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Judah Magnes
This article is part of a series of essays in Socialist Zionism written by prolific socialist Zionists.
Judah Magnes was called to be Rabbi of the leading Reform Synagogue in New
York. He attempted to bridge the gap between his Reform, westernised, richer
congregation and the poorer, Yiddish-speaking masses in New York. From
1905-1908 he worked as secretary of the American Zionist Federation and led the
protests in the US against the anti-Semitic massacres in Eastern Europe. He
broke with the established synagogues and set up his, own organisation -The
Society for the advancement of Judaism. In 1915 he broke with the official
Zionist movement over the question of a Jewish cultural home or statehood in
Palestine. He favoured the path of careful settlement and religious revival to
that of, in his opinion, unrealistic statebuilding.
For the rest of his life, spent from 1922 onwards in Palestine, he forwarded
a pacifist religious argument for the rebuilding of Zion on a spiritual as well
as a physical level. His courage and political unorthodoxy infuriated and
outraged many Palestinian Jews and Arabs. None of his work was more
controversial or characteristic of his individual approach than the following
passage calling for bi-nationalism written and published shortly after the 1929
riots in which the entire ancient Jewish community of Hebron was massacred.
Like all Nations
The discussion concerning the future political regime in Palestine is now
happily beginning to take on a more or less objective character and the
searching question is being asked as to what we want here. What is Our
Zionism? What does Palestine mean for us?
As to what we should want here I can answer for myself in almost the same
terms that I have been in the habit of using many years:
Immigration
Settlement on the land
Hebrew life and culture.
If you can guarantee these for me, I should be willing to yield the Jewish
state, and the Jewish majority; and on the other hand I would agree to a
legislative assembly together with a democratic political regime so carefully
planned and worked out that the above three fundamentals could not be
infringed. Indeed, I should be willing to pay almost any price for these
three, especially since this price would in my opinion also secure tranquility
and mutual understanding. If the Jews really have an historical connection
with Palestine, and what student of history will deny it, and if the Jewish
people are to be in Palestine not on sufferance (as during the days of the
Turks) but as of right -a right solemnly recognized by most governments and by
the League of Nations, and also by thinking Arabs -then surely these three
rights are elemental and hardly to be contested.
We can establish a Home here only if we are true to ourselves as democrats
and internationalists, thus being just and helpful to others, and that we ask
for the protection of life and property the while we are eagerly and
intelligently and sincerely at work to find a modus vivendi et operandi with
our neighbours. The world -not Palestine alone- may be bent upon violence and
bloodshed. But will not my opponent agree that there is a better chance of
averting this tendency to bloodshed if we make every possible effort
politically as well as in other ways to work hand in hand -as teachers,
helpers, friends -with this awakening Arab world?
You ask me, do I want to quit? No, I do not. The Jew will not abandon the
Land of Israel. He cannot abandon it. I have said that Palestine is of value
by and of itself- its rocks, its hills, its ruins, its beauty-and that it is
of value to Judaism even if our community here be small and poor. I am afraid
the first of the quitters will be those who say it is useless except we be in
the majority. But I also know that we cannot establish our work as it should
be established if it be against the determined will of the Arab world, and if
we have not the good will of the good European world on our side. Palestine
means so much in the Jewish scheme of things that I am sure that if the
experiment fails, Heaven forbid, this time (due, as always, partly to our own
sins) there will be another time. But I do not want it to fail, and the only
way it can succeed, so it seems to me, and that success is worth having, is if
we overcome all obstacles through all the weapons of civilisation except
bayonets: spiritual, intellectual, social, cultural, financial, economic,
medical, brotherly, friendly weapons. The Jew may have to be prepared to face
for a further period the hostility of a section of Arabs and of English and
others. Provided our own attitude is just and fair we should face that
opposition and not abandon the struggle. Our goal must be to have our
enterprise rest upon the conviction of all concerned that it is right and
just.
Palestine is holy to the Jew in that his attitude toward this land is
necessarily different from his attitude toward any other land. He may have to
live in other lands upon the support of bayonets, but that may well be
something which he, as a Jew, cannot help. But when he goes voluntarily as a
Jew to re-people his own Jewish Homeland, it is by an act of will, of faith,
of free choice, and he should not either will or believe in or want a Jewish
Home that can be maintained in the long run only against the violent
opposition of the Arab and Moslem peoples. The fact is that they are here in
their overwhelming numbers in this part of the world, and whereas it may have
been in accord with Israelitic needs in the time of Joshua to conquer the land
and maintain their position in it with the sword, that is not in accord with
the desire of plain Jews or with the long ethical tradition of Judaism that
has not ceased developing to this day.
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