• Are we’re talking about the same person? Mentioned in Raimond Gaita’s speech: “I believe, that the concept of ‘an indigenous inhabitant’ hinders rather than helps thinking justly about the conflicting claims of Arabs and Jews to the same territory. And in this connection it is important to remember something when one reads writers – Jacqueline Rose, for example – who advocate a one state solution and who enlist in their support earlier anti-state Zionists like the theologian and philosopher, Martin Buber”!

Who was able to combine Zionism with the ardent German patriotism during World War-I. In his book Drei Reden ueber das Judentum (published in 1911), Buber spoke of a youth who sensed: “The immortality of generations, the community of blood”! Which he felt were the: “Antecedents of his I, the perseverance in the infinite past”! Combined of discoveries and promoted awareness as such at the time: “That blood was a deep-rooted nurturing force within the individual”! Claimed as the: “Deepest layers of human being to be determined by blood”! Moreover that “One’s innermost thinking and will, were affected by it”.

Buber saw the world around him as: “An ambience of influences and imprints, where blood was a realm’s substance, admitting influences and imprints, a substance absorbing and assimilating all into its own form”! Hence he concluded: “Whoever faced a choice between the environment versus substance, and decides for substance, he henceforth will have to be a Jew truly from within. To live as a Jew with all the contradictions, all the tragedy and all the future within a promise of his blood”!

As far as one can tell Jews have been in Europe for millenniums, far longer than say the Magyars, yet no one to dream of referring to Hungarians as Asiatics. But to Buber the Jews of Europe were still Asians and presumably always be. Complemented by his analogy: “You could get a Jew out of Palestine, but you could never get Palestine out of the Jew”!

In 1916 he wrote that the “Jew was driven out of his land and dispersed throughout the lands of the Occident. Yet despite all this, he has remained an Oriental. One to detect all of this in the utmost assimilated Jew, if one knows how to gain an access to his soul”. “The immortal Jew unitary drive will come into being, only after continuity of life in Palestine. Once it comes into contact with its maternal soil, it will revert to become creative again”!

Interestingly the Lubavitcher Rebbe who was completely against giving up land said it was only because of Pikuach nefesh (learnt from Halacha regarding a border city being attacked) that we do NOT give back even an inch – which is exactly what happened – we were attacked even more from a closer distance.