Israel’s security policies—marked by the physical and psychological mistreatment of Palestinian Arabs, which has greatly intensified since the commencement of the Gaza genocide—have led many to question not only how traditional and normative Judaism views such actions but also how modern Jewish thought engages with them.

We’ve previously referenced a notable voice from within Israel: the late Yeshayahu Leibowitz, widely regarded as having been one of the most influential Israeli-Jewish philosophers. He famously coined the term “Judeo-Nazi” to critique Israel’s treatment of Palestinian Arabs, warning that such securitization would, in time, have profound consequences for the Jews themselves.

However, Leibowitz was not alone. Many other notable Jewish thinkers have engaged critically with the Zionist movement and the Jewish state, offering a range of perspectives that are worth exploring.

Martin Buber (1878–1965)

Martin Buber, born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, is often regarded as having been the most significant Jewish philosopher of the modern era. Buber, a “neo-Hasidic” thinker, sought to reinterpret the mystical Hasidic tradition of Ashkenazi Jews through the lens of modern European philosophy—particularly existentialism. His seminal work, I and Thou (1923), presents existence as something fundamentally relational, a view that later shaped his vision of a “Hebrew humanism” grounded in ethical encounter and mutuality.

Buber was also actively involved in the Zionist movement from its early days through the establishment of the state of Israel. True to his philosophical convictions, he opposed Israel’s role as an oppressor of Palestinian Arabs and critiqued the concept of the “nation-state,” which he saw as being incompatible with the universalist aspirations of his Hebrew humanism. Rabbi Bill Plevan wrote in May 2024:

Buber was an influential Zionist thinker who inspired many young Jews in Europe with his passionate speeches about the need to revive Jewish life through idealistic settlement in the ancient homeland of the Jewish people. At the same time, Buber argued that Zionism should not aspire to create a Jewish nation-state, as such an arrangement would deny full equality to Palestinians and likely provoke war. Buber recognized that this approach to Zionism was losing ground as the movement coalesced around the nation-state model.

In an essay dated May 2023, Paul Mendes-Flohr mentions that Buber aimed for a binational state where Jewish sovereignty would be, in a way, limited:

In the years prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, Buber endorsed the idea of a binational state, in which Jews and Arabs would share sovereignty or co-dominion on the land they both regarded as their national patrimony. For Buber, binationalism was but a heuristic vision to illuminate a possible political configuration that would allow Jews and Arabs to dwell in the same land in mutual trust and dignity; it was not a dogmatic or doctrinal position. What was decisive was the “direction” or the horizon of one’s political perspective. And that direction was set by the realisation that the land Jews cherish as Eretz Yisrael and that the Arabs with equal affection call “Palestine” is irrefragably a land of two peoples.

Buber’s worldview stood in stark contrast to the dominant form of Zionism that later took root in Israel, particularly as represented by the right-wing Likud Party under Benjamin Netanyahu. His opposition would be even more opposed to Netanyahu’s recent coalition partners, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who embody a far-right strain of Jewish racial supremacism rooted in Kahanism.

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Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995)

If Leibowitz was the most influential Israeli-Jewish philosopher and Buber the leading German-speaking Jewish thinker, then Emmanuel Levinas stands as the most significant French-speaking Jewish philosopher. Like Buber, Levinas was deeply shaped by the dominant currents of European philosophy in his time, especially Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s existential thought. The parallels don’t end there though: Levinas was also well-versed in traditional Jewish texts—particularly the Talmud rather than Hasidic stories—and his philosophy, like Buber’s, centers on subjectivity and the ethical encounter with “the Other,” i.e., that ethics begin with a relational metaphysics.

Even though he remains an unknown entity in the Anglosphere, Levinas became one of the most read thinkers in France. Another Jewish philosopher, Jacques Derrida, the seminal voice of postmodernism at the time, was responsible for having popularized his works.

