Albert Einstein: The Nobel Laureate Who Spoke Out Against Zionist Violence
As unsettling as they are fitting, the beloved laureate's words still ring true today.
"... the strength of our whole movement [Zionism] rests in its moral justification, with which it must stand or fall."―Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was more than a scientist. He was also a philosopher, humanitarian and peace activist. What did Albert Einstein say about Palestine, Zionism and the modern state of Israel? If he could speak to us today, what would he say?
The thought exercise doesn’t take much imagination. Einstein wrote extensively about the subjects that fuel so much of today’s discord. Much of that work proves to be eerily applicable to the present day.
Today, we face Einstein’s nightmare of fascist politicians wielding power in Israel. Likud’s corrupt, ultra-nationalist chauvinists are driving genocide in Gaza.
In December 1948, Albert Einstein, including Hannah Arendt, wrote a letter to the New York Times expressing concern over the emergence of ‘The Freedom Party’ (Tnuat Haherut) in the newly-created state of Israel.
They wrote a letter highlighting how ‘a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organisation in Palestine’ formed it.
It described Tnuat Haherut as ‘closely similar in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties’.
As their letter details, Tnuat Haherut preached ultra-nationalism and racial superiority. Its leader, Menachem Begin, was involved in the massacre of 240 men, women and children in the village of Deir Yassin. The letter predicted: ‘From its past actions, we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.’
Today, Israel continues to pound Gaza. It has dropped more bombs in six days than in the entire 2014 conflict.
Gaza’s Ministry of Health says that at least 22,835 Palestinians had been killed, with another 58,416 reportedly injured. An estimated 70% are women and children. About 7,000 more are reportedly missing, and most are likely dead.
It has killed more children than killed globally in all conflicts over any year since 2019. A horrific future is upon us. It has been upon us from the establishment of the State of Israel.
It is a settler-colonial project that required the forced removal and elimination of millions of inhabitants of historic Palestine.
In January 1946, in reply to the question of whether Jewish refugee settlement in Palestine demanded a Jewish state, Einstein told the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, "The State idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed. It is connected with narrow-minded and economic obstacles. I believe it is bad. I have always been against it."
The Israeli government of Netanyahu is the most right-wing, racist and genocidal in the country’s history. It has abandoned any pretence of meaningful, accountable democracy, even for its privileged Jewish citizens.
It has created a political crisis in which Israel has a severe Jewish supremacy problem, much like apartheid South Africa’s white supremacist mindset.
In its reaction to Hamas’ violent actions inside Israel, this government is very comfortable committing genocide. The unqualified and uncritical support this fascist, criminal government has received in the US and UK will ensure that this genocide continues until Israel has achieved its deadly, illegal objectives.
When Jewish extremists, fanatic Zionists, religious zealots, ultranationalists and crypto-fascists in the apartheid state of Israel say they want to wipe Gaza off the face of the earth, believe them.
Top Israeli political and military leaders have themselves offered as evidence of intent.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is urging Israelis to “remember” the Old Testament account of the carnage of Amalek “Spare no one but kill similar men and women, infants and sucklings,” reads one passage. To Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, “Gaza won’t return to what it was before — we will eliminate everything.” To the energy and infrastructure minister, “They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave this world.”
By speaking openly about destroying Gaza and dispersing its residents, Israeli leaders have publicised what has, in other cases of genocide, been hidden or denied.
Einstein demanded "Complete Equality" for Palestinians.
Einstein said, "There could be no greater calamity than a permanent discord between us and the Arab people. Despite the great wrong that has been done us [the Holocaust], we must strive for a just and lasting compromise with the Arab people ... Let us recall that in former times no people lived in greater friendship with us than the ancestors of these Arabs."
However, what the early Zionists did, in effect, was use European racism to excuse Jewish racism against Palestinians. It was simply wrong. Historically, Arabs had treated Jews far better than European Christians had. Until Jews began arriving in large numbers with the stated intention of ruling Palestine, Jews and Arabs had lived together mostly in peace.
