The day Albert Einstein was invited to be president of Israel

To this day Palestine has not been established, although more than 140 countries recognize it as a State.

This figure is expected to increase, since some countries have recently announced that they will recognize the Palestinian State in September, during the next session of debates of the United Nations General Assembly.

Israel, on the other hand, did declared its independence in 1948, and in 1949, Weizmann was elected president of the new country, for his dedication to the Zionist cause.

It was, however, a more symbolic and ceremonial position than executive, because Israel is a parliamentary republic, where the prime minister is the Head of Government.

In 1952, at the age of 77, Weizmann died.

Israel needed a new president.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs proposed names of prominent Jews that could perform the position and promote immigration to the young country.

The government of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion decided to invite a scientist to the position.

Immediately, he focused on the most famous scientist.

Israel's ambassador to the United States, Abba Eban, contacted Albert Einstein.

The German physicist lived in the country since 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power and began the persecution of the Jews in Germany.

Eban wrote a letter to Einstein on behalf of Ben-Gurion.

“Israel is a small state in physical dimensions,” he said. “But greatness can reach, since it exemplifies the highest spiritual and intellectual traditions that the Jewish people have established with their best hearts and minds, both in antiquity and today.”

The ambassador also emphasized that Einstein would not have to give up his scientific career. But he should move in New Jersey, where he lived and worked at the Institute of Advanced Studies of Princeton, to Israel.

Einstein, who was then 73, responded politely and seemed pleased with the invitation, but did not want to embark on the adventure.

The scientist argued that he did not have the skills required for the position, according to Ze'ev Rosenkranz, conservative of Einstein's archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in the book The Einstein Scrapbookwhich contains correspondence and personal photographs of the physicist.

“I deeply move the offer of our state of Israel and, at the same time, it saddens me and I am ashamed to be able to accept it,” Einstein replied.

“All my life I have dealt with with objective issues, therefore I lack both natural aptitude and experience to properly deal with people and perform official duties.

“Only for these reasons, it would not be suitable for fulfilling the responsibilities of this high position.

“I feel even more afflicted by these circumstances, since my relationship with the Jewish people has become my strongest human bond since I became fully aware of our precarious situation among the nations of the world.”

According to Alice Calaprice, author of several books about the scientist, Ben-Gurion felt relieved by the refusal.

“Einstein's frankness feared on policies that could go against his conscience,” he wrote in An Einstein Encyclopedia.

The prime minister had entrusted his chief of cabinet, Yitzak Navon (who would be president of Israel from 1978 to 1983): “Tell me what to do if he says yes.”

“I had to offer the position because it would be impossible not to do it. But if you accept, we will have problems.”

He who had not accepted the position does not mean that Einstein was indifferent to Israel's political leadership.

“Einstein was a member of the Zionist movement. Since 1921, he maintained a close relationship with Weizmann, representing a leftist wing of Zionism that advocated the creation of a binational state, with national rights for Arabs and Jews in Palestine,” explains the historian Michel Gherman, professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeir Conflict between Israel and Palestine.

Once again, Einstein's correspondence helps us understand this.

In 1947, after the independence of India, the scientist wrote to the new prime minister of the country, Jawaharlal Nehru.

He congratulated the Indian achievement and left his conviction explicitly: “I made mine the Zionist cause because through it I saw a way of correcting an obvious error.”

The following year, with the creation of Israel, the scientist could have felt satisfied after decades of Zionist struggle. But denounced the abuses committed by a more radical segment of the Israeli population.

At the end of 1948, he and other Jewish intellectuals wrote an open letter to the New York Times criticizing the visit of the Menachem Begin politician to the country.

Begin was a leader of Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary organization known for his terrorist attacks against Palestinians and British in the era before Israel.

That year, the Irgún massacró the village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem, killing more than one hundred Palestinian civilians: men, women and children.

Shortly after, the organization gave rise to a new party, Herut (“Libertad” in Hebrew).

“The visit of Menachem Begin, the leader of this match, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression that it will have US support in the next elections in Israel,” the letter told New York Times.

The signatories made clear in the first paragraph what they thought of Herut: “closely related in their organization, method, political philosophy and social attraction with the Nazi and fascist parties.”

In 2024, leftist profiles on Brazilian social networks rescued this letter after Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (PT) compared Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip, in his war against Hamas, with the Holocaust.

Used out of context, arguments could suggest that the scientist was an opponent of Israel.

“Einstein has been portrayed as a critic and as a defender of Zionism and the state of Israel, according to the agenda of those who wish to claim it for their own cause,” summarized the British historian Richard Crocktt in the book Einstein and the Twentieth-Century Politics.

For Crockat, a fundamental ingredient of the scientist's vision of what the state of Israel should be was its commitment to a broader values framework.

“Above all, there is hate to nationalism and devotion to internationalism, which always operated as a limit to its Zionism and its position towards Israel,” he explained.

This was the Einstein invited to be president of the country in 1952.

“The intention was probably to give international legitimacy to a newly created state that had emerged from a bloody war a few years before,” says Gherman, referring to the 1948-1949 conflict in which Israel defeated the Arab League and seized half of the area that had been reserved for the future state of Palestinian.

The historian Michel Gherman points out that, although the position of president in Israel has a more ceremonial function, it is also “extremely political.”

“Einstein was not invited just because he was Jewish, but because he had political links with the Zionist movement and the defense of the creation of Israel,” he says.

Remember that other notable Jews were and are invited to represent Israel “in symbolic positions, with the intention of improving the country's image.”

At the beginning of the 1990s, for example, former Prime Minister Shimon Peres held in interviews that the writer Amos Oz should enter politics.

In 1952, the group of which Einstein was part, Brit Shalom, had a minority opinion, but never isolated, explains Gherman.

Among its members were respected and internationally admired intellectuals, such as Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem philosophers.

It was the participants of Brit Shalom who founded the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

But today, group members would be treated as “traitors” by the current Israeli government, says Gherman, noting that the administration of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not allow space for divergent opinions, such as the defense of the solution of two states.

“Who would be the Einstein of our time? Imagine if that person would accept the position. Was Ada Yonath, winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and Criticism of the occupation of the Palestinian territories and what happens today in Gaza? I don't believe it.”

As Einstein did not accept, who ended up becoming president of Israel that year was the historian Yitzhak Ben-Zvi.

Menachem Begin, the politician who visited the United States and was criticized by the scientist, acquired more and more influence in Israel.

Herut was the main Israeli conservative party in the following decades, in which the Labor Party held power.

Begin assumed the position of Prime Minister in 1977 and remained in him until 1983.

Five years later, Herut was absorbed by another right -wing party, Likud. Since 2006, its leader has been Netanyahu, the Premier with more years in office in the history of the country: its three mandates add almost 18 years.

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