Strangely, however, Jerome clearly intends Einstein on Israel and Zionism to be a powerful anti-Zionist statement. All the parts of the book that are not from Einstein’s own hand—the extensive passages of historical and biographical background, the introduction, the notes—are written in a spirit not just critical of Israel, but basically hostile to the very notion of a Jewish state. The book’s politics become clear as early as the dedication page, for Jerome has dedicated Einstein’s words “to the memory of Rachel Corrie,” the American teenager accidentally killed when she tried to stop an IDF bulldozer in the Gaza Strip. This is followed by a note from the book’s German translator, Michael Schiffmann, referring to the Palestinains’ “unprecedented Calvary”—a textbook example of the way durable anti-Jewish tropes are recycled into anti-Zionist ones. Jerome himself rails against “the myth of Einstein the advocate for Israel,” which he says was a deliberate creation of the American media.

How does Jerome reconcile Einstein’s obvious love for Jewish Palestine with his own antipathy to Israel? The answer is both historically simple and, as always when it comes to Israel/Palestine, psychologically complex. Starting after the First World War, when Einstein first became interested in Zionism, he was an unwavering supporter of the Yishuv, and he spent a great deal of effort making speeches and raising money for Jewish institutions in Palestine. But he was also a principled cosmopolitan and anti-nationalist, and he was chagrined by the growing antagonism between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. In 1948, he joined a small but impressive group of Jewish notables—including Hannah Arendt, Judah Magnes, and Henrietta Szold—in arguing against the creation of a Jewish State.

Because that opposition is the sole reason why Jerome has published Einstein on Israel and Zionism in its present form, it is vital to understand the reasoning, or failure of reasoning, that led Einstein to it. First of all, like many observers in 1948, Einstein was deeply afraid that a war in Palestine might end in a Jewish defeat, which could well turn into a second Holocaust. On April 10, 1948, the month before Israel’s declaration of independence, he wrote an anguished letter to a representative of the terrorist Stern Group: “When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the Terrorist organizations built up from our own ranks.” Two days letter, Einstein and Leo Baeck wrote an open letter to The New York Times dwelling on the same fear: “We appeal to the Jews in this country and in Palestine not to permit themselves to be driven into a mood of despair or false heroism which eventually results in suicidal measures.”

Beyond the immediate danger, however, Jerome is right to remind us that Einstein was also opposed in principle to the idea of a Jewish state. In response to a questionnaire in 1947, he made his position clear: “Jewish National Home? Yes. Jewish National Palestine? No. I favor a free, bi-national Palestine at a later date after agreement with the Arabs … I am against partition.” Asked to propose his own solution to “the Palestinian problem,” Einstein wrote, “There should be a provisional UN government with a gradually increasing decentralized, bi-national self-government.”

The reasons why Einstein was so averse to the idea of Jewish sovereignty lay deep in his understanding of his own Jewishness. Einstein’s concern with Jewish settlement in Palestine started after World War I, when he was confronted with the upsurge anti-Semitism after Germans started to blame the Jews for their defeat. He admits that before the war, when he was living in Switzerland and doing the scientific work that made him famous, he had no interest at all in Judaism or Jewish issues: “When I came to Germany [in 1914] I discovered for the first time that I was a Jew, and I owe this discovery more to Gentiles than Jews.” Significantly, one of the first documents in this book is Einstein’s 1919 letter to the Berliner Tageblatt complaining about Germany’s mistreatment of Eastern European Jewish immigrants.

Like many German Jewish intellectuals of the time, Einstein found in Zionism a source of new Jewish confidence and solidarity. Broadly speaking, he can be classed with the cultural Zionists, who saw the Yishuv as a means of regenerating worldwide Jewish identity, rather than with the political Zionists, whose goal was a Jewish state. “For me,” he wrote in 1927, “the importance of all this Zionist work lies in precisely the effect that it will have on those Jews who will not themselves live in Palestine…. The internal effect, in my opinion, will be a healthier Jewry: that is to say, the Jews will acquire that happiness in feeling themselves at ease, that sense of being self-sufficient, which a common ideal cannot fail to evoke…. I believe that the existence of a Jewish cultural center will strengthen the moral and political position of the Jews all over the world, by virtue of the very fact that there will be in existence a kind of embodiment of the interests of the whole Jewish people.”

