This Pathless Hour | 279all historical events as building inevitably toward greater freedom and enlight-
enment. At the start of World War I, Zionism was in a precarious position. The
majority of the thirty-five thousand Second Aliyah settlers (themselves only a
tiny fraction of the overall emigration of millions of Jews from Eastern Europe
to points west, primarily the United States, during the same period) had given
up, leaving the movement with more emigrants than immigrants.^152 It was not
inevitable that the Ottoman Empire would collapse, that Britain would issue the
Balfour Declaration and receive the Mandate for Palestine, that the Palestinian
Arab politicians would be so ineffectual, or that Hitler would come to power in
Ger ma ny.
Shalom Ratzabi has written that “the political and social worldview of the
members of the radical coterie in Brit Shalom was shaped and formed at the end
of the First World War. The ingredients of this worldview can be understood
as a coherent doctrine based on their connection to religious socialism, rather
than on the basis of reality in Palestine from the time of their Aliyah until the
establishment of the State.”^153 This is certainly true. But Buber and Brit Shalom
addressed themselves not to the Arab movement, which they understood no bet-
ter than did their Zionist contemporaries, but to their own movement, which
they understood well enough. Regarding Brit Shalom’s much-discussed failure
to find Arab interlocutors, a better question might be whether it could have con-
vinced the Zionist movement of its claims. There is reason to doubt this, given
the different experiences of the Central European Zionists, who hailed from a
multiethnic urban milieu, and the Russian Zionists, who had borne the brunt
of ethnic powerlessness before 1917. But even if the discursive environment was
unfavorable to Brit Shalom’s aims, this does not require a teleological interpreta-
tion of Zionist history.
From a historical point of view, anarchism was a negligible force in Pales-
tine, where it was outmaneuvered, just as in Germany, not by fascism but by
social democracy. Ben-Gurion and the Histadrut, the eventual power base of the
Mapai party, co-opted the kibbutzim and transformed them into state-building
institutions. That this was so easily done should deeply concern the partisans of
the anarchist version of the kibbutz vision. That it had to be done is something
that should give pause to those who see the kibbutz movement as nothing but
a tool for settler colonialism.^154 And it raises a question for Butler’s contention
that “the most consequential blindness in Buber’s position... was that he could
not see the impossibility of trying to cultivate certain ideals of cooperation on
conditions established by settler colonialism.”^155 That question is: If certain ideals
of cooperation cannot be cultivated under settler colonialism, are other ideals
of cooperation possible? If so, what distinguishes these separate sets of ideals?
If not, is this a counsel of despair to any contemporary efforts at decolonization,
which must surely take cooperative forms?^156