Martin Buber's Theopolitics

218 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics

were respected intellectuals who typically came from Central Europe. How-

ever, they lacked counterparts on the Arab side who recognized a Jewish right

to a home in Palestine.^37

One might expect a different treatment from “revisionist” Israeli histories, re-
puted to reconsider the Zionist past in ways more favorable to previously ignored
or silenced voices. Yet Benny Morris’s Righteous Victims mentions Brit Shalom
only once in 694 pages, referring to it as “a significant but ultimately marginal
development... repudiated [by the Yishuv]... as naïve and unrealistic.”^38 Segev’s
One Palestine, Complete, which focuses on the Mandate period (1922–1948), dur-
ing which Brit Shalom was active, nonetheless mentions the group on only two
of its 519 pages.^39 The most recent general work, Anita Shapira’s Israel: A History,
continues the trend, with mentions on three of 475 pages.^40
This collective emphasis on failure and marginality is sometimes coupled
with an acknowledgment of Brit Shalom’s ideological uniqueness.^41 This group
took the problem of Jewish-Arab relations to be morally and practically primary
at a time when other Zionist factions were still denying that a problem existed.^42
The association of Brit Shalom with binationalism, however, has contributed to
seeing it as an idea irrevocably of the past. Binationalism apparently became im-
possible after the 1947 UN partition plan and the 1948 war, and it came to be
viewed as a mere curiosity. History had decided in favor of the nation-state. But
the term “binationalism,” applied too broadly, is reductionist and misleading,
obscuring more than revealing the history and content of Brit Shalom thought.
Binationalism is a policy recommendation, offered in response to a particular
set of options. It emerged, however, from a complex matrix of ideas. As Buber
himself put it in 1947:

This program [binationalism] is only a temporary adaptation of our path to

the concrete, historical situation—it is not necessarily the path itself. The road

to be pursued is that of an agreement between the two nations—naturally also

taking into account the productive participation of smaller national groups—

an agreement which, in our opinion, would lead to Jewish-Arab cooperation

in the revival of the Middle East, with the Jewish partner concentrated in a

strong settlement in Palestine. This cooperation, though necessarily starting

out from economic premises, will allow development in accordance with an

all-embracing cultural perspective and on the basis of a feeling of at-oneness,

tending to result in a new form of society.^43

Here Buber explains that binationalism is the contingent and temporary adap-
tation of “our path” to certain historical circumstances. To call Buber and his
groups binationalist may be a helpful shortcut, but it is also a misleading exercise
in political metonymy, calling an intellectual stance not by its most appropri-
ate name but by the name of something with which it is closely associated. We
have already seen the vast range of connotations that Buber can pack into a short
phrase such as “a new form of society.”