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Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East

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I thanked my friend a hundred times after he gave me this book. As a physicist, I hold Einstein dearly but I have always wondered about his stance on the State of Israel and its displacement of an indigenous population. I was pleasantly surprised by all the ideas and the foresightedness of Einstein, and saddened at how his compatriots at the time labeled him as naive and inexperienced, especially since his ideas couldn't appear to be more correct in light of the current situation in Israel/Palestine.

A big plus is that this book provides translations from German of letters that Einstein has written, so it lets Einstein express his own views for himself. Therefore, I disagree with some of the reviewers who term this book as "propaganda", unless they are implying that Einstein's personal intent was propaganda.

The conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, which in Einstein's own lifetime was bitter and which has only grown sharper since, was not inevitable. So thought Albert Einstein at least. In "Einstein on Israel and Zionism", Fred Jerome has compiled a selection of Einstein's writings and speeches concerning the enterprise to create a Jewish state in Palestine. Zionism was controversial from the start, since it was clear that Palestine already had a number of inhabitants -- non-Jewish -- who could not reasonably be expected to welcome any effort naturally designed to dispossess them. Therefore, in their outward show the early Zionists very quickly ceased speaking of building a *state*, and instead spoke of creating a *homeland* for the Jews.

From his earliest contact with Zionism in 1914 at the age of thirty-five, Einstein was supportive of the Jewish homeland concept. He did so for two major reasons. First, he felt that a Jewish homeland in Palestine would raise the self-esteem of Jews in the diaspora; and, second, he believed firmly that because of anti-Semitism Jews needed a place of refuge as a last resort against persecution. His primary concern is with Jews in the diaspora; at no time does he suppose that life in the diaspora is invalid or impossible. In 1927 he stated: "For me the importance of the Zionist work lies precisely in the effect it will have on those Jews who will not themselves live in Palestine" (p. 60) But what about the Arabs who were already living in Palestine, what effect will Zionism have on them?

Einstein's view can be described as "cultural Zionism", the belief that in Palestine Jews could create an entity, a spiritual and intellectual center which would serve to foster Judaism as a culture, and Hebrew as a language, to unite Jews worldwide. In 1929: "It was a great achievement of Herzl to have realized and proclaimed...the establishment of a national home or, more accurately, a center in Palestine..." In this sense there is no question but that "Zionist" is a term that can justly be applied to Einstein.

However, Einstein never favored the existence of Israel as a political state. In fact, his writings attest that he firmly and consistently throughout his life opposed political Zionism. But wasn't that what the movement begun by Herzl was all about? One gets the impression that at the beginning Einstein, it could almost be said, deceived himself about the actual Zionist goals; but as time wore on, the scales fell from his eyes. He came to see that Weizmann and the rest of the Zionists represented a Jewish chauvinism whose realization would render impossible any just rapprochement with the Arab inhabitants of Palestine -- and which in the end would fail. To Weizmann, 1929: "If we are not able to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we have learned nothing in our two thousand years of suffering, and deserve the fate which will befall us" (p. 78). In this sense, Einstein was anti-Zionist -- much to the chagrin of Weizmann and the mainstream Zionist movement.

One asks, what then is the right way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs? In today's world there is a widely accepted view that the only way to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict is to allow a Palestinian state to be created on the land that Israel has illegally occupied since 1967 and from which it must now withdraw. This is the vaunted "two-state solution". As demonstrated in this collection of his writings, Einstein was adamantly opposed to any two-state solution. To him it was very clear that Jews needed to share all the land of Palestine on an equal basis with Arabs. In 1947 the United Nations voted to partition Israel by creating separate states for Arabs and Jews -- this was the original two-state solution. Einstein opposed it, favoring instead a single bi-national state in which Jews and Arabs were represented on an equal basis: "What we can and should ask is a secured bi-national status in Palestine....if we ask more we are damaging our own cause" (1946, p. 176). He clearly felt that a *Jewish state* was incompatible with the need to maintain just relations with the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine. The conflict was resolvable, but if only the Zionists renounced chauvinism and agreed to share the land equally. This has never happened, of course. Since Einstein's death in 1955, the situation for the Palestinians has grown starkly worse, and Jewish chauvinism has starkly increased.

We tend only to think about Einstein as defining energy and the atomic bomb. This book reveals much of the true character of this wonderful person.

