UN Partition Plan for Palestine

The UN Partition Plan for Palestine appears in the novel both as a concrete United Nations proposal and as the political crossroads at which competing visions for Jews and Arabs become irreconcilable. Its two-state design, approved in November 1947, is set against Shaltiel Abravanel’s opposition to a Jewish state and his proposal for a shared political future; the debate also tests what military power can protect, and what it cannot resolve.

Proposal and Historical Record

The plan called for Palestine to be divided into two independent states, one Jewish and one Arab, with economic relations and a common currency. Jerusalem and Bethlehem were to be placed under international control. In a Davar report dated November 30, 1947, Shmuel Ash reads that the United Nations General Assembly had approved the establishment of a free Jewish state in Eretz Israel by a majority exceeding two-thirds. The article also listed the countries that voted for, against, or abstained from the proposal.

The newspaper’s account gives the decision the immediacy of a result still being decided. As Shmuel works through the earlier reports, he becomes absorbed in the Assembly’s approaching vote, as though each wavering vote might still tip the balance. When he finds the headline announcing the decision, the news moves him to tears. The episode makes the plan more than a background date: through the archive, a settled political outcome briefly returns as a present-tense decision with human stakes.

Abravanel’s Opposition

Shaltiel Abravanel opposed both partition and the declaration of an independent Jewish state. On June 18, 1947, he asked to appear before the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine to present an individual minority view and propose a different route to peace. The Jewish Agency leadership refused, insisting that it and the Zionist Executive Committee must speak to the committee with one voice. Abravanel considered appearing independently but ultimately accepted the majority’s discipline, reportedly after being warned that defiance could cost him his place in the principal institutions of Jewish public life.

His dissent was not a rejection of Jewish belonging in the land. As Gershom Wald recounts it, Abravanel believed Jews were entitled to build a home there, but concluded that this home should be shared with Arabs. He proposed that the departing British Mandate be replaced by international administration or a provisional government under American supervision. A limited immigration of about 100,000 Holocaust survivors from European displaced-persons camps, he argued, could address an urgent Jewish need without immediately establishing a Jewish state. The Jewish population might rise from roughly 650,000 to three-quarters of a million; after that, a pause could allow Arab communities ten or twenty years to absorb the Jewish presence and perhaps permit calm to return.

Abravanel’s political argument rested on his conversations with Arab friends in Palestine and neighboring countries. He believed Arab opposition arose not only from the existing Zionist settlement, which he described as a small number of towns and villages, but from fear that Jewish educational, technological, and organizational advantages would lead to expansion and control of the wider territory. In his view, the plan for immediate statehood intensified that fear instead of addressing it. His proposals therefore sought to slow the political confrontation and build a shared arrangement, while the institutional response to his dissent narrowed the space in which such an alternative could be heard.

Statehood, Force, and the Cost of Dissent

The plan’s adoption is presented alongside the conviction that statehood and security could not be separated from the prospect of war. Abravanel warned that declaring a Jewish state after the end of the Mandate would bring a bloody conflict with the Arab world, potentially extending to the Muslim world. Even if Jewish forces won several rounds, he predicted a generational struggle in which each victory would deepen Arab fear and hostility. His forecast is recalled by Wald after the death of his only son, Mija, in the Jerusalem hills on April 2, 1948, giving the earlier warning a personal and tragic aftermath.

Wald nevertheless defends David Ben-Gurion’s opposing judgment. He regards Ben-Gurion as a farsighted leader who understood that the Arabs would not willingly share territory or power and that no outside force could be relied upon to defend the Jews. In this reading, self-reliance was necessary because good words could not guarantee acceptance or safety. Shmuel, by contrast, argues that the Arab population had reason to resist newcomers who had arrived in great numbers and taken land, fields, villages, cities, ancestral graves, and the inheritance of future generations. Their exchange refuses a simple division between a peace-seeking proposal and an uncomplicated demand for security: it places Jewish vulnerability and Palestinian dispossession within the same argument.

The novel also distinguishes military protection from political reconciliation. Wald says that even overwhelming force cannot turn an enemy into an ally, a fanatic into a tolerant person, or someone bent on revenge into a friend. Military power can avert immediate destruction, he argues, but cannot repair or settle the conflict. The distinction illuminates what is at stake in the disagreement over partition: force may preserve the state that the plan helped bring into being, but it cannot by itself achieve the coexistence Abravanel sought.

Aftermath and Significance

Abravanel’s opposition made him a dissenter within the Zionist institutions he had served. In 1947, after he expressed his individual position against the United Nations plan and Israeli independence, colleagues called him a traitor and questioned his judgment. He was given two hours to choose between resignation and expulsion. He resigned, then withdrew into silence rather than appeal publicly to Jewish or Arab opinion. The political defeat of his proposal thus coincided with his exclusion from the institutions where the future was being decided.

The plan also becomes a measure of historical change in Shmuel’s archival work. Reading the vote report, he recognizes the breadth of Wald’s understanding of Ben-Gurion’s historical importance, even as he remains critical of the nationalist and biblical language surrounding statehood. The proposal’s record, the excluded minority opinion, and the later recollections of war and loss do not resolve which political path might have succeeded. Together, they show the novel treating partition as a moment when a decision about statehood narrowed the available alternatives, while leaving the central problem—how two peoples might live together without domination or recurring violence—unsettled.