An Anti-Zionist Zionist?

Perhaps the most gifted of Heidegger’s students, Hannah Arendt is best known as one of the most influential political theorists of the 20^th century.  What is perhaps not so well known was her early involvement in the Zionist movement during the 1930’s and 1940’s.  Though she helped children escape to Palestine, she herself had little interest in settling there.  When she fled Germany in 1933, her destination was Paris, not Jerusalem.  When she arrived in Paris, she posed the question to herself: “What can I specifically do as a Jew?”  Her answer was to get involved in politically “Jewish work.” 

Her searching lead her to Zionism because this movement was alone in bringing Jews into active engagement with the political.  With the existential threat of annihilation imminent, Arendt believed Jews needed to affect a shift in perception:  they must not only stop seeing themselves as “helpless victims” but also begin to respond constructively.  She saw that Jews could no longer rely on the rule of law, or human decency, but must become responsible political actors and defend themselves as Jews when attacked as Jews.  To the degree Zionism shared this insight Arendt was a Zionist.

But from the beginning she was critical of those elements of the Zionist movement which were racist and cynically nationalistic.  In her most scathing attack, “Zionism Reconsidered” (1944) she lays out a contrast in aims:

The end result of fifty years of Zionist politics was embodied in the recent resolution of the largest and most influential section of the World Zionist Organization.  American Zionists from left to right adopted unanimously, at their last annual convention held in Atlantic City in October 1944, the demand for a “free and democratic Jewish commonwealth…[which] shall embrace the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished.”  This is a turning point in Zionist history; for it means that the Revisionist program, so long bitterly repudiated, has proved finally victorious.  The Atlantic City resolution goes even a step further than the Biltmore Program (1942), in which the Jewish minority had granted minority rights to the Arab majority.  This time the Arabs were simply not mentioned in the resolution, which obviously leaves them the choice between voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship…These aims now seem completely identical with those of the extremists as far as the future political constitution of Palestine is concerned.  It is a deadly blow to those Jewish parties in Palestine itself that have tirelessly preached the necessity of an understanding between the Arab and the Jewish peoples.

One thing that is immediately striking is the use of the term revisionist to describe the extremist position that the Jewish state should include the whole of Palestine.  The fact that this term is used today to describe “revisionist” accounts of the holocaust is a bitter irony.

But the larger issue alluded to is the complete and total denial of the indigenous Arab population.  Arendt was keenly aware that “voluntary emigration” really meant the mass transfer of the Arab population to surrounding countries and the creation of a new stateless people, the Palestinian refugee:

After the War it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved – namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory – but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless.  On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugee, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. (Origins of Totalitarianism, 290)

Arendt emphatically argued that a lasting peace would require direct negotiations between Arabs and Jews, and not the imposition of Jewish domination.  She attacks the “cynical and deep rooted conviction that all gentiles are anti-semitic, and everybody and everything is against the Jews.”  She speaks of this as “plain racist chauvinism,” and claims that the mood of Palestinian Jews is one in which “ terrorism and the growth of totalitarian methods are silently tolerated and secretly applauded.”

On the eve of war in May of 1948, Arendt wrote another critical piece that reiterated her conviction that violence was not inevitable.  What is perhaps most prophetic is her speculation concerning what might happen if the Jews did win the war:   

And even if the Jews were to win the war, its end would find the unique possibilities and unique achievements of Zionism in Palestine destroyed.  The land that would come into being would be something quite other than the dream of world Jewry, Zionist and non-Zionist.  The “victorious” Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities.  The growth of a Jewish culture would cease to be the concern of the whole people; social experiments would have to be discarded as impractical luxuries; political thought  would center around military strategy; economic development would be determined exclusively by the needs of war.  And all this would be the fate of a nation that – no matter how many immigrants it could still absorb and how far it extended its boundaries (the whole of Palestine and the Transjordan is the insane Revisionist demand) – would still remain a very small people greatly outnumbered by hostile neighbors.

