A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [194]
Father still went off every day, as usual, at half past seven in the morning, to work in the National Library on Mount Scopus, on the No. 9 bus that went from Geula Street along Mea Shearim and crossed Sheikh Jarrah not far from Silwani Villa. He came home a little before five, with books and offprints in his battered briefcase and more tucked under his arm. But Mother asked him several times not to sit by the window in the bus. And she added some words in Russian. We suspended our regular Saturday afternoon walks to Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora's house for the time being.
I was barely nine, and already I was a devout newspaper reader. An avid consumer of the latest news. A keen expositor and debater. A political and military expert whose views were valued by the neighbors' children. A strategist with matchsticks, buttons, and dominoes on the matting. I would dispatch troops, execute tactical outflanking movements, forge alliances with one foreign power or another, store up trenchant arguments that were capable of winning over the stoniest British heart, and compose speeches that would not only bring the Arabs to understanding and reconciliation and make them ask for our forgiveness, but could even bring tears of sympathy for our sufferings to their eyes, mixed with profound admiration for our noble hearts and moral grandeur.
I conducted proud yet pragmatic talks at that time with Downing Street, the White House, the Vatican, the Kremlin, and the Arab rulers. "Hebrew state! Free immigration!" demonstrators from the affiliated community shouted in marches and public gatherings, one or two of which Mother let Father take me along to. While every Friday, Arab crowds, marching angrily after they came out of the mosques, roared "Idbah al-Yahud!" (Butcher the Jews!) and "Falastin hi arduna wa al-Yahud kilbuna!" (Palestine is our land, and the Jews are our dogs!). If I had the chance, I could easily convince them rationally that while our slogans contained nothing that could hurt them, their slogans, shouted by inflamed mobs, were not very nice or civilized, and in fact they showed up the people who were shouting them in rather a shameful light. In those days I was not so much a child as a bundle of self-righteous arguments, a little chauvinist dressed up as a peace lover, a sanctimonious, honey-tongued nationalist, a nine-year-old Zionist propagandist. We were the goodies, we were in the right, we were innocent victims, we were David against Goliath, a lamb among wolves, the sacrificial lamb, whereas they—the British, the Arabs, and the whole Gentile world—they were the wolves, the evil, hypocritical world that was always thirsting for our blood, more shame on them.
When the British government announced the intention of ending its rule in Palestine and returning the mandate to the United Nations Organization, the UN set up a Special Committee on Palestine (UN-SCOP) to examine conditions in Palestine and also among the hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews, survivors of the Nazi genocide, who had been living for two years and more in DP camps in Europe.
At the beginning of September 1947, UNSCOP published its majority report, recommending that the British mandate should end at the earliest opportunity. Instead, Palestine should be partitioned into two independent states, one for the Arabs and one for the Jews. The area allocated to the two states was almost equal in size. The complicated, winding border that separated them was drawn roughly in accordance with the demographic distribution of the respective populations. The two states would be linked by a common economy, currency, etc. Jerusalem, the committee recommended, should be a neutral corpus separatum, under international trusteeship with a governor appointed by the UN.
These recommendations were submitted to the General Assembly for its approval, which required a two-thirds majority. The Jews gritted their teeth and agreed to accept the partition proposal: the territory allocated to them did not include Jerusalem or Upper and Western Galilee, and three quarters