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A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs
Theologian, philosopher, and political radical, Martin Buber (1878–1965) was actively committed to a fundamental economic and political reconstruction of society as well as the pursuit of international peace. In his voluminous writings on Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine, Buber united his religious and philosophical teachings with his politics, which he felt were essential to a life of public dialogue and service to God.
Collected in A Land of Two Peoples are the private and open letters, addresses, and essays in which Buber advocated binationalism as a solution to the conflict in the Middle East. A committed Zionist, Buber steadfastly articulated the moral necessity for reconciliation and accommodation between the Arabs and Jews. From the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 to his death in 1965, he campaigned passionately for a "one state solution.
With the Middle East embroiled in religious and ethnic chaos, A Land of Two Peoples remains as relevant today as it was when it was first published more than twenty years ago. This timely reprint, which includes a new preface by Paul Mendes-Flohr, offers context and depth to current affairs and will be welcomed by those interested in Middle Eastern studies and political theory.
Collected in A Land of Two Peoples are the private and open letters, addresses, and essays in which Buber advocated binationalism as a solution to the conflict in the Middle East. A committed Zionist, Buber steadfastly articulated the moral necessity for reconciliation and accommodation between the Arabs and Jews. From the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 to his death in 1965, he campaigned passionately for a "one state solution.
With the Middle East embroiled in religious and ethnic chaos, A Land of Two Peoples remains as relevant today as it was when it was first published more than twenty years ago. This timely reprint, which includes a new preface by Paul Mendes-Flohr, offers context and depth to current affairs and will be welcomed by those interested in Middle Eastern studies and political theory.
320 pages, Paperback
Published March 29, 1984
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About the author
Paul Mendes-Flohr
26 books9 followersPaul R. Mendes-Flohr was an American-Israeli scholar of modern Jewish thought. As an intellectual historian, Mendes-Flohr specialized in 19th and 20th-century Jewish thinkers, including Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 6, 2012
This is a must-read book for anyone interested in the history and politics of the Middle East. I have learned more and more over the years about how the State of Israel was created and the events that surrounded that occurrence. This book, from the point of view of the letters and writings of someone who fought to have accord between the Jews and the Arabs of Palestine helped me better understand the period of time between the early 20th century and the wars in the Middle East.
June 7, 2025
The first time I read Martin Buber, I gave up after a few pages. The second time, too. But something kept pulling me back—his reputation, his connection to Judaism, and the rumor that he’d opposed the very zionist project he helped enable. So I picked up A Land of Two Peoples and tried again.
This book gave me whiplash; one moment Buber was my hero and I was in complete agreement with him, and then suddenly he'd say something super arrogant or racist and I'd want to fight him. Martin Buber was, like all of us, a complex human being with complex thoughts and feelings; he was obviously very principled and a deep humanist, but also couldn't rid himself of his belief in nationalism and the superiority of the Jewish race. But he has been called a moral voice for Jews for many generations and, while he's not a hero by any means, he did have some really good stuff to say.
I have sympathy for those who seek safety. I have even more sympathy to the Jews in the 19th and 20th century who desired a homeland after thousands of years of pogroms and horrible mistreatment everywhere they went. I lost a great percentage of my family in the holocaust and after, when they tried to return home only to find out they no longer had one, many of them wanted to go to Palestine. I'm glad my grandparents didn't succeed, but I could have easily been a Sabra. Unfortunately, none of this excuses what came next.
Buber was the voice for all the Jews who had a problem with wiping out an entire people, with stealing land, with committing atrocities in the name of their own safety; but he was still a bit of a supremacist. Not once in this 305 page book does he refer to Palestinians as anything but Arabs, minimizing their unique culture. There were so many times throughout these essays that Buber refers to the ignorance of the Arabs; the biggest one perhaps is his claim that the soil loves Jews more than Arabs and that Jews had done more for the land in 50 years than Arabs had in 1200. At times he sounds exactly like the European colonizers (the ones we needed to escape from) and the way they talked about the native population on Turtle Island. The closest I came to putting this book down was when I read, “[Israel] is the one people which was sent on the road of its history by commandment of the Divine Power.” Barf. That line, like many others, reminded me that for all Buber’s moral courage, he never stopped seeing Jews as uniquely chosen—a belief that shaped both his ethics and his blind spots.
We're all full of contradictions, but when they come from a great thinking like Buber and when they involve the humanity of people, they can be a little harder to take. Buber claims to have solid ethics—repeatedly insisting the ends are the means, that killing people to achieve safety does not work—while also sticking to his guns that Jews have a legitimate claim to Palestinian land. In one essay he'll say something like “Independence of one's own must not be gained at the expense of another's independence,” but then follow that up a few essays later with “The best of us had no hope of remaining guiltless and unsullied for our future generations, for we knew we were reducing the space for future generations of the Arabs.” Pick a side Martin. The mental gymnastics one has to perform to recognize injustice, but lack the ability to remove oneself from the ideology that fuels it, must be exhausting. I can't think of a world in which I would call myself a zionist, yet Buber refuses to give up that title.
