Comments on: Purely Wrong: Judah Leib Magnes and the Jewish State

By: lennybruce

lennybruce — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:53:05 +0000

Interesting article. I was just doing some research for my own article on Israel’s 60th anniversary and googled Ahad Ha’am’s “Truth from Eretz Yisrael” and found my way to Magnes’ letters to Chaim Weizmann. Also of interest along the way was Jabotinsky’s polemic “The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs)” from 1923. Looking at today’s situation and reading the writings of these 3 very different Zionists from 1891, 1923 and 1929 makes me dizzy. With a bit of language and grammer updates, all three could have been written today, 10 years ago, or 60 years ago. With all the things we can proud of and grateful for, there is something fundamentally wrong when we, in our relations with the Palestinians, have not progressed one iota in over 100 years of our national venture. Regardless of one’s viewpoint – Ahad Ha’am, Magnes or Jabotinsky – it is clear that we are no closer to finding an accommodation with the indigenous residents of Palestine then when these gentlemen wrote what they wrote. And like I said, that makes me dizzy, akin to the feeling of being caught in a time warp.

By: The Ghost of Jacob Talmon

The Ghost of Jacob Talmon — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:10:42 +0000

One day while staying with [Lewis Namier] I began to lament the lost glories of the Mount Scopus landscape, to which he remarked that he had never set foot on the former campus of the Hebrew University. I expressed astonishment that he had never found time in the course of his numerous visits to Jerusalem to visit Mount Scopus before the road to it had fallen into Arab hands. “I would not shake hands with traitors,” he said. “Traitors?” I murmured with raised eyebrows. “Well, Magnes,” came the reply.
–J. L. Talmon

By: Joshua

Joshua — Tue, 06 May 2008 03:00:39 +0000

To my recollection, Ben-Gurion advocated bi-nationalism, or hinted at some kind of de facto support for it, possibly because of his party links towards Labour. Nevertheless, I think Magnes is being too unfairly faulted here especially that Ben-Gurion himself openly stated that he was more than willing to sacrifice Jewish lives for the sole purpose of a Jewish state. Whereas Ben-Gurion felt that war was inevitable with the Arabs, Magnes for his optimism wanted to avoid it with the same conclusion that he is being excoriated for: resisting “further Jewish emigration” towards Palestine whereas the Zionists resisted emigration of the able-bodied towards Western Europe and the US.

By: fiddler

fiddler — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:22:42 +0000

Magnes’ idea of creating a mutually agreed upon binational state may have come a generation too late. I understand until the late 19th century’s start of Zionism-driven mass immigration to Palestine the relations between indigenous Arabs and the equally indigenous Yishuv were amicable enough. Among the latter there was resistance against mass immigration precisely for the reason that relations would severely deteriorate, as sure enough did happen soon. I wonder if the fear and loathing the thought of a possible return of even a fraction of the Palestinian refugees (or their descendants) evokes in many Jewish Israelis is in part an echo of this early experience.

When Heller (not the one of Catch-22 fame, I suppose?) spoke of the quarter million Jews “sitting in camps in Europe with nowhere to go”, who were in danger of being killed, what year was he referring to? In particular, pre- or post-May 1945?
In the last years of the war the Nazis weren’t letting Jews emigrate anymore, as that would’ve made the “Endlösung” ineffective. Relief of the European Jews’ plight couldn’t come then from moving them to Palestine, but from defeat of the Nazis. After that happened, the genocidal threat was gone, and apart from the catastrophic health condition of the concentration camp survivors – Jews and non-Jews alike, of course – the Jews were no worse off than the other multi-millions displaced European victims of that war. If that sounds heartless, consider what many of those same survivors and those ostensibly acting on their behalf should soon prove to be willing to do to not one quarter but three quarters of a million Palestinians. In an ideal world the land would really have been “without people”, in our unideal world, as we all know, it wasn’t.
Magnes tried not to fight one injustice with another, and for that I can’t banish him to the cave.

By: The Other Alan

The Other Alan — Mon, 05 May 2008 17:42:23 +0000

We don’t know if Magnes’ bi-national state would have worked, but a national state for the benefit for all citizens may still. We do know though that Herzl’s “Jewish State” has given us a number of wars, been a thorn in the side of the Middle East, made the lives of Palestinians miserable, caused Jews to be fearful that every year is 1938, enabled an endless search for sources of what best can be described as a Jewish commodity to stock the land with, and, as Jewish scholar Ahad Ha’am warned in 1897 it would, “beget in us a tendency to find the path of glory in the attainment of material power and political dominion, thus breaking the thread that unites us with the past, and undermining our historical basis.”