The Tears of Sovereignty

I have no intention of adding a chapter to the lachrymose historiography of the Jewish people. The tears considered here were not caused by centuries of persecution, oppression, and exile. Nor are they the tears associated with the so-called passivity of a humiliated people. Indeed, they may well be the very opposite of the cliché image of the Jewish diaspora, its conversion or metanoia.

We return to the foundation of the Jewish State, to the moment of doubt and uncertainty when the fate of the Jewish home in Palestine lay in the hands of the nations of the world. The Yishuv, the Jewish population there, found itself at the mercy of the great powers dividing up the globe just after the Second World War. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations, like a somewhat paternalistic pedagogue leading a child by the hand towards the light, emancipated Israel by granting the Jewish homeland, this young nation, its status as an adult through a vote in favor of the partition of British-mandate Palestine. True, the UN vote ran smack up against Arab rejectionism. The War of Independence followed. But before major hostilities began, the UN decision had offered the brilliant possibility of victory and liberation.

Israeli novelist Amos Oz, then named Amos Klausner, was eight years old.

No one has portrayed better than he what was at stake on that decisive night, when the Jews in Palestine suddenly moved from infancy into sovereignty. I shall thus analyze a scene wherein tears and reasons of state merged, and pathos met political logos.

We are thus in the night of November 29 to 30, 1947. The UN General Assembly, located then in New York State, is deciding the fate of the Yishuvand of a future independent state. In A Story of Love and Darkness, a veritable Amarcordof Zionist inspiration, Amos Oz recalls the compact crowd standing petrified, apprehensive, mute in the Jerusalem square just under the windows of the child he then was.