Martin Buber's Theopolitics

Palestinian Rain | 229

Executive and the Palestine Land Development Company, the writer and activist
“Rabbi” Benjamin, and the agronomist and director of the Jewish Colonization
Agency, Haim Kalvarisky. Ruppin expressed his difference of opinion with Brit
Shalom’s “radical coterie”:

What we can obtain from the Arabs we do not need, and what we need we

shall not be able to obtain. What the Arabs are willing to give us is at most mi-

nority rights for the Jews in an Arab state, according to the pattern of minority

rights in Eastern Europe.... Zionism which is willing to give its hand to such

a compromise with the Arabs will not gain the support of the Jews of Eastern

Europe and would soon become Zionism without Zionists.^109

However, Ruppin’s ultimate resignation from Brit Shalom took place not because
of its stance after the riots but because of the radical wing’s support of Britain’s
policy in favor of the Legislative Council for Palestine. All “majority” Zionists
opposed this concept, as the Jews would be outnumbered in any parliament. As
Ruppin put it, “one should not regard democracy and the good of the people as
identical concepts.”^110
Brit Shalom suffered another setback when one of its radicals, Hans Kohn,
resigned from the Zionist movement. Kohn, a former member of the Prague Bar
Kochba Society, moved to Palestine in 1925, became a director of the Keren Haye-
sod (the Palestine Foundation Fund, financial arm of the World Zionist Organi-
zation), and helped found Brit Shalom. Kohn published a biography of Buber in
1929, on which he worked very closely with his subject.^111 The close relationship
between the two men added pathos to Kohn’s admission to Berthold Feiwel, an-
other Keren Hayesod director, that he had “become increasingly aware that the
official policy of the Zionist Organization and the opinion of the vast majority of
Zionists are quite incompatible with my own convictions.”^112 Copying this letter
to Buber, Kohn wrote:

We are seeking a victorious peace... a peace whereby the opponent does what

we want.... [I]t will be possible for us to hold Palestine and continue to grow

for a long time. This will be done first with British aid and then later with the

help of our own bayonets.... [T]he means will have determined the goal. Jew-

ish Palestine will no longer have anything of that Zion for which I once put

myself on the line.... What we support we cannot vouch for.... [E]ither Zion-

ism will be pacific or it will be without me. Zionism is not Judaism.^113

For Buber, Kohn’s resignation represented a challenge to his own struggle to re-
shape Zionist policy and strategy. In response, he disagreed, not with Kohn’s diag-
nosis of contemporary Zionist troubles, but with his decision to withdraw from the
movement.^114 Buber was convinced that “if work is to be done in public life, it must
be accomplished not above the fray, but in it.”^115 Although this may seem like the
kind of realpolitik that Buber normally opposed, he meant that idealists should not