Palestinian Rain

Zionism as Applied Theopolitics

Let the dreamers pass from one sky to another.

—Mahmoud Darwish

They speak about rebirth and mean enterprise.

—Martin Buber

Introduction: Buber’s Zionism as Theopolitics in Action

For all the changes in Martin Buber’s philosophy over the years, one constant
is his inclination to the concrete and the everyday. In 1913, he proclaimed that
“genuine religiosity... has nothing in common with the fancies of romantic
hearts, or with the self-pleasure of aestheticizing souls, or with the clever mental
exercises of a practiced intellectuality. Genuine religiosity is doing.”^1 Fifty years
later, this had not changed: “I don’t believe in theories but in human example. . . .
Not the truth as an ideal nor the truth as image, but the truth as action is what
Judaism is all about. Judaism’s goal is not philosophic theory or artistic creation
but Torah as truth.”^2 By Buber’s own lights, then, his action should be the most
important place we look to determine his teaching—and Zionism was the pri-
mary arena of his political action.^3 After a brief period at the turn of the century
when he seemed to act as a representative of “official” Zionism, he adopted an
oppositional position, which he held for the rest of his life, even as the content of
this position and the vocabulary he used to describe it evolved. This shifting of
vocabularies, the nuance with which Buber expressed his position, and Buber’s
idiosyncratic intellectual inheritance together make it difficult to pinpoint his
Zionism in a single description.
The evolution of Buber’s Zionism is best understood as a manifestation of his
anarcho-theocratic understanding of Judaism, influenced by his collaborations
with Gustav Landauer in politics and Franz Rosenzweig in biblical studies, along
with his awareness of the growing cooperative-settlement movement in Palestine
and the intensification of the Zionist-Arab conflict. No single book-length work
represents this synthesis. However, Ben ‘am le-artzo (Between a People and Its

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