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The Religion & Culture Web Forum

March 2005

Martin Buber's Land of Two Peoples

by Paul Mendes-Flohr
University of Chicago

In the preface to the new edition of A Land of Two Peoples, Professor Mendes-Flohr reflects on Martin Buber's principles of inclusion and the challenge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Buber argues that the challenge facing the Zionist movement is not only to acknowledge the presence of Arabs in the Land of Israel but to honor their opposing national and political claims. In accommodating these claims, it is therefore not simply sufficient to live "next to one another" (nebeneinander) but "with one another" (miteinander). There are concrete steps that should be taken in this direction—to learn Arabic, to gain an appreciation of the customs and culture of the Palestinians, but first and foremost, to cultivate a sympathetic knowledge of Palestinian claims. In delineating these tasks, Buber was naturally addressing his fellow Zionists, who in his judgement had the historical and political responsibility to initiate the process of rapprochement. Ideally, the Palestinians would undertake reciprocal gestures of accommodating the Jewish reality in Palestine. As important as these gestures are, Buber realized that they did not touch the heart of the conflict. The Jews and Arabs have radically divergent national and political interests with respect to the land they by force majeure share.

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The Martin Marty Center's Religion and Culture Web Forum is an online forum for thought-provoking discussion on the relationship of scholarship in religion to culture and public life. Each month the Marty Center, the research arm of the University of Chicago Divinity School, invites a scholar of religion to comment on his or her own research in a way that "opens out" to themes, problems, and events in world cultures and contemporary life. Scholars from diverse fields of study are invited to offer responses to these commentaries on the forum's discussion board, where the public is also encouraged to post thoughts and reactions to commentaries and invited responses.

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