A Tale of Love and Darkness

FATHER EXPLAINED over supper one evening that at the General Assembly of the United Nations, which would meet on November 29, at Lake Success, near New York, a majority of at least two-thirds would be required if the UNSCOP report recommending the creation of two states on the territory of the British Mandate, one Jewish and one Arab, was to be adopted. The Muslim bloc, together with Britain, would do everything in their power to prevent such a majority. They wanted the whole territory to become an Arab state under British protection, just as some other Arab countries, including Egypt, Trans-Jordan, and Iraq, were de facto under British protection. On the other side, President Truman was working, contrary to his own State Department, for the partition proposal to be accepted.

Stalin's Soviet Union had surprisingly joined with the United States and also supported the establishment of a Jewish state side by side with an Arab one: he may have foreseen that a vote in favor of partition would lead to many years of bloody conflict in the region, which would enable the USSR to acquire a foothold in the area of British influence in the Middle East, close to the oil fields and the Suez Canal. Contorted calculations on the part of the superpowers coincided with one another, and apparently intersected with religious ambitions: the Vatican hoped to gain decisive influence in Jerusalem, which under the partition plan was to be under international control, i.e., neither Muslim nor Jewish. Considerations of conscience and sympathy intertwined with selfish, cynical ones: several European governments were seeking a way of somehow compensating the Jewish people for losing a third of its numbers at the hands of the German murderers and for generations of persecution.