A historian of the Middle East recalls the passionate Zionists who opposed such an entity as a distraction from the goal of ‘true Zionism’, which was to create a land where Arabs and Jews would flourish together.
By JOHN MCHUGO
From the 27 July 2024 edition of THE TABLET
“A STATE at any cost” is the title of Tom Segev’s 2019 biography of David Ben-Gurion, the leader and driving force behind the struggle to create an ethnically Jewish state in Palestine. The words reflect what effectively became the policy of the Zionist movement after the 1942 Biltmore Conference in New York City, at which a programme to establish “a Jewish Common- wealth” in Palestine was adopted. Support for the creation of an independent Jewish state in Palestine was to grow among Jews and non-Jews alike as the full horrors of the Holocaust became known.
Yet there were voices within the Zionist movement who opposed this course. Two towering figures stand out: the American Reform rabbi Judah Magnes and the philosopher Martin Buber. Magnes was the first native-born Californian to be ordained a rabbi and would become the first chancellor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1907, on his first visit to the Holy Land, he travelled with a party on horseback across the lands of Gilead from Kerak northwards to the summit of Mount Hermon. “That indeed is the high point which my life is striving to reach,” he wrote at the time, “to possess for the Jewish people all the land from the South to the peak beyond the clouds.” He clearly saw “the South” as comprising both sides of the Jordan and looked to Zionism to create a Jewish majority there.
Magnes might have become the leader of American Jewry and perhaps the Zionist movement itself, save for one thing: the dictates of his conscience. He was a pacifist, and would only abandon pacifism in the face of the evil of Nazism. He opposed the United States’ entry into the First World War and became the victim of a witch-hunt in consequence. He was appalled by the Balfour Declaration. He observed that it was primarily for the benefit of the British Empire, which, as a patriotic American of his generation, he deeply distrusted.
As he put it in a speech in 1919: “To my mind, no Peace Conference has the right to give any land to any people, even though it be the Land of Israel to the People of Israel.”
In 1922, Magnes went to live in Palestine and stayed because of his commitment to establishing the Hebrew University. He sensed the storm clouds on the horizon, as Jewish immigrants built a society parallel to that of the Arab majority and some planned for a future in which they would take over the land.
As he put it in a speech: “Will the Jews here, in their efforts to create a political organism, become devotees of brute force and militarism, as were some of the late Hasmoneans, and will they, like the Edomite Herod, become the obedient servants of economic and militaristic imperialism? It is among the possibilities that someday it may become political treason for someone sincerely to repeat in the streets of Jerusalem Isaiah’s teaching that swords are to be beaten into ploughshares, and men are to learn war no more.”
THE CHOICE before the Zionist movement was simple, he said: Joshua or Jeremiah. Should it build up its strength behind a phalanx of British bayonets until it dominated Palestine (the Joshuas), or should it seek to win the understanding of the Arabs (the Jeremiahs)? Magnes opposed the 1937 Peel partition recommendation as well as the Biltmore programme. He suffered in consequence.
Magnes lobbied after 1948 for a two-state solution
Jewish charities, which had once fallen over each other to attract him as a keynote fundraiser, now shunned him. Magnes had been unable to bear the thought that the Holy Land was being “carved up like a piece of beef ”. Yet after Ben-Gurion’s declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, he lobbied for an armistice and proposed a federation between Israel and a Palestinian state, under which the two states would be independent, with Jerusalem as the shared capital.
He left Palestine in April; on 27 Oct he died in New York of a heart attack. Just before his death, he withdrew from the leadership of an American Jewish welfare organisation he had helped establish after his plea that it extend its help to Palestinian refugees fell on deaf ears. He wrote in Commentary: “It is unfortunate that the very men who could point to the tragedy of the Jewish displaced persons as the chief argument for immigration into Palestine should now be ready, as far as the world knows, to create an additional category of displaced persons in the Holy Land.”
