In sharp contrast to the actual Israel, the country envisioned in Herzl's book is not involved in any wars and in fact does not maintain any armed forces. As explained in the book, the founders took care to get the consent of all European powers for their enterprise and not get entangled in any inter-power rivalry. As for the country's Arab inhabitants, the book's single Arab character, Rashid Bey, explains that the Arabs saw no reason to oppose the influx of Jews, who "developed the country and raised everybody's standard of living". Though at the time of writing there had already been some small-scale incidents between early Zionist pioneers and Arab villagers, these were usually explained away as "banditry" rather than organized Arab resistance to Zionism, and the future predicted in Herzl's book was still plausible.