A couple of months ago I ran across a little book called Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East, edited by Fred Jerome. I was intrigued: Einstein, after all, was... umm... Einstein, the iconic representation of genius in contemporary popular culture. I was curious.
The author's blurb on the flap heightened my interest:
While Einstein was a secular Jew, had mixed feelings about Zionism, and supported the goal of a Jewish "homeland" within Palestine, he never wavered from arguing forcefully for equal rights and equal power for the Arabs -- whom he called "kinfolk" of the Jews. His nationalism had no room for any kind of aggressiveness or chauvinism. For him, the domination of Jew over Arab in Palestine, or the perpetuation of a state of mutual hostility between the two peoples, would mean the failure of Zionism.
This looked like a book I wanted to read.
More on the flip...
The core of the book is composed of Einstein's letters, speeches, and interviews on the subject of Israel and Zionism, organized into chronological chapters. Editor Jerome wrote a short general introduction to the book and brief historical essays at the beginning of each chapter. This structure can sometimes be a bit confusing, as Jerome generally cites in his essays some of the material he reprints later in the chapter. The chronological divisions, however, do make sense, highlighting the evolution in Einstein's thinking as events in Germany and Palestine (e.g. the Nazi seizure of power, the 1929 Hebron massacre, the declaration of the State of Israel, etc.) modified the global context in which the Zionist movement developed.
The book was published in June 2009, and seems to have been rushed into print as a result of Israel's assault on Gaza in December and January. The Introductions of both Jerome, the editor/author, and Michael Schiffman, who translated Einstein's German-language writings into English, make reference to the Gaza war. Schiffman's, dated December 27, 2008, includes these lines:
as I write, the Palestinian people are probably at the absolute nadir of their history and are once more being forced to undergo an unprecedented Calvary, with more than two hundred Palestinians killed today, allegedly in response to Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel where no one was killed and no one was injured but which, according to the TV stations in my home country, Germany, forced the Israeli population of the border region to live "in a state of permanent fear." On December 27, 2008, this is the state of affairs in Israel/Palestine: No physical victims on the side of the Israelis, but since they are afraid, their leaders are entitled to inflict on "the enemy" whatever carnage they deem appropriate. It is the classical colonial relation.
If you're looking for pretensions of authorial objectivity, this is not the book for you.
The book's strength lies in its comprehensive compilation of Einstein's writings on the subject; according to Jerome all of his relevant work is included. It's possible to quibble around the edges of this claim, as Jerome acknowledges that some works bearing Einstein's signature but which it appears Einstein did not actually write are not included while others that are included are of questionable authorship (more on this last point later).
For some reason, when I began reading the book I had the mistaken impression Einstein was an anti-Zionist. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the earliest writings in the book, from the late teens and early twenties, Einstein looked forward to the resettlement of Eastern European Jewish refugees in Palestine and developed an anti-assimilationist cultural nationalism that would form the foundation of the more developed cultural Zionism characterizing his thought for the rest of his life. In 1921, he wrote "How I became a Zionist" for a German Jewish newspaper, in which the defense of Jewish identity in the face of widespread German anti-Semitism played a key organizing role. In 1923 he visited Jewish settlements in Palestine and wrote enthusiastically of his observations in the German-Jewish press. Even at this early date, though, he expressed misgivings about the political intentions of the Zionist leadership:
In comparison with these two evils [indebtedness and the threat of malaria] the Arab question becomes as nothing. And in regard to the last I must remark that I have myself seen more than once insurance of friendly relations between Jewish and Arab workers. I believe that most of the difficulty comes from the intellectuals and, at that, not from the Arab intellectuals alone (p. 53, emphasis added).
Over the course of the next thirty years, until his death in 1955, Einstein continued to develop this theme of inherently good relations between Jewish and Arab workers made impossible through the meddling of Arab, Zionist, and British political leaders.
Einstein, like many people around the world, was tremendously shaken by the tragic events of 1929, but even the brutal, organized massacres of Jews by Palestinian mobs didn't shake his faith that Jewish-Arab cooperation was possible. In August 1929, as the pogroms were still ongoing, he wrote:
The first and most important necessity is the creation of a modus vivendi with the Arab people. Friction is perhaps inevitable, but its evil consequences must be overcome by organized co-operation, so that the inflammable material may not be piled up to the point of danger. The absence of normal contact in every-day life is bound to produce an atmosphere of mutual fear and distrust, which is favourable to such lamentable outbursts of passion as we have witnessed. We Jews must show above all that our own history of suffering has given us sufficient understanding and psychological insight to know how to cope with this problem of psychology and organization: the more so as no irreconcilable differences stand in the way of peace between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. Let us therefore above all be on our guard against blind chauvinism of any kind, and let us not imagine that reason and common-sense can be replaced by British bayonets (pp. 72-3).
