GANDHI, JEWISH PHILOSOPHER MARTIN BUBER, AND HITLER
In February 1939, Jewish philosopher Martin Buber wrote a long and remarkably respectful letter to Gandhi disagreeing with the following assertions the latter had made in his paper Harijan in November 1938:
“My sympathies are all with the Jews. They have been the untouchables of Christianity. But, my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements to Justice. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. The nobler course is to insist on just treatment of Jews wherever they are born and bred. Those born and bred in France are French precisely as Christians born in France are French. Every country is their home, including Palestine, not by aggression but by loving service.
“The Jews of Germany can offer Satyagraha under infinitely better conditions than Indians in South Africa. They are a compact community and are far more gifted than the Indians in South Africa. They have world opinion behind them. I am convinced that if someone among them with courage and vision would arise and lead them in non-violent action, the winter of their despair would be turned into the summer of hope.”
In his sixteen-page February 24, 1939 letter written from Jerusalem, Martin Buber wrote :
My dear Mahatma Gandhi,
He who is unhappy has a deaf ear when idle tongues discuss his fate. But when a voice that he has long honoured, a great voice that pierces the clamour, he is all attention. Here is a voice, he thinks, that can give good counsel and comfort, for he knows what suffering is and has the wisdom to counsel rightly. But what he hears, containing though elements of noble conception, is yet barren of all application to his tragic circumstances.
Jews are being persecuted, robbed, tortured and murdered. Yet you, Mahatma Gandhi, state that their position in the country where they suffer is quite similar to that of Indians in South Africa when you launched your “Force of Truth” (Satyagraha) campaign. I read and re-read these sentences in your article without being able to understand the rationale in them.
Dear Mahatma, are you not aware of the burning of synagogues and scrolls of the Law, some of them of great antiquity, that has happened in Germany ? Have the Boers and Englishmen in South Africa ever destroyed anything sacred to the Indians?
It is not convincing to me that you base your advice to us to observe satyagraha in Germany on similarities of circumstance. In the five years I spent under the present regime, I observed many instances of satyagraha among the Jews which showed strength of spirit against bartering their rights and where neither force nor cunning was used to escape the consequences of their resistance. However, these actions exerted not the slightest influence on their oppressors. An effective non-violent resistance can be taken against inhumane human beings in the hope of gradually awakening their humanity but a diabolic universal steamroller cannot thus be withstood.
You ask, “Why do not the Jews make that country, where they are born and earn their livelihood, their home?” Jews are unable to do this because their destiny is different from that of all other nations of the earth. For their destiny is dispersion. A hundred adopted homes without an original one renders a nation sick and miserable. Although an individual may flourish on stepmother soil, the nation would languish. You, Mahatma, desire not only that all Indians to live and work with dignity, but also that Indian Wisdom should flourish and be fruitful. Soo do the Jews.
‘Mahatma Gandhi, you say that sanction is “sought in the Bible” to support the cry for a national home, which “does not make much appeal” to you. We do not open the Bible to seek this sanction. The opposite is true. The promise of return has nourished the yearning hope of numerous generations. What is decisive for us is not the promise of the Land - but the command, whose fulfilment is bound up with the existence of a free Jewish community on this land. For the Bible tells us that our entry into this land three thousand years ago was for a Divine mission, which was to set up a just way of life with communal ownership of land, no social distinctions, mutual help and a common Sabbath embracing serf and beast as beings with equal claim to the enjoyment of its fruits. We could not then carry out this mission as we were driven into exile. But the command still remains. We need our own land in order to fulfil it as it cannot be fulfilled on foreign soil and under foreign statute. We are not covetous, Mahatma; But only desire to fulfil the Divine command.
You, Mahatma Gandhi, who know the importance of tradition tell us, that Palestine belongs to the Arabs and that it is “wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs”.
