In his recent book Reinhold Niebuhr and His Circle of Influence, Daniel F. Rice
includes a chapter on the eminent Protestant theologian’s relationship with
Felix Frankfurter, one of the most prominent American Jews of the 20th
century.
One of the foundations of their friendship was their shared
belief in the Zionist project. Indeed, Niebuhr not only helped found the
Christian Council on Palestine, an association of pro-Zionist Christian clergy,
but wrote impassioned defenses of the Jewish state for important periodicals
like The Nation and The New Republic. Frankfurter so esteemed Niebuhr’s writings
on Zionism that he was at a loss to find any written work that, in his words,
“faces the Jewish problem more trenchantly and more candidly.”
Such
effusive praise was typical of Niebuhr’s admirers.
Niebuhr, a professor
of Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary, founding member of the anti-
Communist Americans for Democratic Action, and prolific writer, earned renown as
a prophetic voice on American foreign policy. His major works, including Moral
Man and Immoral Society, The Irony of American History, and The Children of
Light and the Children of Darkness, are still cited by contemporary theologians,
writers and politicians. US President Barack Obama, for one, calls Niebuhr his
“favorite philosopher.”
Given the way intellectual fashions have turned
against the Jewish state, it is now very difficult to imagine a prominent
liberal Christian theologian defending Zionism with anything like Niebuhr’s
depth of passion. As Rice notes, Niebuhr supported Israel because he thought it
provided a firm basis for Jewish identity, something he felt American Jews had
lost while stewing in the melting pot. He lauded Zionism for recognizing that
“each race or people has a right or duty to develop” and that “only through such
differentiated development will its highest civilization be attained.”
To
explain Niebuhr’s Zionist sympathies, we ought first to consider three major
themes that he emphasized throughout his work. The first was that policymakers
needed to acknowledge the concrete limits they faced in applying moral precepts
to the practice of politics. Indeed, since politics involved decisions on behalf
of and in reference to collectives, altruism was impossible in the political
realm, especially in the international arena. Nations could not empathize with
other nations, and thus could not be expected to act in accordance with their
perspectives.
Since appeals to other nations’ senses of reason and
morality would inevitably fail, nations could not forswear the use of
force.
Second, and critically, Niebuhr warned against using force without
first engaging in serious moral reflection. He thus eschewed the unthinking use
of armed force no less than the moralism that ignored man’s tragic limitations.
Finally, Niebuhr believed the United States was responsible for promoting
democracy abroad. He thought, however, that the United States should encourage
democracy where it had already taken root rather than introducing it into
regions that were unprepared for it. It was for this reason that he vigorously
criticized the Vietnam War but strongly advocated American aid to West Germany
in the early days of the Cold War.
How does all of this relate to
Niebuhr’s support for the State of Israel? As noted by Edinburgh University
professor Carys Moseley in a 2009 article in Studies in Christian-Jewish
Relations (4:4), titled “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Approach to the State of Israel,”
Eyal Naveh, a professor of US history at Tel Aviv University, has suggested that
Niebuhr admired Zionism not for its lofty “redemptive” vision but for its
hard-headed answer to the problem of anti-Semitism. Niebuhr, like many early
Zionist thinkers, thought that the Jews would be wise to discard utopian dreams
and invest their energies in a properly defended state.
Yet Niebuhr did
not idealize Zionism’s consequences.
As Moseley further notes, while
Niebuhr strongly defended Israel’s right to self-defense and celebrated its
victory over the Arabs in 1948, he acknowledged that one “cannot speak of this
victory as a morally unambiguous one. No political victory can be so
described.”
Given Niebuhr’s belief in the impossibility of a morally pure
politics, he was particularly attuned to the misfortune of the dislocated Arabs;
accordingly, he advocated international assistance for them. In Moseley’s view,
Niebuhr considered the refugee problem the “tragic outcome of the foundation of
Israel.” Even the soundest causes generated lamentable
outcomes.
Niebuhr’s reservations concerning Israel’s morally ambiguous
actions did not diminish his advocacy of a strong US-Israel relationship,
however. He derided America’s hostility toward Israel during the Suez crisis on
grounds that Israel represented “only sure strategic anchor of the democratic
world” and, as such, served as the sole bulwark against Communist encroachment
in the Middle East. Israel’s pivotal role in the region merited an “unequivocal
voice from us that we will not allow the state to be annihilated and that we
will not judge its desperate efforts to gain some strategic security... as an
illegitimate use of force.”
Though he acknowledged that supporting Israel
uncompromisingly was a “risky” move for American policymakers, he warned that
vacillating on Israel’s defense was riskier, even foolhardy. As the world’s
foremost democracy, the United States was obligated to support its only
democratic ally in the Middle East without hesitation.
ALL OF this
underscores Niebuhr’s deep investment in the Jewish state. However, one point
raised by Moseley requires our attention: Despite Niebuhr’s frequent references
to theology throughout his work, he hesitated to discuss Zionism’s religious
dimensions. Why was this so? As Moseley suggests, Niebuhr’s conception of the
relationship between politics and religion provides the most likely explanation.
Niebuhr thought that the Christian religion provided a compelling account of
man’s fallen nature and his inability to move past self-interest in his
relationships with others, including his political
relationships.
However, Niebuhr rejected the notion that God chose sides
in political matters. He shared the conviction of Abraham Lincoln, who declared
that though “both sides prayed to the same god” during the Civil War, “the
prayers of both could not be answered” because “the Almighty has His own
purposes.”
Humans – imperfect, fallible creatures – could never act in
perfect accordance with God’s wishes.
We can therefore conjecture that
Niebuhr was uncomfortable with Zionism’s religious aspects because the
proponents of religious Zionism saw in their political project a fulfillment of
a divine mandate.
Though Niebuhr sympathized with Israel as both a
bastion of democracy and a worthy response to the intractable problem of
anti-Semitism, his approach made no room for an ideology that claimed both to
know and to embody God’s will.
Perhaps he avoided discussion of Israel’s
religious significance because he believed no such significance could exist in
the political realm. Though he recognized Israel’s creation as a significant
accomplishment, he thought it was first and foremost a political accomplishment
and that as such, the explicitly messianic dreams of some of its founders were
ill-founded.
The writer is the assistant editor of Minding the Campus,
the Manhattan Institute’s Web magazine on higher education. This article
originally appeared at Jewish Ideas Daily and is re-printed with their
permission.
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