Martin Buber
On Jewish Settlement in Israel
“Our settlers do not come here as do the colonists
from the Occident to have natives do their work for them; they themselves
set their shoulders to the plow and they spend their strength and their
blood to make the land fruitful. But it is not only for ourselves that we
desire its fertility. The Jewish farmers have begun to teach their
brothers, the Arab farmers, to cultivate the land more intensively; we
desire to teach them further: together with them we want to cultivate the
land -- to 'serve' it, as the Hebrew has it. The more fertile this soil
becomes, the more space there will be for us and for them. We have no
desire to dispossess them: we want to live with them. We have no desire to
dispossess them: we want to live with them. We do not want to dominate
them: we want to serve with them."
Sources: From an open letter from Martin Buber to Mahatma Gandhi in 1939, quoted in Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea. PA: Jewish Publications Society, 1997, p. 464. |