A Land of Two Peoples:

...Israel is a State inhabited by Jews and Arabs and cannot be consecrated and made idolatrous by the assumption that nationality and land are one...

...Only people count...

...I always knew Buber better, but was obliged nonetheless to suffer observations about intellectuals without power and religious visionaries without a constituency...

...Even the religiously orthodox where they were motivated by love of the Jewish People rather than only by love of the Land of Israel collaborated with the Zionist dream, believing steadfastly that the renewed spirit of the People (evidenced in creative work and building in the Holy Land) would result ultimately in that tranquillity in which divine work could once again be undertaken (hence the Zionism of the late Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Rav Abraham Kook...

...Buber's love and clarity demonstrate that both positions are wrong, not simply wrong-headed, but morally wrong...

...It was to this principle that the Zionist politics of Martin Buber was dedicated...

...Mendes-Flohr did not intend his constellation of Buber's view at this time to serve political ends, but inescapably a document that bespeaks such personal urgency and moral leadership cannot help but be political in the finest sense...

...Books: BUBER & THE CRISIS OF ZIONISM MARTIN BUBER is thought a luftmensch, one of that remarkable collection of European-Jewish intellectuals who could manage ideas brilliantly, but were hardly capable of efficacious morality and politics...

...If politics in the Middle East continues on both sides to be conducted as a politics of moral intransigence and cloture alongside deepening religious fanaticism, it is all lost and the Middle East is fated to remain the battleground of nations, now and forever, time without end...

...It is hard to persuade the obdurate and inflexible that Buber's politics in this case his views on Jews and Arabs set forth in Mendes-Flohr's brilliant anthology, A Land of Two Peoples, which contains all of Buber's writings on the subject from 1918 until his death in 1965 is never simply visionary (and hence easily dis-missible by the proudly hard-headed), but tactically sound, precisely because it is morally just and compassionate...

...And yet, precisely because their dreams are all that remains, in my view, between hope for Zionist renewal and ultimate reconciliation with the indigenous Arab populations of Israel and the West Bank occupied territories and an ideology of religious territorialism coupled with secularist manipulation of the army and the judicial and administrative practice governing the occupied lands, it is crucial that attention be paid...

...His point was that there should be no confusion between the People and the land...

...At such junctures Buber would warn that our despair issues from our ejection of the divine voice from the political proc-ess.lt is not common for politicians-Jews or Christians to listen and attend the voice of God...

...Martin Buber could not have produced or led the State of Israel...

...What is called for then is that Jews and Muslims stop and attend...

...The crisis of Zionism (and it is a crisis which deepens daily, despite the relative quiet that obtains in Lebanon and the West Bank) was anticipated long ago, not alone by Martin Buber, but by all the sponsoring figures of the classical Zionist movement whose impetus for Zion arose from considerations of the cultural, ethical, and spiritual primacy of the Jewish People...

...Not Israel alone, but only State of Israel...

...And, of course, the Nazi destruction of a third of the Jewish People created that kind of guilt-laden pressure which the Jews of the Exile and the more politically opportunistic Jews of the Yishuv were able to turn to the advantage of a politics of statehood...

...to some, like historian Hans Kohn, who quit the Palestine experiment because he found Zionism bent upon suborning his own ideals of pacifism and bi-national justice, Buber was too political and accommodating...

...Events have made them dreamers and their dream ridiculous...

...It is told that the Hebrew scholar and philosopher, Simon Rawidowicz, never completed the address of Israel-bound letters other than with the formula: Medinat Yisrael...

...All these devotees of classical cultural Zionism, secular and religious, have A LAND OF TWO PEOPLES MARTIN BUBER ON JEWS AND ARABS Edited with Commentary by Paul Mendes-Flohr Oxford, $29.50, 319 pp...

...Indeed, Buber argues continuously that Jews know precisely what is demanded of them by God and to void that knowledge is equivalent to a fundamental denial of God and Jewish destiny...

