United Nations

The United Nations enters the novel as both a forum for resolving Palestine’s future and the institution whose partition proposal becomes a decisive point of rupture. Shaltiel Abravanel sought to present an independent case for Jewish-Arab accommodation before its special commission; later, the General Assembly’s partition decision is encountered in a newspaper as the announcement of a Jewish state and two states for the land. For Abravanel, that path promised war rather than peace; for the emerging state, it marked international backing for independence.

A forum Abravanel sought to address

On June 18, 1947, Abravanel asked to appear before the United Nations special commission investigating Palestine’s future. He wanted to set out a minority opinion—indeed, his own individual position—and offer an original solution to the conflict between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish Agency leadership refused his request, insisting that the Agency and the Zionist Executive speak to the commission with one voice rather than present contradictory positions.

Abravanel considered defying that decision, but ultimately submitted to the majority’s discipline. He may have been warned that appearing independently would cost him his place in the leading institutions of Jewish public life. The surviving newspaper account Shmuel finds does not record a public debate or any appeal by Abravanel to Jewish or Arab communities. The commission offered a possible platform for dissent, but the institutional demand for unity left his proposal unheard there.

Partition and the statehood decision

In the account Shmuel uncovers in the archives, the commission was sent to clarify Palestine’s future; later newspaper coverage follows the United Nations process for dividing the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state. On November 30, 1947, the newspaper Davar announced that a Hebrew state would soon be established, reporting that the General Assembly had voted by more than a two-thirds majority for a free Jewish state in the Land of Israel. The plan described two independent states with economic relations and a common currency, while Jerusalem and Bethlehem would be placed under international control.

Reading the report, Shmuel is overcome with emotion and tears, as though the events printed on the page were happening before him. The scene places the decision at a deliberate distance: a historical turning point arrives through a newspaper preserved in the archive, while its consequences remain vivid enough to affect the reader of the old page. The United Nations decision is thus not only a diplomatic fact in the novel but also an object of Shmuel’s historical investigation and feeling.

Abravanel’s opposition and the prospect of war

Abravanel opposed both the partition plan and the independence of Israel. He had earlier argued that the British Mandate should give way to an international mandate or a provisional government under American supervision, and that Jewish immigration should be limited to a single wave that could address the plight of Holocaust survivors displaced in European camps. In his view, a pause in demands for a Jewish state might allow Arab communities time to accommodate Jewish presence and make renewed conflict less likely.

His warning was stark: proclaiming an independent Jewish state after the end of the British Mandate would bring a bloody war with the Arab world, perhaps with the Muslim world more broadly. Even a series of Jewish military victories, he feared, would deepen Arab fear and make the conflict last for generations. His opposition was therefore not simply a rejection of statehood in the abstract. It was bound to his forecast that partition and unilateral independence would turn competing claims to security and belonging into a prolonged cycle of war.

Political consequences and limits

Abravanel’s dissent cost him his standing in the Zionist institutions. When, in 1947, he voiced an individual position against the United Nations partition plan and Israeli independence, colleagues called him a traitor and some believed he had lost his reason. He was given two hours to choose between resignation and expulsion; after resigning, he said nothing publicly. The institutional history surrounding the United Nations decision is therefore also the history of how an alternative proposal was excluded from the political mainstream.

The novel does not present Abravanel’s predictions as settled outcomes or the United Nations as capable of resolving the conflict by its decision. Instead, it sets the promise of international deliberation and a two-state arrangement against Abravanel’s fear that partition would magnify hostility, while recalling the support the statehood decision received, including from the Communist bloc. In a later conversation, Shmuel argues that military force can keep Israel from immediate destruction but cannot turn an enemy into an ally or settle the causes of hatred. That distinction echoes the unresolved problem surrounding the United Nations process: a political decision can establish a framework for statehood, but it cannot by itself create reconciliation.