Zionism

Zionism in the novel is both a movement for Jewish collective refuge and self-determination and a disputed political project whose proposed form carries consequences for Jews and Arabs alike. Through the conflict between David Ben-Gurion and Shaltiel Abravanel, the narrative sets the case for a sovereign state and armed self-reliance against a vision of shared life that rejects separate national sovereignties. Their argument is not abstract: it shapes Abravanel’s public standing, the fate of his family, and Gershom Wald’s later grief over the war and his son’s death.

A movement and its competing meanings

Zionism first appears as the effort to establish a Jewish home in the Land of Israel. For Wald, the appeal of that home is inseparable from the history of persecution and the danger facing displaced Jews. In his account of Ben-Gurion’s outlook, the Arabs would not willingly accept Jewish settlement or share power, no outside force could be relied on to defend the Jewish population, and what Jews did not secure for themselves would not be given to them. He sees this political realism as clear-sighted recognition of danger, not merely an appetite for power.

Abravanel also identifies himself as a Zionist, but distinguishes his position from what he regards as a nationalism intoxicated by its own promises. He had long-standing friendships with Arab Muslims and Christians, spoke Arabic, and understood the Jewish home as something that must not be built by dispossessing others or committing injustice. His disagreement with the movement’s leadership therefore concerns the meaning and political structure of the home, rather than a simple choice between Zionism and its rejection.

Wald recalls that in his youth Abravanel believed, as many did, that Jews could build a home in the Land of Israel without displacing anyone. By the 1920s he had begun to doubt that assumption; in the 1930s he concluded that the two peoples were moving toward a violent collision in which one would ultimately be unable to remain. For years he contained his doubts, observed institutional discipline, and sometimes called for dialogue or criticized violence. His dissent became more explicit only in the 1940s, as the movement’s leadership confronted the question of statehood.

The case for sovereignty and self-defense

Wald presents Ben-Gurion as a leader who understood that Jewish safety could not depend on goodwill or external rescue. He connects this argument to the years before independence, when Ben-Gurion had spoken with Arab leaders and concluded that Jewish political aims would not be granted without struggle. Mija, Wald’s son, practiced with a weapon in the woods at Tel Arza; Wald later recognizes that his son, like those around him, understood the danger more clearly than he himself had wished to understand it.

This position gives national sovereignty a stark protective purpose. In the novel, the prospect of an independent Jewish state is bound to the fear that defeat would mean that Jews could not remain in the country. Wald remembers the decision to establish a state as a response to a life-or-death conflict, even as he also recalls the cost of that decision in his own family. His defense of Ben-Gurion’s realism coexists with the personal knowledge that Mija was killed in the war.

The narrative also questions the language through which state-building is justified. Shmuel argues that Ben-Gurion, once a leader of workers, now presides over a nationalist state and surrounds its policy with biblical rhetoric about restoration and fulfilled prophecy. Wald, by contrast, praises Ben-Gurion’s political lucidity. Their disagreement exposes a tension between the practical claims of security and the sacred or messianic language that can make national struggle seem redemptive. Abravanel interprets the latter as dangerous: he fears that a leader cast as a messiah will lead Jews and Arabs into an unending bloodshed.

Abravanel’s alternative and its limits

Abravanel’s proposals develop from the belief that Arab opposition is driven not only by the existing Jewish settlements but by fear of their potential expansion and power. As Wald recounts it, Abravanel believed that many Arabs saw Jewish advantages in education, technology, ingenuity, and determination as signs of a future domination of the region. He thought these fears could still be reduced through patient dialogue, a joint workers’ organization, the opening of Jewish settlements to Arab residents, and access for Arab students to Jewish schools and universities.

His alternative does not stop at a state shared by Jews and Arabs. Abravanel rejects both a separate Jewish state and a binational state, regarding the world’s many states, borders, armies, flags, passports, and separate systems of money as an archaic and destructive arrangement. He imagines neighboring communities of different languages and religions living among one another without separating borders or exclusive sovereignty. In this arrangement, children might learn each other’s languages in their own schools, or attend joint schools; relations built through ordinary coexistence might, over time, become trust and personal friendship.

Abravanel grounds this hope in a shared history of vulnerability. He regards Jews and Arabs as peoples harmed in different ways by Christian Europe: Jews by generations of ostracism, persecution, expulsion, and mass killing, and Arabs by colonial humiliation, oppression, and exploitation. This common history, he argues, could provide a basis for empathy. The novel preserves the appeal of that reasoning without presenting it as an answer accepted by the characters. Shmuel finds something the heart would welcome in Abravanel’s ideas, but considers them too idealistic; he suspects that Arabs were also tempted by Jewish weakness in the present, not merely frightened by Jewish strength in the future.

Dissent, exclusion, and private cost

Abravanel’s political position is also shown through his actions and the labels attached to him. He maintained friendships with Arabs, visited Arab communities, and hosted Arab journalists, politicians, union leaders, and professors at home. During the fighting in 1947 and 1948, he continued to argue that founding a Jewish state was a tragic mistake. His critics called him a traitor, while he continued to think of himself as a Zionist and, in Wald’s recollection, as one of the few who had not surrendered to nationalist intoxication.

On December 20, 1947, Abravanel was removed from his posts in the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency leadership after disagreements with his colleagues. A newspaper report the following day said he declined to explain his dismissal to the journalist. It reported his view that the course chosen by Ben-Gurion and others would lead to a bloody war whose victor was uncertain, and that the lives of the Jewish population in the Land of Israel were at stake. Abravanel still believed a historic compromise between the two peoples might be possible. After being given two hours to choose between resignation and expulsion, he resigned and said nothing publicly.

The cost of this political isolation reaches beyond his institutional career. Wald recalls that after Mija’s death he and Abravanel stopped speaking except about household matters. The question Wald imagined Abravanel asking—whether the sacrifice had been worth it—became a source of lasting pain, precisely because Abravanel never asked it aloud. In the later account of the family’s seclusion, the public debate over Zionism is inseparable from bereavement: Abravanel’s warnings did not prevent war, while Wald’s confidence in the necessity of resistance did not spare his son.

Nationalism, redemption, and historical memory

The novel makes Zionism a debate about the dangers of turning collective liberation into a new form of domination. Abravanel’s warning is that the oppressed may dream of becoming the oppressors of those who once oppressed them. For him, a Jewish state founded through war risks reproducing the coercive structures of sovereignty—armies, borders, and exclusive control—that his projected community would abolish. Wald’s defense of Ben-Gurion answers that fear with another: without self-reliance, Jewish survival would be left to the decisions of others.

Neither position is allowed to remain an impersonal doctrine. The contrast is carried by arguments repeated in the house, by Shmuel’s criticism of state rhetoric, by Wald’s defense of political realism, and by the history of Mija’s death and Abravanel’s estrangement. The result is a portrait of Zionism as a movement whose promise of refuge cannot be detached from the question of how that refuge is established, what it requires of its neighbors, and whether national self-determination can avoid reproducing the violence it seeks to escape.