Hannah Arendt’s Conscience and the Dilemma of Zionism

Hannah Arendt, philosopher, academic and author, was known for her vigorous stand against all kinds of totalitarianism. She was one of the first to place Nazism and Communism in the same political category of "totalitarian."

In a recent essay about Arendt, Tony Judt, writing in The New York Review of Books, notes that, "If Hannah Arendt understood something that so many others missed...it was because she was more concerned with the moral problem of ‘evil’ than with the structures of any given political system."

Writing in Nightmare and Flight in 1945, Arendt declared that, "The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe—just as death became the fundamental question after the last war."

Hannah Arendt was born into a Jewish family in Hanover, Germany on October 14, 1906. She received her Ph.D. in 1928 from the University of Heidelberg.

In 1933, the year the Nazi party took control of Germany, Arendt became involved in Zionist activities. She was stimulated to this position, in part, by the Reichstag fire and the subsequent attacks on Jews. At the time, she was doing research on anti-Semitic activities in Germany and was helping leftists escape from the country. Also in 1933, Arendt was arrested by the police and was questioned for eight days before being released. Shortly after her release she left Germany and arrived in France. She spent several years working for various Jewish causes in France.

Her Own Definition

While Arendt considered herself a "Zionist," her definition of this term was very much her own. Tony Judt writes that, "Hannah Arendt had become a Zionist in Germany, had passed through a neo-Zionist phase in which she was drawn to bi-nationalism in Palestine, and was never anti-Israel; as she wrote to Mary McCarthy in December 1968, ‘Any real catastrophe in Israel would affect me more deeply than almost anything else.’ But she was quite firmly anti-nationalist, Jewish or any other kind."

In May 1940, Arendt and other foreign Jews were rounded up by French authorities prior to the German victory and put in camps. Fortunately, Arendt’s camp was in the part of France that did not come under German occupation. Later she was able to leave the camp and receive an emergency U.S.visa. She left France in January 1941, and in May 1941 sailed from Portugal to New York.

From May 2 to May 11, 1942, a conference was held at the Biltmore Hotel in New York for representatives of various Zionist organizations. Hannah Arendt attended this conference as a journalist for the German-language newspaper Aufbau. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, in a biography of Arendt entitled Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, characterized Arendt’s experience at the Biltmore conference this way: "Arendt was no supporter of Chaim Weizmann; she rejected his attempts to preserve the status quo with the British and was particularly offended by his dismissal of what he slightingly referred to as ‘the so-called Jewish Army.’ But she was just as reluctant to accept Ben-Gurion’s call for a Jewish state in Palestine."

In A History of Zionism, Walter Laquer described the Biltmore Conference as a partial victory for the ideas of David Ben-Gurion. The upshot of the conference was a call for the opening of Palestine for Jewish settlement following World War II. David Ben-Gurion envisioned the relocation of millions of Jews from Europe and elsewhere to Palestine.

A British Colony

In the November 20, 1942 issue of Aufbau, Arendt wrote an article on the subject of Palestine. Dr. Young-Bruehl characterized it in these words: "She called on dissident Zionists to accept the idea that Palestine should not be a British colony, part of a colonial empire, in the manner outlined in the 1917 Balfour Declaration. And then she asked them to work for the establishment of Palestine as part of a postwar British Commonwealth rather than as an autonomous state."

The kind of Palestine Arendt hoped to see was one in which Jews could not persecute the Muslims nor the Muslims mistreat the Jews. She envisioned a society in which men and women would be treated equally, regardless of religion. It was her hope to avoid the negative effects of religious and ethnic based nationalism which had so damaged Europe. The last thing she wanted to see was a form of Jewish Fascism in Palestine. Because of the unpopularity of her views on these issues, she was unable to influence the Zionist movement.

