Palestinian Rain | 217though he eventually left the group, which disbanded completely in 1933.^26 Its
membership never exceeded two hundred, and according to Hattis, neither Brit
Shalom nor its somewhat similar “successor” movements were able to find “until
1946 a single serious Arab who was willing to accept their thesis.”^27
Brit Shalom was not a homogeneous group. According to one account, it was
internally divided between moderates and radicals; according to another, even
the radicals were sharply divided among themselves.^28 Tension revolved around
the question whether agreement with the Arabs was merely a practical idea for
Zionism or whether it was a sine qua non for the moral justification of Zionism.
The name “Brit Shalom” eventually came to be identified more with the position
taken by the radicals than with the historical group itself. As Adi Gordon writes:
“Although generations have come and gone and political reality has changed ut-
terly, Brith Shalom remains somehow very much present in Israeli conscious-
ness—reflecting the association’s transformation into a symbol of considerable
mythological import.”^29 Here, I adopt this “symbolic” usage, so that in retrospect
Ruppin, who was a Brit Shalom member, was not really a “Brit Shalomnik,” while
Judah Magnes, who was not in Brit Shalom, represents its stance.^30 Buber, de-
spite living in Germany for the duration of the movement’s existence, was the
spiritual father of this stance, which is generally seen as destined for marginal-
ity and failure. As the Israeli historian Tom Segev puts it, the tragedy of men
like Magnes is that “there was no demand for their goodwill.”^31 In accordance
with this perception of insignificance, histories of Zionism and the State of Israel
tend to devote little space to Brit Shalom. Yoram Hazony says that it “rarely re-
ceives more than a mention in books dealing with Israel’s founding.”^32 Howard
Sachar’s 1,020-page A History of Israel devotes but one sentence to Buber’s impact
on the young German Zionists who were to form the core of Brit Shalom, and
only one paragraph to the group itself, since “it made hardly a dent on the lead-
ership of Jewish Palestine. Neither did it evoke even the faintest response from
the Arabs.”^33 Conor Cruise O’Brien allots three paragraphs to Brit Shalom, and
never mentions Buber, in his Saga of Israel and Zionism.^34 Martin Gilbert gives
the movement equally short shrift.^35 Brit Shalom fares slightly better in Walter
Laqueur’s History of Zionism: it ranks a five-page discussion in the chapter on
Jewish-Arab relations, along with five other mentions in this six-hundred-page
work. Laqueur describes the group as “highly unpopular” and estimates its size
and impact even less generously than Sachar: “The association had at no time
more than a hundred members,” who “had no mass basis” and whose “political
impact was negligible.”^36 The best summary of this consensus can perhaps be
found in Michael Brenner’s Zionism: A Brief History:
Buber supported the idea of a bi-national state, which the Brit Shalom...
was attempting to achieve. This organization existed for only a brief period
(1925–33). The groups that succeeded it were few in number. Their members