Photo by Phil Hearing
A few weeks before the creation of the State of Israel, Shepard Rifkin, executive director of the Stern Group, requested that representatives of the group meet with Albert Einstein in the United States, “the greatest Jewish figure of the time” according to I.F. Stone. Einstein’s response was unequivocal:
“When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the Terrorist organizations built up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people.”[2]
To grasp Einstein’s prescience, one need only replace “the British” with “the Americans” and “terrorist organizations” such as the Stern Group and the Irgun group with the Netanyahu government, the political descendants of the leaders of these groups, Menachem Begin and Yihtzak Shamir.
Einstein said that his “life was divided between equations and politics.” Yet, among his biographers—there are hundreds of them—and in the mainstream media, his extensive political writings on Israel and Zionism have been, at best, swept under the rug, at worst, completely distorted making him a supporter of the State of Israel.
That is, until the late Fred Jerome sought them out, found them, had them translated, mostly from German, and published them in the book Einstein on Israel and Zionism. Unfortunately, the first edition of this book, published by a New York publishing house, had a very small print run, was never promoted or made into an e-book, and sold out in no time, the publisher having bowed to enormous pressure from the Zionists. That is why Baraka Books has published a new edition with the agreement of Jocelyn Jerome, the author’s widow.
It was in Germany in the 1920s, a time of rampant anti-Semitism when the theory of relativity was attacked as “Jewish science,” that Einstein was drawn to the Zionist movement. It was not until 1914, when he arrived in Germany, that he “discovered for the first time that he was a Jew,” a discovery he attributed more to “Gentiles than Jews.” Before that, he had seen himself as a member of the human species.
He called himself a “cultural Zionist,” but as early as 1921 Kurt Blumenfeld, a Zionist activist sent to recruit Einstein, warned Chaim Weizmann, the future president of Israel, about the great scientist:
“Einstein, as you know, is no Zionist, and I ask you not to try to make him a Zionist or to try to attach him to our organization. . . . Einstein, who leans to socialism, feels very involved with the cause of Jewish labor and Jewish workers. . . . I heard . . . that you expect Einstein to give speeches. Please be quite careful with that. Einstein . . . often says things out of naïveté which are unwelcome by us.”
Apart from Einstein’s supposed “naivety,” Blumenfeld could not have said it better. Einstein would be a constant obstacle to the Zionist project of colonization of Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel until his death in 1955.
Here are some examples of the positions he took.
His exchanges with Chaim Weizmann, the future president of Israel, illustrate how important Einstein was to the Zionists, but more importantly how his views differed from theirs. In a letter to Weizmann on November 25, 1929, he wrote:
“If we are not able to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we have learned nothing during our two thousand years of suffering, and deserve the fate which will befall us.”
The idea of “the fate which will befall us” recurs often. In 1929, he seems to have already foreseen that the State of Israel that the Zionists dreamed of creating without “honest cooperation and honest pacts” with their Palestinian neighbors would become what it is today, namely the most dangerous place in the world for Jews to live.
A few weeks later, on December 14, 1929, he wrote to Selig Brodetsky of the Zionist Organization in London, “I’m happy that we have no power. If national pigheadedness proves strong enough, then we will knock our brains out as we deserve.” »
Furthermore, Leon Simon, one of his early editors and translators, wrote:
“There is in Professor Einstein’s nationalism no room for any kind of aggressiveness or chauvinism. For him the domination of Jew over Arab in Palestine, or the perpetuation or a state of mutual hostility between the two peoples, would mean the failure of Zionism.”
Unlike the vast majority of Zionists, Einstein’s support for a possible “Jewish homeland”—not a state—was not limited to Palestine. There was nothing religious in his commitment. Some Zionists advocated the establishment of such a homeland in China, Peru or Birobidjan in the Soviet Union, but in full agreement with the state authorities and the populations in each case.
Einstein supported these steps. For example, on the Jewish homeland of Birobidjan in the Soviet Union after the Second World War he wrote:
“We must not forget that in those years of atrocious persecution of the Jewish people, Soviet Russia has been the only great nation who has saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives. The enterprise to settle 30,000 Jewish war orphans in Birobidjan and secure for them in this way a satisfying and happy future is new proof for the humane attitude of Russia towards our Jewish people. In helping this cause we will contribute in a very effective way to the salvation of the remnants of European Jewry.”
In the pivotal years between the end of the war and his death in 1955, Einstein was outspoken about the Jewish state project. Invited to testify before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine in Washington, D.C., in January 1946, Einstein answered unequivocally when asked about the possible State of Israel versus a cultural homeland: “I have never been in favor of a state.”
In March 1947, I.Z. David, a member of the Irgun terrorist group led by Menachem Begin, sent him a questionnaire to which he responded sharply and clearly:
Question: What is your opinion about the establishment of a free
National Jewish Palestine?
Einstein: Jewish National Home? Yes. Jewish National Palestine? No. I favor a free, bi-national Palestine at a later date after agreement with the Arabs.
Question: Opinion about partition of Palestine and Chaim Weizmann’s proposals re partition??
Einstein: I am against partition.
On the question of British and American imperialism, Einstein had no illusions as London handed over to Washington:
“It seems to me that our beloved Americans are now patterning their foreign policy on the model of the Germans, since they appear to have inherited the latter’s inflatedness and arrogance. Apparently, they also want to take on the role England has played up to now. They refuse to learn from each other; and learn little even from their own harsh experience. What has been implanted into the heads from early youth is rooted more firmly than experience and reasoning. The English are yet another good example of this. Their old-fashioned methods of suppressing the masses by using indigenous unscrupulous elements from the economic upper class will soon cost them their whole empire, but they are incapable to bring themselves to change their methods; no matter whether it’s the Tories or the Socialists. With the Germans, it was exactly the same. All of this would be good and well, except for the fact that it’s so sad for the better elements and the oppressed… (Letter to Hans Mühsam)
As for the political ancestors of the current Netanyahu government, Einstein tore into them and their political parties, particularly in The New York Times. When Menachem Begin came to New York in late 1948, Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and other Jewish figures in the United States published a letter denouncing his visit and the organization he led calling it “a political party very close in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and fascist parties.” One example they cited was the massacre of 240 men, women, and children in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin.
Einstein would repeat this accusation until his death in 1955: “These people are Nazis in their thoughts and actions.” Anyone who says this today in the mainstream media is immediately labeled an anti-Semite and banned from the same media.
It is common knowledge that when Chaim Weizmann died in 1952 the Prime Minister of Israel offered the presidency of Israel to Albert Einstein. Less well known, however, is the reason Einstein gave for this refusal: “I would have to say to the Israeli people things they would not like to hear.” Even less well known is Ben Gurion’s statement: “Tell me what to do if he says yes! I’ve had to offer him the post because it was impossible not to, but if he accepts we are in for trouble.”
Hundreds, if not thousands, of people are being accused of anti-Semitism or fired from their jobs because they dare to criticize the State of Israel, call it an apartheid state, and denounce the genocide of the Palestinians. May they rest assured: they are in good company, because if Einstein were alive today he would be in the front lines demonstrating with them.
Notes.
[1] Robin Philpot is Publisher of Baraka Books
[2] All quotes are from Einstein on Israel and Zionism, New Enriched Edition by Fred Jerome.
The post Einstein Opposed Zionist Colonization in Palestine and Predicted the Current Catastrophe appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
