In separate novels, Yossi Avni-Levy and Michael Chabon imagine Jewish sovereignty built somewhere other than Israel, and in doing so converge on the same unsettling question: What if the state had been built on different ground?

In An Ode to Sins, Avni-Levy centers his narrative on a quiet provocation. It is not a return to Poland to mourn what was destroyed, but a question directed at the present: What might we have built somewhere else? A Jewish state not recovered from history but chosen in spite of it. Chabon poses a similar question in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. His Alaska is unstable and temporary. It offers no promise of safety. Yet it sits at the edge of the world rather than its center, unburdened by competing religious, national and historical claims.

Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu via Getty Images

The Old City of Jerusalem is seen in the early morning after Israel launched preemptive strikes on Iran's nuclear program on June 13, 2025.

These imagined geographies are not better, but they are simpler. They strip away layers of meaning that, in Israel, cannot be set aside.

That difference is not just cultural or symbolic. It is structural. Israel’s location does not merely complicate its politics. It places the country within an overlapping system of regional, religious, and international pressures in which conflict continually regenerates and cannot be resolved through military force alone. This is the key reality both novels illuminate.

Zionism made a different choice. The “Uganda Scheme” failed not because it was impractical, but because it was insufficient. Zionism chose return over relocation. It chose a place saturated with meaning rather than one that might have been governed more quietly. That choice produced both power and constraint.

Before statehood, Jews lived with vulnerability and without sovereignty. Today’s Israel exists in a region where sovereignty itself is contested. The result is not only strength. It is exposure. Exposure here does not connote weakness. It means living at the intersection of risk, consequence and great-power pressure. Israel is both threatened and central. Its location draws in allies and adversaries alike. Its conflicts do not remain local. They accumulate meaning and attract wider involvement.

What the imagined settings of Avni-Levy and Chabon simplify, Israel cannot escape. The contrast with Poland or Alaska is not about nostalgia or fantasy. It is the difference between contained conflict and a system in which every confrontation expands.

In both novels, conflict is sometimes violent, even existential, yet it remains contained. It does not simultaneously activate religion, regional rivalry, global diplomacy, historical grievances, and identity all at once. In Israel, it does.

A war in Gaza is never only about Gaza. It is also about Palestinian political status, Israeli security, religious narratives, Arab public opinion, and international pressure. The northern border is not only about Hezbollah. It is part of a wider alignment that runs through Iran and beyond. Each arena reinforces the others. These are not separate fronts but expressions of a single structure. Pressure in one place does not stay put. It travels. That is what turns tactical success into strategic repetition.

Inside Israel, debate often focuses on calibration: too much force or too little, strike harder or hold back longer. This assumes that the correct application of force can produce stability. Experience suggests otherwise. Israel has acted with overwhelming force and with restraint at different moments. Neither has prevented the same conflicts from returning in altered form. Military action changes capabilities. It rarely changes the system in which those capabilities acquire meaning.

Hamas can be degraded, but the political conditions that sustain its appeal persist. Hezbollah can be deterred, but the regional network behind it remains intact. Iran can be confronted, but it is a state that learns. It absorbs pressure, tests limits and adjusts. An adaptive system cannot be stabilized by repeating the same moves within it.

This is the tension at the center of Israel’s position. The same centrality that exposes it also strengthens it. It brings strategic alliances, economic depth, and expanding ties with parts of the Arab world. Reducing exposure would carry real costs. The challenge is not to step away from centrality, but to use it differently.

For Israelis, this is not abstract. It is reserve duty that returns year after year. It is the sense that each round ends without closure. It is the recognition that the next escalation is already forming. If repetition is built into the structure, then the response must address the structure itself.

In the Palestinian arena, the absence of a political horizon is not neutral. It shapes every subsequent round of violence. As long as millions of Palestinians live without a defined political future or a credible path toward one, movements built on resistance will continue to regenerate support even after severe military defeat. This is not about engaging those who reject coexistence. It is about changing the conditions that make endless resistance appear to be the only available future.

Across the region, Israel is already part of a network of states, whether it fully acknowledges this or not. Each relationship that deepens its integration into that network changes how pressure is distributed. Conflict does not disappear, but its weight can be redistributed so that no single front carries the full burden.

Iran operates across all these arenas. Confrontation will continue. It cannot be avoided at times. But confrontation alone has not produced lasting change in its behavior. Iran expands where fragmentation creates opportunity and pulls back where pressure is concentrated. The task is twofold: raise the cost of its regional activity while reducing the fragmentation that allows its proxies to operate.

None of this produces a decisive conclusion. It points instead to a different direction: away from reacting to each eruption and toward altering the conditions that make these cycles recur. That shift is slower and less visible, and more demanding, because it requires acting on problems that do not yield immediate results.

Avni-Levy and Chabon make that demand harder to ignore. By placing Jewish sovereignty elsewhere, they reveal how much of Israel’s reality is shaped by where it sits. Poland was a graveyard. Alaska was fiction. Uganda was a fleeting moment. Israel is the only road that was taken. The question is whether it continues in circles.

Professor Sharon Pardo is a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and a professor of international relations and European studies in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.