Palestinian Rain | 223of events that he once again turned his back on the politics of Zionist Congresses,
in which he felt it was impossible to participate “without compromising truth.”^67
The Zionist movement appeared unwilling to heed his call to replace the Balfour
Declaration, perceived as a guarantee of success, by uncertain negotiations with
the Arabs of Palestine. For Buber, however, this was a new theopolitical hour,
and the risk was religiously mandated: “God does not sign promissory notes. But
blessed be the man who lends himself to God without any bill of exchange!”^68
Brit Shalom: Ideology and Career, 1925–1933
In the autumn of 1925, Brit Shalom was founded in Palestine, and Buber, though
still in Germany, became a member. Its founding charter, published in English,
Arabic, and Hebrew, proclaimed that “the object of the Association is to arrive at
an understanding between Jews and Arabs as to the form of their mutual social
relations in Palestine on the basis of absolute political equality of two culturally
autonomous peoples, and to determine the lines of their co-operation for the
development of the country.”^69 Its ideological uniqueness among Zionists is best
explained by focusing on several major concrete and practical issues, issues that
coincided with the major Arab grievances against Zionism: land acquisition, the
rate and scale of immigration, and the policy known as kibbush avodah, the “con-
quest of labor.”^70 On all these matters, Brit Shalom’s stance (i.e., that of its “radical
coterie”) was undergirded by its opposition to sovereignty as a Zionist goal and
its conviction that honoring Arab rights was a necessity for the fulfillment of
Zionism, and not an obstacle to its achievements.
Most Zionists saw their methods of land purchase, like their general inten-
tions, as morally innocent; they viewed sporadic and sometimes violent peasant
resistance to it as nonpolitical in nature, or at least not nationalistically motivat-
ed. This was especially the case prior to 1900, when Jewish purchases seemed little
different, from the perspective of the average fellah, from purchases by wealthy
Arab landlords.^71 These purchases were few, at any rate: “By the [nineteenth] cen-
tury’s end, merely 21 Jewish settlements with about 4,500 Jewish inhabitants—
two-thirds working in agriculture—had been established. These numbers were
hardly large enough to have any serious impact on Arab agriculture.”^72 Benny
Morris notes that conflicts between early moshavot and evicted Arab peasants
did occur, at Petach Tikva, Gadera, and Rehovot; in most of these cases, how-
ever, “once the initial disputes over land were settled, and the Arabs resigned
themselves to their loss, hostility abated.”^73 Neville Mandel agrees, noting that
although the fellahin were generally surprised to learn that their land had been
sold, first to wealthy landowners and then to Zionists, and although from their
perspective this abstract transfer of title had nothing to do with their continu-
ing rights to live and work on the land, they accommodated themselves to new
conditions if they could secure work at the settlements.^74