Einstein and Zionism
Writing in the New Republic, David Billet of Commentary dismantles a new book that says Einstein was hardly a Zionist and would have, according to the publisher, “favored a non-religious state that would welcome Jew and Palestinian alike.
The book — Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East, by Fred Jerome — emphasizes Einstein’s dissents from the Zionist mainstream and ignores his assents — or relegates them to an appendix, writes Billet.
He adds:
Jerome’s larger purpose is to bring to bear Einstein’s moral authority upon the cause of replacing Israel with a binational Palestine that would rescue the Jews from the crimes of statehood.
Read Einstein on Israel, and this is what emerges — a fairly utopian vision of Jewish culture, combined with a real-world understanding of what the Jews needed in the wake of the Holocaust and would need to survive; discomfort with the subjugation of the Arabs but still able to ask Nehru to support the ”right of the Jews to continue the upbuilding of their ancient homeland without artificial restrictions.”
In other words, a lefty Zionist. It’s not an oxymoron. Israel’s critics like to pretend they don’t exist, because it would clash with their vision of Israel as the new South Africa, or historical anachronism.
Nearly every country fails to live up to its founding ideals or contains internal contradictions that cannot be justified or reconciled. But according to supporters of the binational state, only Israel must solve these conflicts by dismantling itself.
JustASC is written by Andrew Silow-Carroll, Editor-in-Chief of the 