Palestinian Rain | 231Framed this way, as directly related to the accomplishment of one’s goal, “this
is not a so-called ‘moral’ claim, but rather a political argument.”^120 Faith that
God is the Lord of history means faith that success will follow the keeping of
the commandment. With respect to Zionist politics, this means that “it may
be characteristic of Zion that it cannot be built with ‘every possible means,’
but only bemishpat (Isaiah 1:27), only ‘with justice.’”^121 Buber’s stress here on
“historical reality” is meant to indicate that even those who do not speak the
“language of religion” should recognize the necessity of consonant means
and ends.
The point was reiterated with more substance, in what is perhaps his most
“traditional” use of religious language, Buber’s letter to Mahatma Gandhi. Writ-
ten in 1939, one year after his emigration to Palestine, and in the midst of the
thawra, this letter has been described as “a serious cry for sympathy and help.”^122
We do not know if Gandhi ever saw it. The letter was written in response to an
editorial in which Gandhi argued that although his “sympathies were all with the
Jews,” the “untouchables of Christianity,” whose persecution in Germany “seems
to have no parallel in history,” he could not condone the aspirations of Zionism
as he understood them: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that
England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhu-
man to impose the Jews on the Arabs.... [I]f they must look to the Palestine of
geography [rather than the Palestine in their hearts] as their national home, it is
wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun.”^123 He urged Jews of Ger-
many to pursue the strategy of nonviolence, or satyagraha (truth-force), which
he had used in South Africa on behalf of the Indian community there, a “truly
religious resistance offered against the godless fury of dehumanized man.”^124 Bu-
ber bemoaned the fact that Gandhi’s argument, “containing though it does ele-
ments of a noble and most praiseworthy conception such as he expects from this
speaker—is yet barren of all application to his peculiar circumstances.”^125 Buber
pointed out: “We began to settle in the land anew 35 years before the ‘shadow of
the British gun’ was cast upon it. We did not seek out this shadow; it appeared
and remained here to guard British interests and not ours.”^126 He rejected Gan-
dhi’s equation of South Africa with Germany, which he would not have made if
he knew “what a concentration camp is like and what goes on there.”^127 Moreover,
Buber had witnessed many instances of nonviolent resistance in Germany, and
none of them had the transformative effect Gandhi claimed for satyagraha. Fi-
nally, the South African Indians could invoke the existence of a mother country;
the Jews of Germany could do no such thing. If the Indians were to be expelled
from India, Buber asked, would Gandhi teach them that “the India of the Vedic
conception is not a geographical tract but that it is in your hearts?” The land is
not a mere symbol. But that is not to say, as Gandhi thought, that sanction for
Zionism is sought in the Bible. It is not the promise of the land, Buber wrote, that
is decisive, but rather the command: