{"id":333,"date":"2007-01-03T03:50:00","date_gmt":"2007-01-03T11:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=333"},"modified":"2007-01-03T03:50:00","modified_gmt":"2007-01-03T11:50:00","slug":"hannah-arendt-zionism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/hannah-arendt-zionism\/","title":{"rendered":"Hannah Arendt & Zionism"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In the current London Review of Books<\/span>, an interesting look at Hannah Arendt’s work and the current use made of that work, in a review \u2014 titled Dragon Slayers<\/span> \u2014 by Corey Robin of three books published in the wake of Arendt’s centenary: Why Arendt Matters<\/i> by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, <\/span>Hannah Arendt: The Jewish Writings<\/i> ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman, <\/span>and <\/span>Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil<\/i> by Hannah Arendt. Robin is critical of both Arendt’s thinking in The Origins of Totalitarianism<\/span> and of the shallow and alibi-like uses made of that book by a range of contemporary writers and thinkers. He does however \u2014 and rightly so, I believe \u2014 think highly of the collection of Arendt’s writings on Jewish themes, and especially on her clear-sighted analysis of the problems of Zionism, and its relation to post-war US politics and ideology. Below, a few paragraphs of Corey’s review on the theme of Zionism and Arendt; you can read the full review here<\/a>.<\/div>\n

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From its inception, Arendt argued, Zionism had exhibited some of the nastier features of European nationalism. Drawing \u2018from German sources\u2019, she wrote in 1946, Herzl presumed that the Jews constituted neither a religion nor a people but an \u2018organic national body\u2019 or race that could one day be housed \u2018inside the closed walls of a biological entity\u2019 or state. With its insistence on the eternal struggle between the Jews and their enemies, she wrote in the 1930s, the Zionist worldview seemed \u2018to conform perfectly\u2019 to that of \u2018the National Socialists\u2019. Both ideas, she added in 1944, \u2018had a definite tendency towards what later were known as Revisionist attitudes\u2019.<\/p>\n

Initially a minor current, according to Arendt, Revisionism poured into the Zionist mainstream in the 1940s. The Revisionists knew what they wanted and used guns to get it. Far from denying them legitimacy, their violent audacity provoked only token disapproval from mainstream Zionists, who secretly or unwittingly supported their initiative. Revisionist violence spoke to a new dispensation among the Jews, which Arendt described in \u2018The Jewish State\u2019. After centuries of settling for \u2018survival at any price\u2019, the Jews now insisted on \u2018dignity at any price\u2019. Though Arendt appreciated the shift, she also detected a secret death wish in the spirit of machismo: \u2018Behind this spurious optimism lurks a despair of everything and a genuine readiness for suicide.\u2019 Many Zionists, she claimed two years later, would rather go down with the ship than compromise, fearing that compromise would send them back to the humiliating days of silent suffering in Europe.<\/p>\n

In 1948, the leader of Herut, Israel\u2019s Revisionist party, travelled to America. Arendt drafted a letter of protest to the New York<\/em> Times<\/em>, which was signed by Einstein, Sidney Hook and others. Herut was \u2018no ordinary political party\u2019, she wrote. It was \u2018closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties\u2019. It used \u2018terrorism\u2019, and its goal was a \u2018F\u00fchrer state\u2019 based on \u2018ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority\u2019. The letter also decried those \u2018Americans of national repute\u2019 who \u2018have lent their names to welcome\u2019 the Herut leader, giving \u2018the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel\u2019. The leader of Herut was Menachem Begin.<\/p>\n

The second failing of Zionism, according to Arendt, was that its leaders looked to the \u2018great powers\u2019 for support rather than to their future neighbours. Her disagreement here was both moral \u2013 \u2018by taking advantage of imperialistic interests\u2019, she wrote in 1944, the Zionists had collaborated \u2018with the most evil forces of our time\u2019 \u2013 and strategic. At the very moment that imperialism was being challenged throughout the world, Zionism had attached itself to a universally maligned form. \u2018Only folly could dictate a policy that trusts distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbours,\u2019 she wrote. In a 1950 essay, she declared that Zionists simply ignored or failed to understand \u2018the awakening of colonial peoples and the new nationalist solidarity in the Arab world from Iraq to French Morocco\u2019. Self-styled realists, they were profoundly unrealistic. They \u2018mistook decisions of great powers for the ultimate realities\u2019, she wrote in 1948, when \u2018the only permanent reality in the whole constellation was the presence of Arabs in Palestine.\u2019<\/p>\n

Arendt did allow for one imperial future, however. \u2018The significance of the Near East for Britain and America,\u2019 Arendt wrote in a 1944 article entitled \u2018USA \u2013 Oil \u2013 Palestine\u2019, \u2018can be expressed nowadays in a single word: oil.\u2019 With America\u2019s reserves dwindling, control over the world\u2019s oil supply would \u2018become one of the most important factors in postwar politics\u2019. After the war, America would control roughly half the world\u2019s shipping, and \u2018that fact alone will force American foreign policy to secure its own oil hubs.\u2019 Because of Europe\u2019s reliance on Arab oil, she added, \u2018America\u2019s future influence on intra-European matters will depend to a large extent\u2019 on its control over an intended pipeline in the Middle East. Though she hoped that America would not pursue an imperial policy, she had no doubt that oil would be a key factor in its deliberations. And with Israel responsible for the \u2018caretaking of American interests\u2019 in the Middle East, she wrote in \u2018Zionism Reconsidered\u2019, \u2018the famous dictum of Justice Brandeis would indeed come true: you would have to be a Zionist in order to be a perfect American patriot.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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In the current London Review of Books, an interesting look at Hannah Arendt’s work and the current use made of that work, in a review \u2014 titled Dragon Slayers \u2014 by Corey Robin of...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}