Palestinian Rain | 239own hopes for his time: Israel would rise as a third between the two Cold War
powers. But a line must again be drawn between the Isaianic and the Deutero-
Isaianic versions of the prophecy. The former can be reformulated as a materialist
wager: that the achievement of a nonhierarchical and voluntary religious social-
ism in Israel will provoke imitation and interest around the world, and lead in
turn to widespread abandonment of the failed ideologies of the West. The latter,
however, is an eschatological conviction that is kin to the kind of messianism that
Buber rejects in Kingship of God and elsewhere. It cannot be reformulated mate-
rialistically, unless with anachronistic reference to the ecological crisis and the
means necessary to avert it. The difference between Isaiah and Deutero-Isaiah
suggests a tension in Buber’s thinking about Zionism as a theopolitical project,
which in turn suggests a tension in the idea of theopolitics itself. Does Zionism
have an end, as political projects do, one that can be measured by success or fail-
ure? Or does it have only a goal, as religious ways of life do, one that cannot be
said to have ever been reached? Can we ever really arrive at Zion? The answers
to these questions have great importance for how we evaluate Buber’s life’s work,
especially in light of his consistent failure to have the kind of impact he wished
for on the Zionist movement.
Conclusion: The Thing’s Name
On the occasion of the sixty-fifth Israeli Independence Day, the left-leaning web
magazine +972 published a commemoration of the holiday as it might take place
in the fantasy alternate-universe state of “Librael.”^154 In this imaginary country,
refugees from around the world have enriched the meaning of the three weeks
leading up to Independence Day, which begin with Passover and include Holo-
caust Remembrance Day and Memorial Day. African Hebrews of Dimona tell
their stories on Passover, adding the memory of the Middle Passage to the memo-
ry of the Exodus from Egypt. Filipino Israelis and Darfuri Israelis share their his-
tories and experiences of occupation and genocide on Holocaust Remembrance
Day. Memorial Day has become a time to recall the struggles of one’s ancestors,
both Israeli and Palestinian, for their causes, the wars that thankfully no lon-
ger need be waged. And on Interdependence Day (as many call it), everyone cel-
ebrates their shared life and freedom. Of course, Librael does not exist. In the
real State of Israel, these three weeks are a time of “hyper-nationalist consensus-
building, of sharpening the supposed differences between us and them with a
race razor.” Enslaved migrant workers, jailed African refugees, Palestinians seek-
ing to commemorate the Nakba, the “catastrophe” of their exile in 1948—these
are excluded from the holidays. “Liberal Zionists,” the piece concludes, “have had
plenty of time to prove that it is possible for an ethnocracy to simultaneously be a
liberal democracy. In this, they have failed miserably.... [I]sn’t it high time that
liberal Zionism retired?”