Comments

[Jodi]

Really interesting post, Alain. Two things occur to me. First, connected with something that my partner, Paul, said to me last night when I was going on about home and objet petit a, 'everything changes once you are talking about the state.' I think this is right and that this is something Arendt is getting at, particularly in the last passage you include. The interests of states are specific. They involve violence. They may well be antagonistic to people and to culture, to experimentation. And this connects with the second thing that occurs to me, namely, whether or not there is something inherent in a state system that produces refugees. If something like this is correct, then maybe Agamben's emphasis on the camp as the central institution of sovereignty needs to be supplemented by attention to the refugee as the remainder, and then the camp is the enclosure which seeks to reintern the remainder within the sate.

[Alain]

Jodi

I think you are absolutely right. States necessarily imply violence, whether in their founding or in their preservation. Interestingly, Arendt thought that Palestine should be organized along the lines of a loose federation, with autonomy focused at the local level. Some sort of council system with a national assembly. In the face of critics who claimed she was not realistic, she argued that the nation-state had produced such monstrous results (WWI, WWII, Imperialism, the Holocaust) that it would inevitably reproduce the same results in Palestine. Although she is scorned by traditional marxists, the frankfurt school, and Zizek (among others), I think her personal experience as a refugee gave her a unique insight into politics as it is lived, with all its brutal consequences. Which isn't to say that her views are not without problems - I find it incomprehensible that she marginalizes the significance of economics with her distinction between the social and the political. But when it comes to analyzing the perplexities of the nation state, she makes a great contribution.

[amie]

Alain, a timely post in untimely times. I think I agree with you that Arendt has quite a number of important questions re the nation state, starting with the rather provacative ( but is not quite evident? )reservation regarding what remains of the nation-state in any real sense, and why it therefore has to resort to violence as its legitimacy?
Am also wondering about Jodi's remark that the state seeks to re-intern the refugee within the state. Does the state re-intern the remainder and the refugee 'within' the state without consequence to its own (self) constitution?

[Alain]

Amie

Thanks. In regards to your last question, clearly the state is altered with its encounter with "the remainder." Isreal is a profound example of what happens when the attempt is made to reintroduce the remnant into the state.

I am now reading a book by Jacqueline Rose that indirectly touches on this issue. It is called "The Question of Zion" and is a study on the messianic orgins of Zionism. She writes in the tradition of Hannah Arendt and Martin Buber as a sympathetic critic of Israel. Perhaps it will further the discussion. What strikes me initially is that secular zionist use the rhetoric of messianism to justify their claims to the land. She quotes Ben Gurion as follows: “Without a messianic, emotional, ideological impulse, without the vision of restoration and redemption, there is no earthly reason why even oppressed and underprivileged Jews…should wander off to Israel of all places…The immigrants were seized with an immortal vision of redemption which became the principal motivation of their lives.”

[Jodi]

Amie,
does the state intern without consequence--interesting way of putting the question, to me it suggests an ideal state gone bad; the way I would think the problem is that 'state' necessarily generates remainder/refugee that it cannot control, that is necessarily threatening and that to remain state the remainder must be interned or expelled, sometimes both, and that interning involves prisons and camps and perhaps families and that expelling involves something like the ban. I have in mind Agamben's account of the relation of sovereignty to the exception; the former depends on the latter.

[bat020]

Fascinating post, Alain, but I'd take issue with your (or perhaps Arendt's) analysis here:

>> Her searching lead her to Zionism because this movement was alone in bringing Jews into active engagement with the political... Jews could no longer rely on the rule of law, or human decency, but must become responsible political actors and defend themselves as Jews when attacked as Jews. To the degree Zionism shared this insight Arendt was a Zionist. <<

The problem is that this conflates Jewish political self-consciousness with Zionism, which from its inception was something much much narrower, namely, Jewish separatism and the creation of a colonial settler state.

