Omelettes into Eggs

Ben Heine/ MWC NEWS

I stuck my nose outside the door of my Haifa hotel room. I was told enthusiastically that the United Nations General Assembly had just decided to partition the country.

I went back into my room and closed the door behind me. I had no desire to join the celebrations.

November 29, 1947 - a day that changed our lives forever.

At this historic moment, how could I feel lonely, alienated and most of all - sad?

I was sad because I love all of this country - Nablus and Hebron no less than Tel-Aviv and Rosh-Pina.

I was sad because I knew that blood, much blood, would be shed.

But it was mainly a question of my political outlook.

I was 24 years old. Two years before, I and a group of friends had set up a political-ideological group that aroused intense anger in the Yishuv (the Hebrew population in Palestine). Our ideas, which provoked a very strong reaction, were regarded as a dangerous heresy.

The "Young Palestine Circle" ("Eretz-Yisrael Hatz'ira" in Hebrew) published occasional issues of a magazine called "ba-Ma'avak" ("In the Struggle"), and was therefore generally known as "the ba-Ma'avak Group") advocating a revolutionary new ideology, whose main points were:

We, the young generation that had grown up in this country, were a new nation.
Our language and culture meant we should be called the Hebrew Nation.
Zionism gave birth to this nation, and had thereby fulfilled its mission.

From here on, Zionism has no further role to play. It is a hindrance to the free development of the new nation, and should be dismantled, like the scaffolding after a house is built.
The new Hebrew nation is indeed a part of the Jewish people - as the new Australian nation, for example, is a part of the Anglo-Saxon people - but has a separate identity, its own interests and a new culture.

The Hebrew nation belongs to the country, and is a natural ally of the Arab national movement. Both national movements are rooted in the country and its history, from the ancient Semitic civilization to the present.

The new Hebrew nation does not belong to Europe and the "West", but to awakening Asia and the Semitic Region - a term we invented in order to distance ourselves from the European-colonial term "Middle East".

The new Hebrew nation must integrate itself in the region, as a full and equal partner. Together with all the nations of the Semitic Region, it strives for the liberation of the region from the colonial empires.

With this world view, we naturally opposed the partition of the country.

Two months before the UN partition resolution, in September 1947, I published a pamphlet called "War or Peace in the Semitic Region", in which I proposed a completely different plan: that the Hebrew national movement and the Palestinian-Arab national movement combine into one single national movement and establish a joint state in the whole of Palestine, based on the love of the country (patriotism, in the real sense).

This was far from the "bi-national" idea, which had important adherents in those days. I never believed in this. Two different nations, each of which clings to its own national vision, cannot live together in one state. Our vision was based on the creation of a new, joint nation, with a Hebrew and an Arab component.

We hastily translated the essence of the pamphlet into English and Arabic, and I went to distribute it to the editorial offices of the Arab newspapers in Jaffa. It was no longer the town I had known from earlier days, when my work (clerk in a law office) frequently took me to the government offices there. The atmosphere felt dark and ominous.

With the expected UN resolution looming, we decided to publish a special issue of ba-Ma'avak devoted completely to it. A student of the Haifa Technical University volunteered to supply a drawing for the front page, and that's why I found myself at that fateful moment in that small Haifa hotel.

I couldn't go back to sleep again. I got up and, in the excitement of the moment, wrote a poem that was published in that special issue. The first verse went like this:

"I swear to you, motherland, / On this bitter day of your humiliation, / Great and united / You will rise from the dust. / The cruel wound / Will burn in the hearts of your sons / Until your flags / Will wave from the sea to the desert."

One of our group composed a melody, and we sang it in the following days, as we bade farewell to our dreams.

The moment the UN resolution was adopted, it was clear that our world had changed completely, that an era had come to an end and a new epoch had begun, both in the life of the country and also in the life of every one of us.