Martin Buber was born in Vienna in 1878, seven months after Magnes had been born in San Francisco. The two became friends while studying together in Germany. By the time he went to university, Buber had ceased to be an observant Jew. Zionism seemed to him a secular and revolutionary way of sustaining Jewish solidarity and national consciousness, and he joined the movement while a student.
Theodor Herzl, who is seen as the founder of political Zionism, made him the editor of the new Zionist newspaper Die Welt. But Buber did not share Herzl’s political vision, soon resigned, and slowly withdrew from activism. His Zionism was religious and cultural rather than political. He believed Palestine was the spiritual centre of the Jewish people and that emigration there should be encouraged. At the same time, he was open to the possibility that it might equally well be Jews of the diaspora who turned out to be the renewers of Judaism. Like Magnes, he was appalled at the Balfour Declaration, which he saw as a fundamental compromise of principles.
The support the Zionist movement gave it shocked him. As he put it in 1918: “[Zionists] are assimilated to the dominant dogma of the century, the unholy dogma of ‘the sovereignty of nations’, which assumes that one’s nation is ‘answerable only to itself ’.”
AFTER HITLER came to power, local stormtroopers would parade through the village of Heppenheim where Buber and his family lived and pause, menacingly, outside their house. It was only in March 1938 that they escaped and emigrated to Palestine, where Magnes procured a professorship for Buber at the Hebrew University. The pair now worked together, seeing their task as rescuing the Zionist project from nationalist extremism.
Bi-national state for Arabs and Jews a more authentic fulfilment of Zionism
Buber, too, opposed the Biltmore programme. While Magnes saw it as a declaration of war on the Arabs, Buber, quoting Joshua 9:23, considered it would make the Arabs no more than “hewers of wood and drawers of water”.
Magnes and Buber argued that Palestine should become a binational state shared by Arabs and Jews, which Buber saw as a more authentic fulfilment of Zionism than a solely Jewish state. To Ben-Gurion’s fury, the pair gave evidence against the partition of Palestine to Unscop, the UN Special Commission on Palestine created in 1947 to make recommendations about the future government of Palestine.
Buber told the commission, “It is … ethically and politically incumbent upon ‘a regenerated Jewish people in Palestine’ not only to aim to live peacefully ‘next’ to the Arabs of the land but also ‘with’ them … Together they are to work to develop the country for the equal benefit of both communities. Within the framework of a shared Arab-Jewish stewardship of the country, Jewish cultural and social autonomy would not, as the great part of the Jewish people think today, necessarily lead to the demand for ‘a Jewish state’ or a ‘Jewish majority’. We need for this land as many Jews as it is possible to absorb, but not in order to establish a majority against a minority.”
Buber saw Israel’s declaration of statehood in 1948 as an act of assimilationism – “Zionism” for Buber meant spiritual renewal, not nation-building. He contrasted the new state with that of the ancient Hebrews. They had not succeeded in “becoming a normal nation”, but under Ben-Gurion, the Jews “were succeeding at it to a terrifying degree. This sort of ‘Zionism’ blasphemes the name Zion. It is nothing but one of the crudest forms of nationalism, which acknowledges no master above the apparent (!) interests of the nation.”
THE EFFORTS of Buber, Magnes and such groups as Brit Shalom and the Ihud party who advocated a binational state with equal rights for Jews and Arabs in an undivided Palestine were cold-shouldered by both the Israeli public and Arab leaders.
Buber lived until 1965, winning accolades of praise and worldwide respect for his philosophy of dialogue and work on reconciliation between Jews and Germans. His pleas for the rights of Palestinian Arab refugees were less welcome in Israel.
Today the seeds of yet further instability, conflict and war have been planted in Palestine and the anger and hatred that are currently being sown render a purely military solution futile and the prospects for a lasting diplomatic settlement remote. Yet if there is to be any hope of ending the cycle of violence, prophetic voices like those of Buber and Magnes must be heard.
John McHugo writes on the history of the Middle East and Islam. He is currently working on a book on the intertwined histories of Islamism and Zionism.