Introduction | 11tend to focus on the non-colonialist reasons and motivations for their immigra-
tion to Palestine, Arabs direct their attention to its results. Until the former learn
about results and the latter about intentions, neither is likely to gain access to new
knowledge.”^52 The question of how to relate intentions to results becomes even
more complicated when dealing with a minority position like Buber’s, which
failed to have its desired effect on the movement to which it belonged. I argue
that Buber’s theopolitics, as elaborated in his biblical works, casts him in the
role of prophet with respect to Zionism: having failed to achieve the anarcho-
theocracy that he considered the ultimate and only purpose of Jewish election,
Buber accepts the Jewish state as a fait accompli while simultaneously adopting
an oppositional stance toward it, attempting to recall it to the service of God by
arguing that true Judaism is impossible in Palestine as long as Jewish sovereignty
oppresses and excludes Palestinians. Failure in this mission, Buber fears, would
entail devastating consequences, not just for the Jewish people, who risk a third
exile, but for the idea they had been called upon to embody.
Theopolitics in Contemporary Thought
Buber’s theopolitics provides a missing coordinate in the contemporary constel-
lation of conversations about political theology, the return of religion, and the
clash of civilizations. Chapter 8 introduces theopolitics to the contemporary
theoretical landscape. Buber’s prophetic politics contests the prevailing versions
of secularized apocalyptic messianism; his anarchism challenges the reigning
neoliberal ideology of the West while engaging the aporias of the postcommunist
left; his Zionism attacks the deadlock between those who can understand Jewish
power only as domination (whether right-wing settlers or left-wing Diasporist
thinkers) as well as those who argue that Jewish power in its current form de-
viates only slightly from its true, enlightened, and tolerant incarnation (liberal
Zionists). This is not to say that Buber can easily be inserted into contemporary
circumstances, as though nothing has changed since his death in 1965. But it does
mean that his theopolitics—long overshadowed by the popularity of his other
work, invisible to those for whom any unconventional politics is an antipolitics,
scrambled through its presentation between the lines of obscure works of biblical
scholarship—may now emerge to speak to this pathless hour.
Notes
- Michael Walzer, In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2012), xiii. - Paul Mendes-Flohr, “The Kingdom of God: Martin Buber’s Critique of Messianic Poli-
tics,” Behemoth: A Journal on Civilization 1.2 (2008): 27n5. Cf. Mendes-Flohr, “Martin Buber’s
Rhetoric,” in MBCP 1–24. - The second edition of 1961 changed the subtitle to Ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte Mit-
teleuropas, 1880-1930.