Martin Buber's Theopolitics

226 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics

Shalom emerged here. Ruppin wrote, “Our principle, which requires that all the
work in our colonies be done by Jews only, does indeed suit our national interests,
but robs the Arabs of the wages which they had been earning in our colonies.”^88
Buber, however, contended that economic segregation was only apparently in the
Jewish “national interest.” In 1939, after the thawra [the Arab Revolt] had been
under way for three years, and a strict Arab policy of economic segregation had
been enacted, Buber lamented the Zionist movement’s failure “to form a serious
partnership with that people, to involve them earnestly in our building of the
land, and to give them a share in our labor and in the fruits of our labor.”^89
Immigration was one question on which all Zionist factions seemed to agree.
In Judah Magnes’s view of the essentials of Zionism, he cited only three things:
“Immigration. Settlement on the land. Hebrew life and culture.”^90 To be sure, the
urgency of immigration increased over time. Nothing united the Yishuv more
than the British White Paper of 1939, which placed a blanket restriction on Jew-
ish immigration at a time when Jews desperately needed to flee Europe. In 1935,
more than sixty thousand Jewish immigrants entered Palestine, a rate that if
sustained would have made Jews a majority by 1947.^91 However, even before the
thawra (by which time Brit Shalom had already dissolved), various Zionist fac-
tions had different conceptions of what immigration meant, depending on their
interpretation of Zionism itself. For Labor and for the Revisionists, immigration
was a means to independence, conceived as sovereignty and a Jewish majority.
This precisely is why the Arabs opposed it. For Brit Shalom, on the other hand,
such a conception of immigration threatened the goal of a democratic society, as
Ernst Simon warned the Jewish Agency in London in 1930:

If the Jews renounce the plan of developing a majority they no longer need to

oppose democratic institutions in the country. Such a peace conclusion would

restore [the] confidence of progressive world opinion including the League of

Nations.... If such a perfect peace is not arrived at... the Palestinian con-

tingent of the Jewish people will have to fall in for hire with the imperialistic

and reactionary forces and must develop all the virtues and all the vices of a

warlike nation.^92

In the face of Arab hostility to the idea of becoming a minority in their home-
land, a Jewish majority could be achieved only by the use of force. David Werner
Senator complained to Weizmann:

If it is not assumed that the Great Powers are prepared to transfer the Arabs of

Palestine from this country to other Arab countries, the [program of a Jewish

commonwealth] can only mean partition. But here again, a workable partition

seems to be possible only if at least a partial transfer [of the Palestinians from

their homes to areas outside the Jewish state] is effected.^93

Unlike either Labor or the Revisionists, Brit Shalom maintained that if Zionist
goals could be achieved only through large-scale force, they not only did not de-