240 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
Liberal Zionists, defined as those who believe that the State of Israel can exist
simultaneously as “a Jewish State” and as a thriving democracy with equal rights
for all, might protest that this article blames them for a political climate largely
created by the extreme political right. The argument accuses liberal Zionists of
providing cover for such tendencies. Persisting in their own impractical vision,
they refuse to ally themselves with the struggles of those to their left, who seek
a greater transformation of Israeli society and thus aid and abet those to their
right, whose blatant nationalism and chauvinism they presumably abhor.^155
Is Martin Buber subject to this critique too? It would be hard to classify him
as a liberal Zionist. Judith Butler has noted that Buber’s “version of Zionism has
become so anathematic in light of contemporary framings of Zionism that it now
reads as ‘post-Zionist’ or simply anti-Zionist.” In the same breath she castigates
Buber’s failure “to criticize Israel as a form of settler colonialism.... [T]he most
consequential blindness in his position... was that he could not see the impossi-
bility of trying to cultivate certain ideals of cooperation on conditions established
by settler colonialism.”^156 Referring presumably to Buber’s statement to Gandhi
that one should ask the soil itself who has the right to work it, she writes that
he imported a “neo-Lockean rationale for land appropriation into his thought,”
failing to understand that “no ‘common’ projects could set aside the land sei-
zures that had already taken place and that the basis on which he claimed Jewish
right to the land installed an aggressive nationalism at the heart of his notion of
cooperation.”^157 Similarly, Atalia Omer has argued that “the binational proposal
articulated by Brit Shalom and Ihud was and remains problematic in that it did
not respond to intracommunal human rights dilemmas and it essentialized or
fossilized the two cultures in their autonomous settings. It neglected to address
the rights and status of individuals who do not affiliate with either community.
. . . Buber et al. were not in a position to recognize the pervasiveness of the Ashke-
nazi orientalist discourse.” She further alleges that “the binational plans devised
by Brit Shalom and Ihud enabled bypassing internal questioning of the entitle-
ment to settle Palestine and cultivate a Jewish/Hebraic culture therein. ... The
presumption of equality... normalizes the core narrative, which is one of injus-
tice.... Buber’s cohort’s visions of binationalism are erroneously retrieved as an
‘alternative’ to the Israeli political project.”^158
These are serious charges. The final chapter of this book explores the extent
to which they are justified. For now, we should remember how Buber himself (in
an essay to which Butler refers, written not two weeks before the proclamation of
the State of Israel) describes the evolution of the goals of the Zionist mainstream:
That demand [for sovereignty] was expressed and presented in two different
forms, one beside the other. The first form crystallized around the ‘democrat-
ic’ concept of the majority: we must endeavor to create a Jewish majority in a
state that will include the whole land of Israel. It was evident that the meaning