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tension around us and the sense that something momentous was about to happen
as the prospect of a state got closer.

The memories remain with me to this day, like a series of snapshots. It was
on a spring morning in 1947 that I got my first real sense that the Jewish state
was something which would have be fought for, and that youngsters not all that
much older than me would have a critical role to play. I got a close-up look at
the elite of the Zionist militias, the Palmach. It numbered something like 6,000,
from a pre-state force totaling around 40,000. The Palmachniks were highly
motivated, young political activists. They had no fixed base. Each platoon,
almost all of them teenagers, spent five or six months at a time on various
kibbutzim. For the first two weeks of each month, they would earn their keep by
working in the fields. They spent the other weeks training. I had just turned five
when I watched three dozen Palmach boys and girls, in their T-shirts and short
khaki pants, rappel confidently down the side of one of our few concrete
buildings. The building was only 25 or 30 feet high, but it looked like a
skyscraper from my perch on the grass in front, and the feat of the young
Palmachniks seemed to me nothing short of heroic.

A few months later, on a Saturday afternoon in November 1947, I crowded
into my parents’ room as the Haganah radio station crackled out its account of a
United Nations debate on the future of Palestine. The session was the outcome
of a long train of events starting with Britain’s acknowledgement that its
mandate to rule over Palestine was unsustainable. The British had proposed a
series of arrangements to accommodate both Arab and Jewish aspirations. Now,
the UN was meeting to consider the idea of splitting Palestine into two new
states, one Arab and the other Jewish.

Since the partition was based on existing areas of Arab and Jewish
settlement, the proposed Jewish state looked like a boomerang, with a long,
very narrow center strip along the Mediterranean, broadening slightly into the
Galilee in the north and the arid coastline in the south. Jerusalem, the site of the
ancient Jewish temple, was not part of it. It was to be placed under international
rule. By no means all Zionist leaders were happy with partition. Many, on both
the political right and the left, wanted a Jewish state in all of Palestine, with
Jerusalem as its centerpiece. But Ben-Gurion and the pragmatic mainstream
argued that UN endorsement of a Jewish state – no matter what its borders, even
with a new Palestinian Arab state alongside it – would represent a historic
achievement. The proceedings went on for hours. At sundown, we had to return
to the children’s home. But we were woken before dawn. The vote for partition

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