Palestinian Rain | 241of that program was war—real war—with our neighbors, and also with the
whole Arab nation: for what nation will allow itself to be demoted from the
position of majority to that of minority without a fight?
When that program was revealed to be illusory, a program of tearing off
took its place. That is to say, tearing one part of the land away from the rest,
and in the torn off portion—once again, a majority, and the thing’s name
would be a Jewish State.^159Neither conquest nor partition, for Buber, have much to do with Zion. The way
of thinking that prioritizes sovereignty and majority is fundamentally corrupt. If
an “aggressive nationalism” is to be found hidden somewhere in Buber’s thought,
it is not on the level of macropolitics. The purported ill effects of Buber’s idea of
land appropriation must be sought elsewhere.^160
I have referred to Buber’s proximity to religious Zionism, despite the fact that
the majority of those who call themselves religious Zionists today do in fact valo-
rize sovereignty and majority. This tendency was not a powerful one in Buber’s
own time, so his polemics are usually directed against the secular mainstream.
Indeed, Buber accuses both Herzl and Ben-Gurion of “secularization.”^161 With
respect to Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of the State of Israel, Buber adds:
“This [secularization], which is supreme in the whole world at present, has very
old roots. Even some kings in Israel are said to have gone so far as to employ false
prophets whose prophesying was merely a function of State policy.”^162 The jux-
taposition of Ben-Gurion to the ancient kings of Israel tells us something about
Buber’s attitude to the state. It is not merely that Buber’s day-to-day involvement
in politics was characterized by pragmatism, which he saw as dictated by his
idealism, although this is certainly true. It is also the case that his pragmatic
idealism is mirrored in his vision of Israelite history, in which the banner of the
kingship of God was first raised by those like Gideon, who sought God’s justice
in an anarcho-theocracy, and then passed on to the prophets, who sought to in-
spirit a popular monarchy. Buber may have wanted originally to realize Zion in a
commonwealth of internally anarcho-socialist kibbutzim, federated in a system
similar to the one Landauer had proposed for Germany, with tight economic and
social cooperation between Jews and Arabs. But an unpredictable combination of
external threats and internal corruption favored the trend toward a “State with a
Jewish majority,” a trend that easily won the day. Buber’s “acceptance” of the State
of Israel, then, can be read as a neo-prophetic gesture, bent on maximizing God’s
justice in the new situation.
Buber could have opposed the state’s proclamation by founding a sect. Per-
haps this is what his younger self, who praised the Essenes for their righteous
separation from the community at large, would have done. But he was seven-
ty years old in 1948, and his foremost disciples were not much younger. Per-
haps he could have played the role of a Zvi Yehuda Kook to a kind of left-wing,