A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs

The title of this book by Buber (1878–1965), first published nearly 50 years ago, refers to the very beginnings of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Editor Mendes-Flohr (emeritus, modern Jewish history and thought, Univ. of Chicago; Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent), one of the preeminent Buber scholars working today, offers 65 of Buber’s essays from 1918 to 1965, specifically focused on the Zionist effort to reclaim Palestine for the Jews as well as the unresolved questions surrounding Palestinian Arab rights. Buber’s words of dignity in compromise are prescient, especially in a world that’s still divided over the very same issues of Jewish nationalism, local ethnicity, and religious patrimony. As early as 1920, Buber, who advocated for binationalism, warned against Jewish immigration at the cost of Palestinian Arab communities, a recommendation that was—and continues to be—widely rejected. These essays demonstrate that Arab-Jewish reconciliation was at the heart of Buber’s philosophical and political writings from the very beginning, even until 1961 when he argued that Arabs deserved equal rights despite the growing adversarial Israeli military government. This latest edition of Buber’s text (an earlier revised edition came out in 2005) includes an additional foreword by law professor Raef Zreik, a jurist and Palestinian citizen of Israel.