The fundamental issue in this case are two vital claims opposed to each other and cannot be pitted one against the other. We cannot renounce the Jewish claim because it is bound up with our divine mission. But we are convinced that it is possible to find agreement between these two claims. We love this land and believe the Arabs love it also. Therefore a union in the common service of the Land must be possible.
I believe in the marriage between man (adam) and earth (adama). This land recognises us, for it is fruitful through us. Our settlers do not come here as Occidental colonists, with natives doing all their work for them. They take up the plough, and expend their strength to make the land fruitful. But it is not only for themselves that they desire its fertility. They have begun to teach their brothers, the Arab peasants, to cultivate the land more intensively and together with them to “serve” it. We have no desire to dispossess them; we want to live with them. We do not want to rule; we want to serve.
You once said, Mahatma, that politics enmeshes us like a serpent’s coils; You said you wanted to wrestle with the serpent. Here the serpent is in the fullness of its power! Jews and Arabs both have a claim to this land. Their claims are reconcilable if they are focussed on the needs of both their peoples. But they are turned through the serpent’s coils into political claims and pursued with the ruthlessness that politics instils. (end of letter.)
CULTURAL ZIONISM
For Buber, the central purpose of Zionism is the spiritual and cultural renewal of the Jewish people. In this respect, he became and remained a disciple of the great Zionist theoretician and Hebrew essayist Ahad Ha’am (Asher Zvi Ginsburg). In their vision, known as Cultural Zionism, the goal was to gradually and organically cultivate a new Jewish society with a thoroughly modern Jewish culture shaped by the texts, ideas and values of the Jewish tradition.
This approach put them at odds with the vision of Theodor Herzl, what I am calling Political Zionism. Herzl prioritized the creation of a Jewish state above all other goals and sought to bring millions of Jews to settle in Palestine in a short period of time. For Cultural Zionists like Ha’am and Buber, Herzl’s plan was not only unrealistic. It also failed to prioritize the gradual process of spiritual renewal. They did not oppose politics (or political aims for Zionism) per se, but they insisted that cultural renewal should be the principal goal.
Buber himself worked closely with Herzl for several years on cultural efforts within the movement, among other things editing a prominent literary journal. However, he eventually broke with Herzl because he felt that Herzl did not sufficiently appreciate the role of culture and spiritual renewal in the Zionist project.
Martin Buber’s affirmation that Jews had a Divine mission to make the land of Palestine fruitful for themselves and their “Arab brothers”, and had no desire to dispossess or rule over them, is testified to by John McHugo in his article, ‘Reimagining Zionism: the leaders who opposed the creation of a Jewish State.’ He names San Francisco-born Rabbi Judah Magnes and Vienna-born philosopher Martin Buber as its two principal leaders. The former became the first chancellor of Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the latter, a disciple of Zionist theoretician and Hebrew essayist Asher Zvi Ginsburg, professor of philosophy there.
STATE FOR PALESTINIANS AND JEWS
John McHugo also points out that Magnes and Buber urged that Palestine should be a binational state of Palestinians and Jews because this was a more authentic fulfilment of Zionism’s spiritual and cultural ideals than a solely Jewish state. To Ben-Gurion’s amazement and fury, they both formally opposed Palestine’s partition at UNSCOP, (UN Special Commission on Palestine) which was created in 1947 to make recommendations about Palestine’s future.
Buber stated to this commission: “It is ethically and politically incumbent upon ‘a regenerated Jewish people in Palestine’ not only to live peacefully ‘next’ to the Arabs of the land but also ‘with’ them … Together they are to work to develop the country for the equal benefit of both communities. We need as many Jews as is possible to absorb, but not in order to establish a majority over the Palestinians.”
Sadly, Rabbi Magnes and Professor Buber turned out to be just “voices in the wilderness”, and the partition of Palestine became a bloody catastrophe for the Palestinians. Just before this partition and creation of Israel on May 14, 1948, 700,000 Palestinians’ (about half of Mandatory Palestine's predominantly Arab population) were forced by Zionist Irgun & Stern terror gangs to flee from their lands. Almost 500 of their villages were destroyed soon thereafter and renamed.