This book is very interesting and led me to re-think many preconceptions I held concerning the Middle East. I had always believed, like most people that Jews and Arabs hated each other for "thousands of years". Albert Einstein made me see that was just not the case. The one fact that kept resounding through my head as I read Einstein's letters was, if Einstein, being the genius he was, could see this situation so simply and oppose a "forced" Israeli state, why would lesser men think they knew better ? Einstein knew and predicted that a forced Israeli state would cause and continue to cause major problems for years to come. Has this not been the case? And if the lesser men understood this, Why would they impose it? When it comes to history I only try and read 'primary resource documents' (documents actually written by those there at the time) I try and stay away from books written about history by those who weren't there and inject their own opinion. Fred Jerome does a fantastic job of chronicling actual letters between Einstein and others concerning the Israeli-Palestine issue. He injects no opinion. Einstein's letters go from 1919-1955 and tell a story of not just a genius concerned about logical conclusions from "forcing a nation" on people, but a human being with a genuine concern for all parties and all mankind in general. The real force of this book for me was, Einstein was a Jew himself. He could of easily been self interested and fully supported a forced Israel...but he took a higher path!

This book is a collection of letters, notes, and other documents written or co-written by Albert Einstein regarding the creation of the Israeli state. It places Einstein in a context of being pro-Israel but anti-Zionism. He simultaneously supports a Jewish homeland while strongly urging cooperation and coexistence with the Palestinian people. Truly a great book and an important book for all interested in establishing peace in Palestine and Israel.

We keep learning that the supposed morality of our fathers ('''' '''' or Pirkei Avot)' does not describe their actual history. Jerome has given us another welcome piece of the untold real story of Zionism. The Einstein of my childhood (the forties and early 50s) was the Dalai Lama of his day, a great humanitarian, humble being but also revolutionary scientist. He was not only thought of as a supporter of Israel but of other liberal causes. In the writings of revisionist historians, Israel, Zionism and the history of the Jews begins to look a lot different than what I was brought up on and what the Israeli propaganda machine wants the world, or at least, the US populace to believe.

Jerome brings us many of Einstein's own writings and speeches on Zionism and Israel. While some of what Jerome offers is well known, the additional source material fleshes out Einstein's views. And though Jerome wants Einstein to speak for himself, Jerome's comments and placement of Einstein's utterance in context is what gives the book life beyond simply a resource for scholars. For myself I wish Jerome had put more of himself in the book.

Einstein, of course, is an interesting character, but as he was wrong about Quantum Mechanics, and wrong for maybe 30 years, so too he was naïve about certain history, even the anti-Semitism through which he lived in the 1920s.

While Einstein, the transnationalist, had doubts about Zionism's nationalism and even accused both Irgun and the Stern gang of being like the Nazi's, he somehow never seemed to unabashedly attack Jewish nationalism that treated the Arabs in ways akin to which the Jews had been. Yes, he uttered harsh words---calling Menachim Begin a Nazi---but his accusations never seemed to stick. He and Buber, and maybe Magnes wanted a binational state but that was never in the cards for the Zionists. When offered the Presidency of Israel, Einstein turned it down saying he was not qualified and would have to say things people did not want to hear. Still he did not use the occasion to criticize Israeli racism and ethnic cleaning.

Einstein had a kind of garbled view of Jews, as nation, as culture, as race. I couldn't quite follow his reasoning. It seems limp. He saw people sticking together because of cultural/religious differences with others and thus different peoples could never live together. I can't figure it out. Einstein was the epitome of the "enlightenment" Jew and yet he criticized them. The assimilated German Jews of Einstein's era were much more interested in being German than Jewish, although some were torn, like Heine. After the defeat of Napoleon and the ensuing reaction when Jew were stripped of some Napoleonic rights, there were many conversions like Karl Marx's father. German Jews shared the German dislike of Eastern European peasants and from the 1880s to WWI facilitated the quiet transport of Ostjüden across Germany by packing them into cattle cars and hiding them in warehouses and cheap hotels in Bremenhaven and Hamburg before they set sail on German shipping lines for America. Jewish assimilation in Germany was an up and down affair. During WWI they were patriotic and included. In its disastrous aftermath, nativism waxed and waned and with it Jews' feelings of belonging. The Jewish bourgeoisie was always threatened by economically induced xenophobia (as happened in the US) but we get no sense from Einstein how influential Jews were in the Weimar Republic. Nor, except for a mention of the Jewish autonomous Birobidjan in '45, do we get a sense from Einstein about how liberated Jews were in the Soviet Union prior to Stalin's paranoia after WWII. After all Hitler and the Nazi's identified Jews with communists, and they were proportionately right when it came to Soviet commissars. Einstein did go against both German and Jewish xenophobia by holding university classes for Ostjüden.