Zionism's founding figure Theodor Herzl came to his political programme precisely because, in the wake of the Dreyfuss affair, he rejected the possibility of ever defeating anti-Semitism sentiment in Europe.

So when Arendt attacks the "cynical and deep rooted conviction that all gentiles are anti-semitic, and everybody and everything is against the Jews", she is attacking the founding tenet of Zionism... this suggests that perhaps her early "Zionism" was based on a fundamental misapprehension of the Zionist political project.

Finally, I don't agree Zionism was the only political movement active at the time that sought to mobilise Jews as Jews - see John Rose's "The Myths of Zionism" for more detail on the plethora of Jewish political movements active at the time.

[Alain]

Jodi

This may sound odd but in reading your last response I was reminded of Plato's Republic, specifically somewhere in the later books (8 or 9) when they discuss the degeneration of the ideal city into its various mutations until finally democracy morphes into tyranny. I could be totally nuts but my recollection is that it is an unaccountable excess in each regime that leads to its eventual demise. I apologize if this is tangential to your point.

[Alain]

Bat

Thank you for the response. I will definitely look for that book. I am attempting to describe Arendt's perception at the time when she herself became a stateless person. I am sure you are right that there were other political responses. And she was certainly critical of Herzl's nationalism. But she, and a small group of other dissidents that were sympathetic to the idea of a "Jewish homeland", definitely did not support the idea of a "Jewish State." The inherent racism of such a project was obvious. But she (perhaps unrealistically) held out the hope for an alternative politics in Palestine. Of course her fears of Jews "winning the war" have been realized in a catastrophic way.

[Gary Sauer-Thompson]

Alain
I've come to this discussion via some postings on Arendt's conception of the relationship between philosophy and politics.

See my philosophy.com
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/003565.html

http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/003569.html

Arendt's intervention into Jewish politics is a good example of her non-Platonic conception of political philosophy as the deliberation of the citizen; one who moves about among her fellows in the public world, paying attention to their points of view, and critically evaluating them.

She was spot on about Israeli dominationof the Palestinians; the Jewishness of the Israeli state; the founding of the Israeli state on the violence of the forced transfer of the indigenous Palestinian people; the existence of Palestianian refugees as a stateless people; and Israel becoming a fortress.

In raising these issues she must have taken a lot of flak. Or were Zionists more open to criticism then, before Zionism became a state ideology?

Suprisingly little is said by Arendt about the settlements as the instrument of colonialism, and the way that Israel became a colonizing power? Was Arendt writing too early for this? Did this only became obvious after the 1960s?

Still this post illustrates Arendt's conception of political philosophy as a different kind of thinking to the Platonic one.

[Alain]

Gary

Thanks for your thoughtful response. In regards to Arendt's attitude toward the settlements, my understanding is that there was relatively little Israeli migration into the West Bank and Gaza until the 1980's. But I think your question does touch on something missing from Arendt's work. After her involvement with the Zionist movement, she was pretty quiet with regards to criticizing Israel publicly. I think part of the reason was her personal feeling that, despite its obvious short comings, Israel ought to survive as an imperfect refuge for Jews. In her private correspondence from the Eichman trial, one detects almost a racist bias - not against arabs per se - but against Israeli's of middle eastern dissent. She expresses discomfort and feeling ill at ease around such people, and ofcourse there is the obvious pride in her glowing description of the judges being of German dissent. I do not want to emphasize this part of Arendt but it clearly influences her public stance.

[isakofsky]

Gary asked about zionism before it became a state ideology. In the UK, in the 1920s and 30s, the two main political, non-zionist strands amongst Jews were the Bund and the Communist Party. Zionism, my father tells me, was seen as (to use some anachronistic words) freaky and hippy. It was definitely a minority position. Most people he knew, politicos or not, did not agree with Zionism. Whether Zionism really is the majority position now, is open to debate. Yes, most Jews may well say that they're Zionists but they don't want to live in Israel. This has always struck me as a rather bizarre situation. Zionism is not just a theory. It's the active taking up of residence in Israel so I'm not sure that diaspora Zionists are what they say they are.