The case for Israel has seldom been better put; it would not be hard to imagine a different editor using Jerome’s own texts to put together a pro-Israel anthology. Yet Einstein was also, again like most German Jewish intellectuals, early and deeply committed to the idea of universalism, which had long been the German Jewish response to anti-Semitism. In particular, he valued Judaism, about which he actually knew rather little, solely as an expression of liberal democratic values. In a piece published in Collier’s in 1938, he declared, “The bond that has united the Jews for thousands of years and that unites them today is, above all, the democratic ideal of social justice, coupled with the ideal of mutual aid and tolerance among all men.” As history this is beyond dubious, but even today it is not uncommon to hear it from Jews who want to reconcile their particular identity with universal values.

In the post-Holocaust period, then, Einstein faced an irreconcilable conflict between two things he cherished: the flourishing of the Jews and the ideal of Jewish purity, which meant Jewish powerlessness. (“We are a minority everywhere and have no violent means of defense at our disposal to protect our community against our numerous enemies and opponents—fortunately,” he said. Fortunately—and that was in 1938, ten days before Kristallnacht.) Jerome honors Einstein for refusing to sacrifice the latter value to the former: “in today’s world,” he writes in one of his tendentious commentaries, Einstein’s view “hardly sounds like Zionism.”

But the two most interesting documents in Einstein on Israel and Zionism actually demonstrate how unsustainable and, ironic though it sounds, illogical Einstein’s position actually was. The first is a transcript of Einstein’s testimony before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, in 1946. Here Einstein rather feebly suggests that there is no genuine antagonism between Jew and Arab in Palestine, that the real source of discord is only British imperial policy. “National troublemaking is a British enterprise,” he says, and it follows that if the British were to give up their Mandate, the trouble would go away.

As a result, he is totally unable to face the truth, which is that Arab and Jewish visions for Palestine were incompatible. Einstein insists, for example, that the Jews then languishing in European DP camps be allowed to enter Palestine, contrary to British policy. One British expert asks Einstein, “What would you do if the Arabs refused to consent to bringing these refugees to Palestine?”—as, of course, they did, just as they had violently resisted Jewish immigration since the 1920s. “That would never be the case if there were no politics,” Einstein replies. There is Einstein’s fallacy in a sentence: his response to a desperate political problem is to wish that there were no politics, which is to say, no conflicting desires, no clash of rights, no power.

But surely the lesson of Jewish history is that powerlessness is not a solution for the Jews, but the most dangerous problem. The same conclusion can be drawn from another valuable document in this book, an account of Einstein’s 1952 meeting with an Egyptian journalist, Mohamed Heikal. Jerome interviewed Heikal in 2006, and he remembered his long-ago visit to Princeton to see Einstein. There the great man spoke with anguished sincerity about his desire to make peace between Jews and Arabs, and tried to use to Heikal to open up back-channel talks with Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s new ruler. Clearly hoping to find common ground with Heikal, Einstein said that “when it comes to people like Menachem Begin and his massacre of Arabs in the village of Deir Yassin … these people are Nazis in their thoughts and their deeds.”

And what was Heikal’s response? “Ben-Gurion is no less a Nazi than Menachem Begin.” Here we see the ugly reality behind Einstein’s dream of a binational state, and Jerome’s present-day anti-Zionism. There was, in 1948, no way to ensure the survival of Jewish Palestine without a Jewish state, which meant an army, a flag, borders, and all the insignia of sovereignty that Einstein detested. Likewise, there is no way to establish a true peace in Palestine today as long as so many Palestinians, elite and ordinary, are committed to Israel’s destruction. Still, Einstein has one advantage over his new editor: his reservations about Israel were voiced from the standpoint of his unquestionable commitment to Zionism. For that reason, he makes a less useful ally than Fred Jerome appears to think.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

Armored vehicle, Kibbutz Hamaapil, 1948

Two days later, three of my friends were killed in a battle. That evening we dropped them into the pits we had dug earlier and I was left on my own. I waited on the lawn and someone who was killed a day afterwards came and picked me up in Ahi’s armored car and said we had to take Abba Eban back to Tel Aviv. The siege was on. Jerusalem was cut off. The ride was long and bumpy. We came across an Arab donkey that brayed at us and Haimke Keresh brayed back at him and shouted that’s regards from our donkey in my village.

So far, there was hardly any talk about establishing a state. From the 1940s, the Jewish struggle was mostly about free immigration. Had the British granted a hundred thousand certificates to Holocaust survivors who were waiting to come, maybe the state would have arisen years later. During the big anti-British demonstrations in the 1940s nobody, apart from a few, spoke about a Hebrew state. Most were struggling to rescue Jews.

