Hannah Arendt
In 1944-45, Hannah Arendt, who had fled the Nazis to come to the U.S., wrote columns for the German-Jewish New York publication, Aufbau. Some of them are collected in the 2007 collection, The Jewish Writings.
The column excerpted below, "New Proposals for a Jewish-Arab Understanding" of August 1944, treats a recurrent theme in Arendt's analysis of "Zionist failure": Jewish immigrants to Palestine needed to forge a political future with the Arabs who lived there, rather than relying on power politics to guarantee the Jewish future. Dependence on foreign powers-- from Turkey to Britain to the U.S.-- would leave any Jewish commonwealth "precarious," she wrote.
Opportunistic politics, which tries somehow to muddle through from day to day, usually leaves behind it a chaos of contradictory interests and apparently hopeless conflicts. Zionist politics of the last twenty-five years vis-a-vis the Arabs could go down in history as a model of opportunism. One of the Arab leaders from before the First World War rightly recognized the true core of Zionist failure when he called out to his Jewish partners in negotiation... 'Be very careful, Zionist gentlemen, governments come and go, but a people remains.'
In the meantime, the Turkish government vanished and was replaced by the British. This reinforced the Zionist leadership in its stance of negotiation with governments instead of with peoples....
Palestine is surrounded by Arab countries, and even a Jewish state in Palestine with an overwhelming Jewish majority, yes, even a purely Jewish Palestine, would be a very precarious structure without a prior agreement with all the Arab peoples on all its borders....
[Arendt then addresses new efforts to bring Jewish and Palestinian people together at a grassroots level]
The political core of this new intra-Zionist opposition is both the realization of the fatal, utopian hyperbole of the demand for a Jewish commonwealth and a rejection of the idea of making all Jewish politics in Palestine dependent on the protection of great powers.... Over the long term, economic interests, whether those of workers or capitalists, are no substitute for politics, although one can use them politically. That is why it is right that an indigenous understanding between Jews and Arabs must first begin at the base, for it would be fatal to forget how often such efforts have been thwarted and rendered useless by political decisions made at the top.
A couple additional comments. Arendt, a leftwinger, absolutely reflects the view of State Department officials in 1948 that an Israel established by force could only be preserved by force. Also, notice the populism in these paragraphs. Arendt trusted the ability of empowered people to determine their futures. She would have hated the Israel lobby. She would have hated the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which granted so much political power to corporations.
I believe she would have looked at the current scene in Israel and Palestine-- in which a rightwing extreme grows in Israeli society, and Palestine has some extremists of its own--and seen that opposition as a fulfillment of her own worst predictions, and then recommended a political solution. I.e., if the two societies were combined politically, with voting rights at last granted to the occupied population, a reasonable consensus might emerge in the middle. This seems to me the most powerful practical argument for democracy in Israel/Palestine.
How true, Phil! Thanks for that.
You know, I wold be lying to you if I said I care about the future of Israel. I have the future of Palestine to worry about and that’s already a lot to handle. But having said that, what Hannah Arendt wrote so many years back is prophetic yet commonsensical. If I were Israeli Jew, I would totally separate Jew from Zionist and focus on preserving the Jew part in the ME. The Zionist part does not belong to the ME or anywhere else.
Ramzi, your comment reminds of Jeremy Ben Ami’s recent statement he’s going to worry about Israel, and Palestinian groups should worry about Palestine, and that’s a reasonable division of labor. Not that I’m judging – it makes perfect sense.
And I’ll agree with you that it’s past time for anyone who cares about the future of Jews in the Middle East to jettison the Zionist baggage. What Jews in Israel need isn’t more nationalism, it’s more long term thinking.
I haven’t had the chance to read Arendt, but she is widely cited by Judith Butler, both in previous works, and in Butler’s latest lecture series at Bryn Mawr. From those readings and from other citations, such as this one Phil, it seems to me that Arendt made a valuable contribution to the canon of moral philosophy based on Jewish tradition.
I think I could be much more joyful if it weren’t for the contribution of Zionism also being a part of the Jewish canon of theory.
When you actually read Arendt, you will see she was a humanitarian first, and last, although she was born Jewish. She coined the phrase “the banality of evil,” when looking at the Nuremberg defendants. She never thought for a moment the Zionists were different. Harry Truman came to the same conclusion before he unilaterally recognized Israel, writing in his diary about the Zionists pounding on his oval office door were, like so many righteous before him, a former underdog who became uberhund once they had power–the power he was talking about was Zionist media influrence and moneybags as the Zionists threatened to give their money, media influence, and key NY vote to Dewey if Harry did not sign the letter of recognition of Israel as a state; even then, although he got us into this mess, he deleted the word “Jewish ” as an adjective for the new state state of Israel he was recognizing.
Hannah Arendt passed through a Zionist phase, prior to writing these lines. Later, she was famously reprimanded by her fellow German ex-pat and Israeli scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom (Gerhard) Sholom for “not loving Jews enough.”
Arendt’s views are similar to Hans Kohn, a disciple of Buber’s who resigned his position on the Zionist Executive in Jerusalem in the 1920s and moved to the States. As Kohn explained to his teacher, Martin Buber, he could no longer accept Zionism’s rejection of dialog with the Palestinians and its blindness to Palestinian aspirations.
