Palestinian Rain | 219Buber’s Zionism after 1916 was built on the foundation of the mystical, post-
Nietzschean anarchism of Landauer and developed through an in-depth study of
biblical theopolitics. Somewhat confusingly, however, Buber calls this complex
and idiosyncratic mixture “Zionism” and continues to insist that this is what
“true” Zionism must mean, no matter how many others with radically differ-
ent ideas claim the term Zionism for themselves. Consequently, it has been dif-
ficult to properly contextualize his activity. Buber joins a strong sense of election,
covenant, and command to a will to the immediate realization of socialism, yet
he remains isolated both from socialist Labor Zionism and from religious Zion-
ism.^44 The term “binationalist” points to the cause of this isolation, yet Buber’s
binationalism is merely a manifestation of his broader theopolitics. Only from
this standpoint can we properly judge Buber’s successes or failures, fifty years,
four Israeli-Arab wars, and two Palestinian intifadas after his death.
In the Fray: Public Intellectual as Theopolitician
Bringing Landauer to Zionism, or Trying, 1919–1925
It is important to remember the connection between Buber’s Zionist evolution
and two other lines of development: the cooperative settlement movement, and
the Zionist-Arab conflict. The turn of the century, the time of Buber’s earliest
Zionist activity, was also the close of the First Aliyah, and the moshav system of
private, plantation-style settlement under professional managers on the payroll
of the Baron de Rothschild. Only in 1910 was the first kvutza, Degania, estab-
lished on collectivist principles, with its workers keeping a common treasury and
exercising control over their own work through direct-democratic processes. By
1914, the end of the Second Aliyah, Degania had become a model for twenty-eight
new kvutzot (totaling about 380 people).^45 The war interrupted the flow of Jew-
ish immigration to Palestine, but by the time of the Third Aliyah in 1919, Buber,
newly reinvested in Landauerian principles, began to take note of the increas-
ingly central role that collective settlement was coming to play in the life of the
new Yishuv. As Grete Schaeder has noted, the Zionist pioneers did not face the
kind of obstacles that Landauer had known: “The Jewish commonwealth that was
developing [in Palestine] would not be hampered by previously existing institu-
tions and constitutional forms. Because that commonwealth was being founded
by like-minded people creating afresh out of the primitive forms of community
life, there was the possibility of charting new territories of creative socialism.”^46
There was no single model kibbutz, but certain broad principles dominated
the movement. As stated by the Degania group in a letter to Ruppin, these aimed
at “a cooperative community without exploiters or exploited.”^47 This objective
would be realized through the collective ownership of property, including the
means of production; free distribution of consumer goods, according to need;
the abolition of wage labor; decisions to be made by a general assembly of all the
kibbutz members, with each member having an equal vote; the integration of