In 1948, Arendt noted that Jews in the United States and Palestine were reaching a consensus of sorts about the formation of a Jewish state. Dr. Young Bruehl wrote about Arendt’s observations at this time: "To Hannah Arendt this emerging unanimity...was ominous: ‘Mass unanimity is not the result of agreement, but an expression of fanaticism and hysteria.’...With sarcasm and condescension, she characterized what she considered a misunderstanding of Russian policy as a ‘childlike hope’ on the part of a ‘people without political experience’ for a ‘big brother’ who would ‘come along to befriend the Jewish people, solve their problems, protect them from the Arabs, and present them eventually with a beautiful Jewish state with all the trimmings’...Resorting again to terms heavy with echoes of the history she was writing in The Origins of Totalitarianism,Arendt claimed that the Jewish ‘master race’ is pledged ‘not to conquest but to suicide by its protagonists...Jewish leaders can threaten mass suicide to the applause of their audiences, and the terrible and irresponsible ‘or else we shall go down’ creeps into all official Jewish statements, however, radical or moderate their source."

Increasingly Disillusioned

Hannah Arendt had become increasingly disillusioned with the path the Zionist movement was taking. In The Fate of the Jews, Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht writes that, "A number of Zionists were concerned that the emerging Jewish state might be bad not only for the Arabs but for the Jews. In 1944 Hannah Arendt mourned the fact that Zionism had adopted the revisionist program that gave the Arabs the choice of ‘emigration or second class citizenship.’ She wrote that if Zionists continued to ignore the indigenous population and serve the major powers they would be viewed as ‘the agents of foreign and hostile interests,’ which would lead to a new wave of anti-Semitism. She described Zionism as a national movement that started out idealistically but ‘sold out at the very first moment to the powers-that-be, that felt no solidarity with other oppressed peoples...that endeavored...to compromise with the most evil forces of our time by taking advantage of imperialistic interest.’"

In 1948, Arendt wrote, "The idea of Arab-Jewish cooperation...is not an idealistic daydream but a sober statement of the fact that without it the whole Jewish venture in Palestine is doomed." She wrote that in a Jewish state surrounded by hostile Arabs "political thought would center around military strategy; economic development would be determined exclusively by the needs of war."

In Arendt’s view, anti-Semitism was the father of Zionism, in the sense that Zionists believed that Jews could not live normal lives in any but their own country. But, she believed, such separateness and exclusivity was not exclusively forced upon them by anti-Semitism but was often the chosen position of some Jews themselves. "The belief that the Jewish people had always been the passive, suffering object of persecutions," Arendt wrote, "actually amounted to a prolongation and modernization of the old myth of chosenness."

As events developed, Arendt favored President Truman’s 1948 call for a trusteeship for Palestine administered by the United Nations as the only way to avoid either Jewish or Muslim terrorists from taking control.

Begin Visit

After Israel came into existence in 1948, a leader of its far-right Freedom Party, Menachem Begin, visited the U.S. The main object of this visit was to obtain funds to help elect Begin Prime Minister of Israel. His political platform called for the incorporation of most of Jordan and other adjacent territories into Israel so that the new state would include the original boundaries of biblical Canaan.

Begin’s record of terrorism as the leader of the Irgun was well known to the State Department and his visa application was rejected until President Truman issued a presidential order to grant entrance. Although many prominent American politicians supported Begin’s visit, the Welcoming Committee, which by then included eleven U.S. Senators and twelve governors, began to disintegrate as the truth about Begin’s career and program became more widely known. Prominent clergymen, among them the Protestant Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin, Catholic Father John La Farge, and Rabbi Morris Lazaron, a prominent member of the American Council for Judaism, warned the U.S. politicians and called for the repudiation of Begin.

Kansas Senator Arthur Capper claimed he did not know how his name happened to appear in a newspaper advertisement concerning Begin. Senator Herbert R. O’Connor of Maryland said he had never approved of acts of terrorism. Congressman John F. Kennedy wired the Committee that, "Belatedly and for the record I wish to withdraw my name from the reception committee for Menachem Begin, the former Irgun Commander. When accepting your invitation, I was ignorant of the true nature of his activities, and I wish to be disassociated from them completely."

