After Buber: Zionism, State, and Peoplehood

This piece grew organically out of a Talmudic-style back-and-forth with my teacher and friend Shaul Magid, following my recent Times of Israel essay responding to his Substack series on the crisis and “pivot” of liberal Zionism. What follows is not a rebuttal and not a counter-manifesto. It is closer to what the rabbis called machloket l’shem shamayim—an argument for the sake of heaven—where disagreement is not a problem to be resolved but a field to be tilled.

In our exchange, Shaul opened with a line from Martin Buber. It was not a throwaway citation; it was an opening salvo, a framing move meant to place the entire conversation under a long historical and moral shadow:

“The feeling of those men [the prophets] were concentrated on their consciousness of God, not upon the State. If the State fell away from God, then they fought God’s cause against the State.”

— Martin Buber, 1916

Buber wrote those words in the aftermath of World War I, as Europe was tearing itself apart under the spell of nationalism. Like many Jewish thinkers of his generation—Hans Kohn among them—he emerged deeply suspicious of ethno-nationalism. Zionism, in his view, risked modeling itself on the worst forms of German nationalism rather than the more civic nationalism of France. A “Jewish state,” he feared, would inevitably sacralize power and betray the prophetic core of Judaism. Kohn abandoned Zionism after the Zionist response to the 1929 riots, in a resignation letter later published as “Zionism is Not Judaism.” In it he wrote, “We pretend to be innocent victims. Of course the Arabs attacked us in August…We have been in Palestine for twelve years without having even once made a serious effort at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous people. We have set ourselves goals which by their very nature had to lead to conflict with the Arabs.”

That suspicion is not only understandable. It is indispensable.

And yet, a century later, I find myself unable to stop where Buber stopped—not because he was wrong, but because the historical terrain beneath our feet has shifted.

The Prophets Fought the State—Not the People

In our back-and-forth, Shaul rightly emphasized that the prophets did not defend the state when it betrayed justice. They opposed structures, not just policies. Sometimes they opposed the very idea of sovereignty as it was being enacted.

But the prophets were never fighting against Am Yisrael as a people, even as they fought against the political reality Am Yisrael created.

They rebuked kings, priests, and structures of power. They practiced tochecha—moral confrontation from within. They did not deny that the Jews were an am, a people (for want of a better English translation), nor did they imagine a future in which the people themselves disappeared as a moral necessity.

That distinction matters.

There is a difference between prophetic critique and civilizational erasure. One assumes the people endure even as the state is judged. The other collapses critique into negation.

Buber feared the state becoming sacred and in doing so, itself becoming an idol. He did not argue for the disappearance of the Jewish collective. In fact, in his response to Hermann Cohen in 1916 he wrote, “We want Palestine not for the Jews, but for mankind. We want it for the realization of Judaism.” If the state could not provide that for Buber, its existence is worse than superfluous, it is sacreligious.

Shaul notes that interestingly Buber considered himself a Zionist but today his words would be maligned as anti-Zionist.

 God, Torah, and Yisrael Are Not the Same Thing

One of the things our exchange kept circling around—sometimes implicitly, sometimes directly—is that Judaism cannot be reduced to a binary of God versus the State.

Judaism is a threefold braid: God, Torah, and Yisrael.

There are moments when Torah stands up to God—lo bashamayim hi (Bava Metzia 59b).

There are moments when prophets stand up to kings.

And there are moments when the people endure even as states rise and fall.

States fail. Shaul is right about that. History bears this out relentlessly.

The real question is not whether the State of Israel will last forever. It will not. No state does.

The question is what conceptual frameworks we build now—frameworks that shape how Jews and Palestinians survive whatever comes next.

Ethno-Nationalism and the Gravity Problem

In our exchange, Shaul argued that liberal Zionism is structurally undercut by reactionary Zionism. The ethnocentric fabric of the state exerts a gravitational pull that drags it rightward. This is why, in his reading, Buber opposed a “Jewish state” altogether. He wrote to Cohen, “My goal lies elsewhere. It is not the Jewish state, which were it to come into being today, would be constructed on the same principles as any modern state.” For Buber, and also Aaron Shmuel Tamares and Hans Kohn, to “be like all the nations,”  arguably the raison d’etre of political Zionism, is the cardinal sin of Zionism.

There is deep truth here.

But there is another gravity we have to name.

There are seven million Jews living in Israel today, and millions of Palestinians living alongside them. Many on both sides experience this land not as an abstract political problem but as home. Many would fight to the death for it.

Any framework that ignores that reality does not transcend nationalism. It evacuates the human terrain entirely.

Critiques that dissolve Zionism without articulating a viable horizon for the people already living there do not create liberation. They create a vacuum—and vacuums get filled by violence.

Excavating the Problem vs. Imagining Futures

At one point in our exchange, Shaul wrote—memorably—that he thinks from excavating the problem, not from solutions. Solutions, he argued, emerge historically; they are not curated in advance. Had someone in 18th-century Poland proposed mass Jewish return to Palestine, they would have been dismissed as insane.

I agree with that caution.

But I also think there is a difference between refusing to pre-engineer solutions and refusing to imagine constraints.

I am not offering a blueprint.

I am insisting on a boundary.

A refusal of frameworks that require one people’s erasure for another’s justice.

A refusal of zero-sum imaginaries that guarantee endless war.

A refusal to let critique harden into a death spiral.

In that sense, I am not thinking from solutions backward. I am thinking from possible futures forward—and trying to rule out the ones that are already soaked in blood.

After the State, There Are Still People

Even if Israel were to become bi-national.

Even if sovereignty were radically reconfigured.

Even if the state, as currently constituted, failed.

Jews would still exist.

Palestinians would still exist.

Peoplehood does not vanish when states collapse. It persists through language, memory, trauma, and obligation.

Any serious moral vision must begin there.

Buber was right to warn us against sanctifying the state.

He was not asking us to sanctify disappearance.

The Work Before Whatever Comes Next

This is why I keep returning to a sentence that frustrates some and unsettles others:

Two peoples exist.

One land is shared.

Neither is going anywhere.

That is not a solution.

It is a condition of reality.

It does not tell us what comes next.

It tells us what must not happen if anything is ever to come next.

The prophets fought the state when it betrayed justice.

They did so to preserve the people, not to erase them, even if for them, preserving the people meant destruction of the state if it did not repent. As the prophets tell it, God agreed.

If we want to honor that tradition, our critique must be fierce and anchored—moral and realistic. Unsparing toward power, but unwilling to sacrifice living human beings to theoretical purity.

After the state—whatever form it takes—there will still be people.

The only real question is whether we are building a moral and political imagination capable of keeping them alive. 

This is where Shaul and I disagree.