FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Zionism, I and Thou

Rant Number 333 31 December 2008

I and Thou. A book that turned me on when, as an alienated teenager, I happened upon it. There is a resonance, a yearning, a promise in that and it stayed with me. ‘I and Thou’. Hope it clicks with you, too. I and You. Say to yourself a few times. The tingle of excitement, do you feel it? It is excitement about an encounter. A possibility. A disclosure. The disclosure of a meeting as…I and Thou.

Human beings only find fulfilment and authentic existence in meeting, in relationships. Did not God create, even before history, Adam and Eve, man and woman, so they should relate to each other? Be with each other? Hence human life at a deep level belongs to the realm of I and Thou. I and Thou stand for persons. To genuinely meet another person, a friend, you should be open, receptive and engaged with him. Should you remain cool, detached and disengaged, you would be acting weird. Because you would be adopting instead an I and It posture. One appropriate with things, sticks and stones, inanimate objects, but not with people. ‘What a monster! He has made his friend an object of scientific study!’ somebody once bemoaned. Why monstrous? Because it is inhuman to treat a friend or a lover as a thing. You should relate to them as I towards a Thou, not as I towards an It. Indeed, the ‘I’ of the ‘I-Thou’ relationship is a different ‘I’ from that of the ‘I-It’. Like two lovers, persons acting as I and Thou speak to each other ‘with their whole being’. Not so in the case of I and It. And of course the supreme example of an I-Thou relationship, an eternal one, is that between man and his Creator.

The Jewish thinker Martin Buber authored I and Thou in 1923. He was of course drawing on a key ethical insight by philosopher Immanuel Kant. ‘Always treat another person and an end in himself, never only as a means to your own ends’ Kant taught, formulating his awesome Categorical Imperative. Buber actually went further. Even a natural object like a tree, or a piece of music, can seize hold of you and give rise to an I and Thou encounter. I think Buber poetically claimed to have met a tree ‘in his treeness’. Hmmm, well, he was writing in German, after all….

Another, more problematical book by Buber exists, however. It is called On Zion. Yes, he was a Zionist. For him Zion was primarily a spiritual matter, a ‘reality of the soul’, rather than political. There was to be no ‘Jewish State’. Yet he supported the broad Zionist aims of settlement in the Holy Land, whilst also calling for equal rights for both Jews and Arabs in Palestine. His hope, later dashed, was for a single, bi-national state, including and reconciling Isaac and Ishmael. Huh! He must have believed in miracles.

On the eve of WWII Buber penned an interesting open letter to Gandhi. ‘Palestine belongs to the Arabs…it is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs’, the Mahatma had written. ‘We cannot renounce the Jewish claim’ Buber countered. It was ‘a divine mission’. And he took Gandhi on. What did he mean with ‘a land belongs to his population’? Obviously, he meant a certain right. A right of possession. But how did the Arabs acquire that right initially? By conquest and settlement. By force, in other words. The Zionist colonists instead were establishing their right to the land in peaceful Buber claimed, though he admitted the Jews’ conduct towards the people of Palestine did not always do ‘full justice to the Arab way of life’.

Buber was right conquest does not necessarily establish a moral right to possession. But it’s a tricky argument. The Greeks were once all over Asia Minor but Turks would not take kindly to a Greek moral claim to their land. Koenisberg was a famous German city – Kant was born there – but the Russians will not cough it back. The Romans once populated Libya and Tunisia – will Ghaddafi and Ben Ali gladly vacate their countries for Berlusconi? Many ancient conquests simply cannot be redressed – tough.

The Jewish philosopher attacked the ‘dogma of possession’. He spoke of ‘a sacred status quo to be maintained at all costs’. Of ‘a free land’. Of the ‘colonisation of thinly populated territories’. He also derided those who ‘cling to ancient forms of agriculture’ and ‘neglect the potential productivity of the soil’. (The familiar argument that the Israelis have made the desert flourish.) He told Gandhi to ‘ask the soil what the Arabs have done for her in thirteen hundred years and what we have done for her in fifty’. And, groan, so on in this vein.

Alas, these are the classic arguments of colonialism. Just as well Gandhi never replied. The French colonists in Algeria may have claimed the same. So did way back the Europeans in Australia, in Kenya, South Africa and, indeed, in America. Whatever merits this type of reasoning might have had, one thing is certain: nobody buys it anymore. Colonies are over. The French had to leave Algeria and the Europeans in Africa are probably similarly doomed. There are not enough Aboriginals left to kick out the Anglo-Saxons but my guess is future Australians will have a rather different skin complexion. As to America…it is up to the Red Indians.

I and Thou. It is sad a profound man like Buber did not see how the reality of Zionist settlement in Palestine undermined the very possibility of that crucial human meeting, that key human relationship between Arab and Jew. Rather, it has engendered a novel, deep hatred between the two peoples. Today, as Israeli bombs and missiles mercilessly rain down on the wretched people of Gaza, the world witness the abysmal moral and spiritual failure of Buber’s Zionist dream. Enough to make you cry.

I and Thou. Buber may have contradicted himself but his was still a vital insight. Only when, insh’allah, Palestinians and Israelis will learn to meet each other as I and Thou, there will be true peace in the land which gave birth to that most special of all Palestinian Jews – Jesus of Nazareth.

Revd Frank Gelli

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