...Throughout Buber's writings on Jews and Arabs in the Land, one always hears the deliberative wisdom of a leader who commands a great voice, but a small constituency...

...With each episode of event and reaction in the Yishuv, Buber, working by himself or in concert with various organizations and publications of protest, called for moderation, humanity, toleration, and justice, documenting patiently the evil consequences of a mounting practice of non-negotiating intransigence...

...The initial dream was for co-existence and mutual enrichment of the land where both Jews and Arabs would benefit and flourish...

...But if, on the other hand, a stasis can be reached in which it becomes possible for Jews and Arabs to take counsel together, it may well be possible still possible to inaugurate that progression from disengagement to complementarity, to mutuality and economic coexistence, to an ultimate commingling of peoples where each person stands beside a neighbor rather than against him...

...It should not be held against Buber's greatness that his constituency was small nor against conventional Zionism that its politics of the efficacious and expedient carried the day...

...This has never been my understanding...

...First came the Balfour Declaration (1917), correctly suspected by Buber of having been fashioned with covert colonial intention, followed by the strengthening of the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement) during the late 1920s and 1930s, and the emergence of economic disequilibrium in which successful Jewish socialism coupled with right-wing Zionist militancy in the face of an emergent Arab politics of terrorism and popular harassment (itself always a politics of defeat...

...What comes through all of Buber's essays, speeches, feuilletons, open letters, and private correspondence (see the particularly moving exchange with Mahatma Gandhi in 1939), each meticulously introduced and documented by Mendes-Flohr, is the overriding conviction that the Zionist idea and the Zionist praxis were rarely successfully correlated to the benefit of both the emerging Jewish majority in the Land of Israel and the increasingly factionalized, poorly led, and ideologically enfeebled indigenous Arab population...

...Ben-Gurion triumphed...

...only short-term politics can be a politics of interest in which moral issues issues of historical destiny and justice are obscured...

...By many Buber was thought a traitor to Zionism...

...Anyone might have tested their erroneous reading of figures like Buber by trying to apply it to the scanning of the biblical prophets, but then more than likely they think the prophets Jewish luftmenschen...

...Only a Ben-Gurion arguing against Buber for an absolute majority of Jews in Palestine and an enabling policy of unrestricted immigration could have accomplished the founding of a state...

...The fact that Buber, Ahad Haam, Jehudah Magnes, Henrietta Szold, and many others among the great moral leaders of modern Zionism failed to persuade the Jews and the Israelis to cultivate justice and move slowly, to educate and convert their neighbors, to demonstrate the ethos of collective collaboration and mutual self-help, rather than capitulating to the provocations of both Jewish and Arab extremists, is not proof either of their inadequacy or (as is commonplace among sentimental Christian anti-Zionists) that "good Jews" lost out to vindictiveness...

...Such admirable dreams rarely come to pass, certainly not in an atmosphere charged by the imperialist ambition of the Ottoman, French, and British empires seeking concession and privilege in the Middle East...

...The business of discriminating true voice and true hearing from their falsification hangs upon the moral trajectory of history and historical events...

...Arthur A. Cohen been confuted by events...

...Granted, Buber would admit, but insist nonetheless that the divine voice is as audible in the politics of the long-range as it is available now and in every instant...

...The truth is always between, upon Buber's "narrow ridge" where the moral hero and the political failure always travel...

...The dream is no longer the great dream that Buber had in the early days, but it will perhaps avert the deadly round of bitterness and misery that has settled over the peoples of smaller and "greater"' Israel...

...It is not that the truth is somewhere in between...

...Too many epis-temological difficulties, too many realms for confusion, too many possibilities for mystification...

...Or as Buber would argue, all long-range politics is inevitably shot through with moral construction...

...The issue may make one weep both the majesty of the Zionist undertaking and the catastrophic trium-phalism to which its success has led...

...Buber lets nobody off the hook, certainly not Jews...

...Buber failed...