Despite what I've said so far, I did truly enjoy reading this book. His ability to use empathy—to try and place himself in the shoes of the Palestinians—is far too rare in our culture. He has the chutzpah to remind his fellow Jews to imagine “as if we were the residents of Palestine and the others were the immigrants who were coming into the country in increasing numbers, year by year, taking it away from us. How would we react to events?” He was also clear in his belief, throughout the book, that one people's freedom should never come at the expense of another's, even if he was unable to follow these thoughts far enough to renounce zionism.
There were times throughout A Land of Two Peoples where Buber felt like a comrade, like his ideas had been implanted into my head without ever having read them. He talks about how sacrificing Jewish values in order to take something that they feel like they have a right to, is the biggest form of assimilation. I'm constantly imagining a world without assimilation, a world where all cultures could keep their foundational beliefs and customs while getting along and thriving with other cultures. Buber did too. Perhaps the way in which I most related to him was in our mutual belief that the switch from a moral/ethical tradition to a colonial nation-state has done more than any enemy to destroy Judaism from the inside.
Buber also talked about dual power decades before I've seen anyone else, even if he didn't use that term. He insists that, instead of sucking up to Britain and other European nations, they should work together with the people already living there to create something that would make British rule obsolete. He wanted one state where all of the inhabitants are treated equally and have an fair share in steering the ship. Eventually he moved on from this to talk about a Near East Federation that would be similar to the United States. These are suggestions that appear naive (something I've been called a lot in my day) but points toward solidarity instead of domination.
He also recognized that, to put it too simply, hurt people hurt people. That perhaps thousands of years of attempted extermination, culminating in the holocaust, has created a situation where “after an action of extermination of this kind, the poor human soul is inclined to see extermination lurking everywhere.” This was obvious even in the 1940s, but is even more glaring today. The paranoia of zionists is disgusting and see through, and it baffles me why the world can't see this.
Obviously I have some mixed feelings about this book and its writer. His essays and speeches are full of contradictions, many of them painful, but he tried. Perhaps more than anyone else at the time. While he couldn't free himself from arrogance and racism, he created a path for this generations anti-zionists to follow.
This book gave me whiplash; one moment Buber was my hero and I was in complete agreement with him, and then suddenly he'd say something super arrogant or racist and I'd want to fight him. Martin Buber was, like all of us, a complex human being with complex thoughts and feelings; he was obviously very principled and a deep humanist, but also couldn't rid himself of his belief in nationalism and the superiority of the Jewish race. But he has been called a moral voice for Jews for many generations and, while he's not a hero by any means, he did have some really good stuff to say.
I have sympathy for those who seek safety. I have even more sympathy to the Jews in the 19th and 20th century who desired a homeland after thousands of years of pogroms and horrible mistreatment everywhere they went. I lost a great percentage of my family in the holocaust and after, when they tried to return home only to find out they no longer had one, many of them wanted to go to Palestine. I'm glad my grandparents didn't succeed, but I could have easily been a Sabra. Unfortunately, none of this excuses what came next.
Buber was the voice for all the Jews who had a problem with wiping out an entire people, with stealing land, with committing atrocities in the name of their own safety; but he was still a bit of a supremacist. Not once in this 305 page book does he refer to Palestinians as anything but Arabs, minimizing their unique culture. There were so many times throughout these essays that Buber refers to the ignorance of the Arabs; the biggest one perhaps is his claim that the soil loves Jews more than Arabs and that Jews had done more for the land in 50 years than Arabs had in 1200. At times he sounds exactly like the European colonizers (the ones we needed to escape from) and the way they talked about the native population on Turtle Island. The closest I came to putting this book down was when I read, “[Israel] is the one people which was sent on the road of its history by commandment of the Divine Power.” Barf. That line, like many others, reminded me that for all Buber’s moral courage, he never stopped seeing Jews as uniquely chosen—a belief that shaped both his ethics and his blind spots.
We're all full of contradictions, but when they come from a great thinking like Buber and when they involve the humanity of people, they can be a little harder to take. Buber claims to have solid ethics—repeatedly insisting the ends are the means, that killing people to achieve safety does not work—while also sticking to his guns that Jews have a legitimate claim to Palestinian land. In one essay he'll say something like “Independence of one's own must not be gained at the expense of another's independence,” but then follow that up a few essays later with “The best of us had no hope of remaining guiltless and unsullied for our future generations, for we knew we were reducing the space for future generations of the Arabs.” Pick a side Martin. The mental gymnastics one has to perform to recognize injustice, but lack the ability to remove oneself from the ideology that fuels it, must be exhausting. I can't think of a world in which I would call myself a zionist, yet Buber refuses to give up that title.