[Alain]

Isakofsky

I appreciate your input. Clearly there were other ways to go, but that was not Arendt's experience, particularly in France. And of course many of the socialists there, excluding the minority that followed Leon Blum, ended up working in the Vichy government. The details of this are beyond my expertise but at a minimum I think one can say that there were many on the left that did not take stand to defend their Jewish comrads.

[Isakofsky]

Gary, Easy on France! There were about 300 thousand Jews in France prior to the Nazi invasion. What Vichy was very 'good' at was turning in foreign born Jews about 78 thousand of them. The rest survived albeit under very nasty conditions. This was for a variety of reasons: 1) The republican tradition of citizenship. Once a citizen always a citizen, even if a horrible Jewish one. 2) Solidarity with Jews in the Resistance 3) Enormous amount of hiding and clandestine support for Jews.

Arendt may have had nasty experiences in Paris - it depended where you were and when. Even so, the figures speak for themselves. I'm all for Klarsfeld et al digging up the actual accounts of deportation and collaboration so that France can't get off the hook. My father's uncles disappeared in the 'rafles' (round-ups) but that survival rate is one of the highest in occupied Europe. Every one of those 78000 matter and is a terrible thing. But the 200, 000-plus who survived is a cause for celebration, methinks.

[Alain]

Isakofsky

I apologize if I am being to emotional about France and the Jews. My father, uncle and grandmother are among those who survived thanks to the heroism of the people of Le Chambon. My grandfather was one of the 78,000 foreign born who were not as fortunate, and my father has recounted to me how it was the French police, not the Germans, who came for him. So this topic is a bit emotional for me. Pardon.

[isakofsky]

Sorry to be pedantic, Alain, about something so awful, but I think that would have been the 'milice' and not the 'gendarmes' who turned your grandfather in. The 'milice' were a government run militia that recruited various lumpen and fascist elements...

[Alain]

isakofsky

Thats ok. But I think even making that distinction does not invalidate my point. And again, thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it. I think in the next several weeks I will try to publish an interview with my Dad about his experience during the war. He was very young so some of the details may not in fact be historically accurate, but nonetheless, revealing something of the Zeitgeist.

[Dustin]

Great post and discussion. One objection, though:

"Her searching lead her to Zionism because this movement was alone in bringing Jews into active engagement with the political."

As noted, Bundism was an active alternative to Zionism, and a far more attractive one to most Jews before WWII. In the East, the Bund had been instrumental in the failed Revolution in 1905 and the successful Revolution of 1917 -- after which their activities were branded un-Bolshevik and they were outlawed in Russia/USSR. The Bundist ideal of cultural autonomy -- in essence, being Jewish in the communities where Jews already lived, with the protection of the state -- obviously didn't sit well with the Leninist post-Revolution state's insistence on the dissolution of ethnic bonds. In any case, Bundism continued to lourish in Poland, where defense committees, schools, theaters, and otehr insititutions were sponsored by Bundists -- until eventually destroyed by the German invasion and Holocaust.

In many ways, Bundism was more politically engaged than Zionism, addressing head on issues of discrimination and labor exploitation that pre-War Zionism preferred to tackle after the formation of a Jewish state. Now, it's possible that Arendt didn't know much about Bundism -- I don't know how much traction it had in France --or rejected it for some reason, but it was a more-than-viable alternative to Zionism before the end of WWII.

[Alain]

Dustin

Thank you for the information. I really do not know if she was aware of it or had a response to it. I like the idea of cultural autonomy. Do you have any recommendations on sources to get additional information?

[Dustin]

It's been years since I've studied this in any depth, so I'm not sure I can remember which works deal best with Bundism, but anything you can find on or about Chaim Zhitlovsky will discuss cultural autonomy.