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.
Hannah Arendt is relevant to our national life which once again is embroiled in a voyeuristic dissembling. Soon we will watch Samantha Power’s confirmation hearings as President Obama’s appointment to the United Nations. Power owes a great debt to Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, mass death and genocide. Will Power have the courage to stand up and say what she actually thinks about American foreign policy? Like Hannah Arendt, it would be worth watching.
No doubt Power would applaud Hannah Arendt if she sees it. But Power should be careful in seeing herself as Arendt’s heir. As more and more women succeed in politics and other professions, the comparisons to their foresisters are less and less apt. Indeed, as it turns out women are just as likely to betray their ethics to make it in the world of thought and politics as men are. I doubt this would surprise Arendt.
Is Power aware of Arendt’s views on Israel? Unfortunately the film gives us only glimpses of Arendt on the formation of Israel as a Jewish state– which she opposed – and her ongoing distaste for Israel’s policies – which was substantial. Then, again, I doubt a film which featured Arendt in her brilliant and sustained combat against state Zionism could have been made and marketed today. How would the extensive funding necessary to make Hannah Arendt have been raised? Whether the Jewish and non-Jewish audience could have understood the reasons for Arendt’s opposition to the formation of Israel is another issue.
Clearly, Power is closer to Arendt’s understandings of Israel than she cares to admit. However, if you hear a word along Arendt’s lines, Power’s political ambition, so persistently pursued, will fall on hard times. Her mea culpa for previous errors in judgment – when she spoke the truth about Israel’s human rights abuses and the need for a real American endorsed Palestinian state – will be exposed as a fake, which it no doubt was.
Unlike Arendt, expect Power to be on her knees begging for forgiveness. However packaged, Power’s testimony promises to be a humiliating display of political and ethical cowardice. Of the many twists and turns in Arendt’s life, you will look in vain for anything like the charade that will soon play itself out on our national stage.
Apparently, Power has already spent time on her knees. As the New York Times reports, Power “cultivated American Jewish groups, meeting in 2011 with 40 leaders of these groups, where she expressed regret for some of her remarks and defended herself in emotional terms against charges that she had an anti-Israel bias.”
Arendt was never on her knees. Whether you agreed with her or not, she refused to debase herself. The film correctly points out that Arendt had a strong sense of her ability to think. However, self-promotion at the price of her integrity was foreign to Arendt. She never gave it a thought.
Arendt refused invitations to repent of her commentary on Eichmann and Israel itself. When she did speak – the film closes with Arendt’s rebuttal of her critics – it is in a classroom. Her words are defiant.
Who’s on Power’s side from the Jewish community? Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States and Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, have come out to support Power. Arendt would have held Oren and Foxman in utter contempt as she did the Jewish leaders of her time. Arendt loathed Jewish establishment types for many reasons but primarily because their inability to think through issues relating to Jews caused tremendous suffering for the very Jews they purported to lead.
You forgot that other very important endorsement from Alan “Authorities should be permitted to use non lethal torture, like sterilized needles under fingernails” Dershowitz. My question to Samantha would be, are you prepared to take back everything negative you have said about Israel in the past in order to further your career? To which I am sure she would answer “yes I will”.
With endorsements from Bornstein and Foxman that spells more bad news for the Palestinians. Another gutless politician.
Power has thrown in her lot with American imperialism. She’s a shill
with nothing like the stature of Arendt.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/20/stay-out-syria/?page=2
“In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote about the millions of stateless and rightless persons cast up by the early wars of the twentieth century and the imperialist manufacture of new nations before and after World War I. A whole generation of the displaced were brought into the world so lacking in hope, so without access to elementary rights that, for them, to live within the law presented no advantage over crime and for that matter terrorism. “The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Arendt wrote, “but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them.” The disasters of the twentieth century, as she judged them, had proved that a globalized order might “produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages.” An end no happier, if we do not take care, awaits us down the road of the “carefully choreographed” violence and the “symphony of diplomacy” conducted by the last of the great powers.”
‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’. Lao-tzu
Forget Powers, forget zionist corrupted America, not going to change until it collapses. Watch the steps other people and countries are taking instead.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/dutch-probe-sends-warning-firms-abetting-israels-crimes/12462
Dutch probe sends warning to firms abetting Israel’s crimes
Salma Karmi-Ayyoub
The Electronic Intifada
16 May 2013
Corporate complicity in Israel’s occupation potentially carries the risk of criminal prosecution.