One of the most interesting parts of the book was Einstein's attempts to communicate with Nasser in 1952-53 through an Egyptian journalist/diplomat. Einstein didn't want to be a mediator but he even sought the help of Nehru to try to get Egypt to negotiate with Israel. While he felt Begin was like the Nazis, he saw Ben-Gurion as different: to which the journalist replied that Ben-Gurion acted no differently. As the author claims, this bit of history has not been presented elsewhere. And we owe him a dept of gratitude for this. It is key because Einstein was never able to clearly strip the enlightenment demeanor from the major Zionists who recruited him while concealing their insidious goals. If he had, his opposition to their program might have been more open and aggressive.

None-the-less I am grateful to the author for giving us a picture of Einstein's dissent which has not been part of the history Zionists would have us believe.

Charlie Fisher, emeritus professor, Brandeis University and author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World

Clearly Mr. Jerome had an agenda and used the name and legacy of Albert Einstein to promote it. He starts off dedicating the book to the memory of Rachel Corrie. Ms. Corrie, her unfortunate demise notwithstanding, would not have been the hero of a man like Albert Einstein. Einstein believed in a home for the Jewish people. Ms. Corrie joined an organization, the ISM, which does not recognize the right of Jews to live anywhere in what they consider Arab land. The ISM supports terror and the murdering of civilians as a form of national resistance. Ms. Corrie left the U.S. to burn the American flag on foreign soil, while Albert Einstein left Europe to come to the U.S. to escape persecution as a Jew. Ms. Corrie died defending the rights of terrorists to murder and maim innocent civilians, while Mr. Jerome's own selected writing demonstrate Albert Einstein deplored violence against civilians. There were 12 other "Rachels" who were murdered by terrorists in Israel in the last 10 years. May I suggest that Mr. Jerome dedicate the book to Rachel Thaler, a 9 year old American citizen, Christian, murdered by terrorists on a bus in Haifa by those Ms. Corrie supported?

His command of history is specious and designed to promote his agenda. He refers to "violence" as though it was violence by both sides, when in these specific instances the violence consisted of Arabs slaughtering Jews. His reference to August 1929 of "violence" breaking out obfuscates that in August 1929, nearly 200 religious Jews in Hebron were slaughtered in what remains to this day the single largest loss of civilian life in modern Israel/Palestinian history. He produces some proposal in 1928 to have a Palestinian parliament for which I could find no reference on Google, nor in a good, unbiased source of pre-statehood Israeli history, "One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate" by Tom Segev. According to Mr. Jerome the Arabs accepted a proposal to have a parliament in Palestine in which Jews and Arabs had equal representation? And the Jews turned it down!? This proposal is no where on Google, nor anywhere else I looked. If anyone can find any reference anywhere to Arabs accepting the rights of Jews to rule over any part of Palestine prior to Sadat please email it to me, I'll buy you a copy of Mr. Jerome's book.

He throws in statistics meant to sway the reader to his point of view without refrences or context. His "context" skips multiple episodes of Arabs slaughtering Jews including the Nebi Musa riots of 1920 and the Jaffa riots of 1921. His rendition of the Peel Report skipped that the Peel Report found the Arabs responsible for the majority of the violence and their reported justification for violence, that Jews were stealing Arab land, was without basis in fact. I could go on and on, but honestly it would require me to spend time with this book which I see no reason to do.

Anyone interested in Einstein has many sources to refer to. This book should be skipped.

The author of the book clearly has a anti Israel agenda. Throuout the book, he interprets Einsteins sayings to fit that agenda. He also talks about ongoing Israeli attrocities, but ignores those committed by the Arabs/Palestinians.

This book is a piece of cheap one- sided political propaganda. It opens with a hatchet- job discussion of events of the past few years in the Middle East, and presents what it imagines Einstein's views would be about them. It downplays Einstein's fundamental sympathy for the Jewish state, and makes little of his having willed his most important legacy, his papers to the 'Hebrew University'. Einstein was a humanist, and did care about safeguarding Arab as well as Jewish rights. He did criticize certain actions of those in the Yishuv. But fundamentally he was a passionate believer and supporter of the Jewish state all through his adult life. The effort of this book is to downplay this special connection and in effect withdraw Einstein's backing from the Jewish state. The book fits in well then with the radical Leftist deligitimization campaign being conducted today.
Einstein was a man of truth. He would have been appalled by the way his views are misrrepresented in this work.