Stateless Common Society Concept

The stateless community proposal is Shaltiel Abravanel’s vision of Jewish and Arab life organized not as a state, but as neighboring and interwoven communities without borders, armies, or separate sovereignty. It rejects both the demand for an independent Jewish state and the compromise of a binational state, imagining instead that shared education and everyday contact might make coexistence possible. Its force in the novel lies in the contrast between that expansive hope and the national conflict that leaves its advocate isolated, disgraced as a traitor, and unable to prevent the deaths and silences that follow.

A Community Beyond the State

Abravanel considered the political world of nation-states an obsolete and dangerous arrangement. In his view, a world partitioned into hundreds of states, each with borders, barbed wire, passports, flags, armies, and a separate currency, was primitive and criminal. He did not regard a binational state as an adequate answer: his objection was to the state form itself, not merely to which people would govern it. Rather than establish another small state through a seemingly endless war, he imagined that states would eventually disappear and be replaced by communities whose members spoke different languages and lived alongside and among one another.

His proposed community included Jews and Arabs, Christians and Muslims, Druze and Circassians, and Orthodox, Catholic, and Armenian communities. These groups would live together without separating borders. The proposal was not simply a refusal of political division: it offered a different account of how a shared society might be built, through proximity, common institutions, and the gradual cultivation of trust. Abravanel believed that the fear Arabs felt toward what they saw as Zionist ambitions to Judaize the land might slowly diminish if Jews and Arabs ceased to approach one another as rival national projects.

Education, Contact, and the Hope of Trust

Education was central to Abravanel’s practical vision. He proposed that children in Jewish schools learn Arabic and children in Arab schools learn Hebrew, then suggested that the communities establish joint schools instead. The measure would make contact part of ordinary life rather than leave it to political negotiation alone. He also imagined the end of the British practice of divide and rule, which he believed had prolonged separation between the communities.

Abravanel did not present friendship as an immediate consequence of a new arrangement. He expected trust and personal affection to grow gradually, perhaps over years rather than days. He pointed to existing professional relationships and family visits between Jews and Arabs during the British Mandate, including in Haifa, Jerusalem, Tiberias, and Jaffa, as evidence that ordinary cooperation was already possible. His account also rested on a historical argument: Jews and Arabs had both suffered at the hands of Christian Europe, though in different ways. Arabs had endured colonial humiliation and exploitation; Jews had faced generations of ostracism, persecution, expulsion, massacre, and genocide. Abravanel saw that shared history of victimization as a possible basis for empathy and understanding, not as a guarantee that either people would act justly.

Advocacy and Political Rejection

Abravanel tried to circulate his ideas in small circles among both Arabs and Jews. At least twice a month he traveled to Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jaffa, Haifa, and Beirut, and he took part in private gatherings in the homes of German intellectuals in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood. His approach therefore extended beyond a theoretical plan: it depended on discussion across communities and on relationships capable of surviving political disagreement.

Yet the proposal confronted a rapidly narrowing political situation. Abravanel had once believed, like others around him, that Jews could build a home in the Land of Israel without displacing anyone or committing injustice. He began to doubt that belief in the 1920s and concluded in the 1930s that the two peoples were moving toward a collision and a war in which only one might remain. For years he continued to observe institutional discipline, while occasionally calling for dialogue and criticizing violence. His interventions attracted little interest. Only in the 1940s did he sometimes voice open dissent in meetings of the Jewish Agency and Zionist Executive. When he opposed the United Nations partition plan and Israel’s independence in 1947, he was given two hours to choose between resigning and being expelled. He resigned and then refused to explain himself publicly.

A contemporary newspaper account reports that Abravanel warned the course chosen by David Ben-Gurion and his colleagues would lead to a bloody war between the two peoples, with the fate of six hundred thousand Jews in the Land of Israel at stake. He maintained that some possibility of historical compromise remained. Gershom Wald later recalls Abravanel’s more sweeping prediction: declaring a Jewish state after the British Mandate ended would bring war with the Arab world, potentially with the Muslim world more broadly, and even Jewish victories would deepen fear and prolong conflict across generations. The novel gives these warnings weight through what follows, while making clear that prediction did not give Abravanel the power to change events.

The Cost of Dissent and the Proposal’s Afterlife

The label “traitor” turned Abravanel’s dissent into a public identity. His sympathy with Arab opposition to Zionism, his friendships with Arabs, and his refusal to endorse the state-building consensus made him suspect to former colleagues and left him without Jewish friends. The proposal’s rejection was thus also a social and political expulsion: Abravanel resigned, fell silent, and understood that he had no interlocutor. His silence did not mean that the ideas had been answered; it registered their failure to find a hearing when the approaching war was understood as a struggle for survival.

The consequences entered the household as well as the political sphere. Abravanel had urged young people on both sides to put down their weapons, but Wald later recognizes his own part in encouraging his son Mija to fight. Mija died in the Jerusalem mountains on April 2. After his death, Wald and Abravanel never resumed their arguments. The two men, once divided by their positions on Ben-Gurion and the war, were joined in silence by grief. Abravanel later died alone in the house, while Wald remembers that the Arab friends who had given his vision a lived context were displaced beyond the new borders or expelled from their homes in Katamon, Abu Tor, and Baka.

The proposal remains a countervision rather than an enacted political settlement. Its account of shared schools, common life, and slowly acquired trust gives concrete form to a future beyond national separation; its defeat shows how little room that future has when war, fear, and competing claims to sovereignty dominate public life. In the novel, the word “traitor” marks not proof that Abravanel betrayed coexistence, but the cost of refusing a political consensus that treated the state and military force as unavoidable.