A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [201]
"I don't envy those Arabs. There are some Jews in America, they will soon send us here some atom bombs."
My mother said:
"These onions don't look too good. Neither do the cucumbers."
And Mrs. Lemberg (who always smelled faintly of hard-boiled eggs, perspiration, and stale soap) said:
"It's all just one big intrigue, I'm telling you! They're making theater! Comedy! Ben-Gurion has already agreed in secret to sell all of Jerusalem to the Mufti and the Arab gangs and King Abdullah, and for this the English and the Arabs have agreed maybe to leave him his kibbutzim and the Nahalal and Tel Aviv. And that's all they care about! And what will happen to us, if they will murder us or burn us all, they don't care about that at all. Jerusalem, the best thing they should all go faifen, so afterward in the state they want to make for themselves they should be left with a few less revisionists, a few less ultra-Orthodox, a few less intelligentsia."
The other women hurriedly silenced her: What's the matter with you! Mrs. Lemberg! Sha! Bist du meshigge? Es shteit da a kind! A farsh-tandiker kind! (Hush! Are you crazy? There is a child here! A child who understands!)
The farshtandiker kind, the child strategist, recited what he had heard from his father or his grandfather:
"When the British go home, the Haganah, the Irgun, and the Stern Gang will certainly unite and defeat the enemy."
Meanwhile, the unseen bird in the pomegranate tree held fast to its own line: it did not budge. "Ti-da-di-da-di." And over and over again: "Ti-da-di-da-di." And after a pause for reflection: "Ti-da-di-da-di!!"
43
IN SEPTEMBER and October 1947 the papers were full of guesses, analyses, assessments, and suppositions. Would there be a vote on partition at the General Assembly? Would the Arabs succeed in getting the recommendations changed or the vote canceled? And if it did go to the vote, where would we get a two-thirds majority?
Every evening Father would sit between Mother and me at the kitchen table, and after drying the oilcloth he would spread out some cards and start calculating, in pencil, in the sickly yellow light, the chances of winning the vote. Evening by evening his spirits fell. All his calculations indicated a certain and crushing defeat.
"All twelve Arab and Muslim states will naturally vote against us. And the Catholic Church is definitely putting pressure on the Catholic countries to vote against, because a Jewish state contradicts the fundamental belief of the Church, and there's no one like the Vatican when it comes to pulling strings behind the scenes. So we'll probably lose all twenty votes of the Latin American countries. And Stalin will undoubtedly instruct all his satellites in the Communist bloc to vote in accordance with his rigid anti-Zionist approach, so that makes another twelve votes against us. Not to mention England, which is always stirring up feeling against us everywhere and especially in her dominions, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, and they'll all be roped in to thwart any chance of a Hebrew state. What about France, and the countries that follow her? France will never dare to risk incurring the anger of the millions of Muslims in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Greece has close trade links with the whole Arab world, and there are big Greek communities in all the Arab countries. And what about America itself? Is America's support for the partition plan final? What happens if the intrigues of the giant oil companies and our enemies in the State Department tip the balance and outweigh President Truman's conscience?"
Over and over again Father calculated the balance of votes in the Assembly. Evening after evening he tried to soften the blow, to devise some coalition of countries that usually followed the United States, countries that might have reasons of their own to oppose the Arabs, and small, respectable countries like Denmark or Holland, countries that had witnessed the horrors of the genocide of the Jewish people and might now gird their loins and act according to the dictates