It was early morning when we reached Tel Aviv in the armored car. A siren sounded. People could be seen dashing to the shelters. We got out of the armored car and stood stretching ourselves, because we had been on the road crowded together for eight hours. I was almost eighteen, I had already seen a lot of death, I had seen cruelty and vengefulness and dreadful poverty. The Tel Aviv streets were empty. I looked at the houses so planted in Tel Aviv, in the streets I knew, and I envied the people who had a Jewish state already but were nowhere to be seen because of the bombing. I arrived at my parents’ apartment and my mother says that when I came in I didn’t say a word and rushed to my room. I didn’t eat. Didn’t drink. Didn’t go to the lavatory. After all, I had just come from hunger and thirst. I stayed alone locked in my room wildly drawing on the walls with colored chalk I found in the drawer of my table. My mother says I climbed onto the table to draw on the ceiling, too. I didn’t let anybody in, I went out to the balcony and gaped at my sea, which was already part of the Jewish state; the sea from whence would come the Jews for whom I had enlisted at the age of seventeen and a half. I gazed at their sea that was still more mine, more home than any other home I remembered, at its deep evening beauty, and the sight of the sun striking the sea instilled confidence in me. I do remember a smell of burnt sausage. Apparently I went out for a moment and swallowed it in the kitchen. I remember the paraffin stove with an orphaned pot of food waiting for me. After a night and half a day I ran from our apartment in Ben Yehuda Street to the armored car and the guys were asleep, standing up. A fat man gave me a cigarette, but he didn’t speak because he didn’t know any Hebrew. On the ride back to Jerusalem, they began to shoot at us and two bullets came through the small slits through which we were shooting. Two of the men in the armored car were already lying dead at our feet. It was narrow inside and bullets were flying from one side to the other and I heard the shriek of the bullets and saw them exploding on the walls of the armored car and the two corpses at our feet emitted the smell of death, but the saliva still flowed from them.

Look, not everybody is capable of establishing a new state in a hostile environment after two thousand years. We weren’t given the tools for building the state. We had no teachers. We had rhetorical prophets who wanted us to bring salvation and we had bewildered parents whose families had perished in the Holocaust and who sent us to be fighters in the new Masada. We had short old revolutionaries who rallied behind us shouting in the belief that when Jews shout they are more in the right and they became increasingly rhetorical, dangerous and noble, for the moment seeing us as belonging to the chronicles of Israel, a nation now seeking to live in its own house, avenging the history of Israel, avenging pogroms we didn’t know because we were born here. We knew battles with Arabs, but no pogroms.

Soldiers at a post near Tel Aviv, c. 1948

It was given to us to restore the respect of a humiliated People who were attacked in order to be destroyed, whereas we set out to establish the state against the Nazis more than to counter the Arabs who thought Auschwitz was sort of a city overseas. We were children of the bible with a homeland. A history. Poetry. We had in us the pain of Jews who allowed longing to change into prayer. Our parents came to renew our days as of old and sixty years ago, from December 1947 till the end of 1948, four hundred of my brigade that numbered twelve hundred youngsters commanded by Yitzhak Rabin, were killed in three months. It was a kind of Children’s Crusade. We were almost devoid of weapons, with officers who were talented but lacking in battle experience. We were few, alone, hungry, thirsty. We were in Jerusalem and on the way there and we had killed and been killed and we sang, “If we die, bury us in the hills of Bab El Wad,” we sneaked in from all sorts of places, we didn’t have a penny to our names and we sang how we would die. Longingly, firm in spirit, we sang a song with the words “we walk as if dead” and thought that it would be wonderful to die. Wise we were not. The wise don’t choose to go out and die at the age of seventeen without first knowing how to shoot. The wise prefer existing states rather than new states to be established among white rocks under a flaming sun. You had to be stupid, young, and crazy to fight the Jewish People’s suicidal war. To die for someone you don’t know and to discover only after the war that we had established the state for Holocaust refugees in camps somewhere in Europe.

When we were still children, in the 1930s, the Arabs started an uprising against the British in order the block the flow of Jews into the country and they won. The English preferred the oil, gave in and closed the gates of the country. A German soldier on a submarine, seeing the sinking of illegal boats on the way to Eretz Yisrael, laughed and said, “The Jews are swimming to Palestina.”

