Between conflict and reconciliation: Martin Buber on the Jewish settlement of Palestine. With the unpublished manuscript “Fragen und Antworten. Die jüdische Besiedlung Palästinas” (1947)

ABSTRACT This paper presents Martin Buber’s unpublished manuscript ‘Fragen und Antworten. Die jüdische Besiedlung Palästinas’ in the original German with English translation and contextualizes it within the main stations of Buber’s Zionist thinking: cultural Zionism, religious Zionism, and Zionism of realization. It problematizes Buber’s reflection on Jewish settlements in Palestine with reference to the significance of Zionism for humanity as well as the possibility of reconciliation between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. It also addresses the problem of Jewish terror, framing it in correlation with the restrictions on Jewish migration to Palestine and the catastrophe of the Shoah.


Introduction
The issue of Jewish-Arab relations -between conflict and reconciliation -has enduringly accompanied Martin Buber's life and thought, not only as an object of theoretical considerations but also as a leading thread at the core of his political praxis.While the Austrian-Jewish intellectual expressed his responsibility before the historical hour in a wide range of occasional writings, 1 Buber's agency within the Zionist movement also reflected a dialogical attitude toward the given circumstances.Time and again, the philosopher supported a range of 'subaltern' 2 positions in it, through which he repeatedly challenged the hegemonic discourse of leaders such as Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, and David Ben Gurion.Presenting the unpublished manuscript Fragen und Antworten.Die jüdische Besiedlung Palästinas [Questions and Answers.The Jewish Settlement of Palestine] therefore requires first of all tracing Buber's stance on Zionism.Significant in this regard is the programmatic sketch Drei Stationen, 3 in which Buber, as early as 1929, formulated a self-understanding of his engagement within the Zionist movement in terms of a development articulated in three distinct phases: (1) The first station is Buber's cultural Zionism (Kulturzionismus).In the years spanning from the congresses led by Theodor Herzl (1897-1904) to the outbreak of World War I, Buber understood Zionism primarily as a vector for overcoming the estrangement from their Judaism suffered by diaspora Jews.The notion of 'people' (Volk) gained centrality in his writings, and it is as a 'Volkserziehung', 4 i.e., as a political pedagogy, that one should read the editorial line that he promoted as editor in chief of the weekly newspaper Die Welt (September -December 1901) and the activities he encouraged within the Demokratische Fraktion he co-founded at the time of the 5 th Zionist Congress (December 1901).This included: organizing the visual art exhibition Jüdische Kunst, launching the publishing house Jüdischer Verlag, co-writing a prospectus for the establishment of a Jüdische Hochschule which would materialize, a quarter of a century later, in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 5According to Buber, it made little sense to appeal to a 'Jewish state' if a 'Jewish people' had not first awakened.The Jüdische Renaissance (1901) 6 he heralded, that is, the 'rebirth of Judaism' through a series of processes of rediscovery and appropriation of the creativity (art, culture, language) and religiosity of the Jewish people, thus had an overtly political purpose.(2) During World War I, Buber's thinking underwent many paradigm shifts: not only did his fundamental turn from mysticism (and aestheticism) to dialogue take place, 7 culminating in his masterpiece Ich und Du (1916-23), but also his stance toward Zionism was challenged, to the extent that he left aside the leading principle of 'culture' by reaching his second station, namely that of a 'religious Zionism' (religiöser Zionismus).Community, in antithesis to both the anonymity of mass society and the power excess of nation-state, became as early as 1919 the political 'locus of realization' (Ort der Verwirklichung) 8 of Buber's relational ontology, according to which every I -Thou encounter bears witness to the presence of the Eternal Thou in the here and now. 9This is also reflected in the specific character of his religious Zionism.Partly inspired by his dialogues with Gustav Landauer and Leonhard Ragaz, 10 but also sharply perceivable in a dispute he had with Hermann Cohen, 11 from 1916 onward Buber formulated a plea for an anarchotheocracy, 12 referring to the Old Testament covenant in terms of a pact of sole obedience of the Jewish people to God's sovereignty (hence, 'theocracy'), but also as a resource for radically contesting any power relations embodied by the European nation-state (hence, 'anarcho-theocracy'). (3) In the same years in which Buber developed his religious Zionism, he also observed the intensifying of Jewish emigration to the Holy Land following the Balfour Declaration (November 1917) and the inception of the British mandate for Palestine, so that his Zionism reached its third station, namely that of 'realization' (Verwirklichungszionismus).Through the term 'realization', a significant legacy of his pre-dialogical writings, 13 Buber assigned messianic significance to the Jewish settlement in Palestine, by defining the hard labor of the pioneers -carried out in the Kibbutz, agricultural cooperatives with a strongly communitarian structure -as the actualization and fulfilment of God's sovereignty in this world, on which would depend not only the particular fate of the Jewish people, but also, in a universal sense, that of the whole humanity.Buber's conception of Zion, accompanied by religious inspiration, was nonetheless driven by a 'greater realism', 14 as the philosopher urged that the presence of a resident Arab population be taken seriously.At the core of Buber's Zionism of realization lay, as early as 1919, the moral imperative to build right relationships between both peoples. 