This week sees the conclusion of a three-year criminal investigation into the Dutch crane company, Riwal, accused of complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied West Bank. The case is unprecedented as it is the first time a company has been criminally investigated for involvement in the Israeli occupation.
Although the case has not resulted in a prosecution, it is nonetheless an important step for those seeking justice for human rights abuses committed against Palestinians. The case sends a clear message to the corporate sector: complicity in Israel’s occupation potentially carries the risk of criminal prosecution.
The case started with a complaint submitted to the Dutch prosecutor by the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq in March 2010. The complaint documented the involvement of Rivals cranes and aerial platforms in constructing Israel’s wall and illegal settlements in the West Bank. It prompted the prosecutor to launch a large-scale investigation into the company’s activities, including a raid on company headquarters in September 2010.
The investigation established that the company contributed to constructing the wall and settlements in at least six incidents mentioned in the complaint. However, the prosecutor cited various considerations, including the complexity of the case, limited resources and the likely lack of cooperation by Israel in obtaining further evidence, as reasons not to pursue a prosecution. There is a right of appeal against the prosecutor’s decision, which can also be reconsidered if circumstances change or in light of new evidence.
Significant
Despite the lack of prosecution, the decision by the prosecutor to open the investigation, and to pursue it for as long he did, is legally significant. It means the prosecutor accepted two assertions at the heart of the complaint. First, the construction of the wall and settlements in the occupied West Bank entails the commission of war crimes. Second, that companies involved in this construction may be complicit in, and hence legally responsible for, those crimes.
The case therefore supports the assertions that have been made by lawyers and human rights groups for years: not only is the building of the wall and settlements by Israel illegal and criminal, so is complicity with that construction. Those responsible should be open to prosecution in the correct legal forum.
It undermines the charge often made by Israel and its supporters that legal challenges of this kind merely represent “lawfare” — that is vexatious, politicized attempts to abuse the law in order to “delegitimize” Israel.
Increasing trend
The Rival case reflects an increasing trend of legal challenges brought by victims and human rights groups against Israel’s violations. Recent years have seen a case in the United States against Caterpillar for its supply of militarized bulldozers to the Israeli army. In Canada, residents of the West Bank village of Bilin brought a case against the companies Green Park and Green Mount International for constructing an Israeli settlement on village land.
There have also been several arrest warrant applications in European countries against visiting Israeli officials for their involvement in war crimes — including a successful application against Tzipi Livni in England in 2009.
Asymmetrical battle
These cases reflect the belief that not only are victims of war crimes entitled to legal redress, but that accountability for Israeli crimes and abuses is an essential prerequisite to achieving a just and lasting resolution to the conflict. The Israel-Palestine conflict is, after all, an asymmetrical battle between a powerful, highly militarized state enforcing a colonial occupation of land that does not belong to it, and an indigenous people fighting against occupation for self-determination.
Accountability for the crimes that are integral to maintaining the occupation is not only right in principle, it constitutes a serious incentive to Israel to desist in its practices. Accountability is essential for achieving a just and lasting peace.
The ad hoc nature of these cases, however — they are invariably brought by victims and human rights groups in domestic jurisdictions — and the absence of a properly resourced, large-scale investigation of Israel’s crimes at the international level, is a result of the impunity accorded to Israel by the US and its allies.
The report of the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (the Goldstone report) concludes there was evidence that war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity had been committed by both sides during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s military assault on Gaza in 2008-09. It recommends the situation be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC). To date this recommendation has not been acted on and a referral to the ICC would almost certainly be vetoed by the US in the UN Security Council.
Right direction
Also ignored is the International Court of Justice’s ruling in 2004 that the West Bank wall is illegal and must be dismantled and that the international community must ensure that any obstacle to Palestinian self-determination caused by the wall be brought to an end.
Finally, Palestine’s application in 2009 to the ICC for it to investigate war crimes committed in Palestine since 2002 (the date the Rome Statute of the ICC came into force) was rejected.
Within the context of this crisis of accountability, the Rival case is a positive development. The case did not result in justice for the victims and much more needs to be done. However, it demonstrates that allegations of complicity in Israel’s occupation by foreign companies are a serious legal matter that can potentially result in prosecution.
The case may deter other companies from complicity with Israel’s illegal and criminal occupation practices. It is a step in the right direction in the pursuit of justice and accountability.”
The test of virtue is power. It applies to Jews in USA & Israel, and to Power & other female politicians as as well. So funny, it seems nobody looks at what females did when they wore the crown in feudal Europe. And look at Thatcher and Meir.