Hannah Arendt: Born in conflict, Israel will degenerate into Sparta, and American Jews will need to back away
For the new year, here
are some prophetic excerpts from two essays of Hannah Arendt’s, collected in The
Jewish Writings (2007). Please note her predictions of the Nakba, of
unending conflict, of Zionist dependence on the American Jewish community, of
ultimate conflict with that American Jewish community, and the contribution of
political Zionism to world anti-semitism. Just what Howard Gutman said recently.
For which he was denounced by– Zionists.
Zionism Reconsidered,
1944:
Nationalism is bad
enough when it trusts in nothing but the rude force of the nation. A
nationalism that necessarily and admittedly depends upon the force of a foreign
nation is certainly worse. This is the threatened state of Jewish nationalism
and of the proposed Jewish state, surrounded inevitably by Arab states and Arab
people. Even a Jewish majority in Palestine–nay even a transfer of all
Palestine’s Arabs, which is openly demanded by the revisionists–would not
substantially change a situation in which Jews must either ask protection from
an outside power against their neighbors or come to a working agreement with
their neighbors…
[T]he Zionists, if
they continue to ignore the Mediterranean people and watch out only for the big
faraway powers, will appear only as their tools, the agents of foreign and
hostile interests. Jews who know their own history should be aware that such a
state of affairs will inevitably lead to a new wave of Jew-hatred; the
antisemitism of tomorrow will assert that Jews not only profiteered from the
presence of foreign big powers in that region but had actually plotted it and
hence are guilty of the consequences…
[T]he sole new piece
of historical philosophy which the Zionists contributed out of their own new
experiences [was] “A nation is a group of people… held together by a
common enemy” (Herzl)–an absurd doctrine…
To such [political]
independence, it was believed, the Jewish nation could arrive under the
protecting wings of any great power strong enough to shelter its growth…. the
Zionists ended by making the Jewish national emancipation entirely dependent
upon the material intersts of another nation.
The actual result was
a return of the new movement to the traditional methods of shtadlonus [court
Jews], which the Zionists once had so bitterly despised and violently
denounced. Now Zionists too knew no better place politically than the lobbies
of the powerful, and no sounder basis for agreements than their good services
as agents of foreign interests…
[O]nly folly could
dictate a policy which trusts a distant imperial power for protection, while
alienating the goodwill of neighbors. What then, one is prompted to ask, will
be the future policy of Zionism with respect to big powers, and what program
will Zionists have to offer for a solution of the Arab-Jewish conflict?…
If a Jewish
commonwealth is obtained in the near future–with or without partition–it will
be due to the political influence of American Jews…. But if the Jewish
commonwealth is proclaimed against the will of the Arabs and without the
support of the Mediterranean peoples, not only financial help but political
support will be necessary for a long time to come. And that may turn out to be
very troublesome indeed for Jews in this country [the U.S.], who after all have
no power to direct the political destinies of the Near East. It may eventually
be far more of a responsibility than today they imagine or tomorrow can make good.
To Save the Jewish
Homeland, 1948 [on the occasion of war in Palestine]
And even if the Jews
were to win the war, its end would find the unique possibilities and the 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 into ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical
self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and
acitvities. 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…. 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 Transjordan is the insane Revisionist demand)–would still remain
a very small people greatly outnumbered by hostile neighbors.
Under such
circumstances… the Palestinian Jews would degenerate into one of those small
warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply
informed us since the days of Sparta. Their relations with world Jewry would
become problematical, since their defense interests might clash at any moment
with those of other countries where large number of Jews lived. Palestine Jewry
would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its
isolation develop into an entirely new people. Thus it becomes plain that at
this moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected
at the price of the Jewish homeland…
One grim addendum. In
the heyday of the special relationship between the US and Israel, American
Jewry felt itself to be one with the Israeli people. We Are One! declared
Melvin Urofsky’s book of 1978. That unity is today being dissolved. The
haredi-secular conflict in Israel that is getting so much attention here is one
means of that dissolution. And the aim, unconsciously, may be a desire by
American Jews to distance themselves from Israeli Jews so that when the Arab
Spring at last brings a democratic movement to Israel and Palestine, and bloody
conflict ensues, and the Israeli gov’t is cast as the bad guys, American Jews
are emotionally prepared to regard the bloodshed as inevitable and not their
problem.
http://mondoweiss.net/2012/01/arendt-born-in-conflict-israel-will-degenerate-into-sparta-and-american-jews-will-need-to-back-away/Also see:
Pariah: can Hannah Arendt help us rethink our global refugee crisis? by Jeremy Adelman
Jon Nixon - Hannah Arendt: thinking versus evil
Rabindranath Tagore's four-part essay on Nationalism (1917)