15His proposed resolution on the Arab question at the 12 th Zionist Congress in Karlsbad (September 1921) -in which Buber spoke as a delegate of the Hitachduth ('unification') -a political formation resulting from the merging of the non-Marxist socialist Zionist party Hapoel Hazair ('the young worker'), founded by Aaron David Gordon in 1905, and the grouping of Zeire Zion ('youth of Zion') -constitutes a paradigmatic expression in this regard.Even today, Buber's words still resonate as a mighty caveat: 'The Jewish people, who have constituted a persecuted minority in all the countries of the world for two thousand years, reject with abhorrence the methods of nationalistic domination, under which they themselves have long suffered'. 16hrough his critique of nationalism, militarism and imperialism, but also of mercantilism and colonialism, 17 which went hand in hand with his advocacy of equal economic and cultural cooperation with the Arabs, Buber's Zionism of realization thus differed radically from all the European chauvinism which spread out in the aftermath of World War I.

st Question: the value of the Jewish settlement
The opening question of Fragen und Antworten inquires if, according to Buber, the Jewish settlement in Palestine is only of particular value to the Jewish people or whether this undertaking has a universal significance instead.It is noteworthy that, in asserting that this issue expresses a general concern, the philosopher responds by replacing a faceless 'general public' (Allgemeinheit) with the term 'humanity' (Menschheit).In line with what he stated a few years earlier in his monograph Israel und Palästina.Zur Geschichte einer Idee (1945), 20 Buber affirms a direct connection between the realization of Judaism in Palestine and the fate of humanity.He then elaborates on his position: Palestine is characterized in the very first lines of Buber's Fragen und Antworten as a 'bridge between Orient and Occident', not without a certain echo of that 'oriental' and mediating character toward the West that the philosopher assigned to Judaism in his Drei Reden über das Judentum (1911). 21This happens in the same paragraph in which Palestine is defined as a land of universal significance, a 'world problem' and a 'world concern'.Buber's cult of the ancestral homeland, which placed him in a position antithetical to Herzl's territorialism as early as the beginning of the 20 th century, is tied here to statements reminiscent of his encounter with Gordon, so that Buber's laudatory references to settlers and his celebration of the regenerative power of labor in Fragen und Antworten can actually be traced Jewish settlements are defined by Buber as communities 'of production and consumption', structured according to 'cooperative principles' characteristic of the Kibbutz, as attested also by his reference to the term 'social experiment[al]'. 23In consonance with his theses in Pfade in Utopia (1947), 24 the indissoluble bond between new forms of 'common economies' and 'living-together' would make Jewish settlements a possible third way for a humanity entangled in a 'overall crisis', crushed as much by the individualism of Western capitalist societies as by the collectivism of the Soviet Union.The Kibbutz assumes a significance that is as distinctly Jewish as it is relevant to the entire humanity and would thus attest to the messianic value of Zion, which passes inescapably, according to Buber, through the direct and concrete experience of working the land.The philosopher counteracts the crisis with his confidence in the communities of settlements, which thus rise to guarantee of the mutuality and horizontality of the socially embodied I-Thou relationship.As always in his pages, all political and economic renewal stems from the rebirth of the interhuman, i.e., the repair of the human capacity to enter the I -Thou relationship.Buber's 'social principle', 25 which emerges in sharp antithesis to the power excess of the surplus-state in the last season of his political thought, is expressed here in terms such as 'freedom' and 'autonomy', along with a plea for federalism and self-government.Buber then returns to a messianic and universalistic idea of Zionism he had already formulated in his dispute with Cohen toward the end of World War I, as he firmly sentenced: 'We do not want Palestine for the Jews, we want it for humanity, for we want it for the realization of Judaism'. 26In Fragen und Antworten he asserts again, three decades later, that the awakening of the Jewish people through its settlement in Palestine is not an end in itself but is rather placed at the humanity's service: Thirdly: However, it must be noted that the consolidation of the Jewish people itself is not merely a national interest, but an interest of the humanity.If the core of this people is detached from that mixture which has become fatal to the substance of the peoples and is awakened to its own life and creativity on its own soil, one can hope that it will contribute to the construction of a new humanity, which is not unworthy of its beginnings.
