Palestinian Rain | 221sustained—in fact, it is not even a beautiful dream.”^54 In 1913, he contributed an
article to the volume Vom Judentum, published by Buber’s disciples in the Prague
Bar Kochba Society, in which he asked, “What is Nation other than a union of
those who, brought together by unifying Geist, feel in themselves a particular
duty toward humanity? To be a nation means to have a function.”^55 On this basis
he condemned the chauvinism of political Zionism, and regularly spoke to Zion-
ist youth groups.^56 In declining to join in Buber’s Zionist projects he vacillated
between indifference and generous neutrality. “The more Germany and Turkey
on the one side, England, America, and the political Zionists on the other, take
an interest in Palestine,” he wrote to Buber in 1918, “the more my attitude cools
toward this region, to which my heart has never drawn me and which for me is
not necessarily the site for a Jewish community.”^57 A few months later he wrote:
“Don’t take it amiss, Buber, if I cannot participate in one or the other of your
undertakings; everyone needs his own forms and springboards. That doesn’t af-
fect our harmony and community, which has grown much deeper in the course
of these years.”^58 Buber did not cease attempting to involve him, however. As late
as March 1919 he persuaded Nahum Goldmann (1895–1982) to ask Landauer to
speak at a conference in Berlin for German socialist Zionists. Goldmann also
convinced Landauer to take part in a small preliminary convention in Munich,
planned by Buber for April 1919; he specifically asked him to draft statements on
decentralized society, nationalization of land, and worker control of industry.^59
The Bavarian Council Republic interrupted these plans and neither conference
ever took place, but the correspondence shows that Landauer’s “utopian” ideas
were taken seriously by socialist Zionists at the time, who saw potential to ap-
ply them immediately in building nonhierarchical socialist settlements in Pal-
estine.^60 After Landauer’s death, Buber lamented that Zionism had never met its
true, hidden leader: “Landauer’s idea was our idea... and in accordance with this
idea, Landauer was to have participated in the building of a new land and a new
society as guide and mentor.”^61
These words were addressed to the Founders Conference of the German
branch of Ha’poel Ha’tzair (The Young Worker), which took place in 1920 in
Prague. Ha’poel Ha’tzair was a non-Marxist socialist Zionist group, led in Pales-
tine by the farmer-philosopher A. D. Gordon (1856–1922). It was pacifist leaning,
and a close, if not exact, fit for Buber ideologically. The conference was an early
indication of Buber’s success in bringing Landauer’s ideas to the non-Marxist so-
cialist Zionists.^62 Chaim Arlosoroff (1899–1933), a young leader of Ha’poel Ha’tzair
who would later be instrumental in the founding of the Mapai, declared to the
conference, “In our views as to building up our economy in Palestine and in the
Exile the Weltanschauung of Gustav Landauer has served us as a foundation.”^63
At the conference, Buber’s group merged with another one to form the Hitachdut
Ha’poel Ha’tzair v’Tzeirei Tzion, and it was as a delegate of this organization that
Buber attended the Twelfth Zionist Congress in Karlsbad in 1921.