Despite what I've said so far, I did truly enjoy reading this book. His ability to use empathy—to try and place himself in the shoes of the Palestinians—is far too rare in our culture. He has the chutzpah to remind his fellow Jews to imagine “as if we were the residents of Palestine and the others were the immigrants who were coming into the country in increasing numbers, year by year, taking it away from us. How would we react to events?” He was also clear in his belief, throughout the book, that one people's freedom should never come at the expense of another's, even if he was unable to follow these thoughts far enough to renounce zionism.
There were times throughout A Land of Two Peoples where Buber felt like a comrade, like his ideas had been implanted into my head without ever having read them. He talks about how sacrificing Jewish values in order to take something that they feel like they have a right to, is the biggest form of assimilation. I'm constantly imagining a world without assimilation, a world where all cultures could keep their foundational beliefs and customs while getting along and thriving with other cultures. Buber did too. Perhaps the way in which I most related to him was in our mutual belief that the switch from a moral/ethical tradition to a colonial nation-state has done more than any enemy to destroy Judaism from the inside.
Buber also talked about dual power decades before I've seen anyone else, even if he didn't use that term. He insists that, instead of sucking up to Britain and other European nations, they should work together with the people already living there to create something that would make British rule obsolete. He wanted one state where all of the inhabitants are treated equally and have an fair share in steering the ship. Eventually he moved on from this to talk about a Near East Federation that would be similar to the United States. These are suggestions that appear naive (something I've been called a lot in my day) but points toward solidarity instead of domination.
He also recognized that, to put it too simply, hurt people hurt people. That perhaps thousands of years of attempted extermination, culminating in the holocaust, has created a situation where “after an action of extermination of this kind, the poor human soul is inclined to see extermination lurking everywhere.” This was obvious even in the 1940s, but is even more glaring today. The paranoia of zionists is disgusting and see through, and it baffles me why the world can't see this.
Obviously I have some mixed feelings about this book and its writer. His essays and speeches are full of contradictions, many of them painful, but he tried. Perhaps more than anyone else at the time. While he couldn't free himself from arrogance and racism, he created a path for this generations anti-zionists to follow.
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January 14, 2024A comprehensive collection of writings, lectures and speeches by Martin Buber concerning Jewish-Arab relations in Mandatory Palestine (and into post-48), which served as a point of spiritual inspiration for organizations supporting bi-nationalism like Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace). Great introduction by scholar Mendes-Flohr, dealing with the 'the Arab question' in early zionist thought, and the political life of Buber.
Also includes his commentary on the character of Jewish nationalism which Buber feared would be corrupted from within, if it were to exceed from its main purpose of securing territorial sovereignty and safety for a people, and make ‘the nation itself its supreme principle’ - a philosophical discourse relevant not only for considering the modern nationalistic character of Israel, but also the ideological nature of nationalism in general.
Even though the writings deals mainly political issues, it does so within a philosophical and spiritual framework, and even though one fully agrees on a ethical and ideological level, one can also at times sympathize with the individuals who branded him as being rather ‘politically idealistic and utopian'
Also includes his commentary on the character of Jewish nationalism which Buber feared would be corrupted from within, if it were to exceed from its main purpose of securing territorial sovereignty and safety for a people, and make ‘the nation itself its supreme principle’ - a philosophical discourse relevant not only for considering the modern nationalistic character of Israel, but also the ideological nature of nationalism in general.
Even though the writings deals mainly political issues, it does so within a philosophical and spiritual framework, and even though one fully agrees on a ethical and ideological level, one can also at times sympathize with the individuals who branded him as being rather ‘politically idealistic and utopian'
May 7, 2024
I'm Jewish and was born in 1950 , just 2 years after the state of Israel was created. Zionism was an unadulterated shining light in my upbringing. The Jews who moved to Israel and who worked to build a new society in the desert were heroes to me. As a teenager I read the book Exodus and I saw the movie. I heard the phrase " A land without people for a people without land" and accepted it unquestionably.
But fifty years later, I began a journey of questioning the truth of this story when I first heard Miko Peled being interviewed on a podcast. I read his book, The General's Son and while I was reading it, i coincidentally met an exchange student from Gaza with whom I still communicate.
Now ten years later I'm reading A Land Of Two Peoples and it is a revelation to me. I had no idea that in the early days of Zionism, as it formed in Europe, that there were voices like Martin Buber's who were were calling out for peace and understanding with our Arab brothers and sisters in Palestine. He was not alone, but they were in the minority. Though he never gave up hope, he would be appalled today to see the dark path that Zionism has taken.
But fifty years later, I began a journey of questioning the truth of this story when I first heard Miko Peled being interviewed on a podcast. I read his book, The General's Son and while I was reading it, i coincidentally met an exchange student from Gaza with whom I still communicate.
Now ten years later I'm reading A Land Of Two Peoples and it is a revelation to me. I had no idea that in the early days of Zionism, as it formed in Europe, that there were voices like Martin Buber's who were were calling out for peace and understanding with our Arab brothers and sisters in Palestine. He was not alone, but they were in the minority. Though he never gave up hope, he would be appalled today to see the dark path that Zionism has taken.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews