UN General Assembly

The UN General Assembly’s November 29, 1947 vote to partition Palestine is presented as the turning point that authorized a Jewish state alongside an Arab state, with Jerusalem and Bethlehem placed under international control. In the novel, the vote is at once a document of political decision, the focus of Shmuel Ash’s almost immediate emotional identification with the past, and the disputed premise of arguments about statehood, force, and the Arab population’s loss of land.

The vote and its reported terms

In the weeks before the vote, Shmuel searches old issues of Davar in the newspaper library. Reading the run-up issue by issue, he becomes absorbed in the shifting political moment, as if each uncertain vote could still tip the balance. The archive makes history feel contingent rather than settled: although Shmuel knows the outcome, the newspapers restore the suspense of a decision that once remained open.

The next morning, he finds the November 30, 1947 issue. Its large headline announces that a Hebrew state will soon be established, and the report says the UN General Assembly has decided by a majority of more than two-thirds to establish a free Jewish state in Eretz Israel. The article describes the land as divided into two independent states, Jewish and Arab, with economic relations and a common currency; Jerusalem and Bethlehem are to be under international control. It also lists the countries that voted for, against, or abstained from the resolution.

Shmuel’s encounter with the archive

The newspaper’s account moves Shmuel so strongly that his eyes fill with tears. He experiences the printed announcement not as a safely completed episode but as though its events were taking place in the reading room at that moment. The scene gives the resolution a double temporal life: the vote is past, yet the archive lets its uncertainty and emotional force return.

A man with no eyebrows, a goatee, and gold-rimmed spectacles watches Shmuel’s reaction. When their eyes meet, the stranger quickly looks down at his papers, and Shmuel looks away too. The brief exchange remains unexplained, but it places Shmuel’s private response within a shared, watchful space of historical research rather than leaving him alone with the newspaper.

The decision’s political dispute

The resolution’s promise of two states is set against Shmuel’s recognition that Jewish statehood was bound up with another people’s dispossession. In a conversation with Gershom Wald, Shmuel asks why Arabs should welcome newcomers who arrived in great numbers and took their land, fields, villages, cities, ancestral graves, and children’s inheritance. He challenges the story that Jewish immigrants came simply to rebuild the land and redeem ancestral inheritance, asking whether any people would welcome a sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands, later millions, who claimed the country on the authority of their sacred books.

Wald recalls that Shaltiel Abravanel tried in 1948 to persuade David Ben-Gurion that an agreement with the Arabs might still be possible as the British left, if the Zionist leadership relinquished the demand for a Jewish state and considered a condominium. Abravanel was expelled from the Zionist Executive Committee and the Jewish Agency leadership. Wald admits that he sided with Ben-Gurion’s hard realism rather than Abravanel’s proposals, making the debate personal as well as political: the vote’s state-making logic had divided people who understood the danger of the conflict differently.

Statehood, force, and the feared aftermath

Shmuel rejects the assumption that the Arabs’ opposition was inexplicable or that the Jews in 1948 had simply been trapped between a sword and a wall. He answers that the Jews were themselves the sword and the wall, questioning the retrospective claim that war had been unavoidable. In the same argument, he notes that the wider world, including the communist bloc, supported establishing a Jewish state and supplied weapons. The vote thus appears not as an isolated parliamentary act but as part of a political and military sequence whose beneficiaries and costs were unequal.

Abravanel’s alternative, as Wald recounts it, was to let a limited wave of displaced Holocaust survivors immigrate, then pause the public demand for a Hebrew state and allow Arab communities time to accommodate Jewish presence. He believed Arab fear centered not only on the existing Zionist settlements but on the possibility that Jewish advantages in education, technology, ingenuity, and motivation would grow into territorial dominance. He warned that declaring an independent Jewish state after the British Mandate would provoke a bloody war with the Arab world, perhaps the Muslim world more broadly; even repeated Jewish victories, he feared, would deepen Arab terror and prolong hostility across generations.

Wald does not turn that warning into a claim that military power is unnecessary. He argues that force can keep Israel from immediate destruction, but cannot transform an enemy into an ally, a fanatic into a tolerant person, or someone seeking revenge into a friend. The resolution therefore carries a tension that the novel refuses to settle: statehood and military strength may protect a population in the short term, while neither can repair the antagonism and dispossession that the political settlement leaves behind.