United Nations partition resolution of November 29, 1947

The United Nations partition resolution of November 29, 1947, proposed dividing the land into independent Jewish and Arab states, linked by economic relations and a common currency, while placing Jerusalem and Bethlehem under international control. In the novel, the resolution becomes a charged point of disagreement: Shmuel Ash encounters its promise in a newspaper as if it were unfolding in the present, while the recollections of Gershom Wald set it against Shaltiel Abravanel’s failed effort to secure a shared political future with the Arabs.

The resolution in the newspaper

The day after a conversation about political power, dreams, and the limits of force, Shmuel goes to the reading room of the newspaper archive. He finds the November 30, 1947, issue of Davar, whose headline announces that a Hebrew state will soon be established. The report says the UN General Assembly has voted by more than a two-thirds majority to establish a free Jewish state in the Land of Israel. It describes the proposed division into two independent states, Jewish and Arab, with economic relations and a shared currency; Jerusalem and Bethlehem, it adds, are to come under international control. The newspaper also lists the countries that voted for, against, or abstained.

The vote is not merely archival information to Shmuel. Reading the report, he is overcome with emotion and his eyes fill with tears, as though the events described had taken place that very moment. A man with a goatee and pince-nez watches him; when their eyes meet, the stranger quickly looks back down at his papers, and Shmuel turns away as well. The brief exchange of glances leaves the public record and the reader’s private response side by side: a decision made by an international assembly is encountered anew as intimate, still-living history.

A disputed answer to the conflict

The resolution’s promise of two states stands within a deeper argument about the claims and fears shaping the conflict. Shmuel challenges the assumption that Arabs should have welcomed Israel, asking why people whose land, fields, towns, cities, ancestral graves, and inheritance had been taken by newcomers would accept that loss without resistance. He points to the justification offered by the newcomers—that sacred books promised them the land—and questions whether any people would have welcomed the sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of foreigners, followed by millions.

Wald recalls that Shaltiel Abravanel tried in 1948, as the British were leaving, to persuade David Ben-Gurion that an agreement with the Arabs was still possible. Abravanel advocated a condominium for Arabs and Jews, contingent on giving up the idea of a Jewish state. His proposal was rejected; he was expelled from the Zionist Executive Committee and the Jewish Agency leadership, which Wald describes as the unofficial Jewish government at the end of the British Mandate. Wald admits that he himself sided with Ben-Gurion’s hard realism rather than Abravanel’s ideas. The resolution thus marks not only a decision about political division but also the defeat of a competing approach to political coexistence.

Partition, force, and the limits of security

The debate over the resolution is inseparable from the question of whether a state founded through partition and defended by military power could overcome Arab hostility. Shmuel argues that Israel’s arrival and the loss of Palestinian land help explain why the Arabs opposed it; he refuses to treat that opposition as inexplicable hatred. In another part of the discussion, Wald distinguishes military force from political reconciliation: force can prevent an enemy from destroying Israel, but it cannot turn an enemy into an ally, a fanatic into a tolerant person, or someone thirsting for revenge into a friend. Military power can avert disaster for a time, he insists, but cannot repair or resolve the underlying conflict.

That distinction shapes the historical meaning of the vote in the novel. The resolution establishes an international framework for partition, but the characters’ arguments expose what a formal division cannot settle: whether the people living in the land can accept one another’s claims, and whether security can be achieved without an enduring cycle of fear and force. The same historical decision that moves Shmuel to tears is therefore also the focus of unresolved political and moral questions.

Abravanel’s alternative and its failure

Wald’s account of Abravanel gives the proposed division a counter-history. Abravanel believed that a Jewish state would make a bloody war with the Arab world inevitable, possibly drawing in the wider Muslim world. He anticipated a vast imbalance between roughly half a million Jews and hundreds of millions of Muslims, and warned that even Jewish victories would deepen Arab fear and prolong conflict across generations. His alternative was not simply to oppose Jewish immigration: he expected that the entry of one wave of one hundred thousand Holocaust survivors might be accepted, raising the Jewish population from about 650,000 to three-quarters of a million. He proposed allowing the Arabs time—perhaps ten or twenty years—to absorb the Jewish presence, while replacing the departing British Mandate with an international mandate or a provisional government under American supervision.

Abravanel’s reading of Arab opposition also differed from the confidence of state-building. As Wald recounts it, Abravanel believed that Arabs feared not only the existing Zionist settlement, then a small collection of towns and dozens of villages along the coastal plain, but its potential expansion. Their anxiety, he argued, centered on Jewish strengths in education, technology, ingenuity, and motivation, and on the prospect that these might lead to control of the wider Arab territory. For him, declaring a Jewish state after the Mandate ended would turn that fear into a generational war. The partition resolution represents the route that prevailed; Abravanel’s warning preserves, within the novel’s political argument, the cost and uncertainty of the alternative it displaced.