278 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
The political questions would find their solution once most of the land in
Palestine was in Jewish hands, most of the population was Jewish, the Jews
dominated the economy, especially agriculture, and the Jewish residents de-
manded autonomy. Demography and agricultural work were interconnected
in assuring control of land. These were the operative conclusions of Arthur
Ruppin’s 1907 plan, upon the submission of which he was appointed to head
the Palestine Office, in 1908.^148Franz Oppenheimer’s moshav at Merhavia, from which the first kvutza, Degania,
split off a year later (citing objections to wage labor and hierarchical manage-
ment), was founded under the auspices of this plan, and as such the kibbutz must
be seen as a colonial enterprise from the outset. Horrox awkwardly concedes the
point that the kibbutz movement was betrayed not only by the forces of state
socialism but also “by the underlying reality that Zionism was, from the outset,
in the service of colonialism.”^149 A nexus of economic and demographic interests
accounts both for the militarization of the settlements and for the eventual agree-
ment of the Zionist labor movement to territorial partition, maximizing Jewish
population density by reducing the land area of the new state: “It was precisely
the acknowledgment of the conflict of real interests that led the Jewish immi-
grants to transform their position as combatants in a clash of forces into one of
champions of a socially, psychologically, and ultimately a morally coherent and
legitimating vision.”^150 Liberal Zionists like to distinguish themselves from more
radical (and thus illegitimate) critics of the State of Israel by saying that the prob-
lem is 1967 (the date of the Six-Day War and the beginning of the occupation of
the West Bank and Gaza), whereas for these other critics, the problem is 1948 (the
existence of the State of Israel itself). If we were to extend this practice of using
individual dates to stand in for ways of conceptualizing when things went wrong,
we might initially say that for Buber, as for Horrox, the problem is 1917, the date
that imperial and statist forces initiated a long-term program of control over the
Zionist project. For Shafir, however, and for others like him, the problem is 1882:
settlement in colonies.
A teleological conception of Zionist development, as emerging necessarily
from the socioeconomic conditions on the ground, strikes at the heart of Brit
Shalom ideology, more deeply than the contingent fact that they failed to find
interlocutors. In its thoroughgoing materialism, this idea contrasts more starkly
with Buber’s perspective than does the usual leftist claim that Zionism, only su-
perficially socialist and secular, was in reality indebted to romantic, völkisch na-
tionalism.^151 Here we have a flat denial of the relevance of ideology to the course
of events. However, such an attitude is just as inappropriate in the Zionist context
as in the so-called German Sonderweg (special path), a term used to designate
a controversy about the distinct historical trajectory of Germany among Euro-
pean nations, or in the classic “Whig interpretation of history,” which imagines