Facing the Question

Leora Batnitzky on Between Jew and Arab

IN AUGUST of 1966, President Lyndon Johnson hosted a reception at the White House in honor of Israeli President Zalman Shazar. Shazar was introduced to Abram Sachar, who was then the president of Brandeis University. Turning to Johnson, he exclaimed, “Brandeis—that’s where Rawidowicz was” before launching into great detail about how “what a seminal scholar Rawidowicz was.” There is no doubt that Johnson, whose administration would be instrumental in securing Israeli’s victory in the Six Day War of 1967, would have strongly opposed Rawidowicz’s politics. Shazar, who would work alongside Johnson in that effort, also rejected Rawidowicz’s politics, but he nevertheless insisted that Rawidowicz “should be recognized as ‘one of the founders of the organized Hebrew movement.’”

So who was this Rawidowicz? David Myers’ recent book Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz is meant to begin to answer this question. Like Shazar, Myers has a deep respect for Rawidowicz’s scholarship and wants to bring his thought to contemporary readers, and to this end, he plans to write a more comprehensive study of Rawidowicz. But Between Jew and Arab is Myer’s attempt to recover what he believes is the timeliest and most political aspect of Rawidowicz’s work: his consideration of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians—both those living within its borders and those who became refugees in 1948.

Myers unearths an obscure and until now unpublished chapter that Rawidowicz cut from his magnum opus, Babylon and Jerusalem (which itself remains an obscure, untranslated work written in a very idiosyncratic Hebrew). The chapter’s title is “Between Jew and Arab,” hence Myers’s own title, and Myers wants to remind us that Rawidowicz was not only a great scholar but also a valuable alternative voice for those struggling with the moral and political implications that surround the status of Palestinian refugees.

RAWIDOWICZ’S CHAPTER “Between Arab and Jew” was written in the 1950s when approximately 150,000 Arabs lived within Israel borders while over 700,000 were refugees. What was problematic then is still problematic today: Israeli Arabs now constitute roughly one-fifth of Israel’s population, and Palestinian refugees living in or beyond Israeli occupied territory number in the millions. Rawidowicz strongly criticized the discriminatory treatment of Palestinians living in Israel—who, until 1966, lived under military government—and he also called for the right of all the refugees to return to Israel.

Rawidowicz’s first proposal is uncontroversial. Practically every respectable Israeli endorses the demand to end discrimination against Arabs living in Israel. But his second has almost no support in Israel today. Strikingly, Myers also does not accept the right of return for refugees—arguing that it is impossible under current political circumstances. (Myers does believe that the refugees should somehow be compensated.) And this raises the question: If Rawidowicz’s political recommendations do not have any practical payoff, then why translate and publish a chapter from a book that Rawidowicz himself did not choose to publish?

Myers argues that Rawidowicz’s thought serves as a healthy antidote to contemporary Zionist thinking. Rawidowicz may not offer a useful recommendation for what Israel can do for the Palestinian refugees, but the depth of his thought will encourage Zionists to think hard about their moral and political commitments.

MYERS IS right to insist on the need for self-reflection and self-scrutiny, and his hope that reading Rawidowicz might prompt some to rethink their understanding of Zionism is admirable. However, the contours of Rawidowicz’s thought are not always clear and even on occasion problematic–especially in regard to his claims about the sources of the moral obligation that he thought was unique to the Jewish people.

Rawidowicz was raised in an orthodox environment but rejected the authority of the tradition in favor of an embrace of Hebrew culture. Like his contemporary Martin Buber, Rawidowicz was a follower of the cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am, and he refused to define Zionism in terms of a sovereign state. Instead, he advocated for the cultural renaissance of the Jewish people in the land of Israel. And like Ahad Ha’am and Buber, Rawidowicz linked Hebrew culture to Jewish and Arab coexistence in the land.