In this section, it is possible to observe continuity with some of Nietzsche's lexemes that are characteristic of Buber's early Zionism too: 'life', 'creativity', 'awakening', 27 but also with his critical stance toward diaspora, which differentiated Buber, to take one example, from Stefan Zweig's radical cosmopolitism. 28 reflection on Jewish settlements in Palestine cannot avoid questioning the relationships between the Kibbutz and the Arab population.According to Buber's Fragen und Antworten, the factual interests of the two peoples are by no means irreconcilable.On the contrary: it is 'political propaganda' that tends to polarize the two groups and intentionally generate conflict.29 In the antithesis he poses between concrete 'reality' on the one hand and the interests of politics on the other, Buber appeals for reconciliation in the name of a pragmatic approach, which starts from the acknowledgment of mutual interdependence and cooperation between two groups as a resource of mutual benefit.30  Admittedly, the linkage of the Arabs with the Jewish economy should have been far more comprehensive and far-reaching than it has been; the obstacles have been overestimated and the extent of the task underestimated.Anyway, it is not yet too late to build a large common Palestinian economy, which is really compatible with the unrestricted specific lives of both cultures, and to prepare a binational common entity.Let only the representatives of the two peoples co-administer the affairs of common public life to the extent possible today, and the mutual mistrust that poisons all relations will gradually be replaced by that fruitful trust without which no common work of peoples can grow on earth.

Freilich, die Verknüpfung der Araber mit der jüdischen Wirtschaft hätte weit umfassenden und tiefergreifenden erfolgen sollen als es geschehen ist; man hat die
According to Buber, peace and reconciliation between Jews and Arabs will be secured through the full deployment of interdependence between the two peoples.Concretely, this means an active involvement of the Arabs in a 'common economy', and it is in an equal cooperation that Buber poses as a necessary precondition for the success of a 'binational common entity'.The philosopher writes in heartfelt agreement with the core values of the Ichud, which places at the center of its agenda the unfolding of just relations between Jews and Arabs, questioning also the goal of achieving a Jewish majority in Palestine, and even to move beyond the idea of a Jewish state.Just as Buber opposes an exploitative capitalist economy, he similarly rejects a state perceived as a top-down entity; therefore, he advocates a bottom-up administration, pro-actively involving both Jews and Arabs.Mistrust, be it between different peoples or between individuals and their representatives, Buber warns us, is the consequence of the power excess of the centralized surplus-state; yet, it can be overcome, as he will argue in later post-World War II writings such as Hoffnung für diese Stunde (1952), 31 through the flourishing of horizontal I-Thou relationships in the public sphere.Admittedly, there should be no possibility of majorization with regard to the vital needs of the Jewish community, without the satisfaction of which its development and thus also its work on the land, the right to immigration and the right to purchase land, would be hindered.But should the future of human peoples really be inevitably at the mercy of the alleged law that a majority always rules over a minority?Should not there be a chance here, in this land of a world problem and a world concern, to try a different form of living-together and interactingtogether between two peoples?
The so-called 'majority issue', that is, the goal of increasing Jewish migration to Palestine as much as possible, was strongly supported by almost the entire political spectrum of the Yishuv, from Ben Gurion's Mapai ('Workers' Party of the Land of Israel') to Jabotinsky's revisionist Zionism.In contrast, according to the Ichud, 'the rate of immigration should be regulated by the economic or "absorptive" capacity of the country so as not to exacerbate Arab fears of being inundated and excluded from the development of the country they share with the Jews'. 32Israel, which, at the time Buber writes Fragen und Antworten has not yet proclaimed its independence as a sovereign state, has, according to the philosopher, a specific duty: to be 'not a state like the rest'. 33This means: the political affirmation of Israel must go hand in hand, so Buber, with the moral imperative of the 'tradition of justice' 34 in Judaism, which challenges the Realpolitik logics, including the hegemony it assigns to the majority.