This mass displacement fractured Palestinian society and drove them into exile and became for them and their progeny the Nakba, which means Catastrophe.
Martin Buber’s refutation of Gandhi’s affirmation that “The Jews of Germany can offer Satyagraha under infinitely better conditions than Indians in South Africa” and that “if someone among them with courage and vision would arise and lead them in non-violent action, the winter of their despair would be turned into the summer of hope” has already been mentioned earlier in this article.
Pankaj Mishra, in an article in the New Yorker of May 2, 2011, averred: “In advising European Jews to practice nonviolent resistance against Hitler, Gandhi was guilty of a grotesque misunderstanding of the Third Reich.”
In sharp contrast, Professor Johan Galtung has written: “That a demonstration against the Gestapo in favour of Jews actually took place and was successful seems absolutely incredible. Yet this did happen and that too at a high point of terror in Berlin, the epicenter of Hitler’s Nazism, at the beginning of March 1943.”
“GIVE US OUR HUSBANDS BACK”
Nathan Stoltfus has dealt with this episode in detail in his Resistance of the Heart book and indicated that in February 1943 the Gestapo had arrested the approximately 10,000 Jews still in Berlin. Of these 8000 were promptly transported to Auschwitz and were never heard of again. As the other 2000 had German wives, they were detained at a “Collection Centre” on Rosenstrasse Avenue. As soon as they learnt of their husbands’ detention, their wives rushed to the collection centre and began to chant “Give us our husbands back.”
There were constant scuffles between them and Gestapo officials some of whom threatened to open fire unless they withdrew. Nonetheless, these wives were undeterred and kept up their chants. On the 8th day, to their great joy and relief, their husbands were released. This was a triumphant climax not only to their seven-day protests but also to their ten-year stolid resistance to strong Nazi pressure to divorce their “non-Aryan” husbands.
Nathan Stoltfus, who interviewed some of the Gestapo officials about the release of the mentioned Jews, has written: “The Nazi regime perpetrated an image of the German people as uniformly supportive of Nazism. Goebbels feared that actions like the Rosenstrasse protest that showed dissent publicly could spread quickly. These protesters represented personal interests yet the public nature of their opposition wrecked the regime’s daily portrayal of reality, while the terror apparatus remained on the side-lines. In a state that inhibited assembly, controlled information and portrayed dissidence as a fringe element in an unified populace, mass public protest was a political challenge, and an even more overt challenge to authority than non-compliance with its laws and regulations.”
Stoltfus also indicates that Goebbels’ deputy, Leopold Gutterer, attributed the success of the Rosenstrasse protest “to its openness” and contrasted it with conspiratorial and armed resistance. “Unarmed actions avoided the appearance of treason and did not legitimize and unleash the crushing violence of the Nazi regime. If the Rosenstrasse protesters had come armed, the Gestapo would have shot them.”
The April-May 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which occurred just a few weeks after the Rosenstrasse protest, was a heroic armed struggle in which these Jews resisted transportation to Treblinka with revolvers, pistols, gasoline bombs and a few rifles received from the Polish resistance. In this uprising, 17 Gestapo officials were killed and 90 wounded. However, the tragic and predictable outcome of this uprising was the brutal massacre of all the 13,000 Jewish men, women and children in that ghetto.
The moral to be drawn from the Rosenstrasse protests and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising is that nonviolent resistance against Nazi terror not only worked. It was the only form of resistance that had any chance of succeeding.
Sceptics will undoubtedly disagree and affirm that the Rosenstrasse protests succeeded only because the protesters were German. That this is not so is amply clear from what Leopold Gutterer told Stoltfus: their success was due “to its openness” and “unarmed nature” and if they had come armed, “the Gestapo would have shot them.”
