained friendships with both Muslim and Christian Arabs. During the violence and road blockades that preceded the war, he continued visiting Arab acquaintances to argue against war. Neighbors called him the Arabs’ friend, the Muezzin, or the Devout Muslim; some called him a traitor. The labels register the social pressure created by his attempt to oppose nationalist certainty while still claiming a Zionist identity.

The political disagreement also shaped Wald’s relationship with Abravanel and the memory of Mija. Wald recalls that Abravanel had urged young people on both sides to lay down their arms and refuse to fight. Wald, by contrast, had spoken of the war as sacred and helped form the voice that called Mija to go: he remembers the stories of earlier Jewish defenders, the teaching and training that prepared the young, and the repeated conviction that no people retreats from its trenches. He later admits that Mija might not have gone to war without his own part in that message. In Wald’s recollection, the political dispute is inseparable from this personal responsibility.

The unresolved cost of victory

Wald’s judgment of Ben-Gurion remains divided by grief. He calls him the greatest Jewish leader and a far-sighted statesman, yet remembers Abravanel’s warning that Ben-Gurion had become a false messiah whose project would bring a tragic, seemingly endless bloodshed upon Jews, Arabs, and the wider world. Abravanel feared that the oppressed, once liberated, might dream of becoming oppressors themselves. Wald recounts this warning while living in the house that had belonged to Abravanel, where the absent father’s political convictions remain present in conversation and memory.

After Mija’s death, Wald imagines Abravanel asking whether the sacrifice had been worth it. Abravanel never asks him that question aloud, but Wald says that the imagined question wounds him, and that thereafter the two men no longer speak as before. They exchange only practical remarks about such matters as roof tiles or buying a refrigerator. The political opposition therefore ends not in reconciliation or a settled verdict, but in a silence shaped by loss: Ben-Gurion’s state has been established, Abravanel’s alternative has been rejected, and Wald cannot separate his support for the winning course from the death of his son.