3 rd Question: Jewish Terror The third and final question concerns the so-called 'Jewish terror'. 35I recall here, by way of example, the attack on the King David Hotel by the Irgun ('National Military Organization') on 22 July 1946, which, by blowing up the offices of the British Mandate government, resulted in the death of 91 people, including several civilians (British, Jews, Arabs).Buber's firm condemnation of politically motivated violence in Fragen und Antworten is accompanied by a hermeneutical effort (to understand is not to justify!) that leads him to identify a strong connection between the most radical 'despair' and the enactment of terror attacks -a 'despair' that is directly related with British legislation, which severely limited the possibility of emigration to Palestine in the darkest hour of Jewish history.Fragen und Antworten thus ends with Buber's reference to the Shoah, defined here by the term 'catastrophe' and by its being 'unequaled in scale and depth of suffering in the annals of humanity', in continuity with his words in Schweigen und Schreien (1944). 36On the same wavelength of thinkers as such as Hannah Arendt or Theodor W. Adorno, Buber manifests an early understanding of the unprecedented character of the Jewish genocide.Interestingly, he also agrees partly with Ben Gurion's thesis, according to which the 'catastrophe' meant migrating to Palestine as the only chance of salvation to not a few survivors.Yet, according to Buber, a moral act (rescuing the European Jewry) should not be merged with the political goal of building a Jewish majority in Palestine. 37

Conclusions
Reconciliation and a solid peace between Jews and Arabs can only take place, according to Buber's Fragen und Antworten, by overcoming the political polarizations fomented by external political powers, and only by returning to the real, 'vital needs' of the two peoples, which are often more coincidental than divergent when it comes to concrete demands.Buber, who was one of the founding members of the Brit Shalom ('Covenant of Peace') association as early as 1925, soon raised attention to the issues of peace and reconciliation in the Near East, expressing the goal 'to arrive at an understanding between Jews and Arabs as to the form of their mutual social relations in Palestine on the basis of absolute political equality of two culturally autonomous peoples, and to determine the lines of their cooperation for the development of the country'. 38In the plurality of the three stations through which Buber engaged with and within the Zionist movement, he always spoke and acted from the standpoint of a 'prophetic politics', 39 arguing that religion, ethics and politics cannot be separated, but he also expressed himself in much more practical, even pragmatic terms than is usually acknowledged.In his stance toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Buber ultimately remained true to his relational ontology, according to which any social renewal requires first and foremost the healing of damaged (or even broken) relationships, 40 namely: the work of reconciliation.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.First page of the manuscript in Buber's handwriting.

1 .
22age: Kommt der jüdischen Siedlung in Palästina lediglich ein Wert für die Konsolidierung des jüdischen Volkes zu oder darüber hinaus auch für die Allgemeinheit?Antwort: Der Menschheitswert der jüdischenSiedlung in Palästina ist ein dreifacher.1 st Question: Does the Jewish settlement in Palestine only hold value for the consolidation of the Jewish people or also for the general public?Answer: The Jewish settlement in Palestine has a threefold value for humanity.tohis addresses for the Hapoel Hazair in the period immediately following World War I (1919-1921).22 Zum ersten: Palästina, die Brücke zwischen Morgen-und Abendland, ist ein Weltproblem und eine Weltsorge.Die Menschenwelt hat ein Interesse daran, dass dieses Land, das in Lauf der Jahrtausende zu einem Aussenbezirk der Wüste geworden war, neu erschlossen und produktiviert werde.Dieses grosse Werk haben erst die jüdischen Siedler begonnen, mit einer Kraft der Hingabe und der Ausdauer, die von keinem andern Vorgang in der Siedlungsgeschichte der Menschheit überboten wird.Sie haben bereits Ungeheures zustande gebracht und ihre Arbeit schreitet, auch in Zeiten wo die Schwierigkeiten wachsen und wachsen, rastlos vorwärts.Im kritischen letzten Jahr ist die Besiedlung des ganz zur wasserlosen Wüsten geworden Südens, des "Negev", inauguriert worden.Man lasse diese ganz an ihr Werk hingegebenen Menschen arbeiten, und das Land wird bald in seinem vollen Segen blühen wie einst.Firstly: Palestine, the bridge between Orient and Occident, is a world problem and a world concern.The human world has an interest that this land, which over the millennia had become an outlying area of desert, will be newly developed and made productive.This great labor was first begun by the Jewish settlers, with a strength of dedication and perseverance unsurpassed by any other process in the history of human settlement.They have already accomplished enormous things, and their work continues tirelessly even in times when difficulties grow and grow.In the critical last year, the settlement of the completely waterless desert of the South, the "Negev", was inaugurated.Let these people work, who are completely dedicated to their labor, and the land will soon flourish in its full blessing as it once did.back It is the one thing that will solve the world problem of Palestine and overcome the world concern of Palestine: If the powers whose power game determines the destiny of humanity today agree to settle the Palestinian question exclusively from its own perspective, that is, from the vital needs of the country itself.