Judah Magnes at the opening of Aharonson House, Rehovot, Israel (March 12, 1942) | National Photo Collection of Israel / Public Domain
Judah Magnes, rabbi, orator, pacifist, and founding Chancellor of the Hebrew University, has long haunted the political margins of Israeli and Palestinian history. Too Zionist for the anti-statist left, too pacifist for the militarizing Yishuv, and too binational for a nation determined to consolidate, Magnes occupies a strange position in the modern Jewish imagination: remembered but not quite revered. However, dismissing him as a relic of liberal idealism means overlooking the spiritual force at the heart of his politics.
In the decades preceding the founding of the state of Israel, Magnes labored tirelessly to envision a shared political future between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, not in abstraction but through institutional effort, diplomacy, and constant moral reckoning. Alongside Martin Buber, Henrietta Szold, and others associated with Brit Shalom and later Ihud, Magnes argued that the ethical legacy of Judaism demanded more than refuge; it demanded justice. He proposed a binational commonwealth grounded in mutual recognition, cultural autonomy, and constitutional restraint. This vision, often dismissed as unrealistic or naive, should be read as something else entirely: a form of political theology that draws from prophetic ethics, diasporic humility, and spiritual resistance to the idolatry of power.
This conviction increasingly put him at odds with the mainstream leadership of Zionism, particularly during the challenging years of the British Mandate. In 1937, when the British Peel Commission proposed the partitioning of Palestine into distinct Jewish and Arab states, Magnes reacted with alarm. In a speech to the American Jewish Congress, he asserted, “Partition means force, force means war, and war means defeat.” As Zionist institutions moved toward statehood, he became increasingly alienated from a movement he had once helped shape: “We are in danger of winning the land but losing our soul.” His response was not withdrawal but prophetic dissent—a refusal to collapse moral integrity into political expediency. In a 1946 memorandum to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, he wrote: “We are concerned not merely with the establishment of a home, but with the character of the home that is established.”
In Magnes’s view, a state should sanctify cohabitation, not merely secure territory. Here, his vision aligns with Martin Buber’s concept of the “I-Thou” relationship, in which the other is not an object to be managed but a presence to be encountered. In political terms, this translates into shared institutions, mutual guarantees, and the humility to limit one’s power.
Magnes feared that a Jewish state founded on unilateralism would lose its ethical distinctiveness and become, in effect, just another nation among nations—functioning as another piece in a game of global chess, but one desacralized.
His idea of binationalism was never just a pragmatic proposal, like the “two-state solution” for peace between Israel and Palestine. This was an idea originally endorsed by the United Nations in 1947, but rejected by the majority of Arabs and Zionists alike, leading to the 1948 Palestine war, which ended with the new sovereign state of Israel controlling all the land allotted to it by the UN, as well as 60 percent of the land the UN had allotted to the new sovereign state of Palestine.
What Magnes promoted was a myth he hoped might unify, a symbolic container for collective longing, a covenantal ethics—and a refusal to resolve the “I-Thou” relationship through sheer force. It asked not only for policies but for fidelity to a more profound vision of cohabitation, in the sense that Gershom Scholem meant when he spoke of Jewish mythic energies: forces capable of shaping national identity and apocalyptic movements as a carrier of collective longing, memory, and moral charge. Magnes asked Jews to believe in a future where dignity was not a zero-sum game, and homeland did not require erasure.
In moments like this, it is worth recalling the trauma that preceded statehood: the descent into World War II, the horror of the Holocaust, and the immense challenges Zionists faced in their mission to not only recover the souls that were lost but to reckon with what a Jewish homeland would become.
Magnes died in 1948, the year of Israel’s founding. He did not live to see the consequences of what he had feared—a ruptured holy land—but the myth he carried did not die with him. It remained dormant and wounded in the margins of political discourse.
Today, as new plans for the Gaza Strip take shape, Magnes’s myth returns as a provocation.
He reminds us of the many forms Zionist ambition once took in the face of overwhelming pressure. His political theology asked not just what is possible but what is holy. As Dr. David Barak-Gorodetsky observes in Prophetic Politics, Magnes’s unwavering commitment was to a vision of a land Jews and Palestinians could dwell together not as rivals over sovereignty but as co-stewards of a shared sacred land.
Like Buber and Scholem, he upheld a kind of utopian, even mystical, hope.