The reference to chauvinism in that passage is ambiguous: while the paragraph overall is about Jewish responsibilities to seek common cause with the Arabs, Einstein was not explicit as to whether he was referring to Jewish nationalism, Arab nationalism, or simply nationalism in general. In a June 1930 letter to Hugo Bergmann (a founding member of the cultural Zionist organization Brit Shalom) Einstein was much more clear:
Only direct cooperation with the Arabs can create a dignified and safe life. If the Jews don't comprehend this, the whole Jewish population in the complex of Arab countries will become step by step untenable. What saddens me is less the fact that the Jews are not smart enough to understand this, but rather, that they are not just enough to want it (p. 94, emphasis in Einstein's original).
In a pair of letters in early 1930 to the Jaffa newspaper Falastin (according to Joel Beinin (.pdf, login required), the second largest Arabic paper in Palestine), Einstein began to develop the idea of an elite bi-national council to resolve the outstanding issues separating Arabs and Jews. In the second letter, published in Falastin on March 15, Einstein wrote:
A Privy Council is to be formed to which the Jews and Arabs shall each send four representatives, who must be independent of all political parties.
Each group is composed as follows:
A doctor, elected by the Medical Association;
A lawyer, elected by the lawyers;
A working men's representative, elected by the trade unions;
An ecclesiastic, elected by the ecclesiastics.
These eight people are to meet once a week. They undertake not to espouse the sectional interests of their profession or nation but conscientiously and to the best of their power to aim at the welfare of the whole population of the country. Their deliberations shall be secret and they are strictly forbidden to give any information about them, even in private. When a decision has been reached on any subject in which not less than three members on each side concur, it may be published, but only in the name of the whole Council... If one of the elective bodies above specified is dissatisfied with a resolution of the Council, it may replace its representative by another (pp. 89-90).
Eight years later, at the height of the Palestinian General Strike, Einstein actually attempted to implement this utopian plan. A series of letters reproduced on pp. 113-120 of the book detail the failed efforts to establish exactly this kind of Privy Council after being contacted by F.I. Shatara, who represented himself as the president of the "Arab National League" in New York. It turned out, however, that Shatara, a Christian Palestinian doctor, had no influence on the Palestinian political leadership back in the Middle East and neither Einstein nor Shatara were able to convince any organizations to send representatives to the Council. Einstein, however, did not give up on the idea. In testimony before the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry on Palestine in January 1946 he said:
I believe, if there would be a really honest government for the people [in Palestine], that got the Arabs and the Jews together, there would be nothing to fear (p. 162).
He had learned something from the failed Shatara initiative, though, and instead of a private initiative of Arabs and Jews he now proposed an external party to manage the territory:
I believe the Palestine people [by this he means Arabs and Jews], under the severe influence of the United Nations, will be able to create a better state of affairs [p. 166].
Einstein, who had grown up and completed his most important scientific discoveries in Switzerland, believed that country's cantonal structure could provide a workable model for a bi-national state in Palestine. In 1931 he had written:
We -- that is to say, the Arabs and ourselves -- have got to agree on the main outlines of an advantageous partnership which shall satisfy the needs of both nations. [This] is no less important and no less worthy of our efforts than the promotion of the work of construction itself. Remember that Switzerland represents a higher stage of political development than any national state, precisely because of the greater political problems which had to be solved before a stable community could be built up out of groups of different nationality (p. 97).
In September 1947, on the eve of the partition of Palestine by the United Nations, Einstein wrote to Jerome Frank:
I have never favored a Jewish State in Palestine but a binational state, held under strict United Nations government as long as national antagonisms are prevailing there (p. 185).
In April 1948, after Partition and with generalized conflict between Palestinian and Jewish militias well under way, Einstein and Leo Baeck signed a letter to the New York Times calling for Arab-Jewish cooperation in order to circumvent "Arab and Jewish extremists [who] are today recklessly pushing Palestine into a futile war" (p. 187). Even after the declaration of Israeli independence, in May 1948, Einstein continued to hold out hope for equal treatment of Arabs in the Jewish state. In the waning months of his life, in January 1955 (he died in April of that year), he wrote to Zvi Lurie:
We must incessantly strive to treat the citizens of Arab descent living in our midst as our equals in every respect, and we must develop the necessary understanding for the difficultires of their situation naturally accompanying it. By such a stance, we will both win loyal fellow citizens and improve, slowly but steadily, our relations with the Arab world... Our stance toward the Arab minority is the true touchstone of our moral standard (p. 222).
This is getting long. In a second diary, I'll talk about Einstein's experiences with anti-semitism in Germany, his relations with the Zionist movement, and critique the sophistication of his political thought.