But was Levinas coherent with his philosophy when it came to the matter of Israel? In other words, did he view the Palestinian-Arabs as “the Other”? Judith Butler, the Jewish thinker who contributed majorly to third-wave feminism, seems to disagree. In her book Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), a book that is critical of Israel and was written after the Gaza War of 2008–2009, she writes (pp.38–39):

This [Levinasian] position differs from the “I-Thou” of Buber, which would insist on separate identities, culturally distinct, that nevertheless federate as a cooperative dialogue and venture. The Levinasian position assumes the asymmetry of the relation between the subject and the Other; it also assumes that this other is already me, not assimilated as a “part” of me, but inassimilable as that which interrupts my own continuity and makes impossible an “autonomous” self at some distance from an “autonomous” other. Indeed, the Levinasian position, taken seriously, would defeat Buber’s philosophical notion of dialogue, despite the superficial resonances between them.

 

[…]

 

We have not yet seen a study of the “faceless” in Levinas, but let us presume it is on its way. The fact that Palestinians remain faceless for him (or that they are the paradigm for the faceless) produces a rather stark quandary, since Levinas gives us so many reasons to extrapolate politically on the prohibition against killing.

Unlike Buber, whose philosophy emphasized authentic dialogue and engagement with Palestinian Arabs, Judith Butler contends that Levinas failed to recognize the Palestinian Arab as possessing a distinct ontological identity—lacking, in a sense, individuality or even complete humanity. This may stem from Levinas’s primary focus on the Talmud, in contrast with Buber’s broader humanistic approach.

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Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972)

The final Jewish thinker I’ll be making mention of here is Abraham Joshua Heschel, who is often regarded as the most important American Jewish philosopher (we thus have an all-around representation of English-speaking, German-speaking, and French-speaking modern Jewish thinkers). Unlike the figures mentioned previously, Heschel was an ordained rabbi and also a Holocaust survivor, having lost most of his family to bombings and concentration camps. This personal history instilled within him a profound commitment to justice, which led to his active involvement in the American civil rights movement (where he notably worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr.). For Heschel, this activism was a natural extension of the moral legacy of the Biblical prophets.

Yet, perhaps due to his traumatic personal experience with the Holocaust, Heschel’s unwavering commitment to Israel made him somehow numb to the Palestinian-Arab suffering, even if he did perhaps happen to feel self-conscious regarding such a moral contradiction. Cornel West, considered to be the most important African-American thinker alive, wrote the following for a Jewish publication in December 2020:

It’s true that both King and Heschel died before the crystallization of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian people and lands, and prior to the scholarship and disclosures that have allowed us to fully understand how the foundation of Israel was built upon the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. And we know of King’s commitments to “fair and peaceful solutions” for Arabs and Israelis, as he wrote in 1967, and of Heschel’s concern for Palestinian lives. In his book Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940–1972, scholar Edward K. Kaplan records Heschel’s response to the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, in which far-right Zionist paramilitaries murdered more than 100 Palestinians: “If Jews can do that, I’m so disturbed that I’m calling off the class,” Heschel said when he read about the massacre. Still, neither Heschel nor King fully appreciated the dispossession and violence of the founding of Israel as a settler-colonial state, nor foresaw its development into an apartheid-like system in the occupied Palestinian lands.

It’s clear that modern Jewish thought has approached the Palestinian-Arab question in markedly different ways—even among its most prominent voices. Thinkers like Buber (and, as we read in an earlier article, Leibowitz) were more open and empathetic, whereas Heschel’s stance remained ambiguous, and Levinas appeared largely indifferent to the suffering of Palestinian-Arabs.

One might wonder whether a greater sense of empathy from contemporary Jewish figures—such as Ben Shapiro—toward the plight of Palestinian Arabs could help curb or even prevent the resurgence of antisemitism.

But we also now understand why Buber was never really accepted in Israel. Rabbi Jeremy Rosen writes:

Buber contradicted himself. On the one hand, he claimed that a Jewish cultural component validated a Jewish State. And on the other he avoided synagogue even on the Day of Atonement. Indeed Buber claimed to be a great admirer of Jesus of Nazareth and in many respects was closer to Christianity than to Judaism.

 

Martin Buber was never completely accepted in Israel. He came to be regarded as something of a saint. A gentle man, out of touch with reality.

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