Kohn’s analysis of Zionism is important because he was intimately acquainted with the Zionist leadership in Europe and Palestine. Also, his awakening predates Ben- Gurion’s tenure as leader of the Zionist movement, the Arab Revolt, WWII and 1948 – all the key events that are often offered as explaining where Zionism went wrong. As such, they point to an essential flaw.
The criticism of Zionism and the emerging State of Israel written by Kohn, Arendt in the 1940s and Buber (particularly following WWII through May 1948) all sound remarkably relevant today.
A lot of the support, especially in New York, for Henry Wallace’s third-party run in 1948 was from Jews, left-wing Jews. Wallace didn’t end up getting many votes nationwide, Truman tipped towards labor enough to minimize that threat, but the support for Wallace in New York did end up being enough to allow Dewey to carry that state.
In “Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations with a Militant Israel,” Stephen Green chronicled the institutionalization and globalization of Israel’s militancy and armaments sales. Citing as an example Israel’s expanding reach, Green cited support for, and transshipment of–through US intermediaries– Duvalier’s crackdown on Haitians, for which Israel supplied money and weapons to Duvalier.
Green then quotes from an article by Israeli journalist Simha Flaphan, who published a lengthy analysis of a speech in Knesset by Shimon Peres, then Deputy Minister of Defense, in Sept. 1963. Peres said that it was not Israel’s “main duty” to convince the world that “Israel can be destroyed” but rather to
My reading of Peres’ words is that ISRAEL is the graver danger to peace in the Middle East.
Flapham concurs:
Flapham went on to discuss Israel’s two track approach — “a defense army” to protect the homeland, and “a strike force designed for “preventive war,” i.e. for a first strike:”
In the Kennedy administration the US still retained some sovereignty over its foreign and war policy. With JFK’s assassination and the presidency of LBJ, that sovereignty was seriously weakened, until, with the rise of the neocons, the USA is now Israel.
Did Hannah Arendt examine the corrosive effect on the host nation of of Israel’s policy of survival by demanding the military support of other powers? Or is USA, the object lesson, all the discussion required?
I read Arendt. Human dignity was her first and last concern.
‘Arendt, a leftwinger ‘
Are human rights leftwing?
Arendt on ‘banality’ became famous with reference to the Eichmann trial rather than the Nuremberg trials and is much influenced, I think, by Lenin’s ‘The State and Revolution’, which identifies ‘bureaucracy’ as the main force stifling human liberty and development. So there’s a genuine far-leftist element in her analysis, though also a more conservative element derived (I would think) from Heidegger. She denounces Cecil Rhodes, as I remember, for having no true national loyalties but only grandiose personal projects – ironically coming rather close to the ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ stereotype.
The idea that evil is boring, good interesting seems very questionable to me.
“The idea that evil is boring, good interesting seems very questionable to me.”
I don’t think Arendt meant ‘banal’ as in boring. I think she meant it as in ordinary rather than extraordinary. She was trying to get across the point that there was really nothing extraordinary or demonic or sadistic about the people who perpetrated these acts.
Maybe you’re right but to me the ordinariness of evil and the banality of evil seem very different things.
RE: “a recurrent theme in Arendt’s analysis of ‘Zionist failure’: Jewish immigrants to Palestine needed to forge a political future with the Arabs who lived there” ~ Weiss
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>> Palestine is surrounded by Arab countries, and even a Jewish state in Palestine with an overwhelming Jewish majority, yes, even a purely Jewish Palestine, would be a very precarious structure without a prior agreement with all the Arab peoples on all its borders….
But Zionists did come to an agreement with the Arab peoples. It went something like this: “Give us what we want, or we will take it from you.”
Today, this type of agreement is more commonly referred to by “common sense”-gifted Zio-supremacists as “negotiations”.
“an Israel established by force could only be preserved by force”
And force became the raison d’etre . So they don’t trust anyone. Which means Zionism is a trauma the Jewish Israeli people haven’t gotten over. Force is the means to an end. For Israel it got caught up in the Messianism and has become the end. It is a tragic trajectory.
Look at Lieberman
“Moreover, Lieberman also commented on the latest diplomatic faceoff between Israel and European countries, who harshly criticized the recent violence by rightist extremists and Israel’s settlement activity. In return, Israel’s Foreign Ministry called European countries “irrelevant.”"
Which is why Israel is such a diplomatic basket case. Utterly dependent on a bought Congress.
Labeled an “Enemy of Israel”.
link to tikkun.org
Arendt had a complicated relationship with Zionism. As a 20 year old girl, she was attracted to Kurt Blumenfeld, a Zionist leader in Konigsberg, Germany. In the forties, she spoke in favor of collaboration with the Palestinians. In the 1950′s, her book Eichmann in Jerusalem raised uncomfortable questions about Israel. But by 1967, she was thrilled by Israel’s smashing military victory.
A useful guide to Arendt’s complicated history is the article by Gabriel Piterberg in New Left Review (November/December 2007) (LINK)
the headline and the quote are correct
if “israel” is to survive as any kind of state the jews there need to learn to live as good neighbors in this region long a home to many different peoples you have to be a good neighbor to have good neighbors … they wouldn’t need all the armaments, all the oppressive militarism, the state terror tactics … if zionists could just give up their fantasy vision of a “greater israel” by and for only jews then israel could survive and thrive as a place jews can call home and love … but they need to learn to share