Last night the Center for Jewish History had its Hannah Arendt event. The big surprise about the evening for me was the extent to which the panel, which consisted of two Arendt-adorers in Jerome Kohn and Richard Bernstein, ennobled Arendt’s anti-Zionist views as prophetic. On the left, we knew these views to be prophetic (indeed, an Arendt essay is included in the wonderful book Prophets Outcast, published by the Nation). But the significance of the event was that on the same stage where Marty Peretz and Michael Walzer lately erased the Palestinians, anti-Zionist views were being espoused. At one point in the evening, Jerome Kohn spoke feelingly of the murder by right wing Israelis of Folke Bernadotte in 1948, the U.N. negotiator who wanted to bring about a binational state in which Palestinian refugees were repatriated.
Haltingly, Kohn said that over 700,000 Palestinians had been "expelled" in 1948. Expelled. Nothing about, the Arabs ordered them to leave. No: The expulsion of the Palestinians. At the Center for Jewish History. That’s progress.
In the Q-and-A, Eric Alterman of the Nation said that Arendt was a political nudnik because a binational state was impossible in the 40s. Yes, liberal Jews were for it, but there was no one on the Arab side to negotiate with, he said, sounding the realist.
Alterman’s question gets at the larger issue of Why Hannah Arendt now. Forget about the Eichmann controversy and European antisemitism, why should we read Arendt now? The reason is that she was right. Everything she said about the Jewish state has come to pass: it is militaristic, at endless war with its neighbors, has sacrificed culture and progress to military innovation, is dependent on a superpower and contemptuous of the other, has transformed Jewish identity in other places, etc. This is no way to have a country. Young people don’t want to embrace a vision of the future that is endless war.
By acknowledging that rightness, we rehabilitate her vision for Palestine, a Jewish liberal pluralist solution, and use her eminence to transform our discourse. I.e., this famous Jew said this stuff, we can too. Maybe she was a nudnik then. Not now.