During Hanukkah 1947, we hiked to Masada. It was quiet, with a lowering black sky, the heavenly hosts in abundance. We declared loudly enough to be overheard in Great Britain, “We will not forget thee, O Diaspora,” and a Palmach fellow who was with us drew his revolver and fired a symbolic shot against the enemies of Israel. After this I went for a walk. It was cold the way a desert knows how to be at night. Illegal immigration had just come to an end, the big war had ended two years earlier. I gazed at the lights of Hebron and Bethlehem and Jerusalem and thought that it was like Christmas in the movies and I heard a stone fall into the abyss and stumbled, luckily I was flexible and quickly swung backwards, realizing that I was standing on the edge of the mountain. I understood that had I taken one more step, I would have become a stone at the foot of the mountain.

A boat full of illegal immigrants

Fascinated and alarmed, my legs shaking from what had just happened to me, I looked at the extensive lights of the Arab cities and Jerusalem and thought that if a Jew stands on the finish line he always sees Paradise and this is dangerous but beautiful. Then the Palmach fellow was wounded by a shot he fired by mistake and one of the guides ran tens of kilometers to Kibbutz Beit Ha’arava to get bandages while we pressed the shot fellow’s wound to stop the flow of blood and about five hours later his friend came back with a medic, near the River Jordan, after which we hiked for two days and went for a covert swim in the Dead Sea on our backs with our knapsacks on our stomachs, after all, we couldn’t sink but we burned from the salt water and the proud hills of Moab spread above us and dark stone crags loomed behind us in the night and a bat was there and the eagle crossed the sky and I thought about the concept of the finish line, not understanding exactly what this terrible expression meant, if standing on it you saw Paradise, but also the opposite.

A few months later, I had already volunteered in the war. After the battles, we would bring the bodies, lay them out and take some of their clothes to wear. We went out by night. Saw our friends hacked to pieces, the penis stuck in their mouths and we fought. They were pitiless. We were pitiless, too. Then I was wounded and almost died and I escaped from the hospital in Jaffa and went to Ramleh to organize a new brigade of jeeps. The town was empty. The Arabs had been chased out. Food still squatting on the tables. We slept in a beautiful house. It was awful and quiet and saddening. Suddenly, halfway through the night we heard a terrible noise. We went outside. A thousand, maybe more, people arrived in trucks. They cut the barbed wire fences enclosing the town and flowed past the evicted Arabs standing by the fence and crying that they wanted to return. These peculiar Jews who resembled a herd of animals darting from the trucks with the look of hungering wolves had never heard of Ramleh, but the instant they entered the houses, to sleep on sheets again for the first time in years and after all those camps, even though they couldn’t pronounce the name of the town they became its landlords. They were full of profound animosity towards the world, a tribe of jackals come down from the black mountains; people who emerged from hell to rejoin the history that now lay on the barbed wire, stricken and wailing in Arabic. The sight of the Jews grabbing every house was sad, but also imbued with a kind of magic, a human beauty beyond judgment. The last time any of them had a house or apartment was in the thirties. I remember having a pointed conversation in flowery Hebrew with a man who said that morality and justice are for celebrations, not life, and that we, unlike the Arabs, do not have relatives within ten kilometers.

Those Jews were stronger than we Israelis. Compared to them, we were jokes walking around inflated with self-importance because we won some Mickey Mouse war.

The author at home in Tel Aviv, 2008

For them, war was Wehrmacht, Nazis, Gestapo, tanks, freight trains, grey huts, smoke, walking to God via the furnaces. They felt that they were wretched souls, winners only because they were alive. They dismantled the barbed wire fences the way children open bars of chocolate. They took. They stayed.

This strange encounter between the pleading Arabs at the fences and the beaten Jews falling upon a whole town that yielded sheets and refrigerators with food inside, was nothing compared to the unsolvable tragedy of our war that began eighty years ago and continued until the War of Independence and until today, under various names. Once, on a walk with my mother who grew up in Eretz Yisrael from 1909 and saw all possible bereavements, we came to Tel Aviv’s old cemetery and stood beside the common grave of those who perished in the Arab uprising in 1921 that was the beginning of the above- mentioned war. She was a girl then, and bandaged twenty-three Jews murdered near Tel Aviv. It was impossible to identify them because they had been disfigured and my mother standing beside that common grave said to me, Yoram, look what an inheritance I’m leaving you, my son.