"West," but to awakening Asia and "the Semitic region"-a term we invented in order to distance ourselves from the Europeancolonial 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 should
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 (as a 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."