Shaltiel Abravanel’s borderless community proposal

Shaltiel Abravanel’s borderless community proposal is a political vision of Jewish-Arab coexistence built around shared life rather than separate sovereignty. It rejects not only a Jewish state but the state system itself, proposing communities of different languages and religions living alongside and among one another, with common institutions and sustained contact. In the novel, this ideal is set against the forces of fear, national ambition, and war that Abravanel believes will make its realization increasingly difficult.

Political diagnosis

Abravanel argues that Arab opposition is driven not simply by the small Jewish presence then taking shape between the coast and the mountains, but by fear of what that presence might become. In his account, Arabs see Jewish advantages in education, technology, ingenuity, and motivation as signs of a potential expansionist power. The danger, as he understands it, is less the existing Zionist settlement than the imagined giant hidden inside it: a future force capable of controlling the whole region.

That fear is magnified by suspicions that Jews intend to destroy the mosques on the Temple Mount, rebuild the Temple, and create an empire stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates. Abravanel treats these suspicions as a political reality with consequences, whether or not they accurately describe Jewish intentions. He believes they can still be eased, but only through patience, goodwill, tireless dialogue, and policies that make Jewish-Arab cooperation visible in daily life.

His diagnosis places responsibility on political choices as well as on inherited antagonism. If Jews proclaim a sovereign state, he warns, they will intensify Arab fears of Jewish power and help set off a conflict that could draw in the wider Muslim world. In his prediction, even repeated Jewish military victories would deepen that fear rather than settle it; the result would be a war lasting across generations.

Communities instead of states

Abravanel refuses the familiar compromise of a binational state. He considers the broader system of hundreds of national states—organized around borders, checkpoints, passports, flags, armies, and separate currencies—archaic and destructive. Rather than establish another small state through a war, he imagines that states will eventually disappear, replaced by communities of speakers of different languages living both beside one another and within one another.

In this local vision, Jews, Arabs, Christians, Muslims, Druze, Circassians, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, and Armenians would form neighboring communities without separating borders. The proposal does not ask one population to vanish into another; it imagines shared space across linguistic and religious difference. Abravanel’s alternative to competing sovereignties is a social fabric in which no single community claims exclusive political ownership of the land.

The proposal is also practical in its emphasis on institutions. Jewish settlements would open to Arab residents, Jewish schools and the university would admit Arab students, and the communities could establish common schools. Jewish children would study Arabic and Arab children Hebrew. Abravanel also calls for a shared workers’ union. These measures are intended to make interaction ordinary and reciprocal, countering the division encouraged during the British period by a policy of divide and rule.

A path from contact to trust

Abravanel’s optimism rests partly on the claim that Jewish-Arab relationships were not merely theoretical. He points to existing professional and personal ties in Haifa, Jerusalem, Tiberias, and Jaffa, where members of the two communities worked together and visited one another with their families. His own friendships with Arabs exemplify the kind of contact he wants to widen, not treat as an exception.

He also frames mutual understanding through a shared history of victimization by Christian Europe. Arabs, he says, have endured colonial humiliation, oppression, and exploitation; Jews have faced generations of mockery, exclusion, persecution, expulsion, massacre, and genocide. For Abravanel, that history provides a basis for empathy rather than a reason to compete over suffering. Trust and even personal friendship might emerge gradually from the recognition of common vulnerability, but he does not expect them to appear at once: he speaks of patient work over years and of early signs of confidence developing over time.

His proposed measures therefore connect political restraint to everyday encounters. Abandoning the demand for a separate Jewish state is, in his view, not enough on its own; it must be accompanied by shared schools, open institutions, common labor organizing, and continuing dialogue. The proposal treats the reduction of fear as something communities must build through repeated contact, rather than something leaders can secure through a declaration.

Opposition, isolation, and the proposal’s limits

Abravanel’s position leaves him politically isolated. He continues to oppose a Jewish state even as the possibility of establishing one gives many Jews hope. Gershom Wald recalls that Abravanel was called a traitor both for his friendships with Arabs and for arguing during the fighting of 1947 and 1948 that statehood was a tragic mistake. He favored replacing the departing British Mandate with international administration or a provisional government under American supervision, while allowing Jewish immigration to provide refuge for Holocaust survivors and giving the region time to adjust to their presence.

Wald himself distinguishes Abravanel’s ideas from the emotional pull of Jewish statehood: the prospect of an independent state, even on a small part of the land, had stirred hope in him too. Shmuel Ash likewise calls Abravanel’s reasoning appealing but overly optimistic, countering that Arab opposition may have been drawn not by Jewish future power but by Jewish weakness in the present. Their disagreement marks the proposal’s central vulnerability: it depends on restraint and mutual confidence in conditions where each side may interpret the other’s actions as evidence of danger.

Abravanel’s warning that statehood would bring war is not presented as an abstract prediction detached from loss. Wald recounts that his son Mija died in the fighting at Bab al-Wad on April 2, 1948, and says the death silenced the arguments between him and Abravanel. Afterward, Abravanel lived with Wald and Atalia in the house, increasingly withdrawn. He died there alone two years later, after Arab friends had been separated from him by new borders or expelled from their homes and Jewish friends had turned away from him as a traitor. The proposal’s force in the novel lies partly in this contrast: it imagines a political order without borders, while the story shows how war and the drawing of borders can sever relationships and leave dissenters isolated.