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14 The Arab-Jewish Dilemma BERNARD WASSERSTEIN The last person to have favored an uncritical celebration of the life and legacy of Judah Magnes would have been Magnes himself. The diary notes and other writings recently published by Professor Arthur Goren1 reveal a deeply self-critical, self-questioning spirit - perhaps the essential private aspect of a public figure whose primary role was as radical critic and asker of awkward questions. In any assessment of his work in Arab-Jewish relations, on which he expended such passionate efforts in the last two decades of his life, we therefore owe it to his shade to paint the portrait, warts and all, to follow this man's own example in seeking the unvarnished, unadorned, and sometimes unpalatable truth. There is a poignant irony in the fact that Magnes today is chiefly remembered less for his great constructive and in some respects enduring achievements in the social and educational spheres in America and Palestine than for his activities in an area that he would have been the first to acknowledge candidly as one in which he failed almost utterly. The political arena into which he flung himself with such energy and zeal was almost completely barren of success and it might be thought a matter for wonder that he is recalled today not so much as the creator of the New York Kehillah, nor as first head of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but rather as the chief inspiring force of a small band of intellectuals on the political fringe of Zionism, a group which had negligible support among the Yishuv and one whose binationalist political objectives were trampled into the dust by the onward rush of competing nationalist forces. The reasons for this failure belong in the main to the larger macrocosmic level beyond the capacity of any individual or group to 187 188 PART V. ARABS AND JEWS influence. But since we are concerned here with the microcosmic level of human biography, we may pose the question which Magnes would surely have expected to be raised: how far was the failure to realize Magnes's political ideas the result of intellectual, emotional, or other failings in Magnes himself? Magnes was a complex man, intellectually as well as emotionally. He did not belong to that breed of prophet whose moral force derives from a pure simplicity of character and outlook: whatever political views he shared with them he was in this n~spect quite distinct from Albert Einstein and Mahatma Gandhi. Magnes's critique of mainstream Zionism, his doubts, his questions were rather the product of a process of internal fermentation, spiritual conflict, and perhaps of the self-doubts and self-contradictions with which he was afflicted. Writing in his journal on Rosh Ha-shana, the Jewish New Year, 1923, Magnes confessed: I am a deeply "religious" man, but Divinity is hazy and vague to me, not always active in me. I may be a religious man, but I am not a religious leader. An understanding of God is what is lacking within me. I doubt Him and question Him - His ways, His aloofness, the sufferings He causes man, the uncertainty of life, the blackness of death.2 The core of spiritual uncertainty, which can occasionally be glimpsed in such private reflections, was transmuted in his public persona into a strange failure of communication: this master of the spoken and written word, when faced in the final act of his life with a supreme task of political propagandising and proselytising, found again and again that while he could carry conviction he could not convince, while he could impress he could not persuade. Although he settled in Palestine in 1922, Magnes initially abstained from public involvement in political issues.. When the binationalist Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace), society was formed in 1925 he did not become a member, even though he was in general agreement with its objectives. The outbreak of fierce Arab-Jewish violence in 1929, however, shocked Magnes deeply and he felt compelled to speak out. In a speech on the occasion of the opening of the new academic year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Magnes set forth his credo. The Jewish National Home, he declared, could not be established on lithe bayonets of some empire"; Zionism could not be achieved through the conquests of some latter-day Joshua but only by peaceful means.3 In a letter written to Chaim Weizmann about the same time, Magnes set out for the...
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