So recently I found out that Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of the state of Israel, I was wondering, what would’ve happened if he accepted it? What would the implications of it be?
WI. Einstein accepts Isreali presidency
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SwampTiger
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Why on earth would he accept this? As a supporter of Israel, he certainly knew it needed younger, more dynamic leadership, even in a ceremonial position.
He’d definitely be more polarizing since even if the post is ceremonial he served as president of one of the worlds most controversial states. I could see some Palestinian activists claiming he shouldn’t be treated as honored as he is due to his more visible Zionism.
Chain Weizmann, who accepted the post, was 5 years older than Einstein.
I suspect it had more to do with the fact that while Einstein was a Zionist, he wasn't Zionist enough to leave his fairly cushy life in New Jersey to travel to what was at the time a developing nation.
It's a ceremonial position, and doesn't really do much, but I guess some Israeli institutions (like the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; which Einstein was part of the first Board of Governors along with Martin Buber, Sigmund Freud, and Chaim Weizmann) might benefit from having Einstein's name attached to it. Other than that, there's not much that would really change.
It definitely changes his legacy. Today, he's some almost everyone admires, but if he was a political figure he would need to make at least a few people angry because of his decisions.
I'd say he would get into disagreements with right-wing Israelis due to his personal views of Jewish-Arab cooperation, anti-nationalism (Which most of Israel is quite nationalistic.), & his socialist views.
In all honesty, due is his personal views, I don't see Einstein taking up the offer of being President of Israel. Even if he did, later on his reputation would be tarnished seeing that a well known Physicist who was well liked & admired, only to become President of an Apartheid state. History around him would be very controversial.
In all honesty, due is his personal views, I don't see Einstein taking up the offer of being President of Israel. Even if he did, later on his reputation would be tarnished seeing that a well known Physicist who was well liked & admired, only to become President of an Apartheid state. History around him would be very controversial.
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Einstein was a somewhat reluctant Zionist, but he opposed the idea of a unitary, Jewish nation-state thats embodied by OTL 2018 Israeli. He and Hannah Arendt, among several other diaspora jewish intellectuals, signed a letter that condemned Menachem Begin's Herut party (forerunners of Likud) as proto-fascist and reactionary.
Putting aside Israeli-Arab issues, a Western European jews as Israel's first president might have exacerbate Israel's intra-Jewish social divide. The state's founding elite was largely secular, socialist, eastern European jews who were in charge from '48 up to the late '70s. Menachem Begin, the first non-socialist leader, gained power in the late '70s thanks to a coalition of religious and Sephardic Jews (jews from the Middle East) who felt disenfranchised in a state that was in may ways began as an extension of European culture and political ideas.
There was a large degree of racism and cultural friction within European Jewry. German-speaking Jews who tended to be more secular and assimilated looked down on eastern European jews as uncultured, religious country bumpkins who spoke a strange yiddish creole instead of the language of Kant and Goethe. Some excepts from Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem is indicative of this mindset:
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I have to say, "the Einstein Institute of Science" sounds pretty damn good.
Furthermore, in this thread: people who aren't familiar with Israeli history. Early Israel was dominated by socialists, and the Revisionists were, at best, a weak opposition. While most people think that most of the Labor Zionists leadership probably wasn't as pro-coexistence and some of them liked to say they were, the fact is that openly calling for Jewish-Arab cooperation isn't going to get Einstein any trouble from anyone of importance in Israel in 1948. Chaim Weizmann (OTL first president) in fact was also very pro-coexistence, and wrote at length about the need to treat with the native Arabs fairly and without cruelty. And a bunch of Yekke intellectuals calling the Irgun "fascists" wasn't particularly controversial (in fact, the early 30s saw a faction of the Revisionists openly declare themselves to be fascists, before the word became entangled with Nazis).
The stern gang actually wanted to work with the nazis, back when the plan was expulsion not murder. A few supported the madagascar plan. Italy advocated an alliance with irgun against the british and the ussr.
Einstein University also has a nice ring to it.
A lot of the early Israeli politicians would probably be fine with Einstein calling for Arab-Jewish coexistence. Hell, Einstein putting his name to it might help end the curfews the Arab-Israelis were under until '66. Pinhas Lavon was a high-ranking member of Mapai in the early 1950s and pushed for Arab integration the IDF by extending the draft to include them (which he saw as a way to equalize Arab-Jewish society in Israel), and was very surprised by just how many Arab-Israelis pushed to join the ranks (several thousand answered the draft extension). Having Einstein call for integration of Arabs and Jews might keep Lavon's draft extension viable, and I agree with you that it won't be controversial in Israeli society.