Rawidowicz was not alone in regarding the “Arab” problem as a fundamental Jewish problem. Among his contemporaries who advocated coexistence between Jews and Arabs were Buber, Hannah Arendt, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Samuel Hugo Bergmann, S.D. Goitein, Judah Magnes, L.A. Mayer, Arthur Ruppin, Gershom Scholem, and Ernst Simon. But whereas many in this group had a high regard for Islam and Arab culture, Rawidowicz’s concern for the “Arab problem” did not stem from a respect for or even from any knowledge of Arabs. The moral force driving Rawidowicz’s call for coexistence was his belief in the moral exceptionalism of Jews and Judaism—and ultimately the Jewish State as well. The Zionist movement, in Rawidowicz’s words, aimed to “redeem Zion with justice” (Isaiah 1:27) and Zionists needed to preserve their mission by remembering that “it is forbidden for the Jewish people to adopt the laws of the Gentiles.”

A surprising number of Israeli politicians—including Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett—thought long and hard about the moral case for allowing the Palestinian refugees to return. Yet their ultimate priority was state building, which, given continued Arab hostility to the Jewish state, led to their decision not to let the refugees return.

Rawidowicz’s priority, however, was different. His worry was that Jews would lose their moral exceptionalism.

The verdict that the State of Israel pronounced upon the Arab refugees is an act that should not have been taken as a matter of morality. We were once certain that such an act could never have been undertaken by Jews. Now that we have descended into “the valley of the shadow of death”—that is, into the morality of the Gentile nations—we think and act like they do.

To be sure, Rawidowicz’s insistence that the bad behavior of “the others” does not give “us” (any “us”) an excuse to behave badly is a hard but essential moral lesson. But Rawidowicz’s faith in Jewish moral superiority also makes his concern for the Palestinian people smack of ethnic chauvinism—an impression that is unfortunately further confirmed by his assumption that economic opportunity would fully satisfy the religious and national aspirations of returning Palestinian refugees.

RAWIDOWICZ ALSO believed that there were pragmatic and economic reasons for the refugees’ return. He was worried that the Arab boycott of Israel, which he viewed as primarily the result of the refugee problem, would increasingly harm Israel’s economy, and he also—and more urgently—warned that the plight of the refugees would harm, perhaps irreparably, Israel’s foreign relations not just with the Arab world but also with the West. And this surely has come to pass.

So what would have happened if the refugees had returned in the 1950s? There seem to be only two possibilities. If one assumes that coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Palestine was a real possibility, one might conclude that Israel would be much improved. Israel would be a more democratic, if less explicitly Jewish, state (perhaps not a Jewish state at all), and the festering hatred and human suffering caused by the unchanging status of the refugees would have been greatly lessened, even entirely eliminated. But if one thinks that history has proven that the Palestinians and the Arabs States never would have accepted a state with a large Jewish presence in Palestine, then one might conclude that allowing the refugees to return would have been an unmitigated disaster. It would not have satisfied the national aspirations of either the Jews or the Palestinian Arabs; it would have made for intense ethnic and religious conflict and, ultimately perhaps, civil war.

Myers recognizes the difficulty, if not impossibility, of affirming the first possible outcome today but he also wants to avoid the second. He has “become unsettled by the intoxicating effects of political power and sovereignty on the Jews” but, at the same time, believes “that the absence of such power has had even more devastating effects on the Jews.” This brings us to the question of why Rawidowicz never published “Between Jew and Arab.” Myers suggests that the decision not to publish it might have been an act of self-censorship, precipitated by growing fears of Arab aggression that culminated in 1956 with the nationalization of the Suez Canal and a pact between Egypt, Syria, and Jordan that placed all three armies under Nasser’s command. But the argument here is entirely circumstantial. There is, to my mind at least, a more compelling answer: Rawidowicz realized that he, like many people after him, simply did not have a good proposal for solving the refugee problem.

Rawidowicz was right that—in the words of S. Yizhar, an author he greatly admired—the Palestinian question “is a question for the Jews and a question for Judaism. And instead of continuing to run away from it, one must stop and turn to face it, turn and look at it directly.” Yet in the end Rawidowicz may have realized that turning and facing a question is not the same thing as finding an answer for it.

Leora Batnitzky is professor of Religion at Princeton University. She is the author, most recently, of Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation and the forthcoming The Invention of Jewish Religion.