This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
The new film “Hannah Arendt” is interesting for a variety of reasons but mostly for what the film apparently doesn’t address. That’s a shame. It’s also quite predictable.
I refer to the Jewish politics Hannah Arendt argued for. The Jewish politics we turned our backs on. The Jewish politics we desperately need.
Arendt is defamed or lauded but Jewish politics, an abiding concern throughout her life, is rarely discussed, let alone understood.
And, yes, she referred to it as “Jewish” politics. Distinctively Jewish. Capital “J.”
Instead, once again the focus is on her depiction of Adolph Eichmann and the banality of evil. Arendt’s real issue was how the destruction of Europe’s Jews “functions” in Jewish politics and the Jewish establishment’s ideological misreading of Jewish history in relation to Zionism and the state of Israel.
Arendt didn’t think evil was banal. The Nazis were haters. Their genius lay in their ability to translate Nazi ideology into state-sponsored institutionalized violence.
Arendt saw the Nazis as barbarians in modern form. Therefore the lessons of the Nazi era aren’t past at all. The modernity Nazism represents resides at the core of the advanced societies most Jews live within and benefit from today.
Arendt is too sophisticated for the Jewish establishment to wrap their minds around. Their animus toward Arendt is more direct. It has to do with Arendt’s opposition to a Jewish state.
Arendt thought that the creation of the state of Israel was a regressive misreading of the political lessons of the Holocaust. Instead of pursuing a new Jewish politics after the war, Arendt saw State Zionists and their enablers creating a situation where Jews were once again dangerously isolated.
For Arendt, isolated Jews are Jews in danger. Ostensibly a protection, Israel is a militarized ghetto. Arendt foresaw Israel’s Jewish future. She spoke against it.
Arendt thought Israel’s origins and what it represented to a decolonizing Arab world would make Israel’s position in the Middle East perpetually precarious. This, in turn, would be used by the Jewish establishment to shut down Jewish dissent. How could Jews dissent when Israel, the state created to secure post-Holocaust Jewish life, was always in danger?
Without dissent there is no politics. Arendt knew that without dissent rule through fear is the watchword.
Arendt foresaw the Catch-22 of the post-Holocaust prophetic. Prophetic Jews are labeled disloyal to Israel. Therefore they are disloyal to Judaism, Jewish history and the Jewish people.
Arendt understood anti-Semitism as a political question to be addressed alongside other communities and peoples. This comported with her idea of Homeland Zionism. Arendt believed Jews could develop a communal sense of partnership with the Arabs of Palestine and the broader Middle East by practicing a politics of interdependent empowerment.
State Zionism sees it differently. For State Zionists, creating a Jewish state means a militarized separation of Jews. Only with separation can Jews protect themselves from an anti-Semitism that, in the mind of State Zionists, is eternal rather than political.
This is why Arendt thought Eichmann should be tried for crimes against humanity rather than crimes against the Jewish people. Crimes against a particular people are crimes against all peoples.
Arendt didn’t dismiss Jewish suffering; she was immersed in it. Arendt wasn’t abstracted from the plight of Europe’s Jews; she was a European Jewish refugee who fled the Nazis. When Arendt arrived in America, she worked tirelessly on behalf of her fellow Jewish refugees.
Arendt’s detractors who say she wasn’t Jewish enough are ignorant. Anyone who reads Arendt’s Jewish writings recognizes they comprise the bulk of her literary output. Arendt writes as a Jew. Her writings evince a distinct concern about Jews, Jewish history and a Jewish future.
Arendt’s supporters who see her as a universalist raised above Jewish parochialism are mistaken. Arendt was a distinctly cosmopolitan – Jew.
What to do with a prophetic Jew like Hannah Arendt whose Jewish particularity opens up the universal?
If you’re the Jewish establishment, you bury her with labels that make her untouchable. If you’re a (German) filmmaker, you query the banality of evil.
Hannah Arendt’s Jewish politics are much more challenging. They involve the Jewish politics of a Jewish state. Is that why they rarely see the light of day?
The lessons of the Native American, African, Armenian, Cambodian and Jewish holocausts? That racism in whatever form must be challenged and defeated, that to remain silent is to be an accomplice to such crimes against humanity, and that attaining a just and peaceful world will be the only guarantee against another holocaust.
The banality of evil certainly applies to the remote, robotic use of drones to commit murder of innoncents. However, I doubt if Obama or the drone operators themselves believe they share a common thread with the Nazis of mechanized, industrial murder committed by technocrats with clean fingernails.
Arendt was a Jewish nationalist. She decried the tendency of the Zionist leadership to concentrate on the politics of the great powers rather than create an understanding between the Jews in their homeland and the Arabs in their homeland. And by Jews in their homeland, Arendt meant Palestine. Of course the state Zionism of Ben Gurion and the Revisionist Zionism of Netanyahu are not the same as Arendt’s Zionism. But Arendt was a Zionist. (For example her strong support for a Jewish army in WWII. For example her rejection of the the mindset of the assimilationists who had to give up their history in order to gain an admission into gentile German society, and her clear attitude that they had betrayed themselves by pretending to be something they weren’t or more specifically by pretending not to be something they were. She praises Heine for his introduction of a poem about Shalot (cholent, the special shabbat food) and contrasted his willingness to bring the specifics of the society he came from into his art, whereas the assimilationists were phonies and empty on some level, always hiding their past, their history, detached from the spirit of their specificity if not specialness.)
This form of opposition was common enough in the early stages of Zionism, but one has to make the point that it is substantially vacuous. It’s a purely pragmatic objection to Zionism; it implies that the issue is solely that it is counterproductive /for jews/, because it creates a “giant ghetto”, not that it is intrinsically wrong to ethnically cleanse an impoverished indigenous people by privileged europeans in the service of a disingenous revanchist nationalistic ideology.
In modern times, MJ Rosenberg’s style of argumentation is a direct descendent of this kind of vacuous phony moral rhetoric.
Thank you for writing about Hannah Arendt’s Jewish politics. Is it also possible that Hannah Arendt might have viewed Zionism, at least partly, as an expression of anti-Semitism? She certainly viewed Zionism as a form of assimilationism. As she put it, “the Zionists, in a sense, were the only ones who sincerely wanted assimilation, namely ‘normalization’ of the people (‘to be a people like all other peoples’)”. Considering that the social order that the Zionists wanted to assimilate into was not the liberal democratic Europe of today but the ethnic nationalist Europe of the first half of the twentieth century, which was deeply racist and anti-Semitic, I believe the Zionists too embraced many of the anti-Semitic norms of the social order in which they (as Arendt has clearly shown) desired acceptance.