Einstein: His Life and Universe

by Walter Isaacson

Once again, he was deducing a theory from grand principles and postulates, then deriving some predictions that experimenters could proceed to test.

Until then, Einstein’s scientific success had been based on his special talent for sniffing out

the underlying physical principles of nature. He had left to others the task, which to him seemed less exalted, of finding the best mathematical expressions of those principles, as his Zurich colleague Minkowski had done for special relativity.

After the war, he took the same stance. When he testified in Washington in 1946 to an international committee looking into the situation in Palestine, he denounced the British for pitting Jews against Arabs, called for more Jewish immigration, but rejected the idea that the Jews should be nationalistic. “The State idea is not in my heart,” he said in a quiet whisper that reverberated through the shocked audience of ardent Zionists. “I cannot understand why it is needed.”

“I have never considered the idea of a state a good one, for economic, political and military reasons,” he conceded. “But now, there is no going back, and one has to fight it out.”43 The creation of Israel caused him, yet again, to back away from the pure pacifism he had once embraced.

Einstein told him that he saw the birth of Israel as one of the few political acts in his lifetime that had a moral quality. But he was concerned that the Jews were having trouble learning to live with the Arabs. “The attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people,”

“I speak to you today not as an American citizen and not as a Jew, but as a human being,”