Zionist movement

The Zionist movement is a contested project of refuge, political self-determination, and national state-building whose aspirations in the novel are inseparable from the question of what forms of power they authorize. Its supporters see a state as necessary protection in a hostile world; its dissident critic Shaltiel Abravanel fears that a secular movement has harnessed religious and messianic hopes only to unleash them as nationalism, division, and war. The movement is therefore not represented as a settled ideal but as a struggle over whether Jewish safety can be secured without making a separate state and confronting the Arab population already living in the land.

A movement shaped by competing ideals

The arguments about the Zionist movement unfold in ordinary conversations in the Wald household, where newspapers, tea, and discussion of the news make political history part of domestic life. Gershom Wald follows the bulletins and reads Davar, explaining the political stakes to Shmuel Ash. He praises David Ben-Gurion as a leader of unusual breadth, particularly for understanding that Jewish peoplehood set apart from other nations could be a curse rather than a blessing. For Wald, the practical question of Jewish survival makes state leadership and political realism unavoidable.

Shmuel challenges that language of national restoration. He sees Ben-Gurion as the head of a nationalist and sanctimonious state, invoking biblical phrases about restoring and fulfilling prophecy while advancing modern political power. That criticism exposes a contradiction at the heart of the movement as the novel presents it: political action may be secular and practical in its institutions while borrowing the emotional force and promised destiny of religious language.

Wald’s own judgment is divided rather than simply celebratory. He calls Ben-Gurion the greatest Jewish leader, even greater than King David, because he believed the Arabs would not willingly accept Jewish presence or share territory and power, and that no outside power would reliably defend the Jews. Yet Wald also recounts the anguished alternative represented by Abravanel, whose question about whether the outcome had been worth the cost remained with him after the death of his son Mija. The movement’s achievement and its human consequences thus occupy the same moral frame.

Abravanel’s dissent from within Zionism

Shaltiel Abravanel’s opposition carries particular weight because he had been a Zionist participant, not an outsider to the movement. He served for years in the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency’s leadership, while continuing to call himself a Zionist. He described himself as among the few authentic Zionists who had not become drunk on nationalism and as the last disciple of Ahad Haam. Fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, Ladino, English, French, Turkish, and Greek, he maintained friendships and conversations with Arabs rather than treating them only as a political obstacle.

Abravanel’s critique developed over time. In Wald’s account, the Arab Revolt of 1936, Hitler, resistance and reprisals, British executions, and sustained conversations with Arab friends all contributed to his conviction that the two communities needed space to live beside or among one another, without a state framework that made one’s future a threat to the other’s. His later assessment was that Jewish and Arab communities were moving toward a collision that could leave only one able to remain. The novel presents this as a conclusion reached through historical experience, not as a sudden rejection of the movement’s original purpose.

Abravanel understood Zionist founders to have mobilized generations of Jewish religious and messianic energy in the service of a movement that was essentially secular, pragmatic, and modern. He warned that the golem would one day rebel against its creator: the very hopes recruited for political ends might escape their intended control and destroy what the movement sought to build. In his account, Ben-Gurion and his followers had strayed from the path and become captive to nationalist and messianic impulses. This image makes the movement’s religious inheritance more than a rhetorical flourish; it is a potential force with political consequences.

The alternative of shared life

Abravanel proposed neither the abandonment of Jewish refuge nor the denial of Jewish aspirations to a home in the Land of Israel. He came to believe that the home must be shared with Arabs. In place of separate sovereign states, he imagined neighboring and intermingled communities: Jews and Arabs, Christians and Muslims, Druze and Circassians, and members of different churches living without separating borders. He envisioned children learning each other’s languages, perhaps in joint schools, and the gradual growth of trust and personal friendship.

His practical proposals included common labor organization, opening Jewish settlements to Arab residents, and admitting Arab students to Jewish schools and the university. He argued that the end of British divide-and-rule policies could allow confidence to emerge over time. Existing professional and family connections between Arabs and Jews in places including Haifa, Jerusalem, Tiberias, and Jaffa offered, in his view, evidence that relations need not be defined solely by hostility. He also appealed to a shared history of injury: Arabs had suffered under colonial powers, while Jews had endured persecution, expulsion, massacres, and genocide in Christian Europe. Their different experiences, he argued, could provide a basis for empathy.

Abravanel’s analysis of Arab opposition also challenged the movement’s reassuring account of itself. He believed that Arab fears concerned not merely the small Zionist presence of the time but the possibility of Jewish expansion and eventual control. The fear was intensified, as he understood it, by perceptions of Jewish advantages in education, technology, ingenuity, and motivation, and by suspicions of plans to dominate the wider region. He thought patience, dialogue, shared institutions, and the abandonment of a separate Jewish state and army could help allay those fears. Shmuel finds something emotionally compelling in Abravanel’s ideas but considers them too softened by hope; he argues instead that Arab resistance may have been encouraged by Jewish weakness in the present.

Statehood, exclusion, and the consequences of dissent

Abravanel opposed the 1947 partition plan and Israeli independence, while proposing that the British Mandate be replaced by an international mandate or a provisional government under American supervision. He believed a single immigration of Holocaust survivors could increase the Jewish population from about 650,000 to three-quarters of a million and help address the displaced survivors’ plight. He then favored allowing the Arab population ten or twenty years to adjust to Jewish presence, while Jews ceased demanding a conspicuously separate Hebrew state. His plan was an attempt to meet the immediate need for refuge without treating state sovereignty as the sole possible foundation for Jewish life.

The movement’s institutions did not preserve space for this dissent. As its leadership moved toward partition and statehood, Abravanel’s objections were treated as evidence that he had lost his reason; he was called a traitor and an Arab sympathizer. He was given a choice between resigning and formal expulsion from both the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency. His reasoned resignation letter was hidden, and when Atalia later searched the Zionist archives for it, she was told that no such letter had ever existed. The silencing of the document mirrors the larger failure of Abravanel’s proposals to gain a public hearing.

Abravanel’s exclusion became bound up with Wald’s grief over Mija, who died in the war. Wald had supported Ben-Gurion’s realism, believing that Zionism could not be realized without confrontation; Abravanel believed it could not be realized through confrontation. After Mija’s death, Wald imagined the question Abravanel never asked him: whether the price had been worth paying. Their estrangement shows the cost of political disagreement within a household, while the son’s death prevents either position from remaining an abstract argument about strategy.

Nationalism and the movement’s unresolved legacy

Abravanel’s warning about the golem connects the movement’s political methods to its later national character. In Wald’s account, Abravanel feared that the religious energies used to mobilize a modern political project would return as irrational nationalism. Later, secluded in the house, he viewed the new state as militaristic, intoxicated by victory, and consumed by empty nationalist exaltation. The state had answered the demand for Jewish political power, but for Abravanel it had not resolved the underlying conflict between Jewish security and Arab presence.

The novel leaves that conflict unsettled. Wald insists that Jewish survival could not depend on good words or an expectation that Arabs would willingly share power; Shmuel challenges the scriptural and nationalist language through which statehood is justified; Abravanel proposes shared communities without separate sovereignty, but is politically defeated and increasingly isolated. In their disagreement, the Zionist movement becomes both a response to real Jewish vulnerability and a project whose pursuit of security can deepen Arab displacement, communal fear, and enduring hostility. The question it leaves is not whether refuge mattered, but whether the form chosen for refuge made coexistence harder to imagine and harder to achieve.