Why, then, were Arabs singled out for oppression and domination by Jews? Primarily because the Jews needed a safe place to land, but rather than accepting minority status and majority (i.e., Arab) rule, they insisted on taking over, using British clout and cannons to conquer a largely defenceless populace.
Einstein lamented the failure of Zionist Jews to reach a just understanding with Arabs and criticised their reliance on their influence with powerful Englishmen like Winston Churchill.
He opposes any form of nation-state, which creates nationalism by creating statelessness and a lack of another community. His criticism of fascism came to inform his criticism of Zionism.
He predicted that this project in nationalism would turn into something darker. It is a product of the very colonialism and oppression that it had set out to resist.
He correctly diagnosed that Jewish identity was ultimately a European identity. Establishing a nation-state explicitly for Jews mimicked the colonial project. This time, instead of having the Africans or Asians as its victims, it was Palestinians.
One can see the parallels between the Nazi actions and those of the Israelis. Einstein believed that political Zionism was fundamentally mistaken in its aims and desires. For him, the notion that Israel can use it for the sake of its salvation is the original sin of Zionism—one of forced expulsions and statelessness. German Jews became a non-recognised minority in Germany during Hitler’s reign.
The same fate now meets Palestinians. Einstein precisely saw the reality. The anti-Semites and the Zionists both had in common that desire for Israel. It was the perfect match. The former wanted Jews out of their lands, and the latter wished for these expelled Jews to come and settle down in what is now the State of Israel.
Israel, with the help of the British, founded itself upon decades of militia and state violence and the expulsion and segregation of its Palestinian population.
But over the past few years, the Israeli government has lurched even further to the right, resembling more and more the Nazi regime of the past.
We must not use Nazi comparisons lightly. But the idea that Israeli politicians and military have become the same monsters from whom the Jews fled has become harder and harder to stomach.
Einstein implored Jewish people to fight injustice, an imperative he internalised for most of his life. In the face of a fascist Israeli government, he will say that "Palestinian freedom and Jewish freedom are inextricably linked. And that freedom cannot be achieved until there exists one free and democratic state for Jews and Palestinians."
The struggle to make “never again” a reality is far from over. Einstein will say if “never again” is to mean anything, it must require action right now in Palestine.
In a painful twist of historical irony, a once historically displaced and oppressed group has used its traumatic past as an imperative to repeat the same crimes it once faced. And just as “never again” has acted as an ideological underpinning of Israel’s settler-colonial project, it has been used to dismiss critics of Israel as no better than the Nazis.
Today, the oppressors and the tyrants are the Israelis, who are following the footsteps of the British colonialists. Today, the friends and allies of the Palestinians are few and far between, and their voices are drowned out by the powerful and the privileged.
But history has a way of repeating itself, and justice prevails in the end. The Palestinians, like the Jews before them, will not give up or give in until they achieve their freedom and dignity.
The Palestinians, like the Jews before them, will find their supporters and admirers who will stand with them and speak for them.
The Palestinians, like the Jews before them, will make their mark on history, and they will prove that they are not terrorists but freedom fighters.
Einstein dreamed of a Jewish homeland. He desires a community where Jews would be safe and peacefully live together. But not a political state that is bristling with weapons:
"We can choose to see all men as equals, respect their rights as we wish them to respect our own, and live in peace, or we can call ourselves the Chosen Few, trample on the rights of others, and go down to Sheol: to death, to destruction.”
If Einstein were writing today, he would likely continue to confront the world of equal rights for Palestinians. As bad as the carnage is, he would have been hopeful.
Einstein knew we’d transcended harsher obstacles. So, his hope will not be romantic. It will stem from righteousness and radical truth-telling. He will ask us to examine ourselves to free ourselves of Jewish exceptionalism and try to find out what is happening:
"I deplore the tragic events ... not only because they revealed human nature in its lowest aspects, but also because they have deranged the two peoples and have made it temporarily more difficult for them to approach one another. But come together they must, in spite of all." — Albert Einstein