A particular incident involving the Irgun which attracted much outrage in the U.S. and throughout the word occurred in the Arab village of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948. At that time, 254 women, children and old men were killed and their bodies thrown down a well. This village was a peaceful one and had managed to keep out of the turmoil of fighting and the excesses of nearby Jerusalem until that moment. Haganah commander David Shaltiel noted that Deir Yassin had been "quiet since the beginnings of disturbances...not mentioned in reports of attacks on Jews, and one of the few places which had not given a foothold to foreign bands." Deir Yassin had done nothing to provoke the attack. It was the Muslim sabbath when the attack was launched on the village by the combined forces of the Irgun and Stern Gang.

No Warning Given

Author Alfred Lilienthal notes that, "No warning had been given to the villagers, as was later claimed (Begin has stated that all victims of Irgun attacks had been warned beforehand), because the armored truck with its loudspeaker had tumbled into a ditch and been tossed on its side far short of the first houses of the village. Advised by a nightwatchman of the approaching Jewish raiders, some inhabitants, with only a robe thrown around them, managed to flee to the west. The initial resistance of the men of Deir Yassin to the attack was soon overcome, and all of the town’s inhabitants were ordered out into a square, where they were lined up against the wall and shot."

In the book O! Jerusalem by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, the daughter of one of the principal families of Deir Yassin, is quoted as saying that she saw "a man shoot a bullet in the neck of my sister Salhiyeh, who was nine months pregnant. Then he cut her stomach open with a butcher’s knife. Most of the men of the village were absent because they worked in Jerusalem. When the terrorists entered, there were only women and children and older people."

Haganah commander David Shaltiel was told by Irgun commander Mordechai Tamaan that Deir Yassin was completely under control and a Haganah unit should be sent in to take over. Shaltiel replied: "We’re not going to take responsibility for your murders." Another Haganah member, the commander of the youth organization Aliyahu Arieli, stated, "All of the killed, with very few exceptions, were old men, women or children. The dead we found were all unjust victims, and none of them died with weapons in their hands."

Hannah Arendt and a number of other prominent Jewish figures protested Menachem Begin’s visit to the U.S. The New York Times of December 8, 1948 included a letter from, among others, Arendt, Albert Einstein, Sidney Hook and Seymour Melman. It declared, in part: "Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the emergence in the newly created State of Israel of ‘The Freedom Party’...a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist right-wing chauvinist organization in Palestine."

Deir Yassin

The authors state that, "The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative elements in the U.S....It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if currently informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents...A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin...this incident exemplified the character and actions of the Freedom Party. Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority...their record of past performance in Palestine bear the imprint of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs and British alike) and misrepresentation are means, and a ‘Leader State’ is the goal...It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to campaign against Begin’s efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the dangers to Israel of support to Begin..."

Later, when in 1952 the Israeli Defense Ministry was responsible for a number of attacks on Arab villages, in one of which 52 Arabs were killed, Hannah Arendt responded this way: "The shortest statement to be made would be: Thou shalt not kill, not even Arab women and children. And this certainly is a little too brief. The whole business is absolutely nauseating. I decided that I do not want to have anything to do with Jewish politics any longer."

For several years, Arendt kept this promise. Then, in 1961, she went to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker. She attended the trial daily and later expanded her articles into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which was published in 1963.

Israel and Weimar

While in Israel, Arendt was disturbed by some of the things she saw. She was particularly troubled by a huge parade of tanks. Israel reminded her of the old Weimar Republic of Germany. The non-separation of church and state in Israel was another troublesome matter. Concerning this movement toward theocracy in Israel, Arendt wrote: "But I could have answered: the greatness of this people was once that it believed in God, and believed in Him in such a way that its trust and love towards Him was greater than its fear. And now this people believes only in itself."

The book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, stirred widespread controversy. Edward Alexander, in The Holocaust and the World of Ideas, reported that, "The book aroused a terrific storm of controversy primarily because it alleged that the Jews had cooperated significantly in their own destruction. ‘Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis.’ Except among her most passionate disciples it is now generally accepted that Arendt was woefully and willfully mistaken in this central assertion."

Dr. Alexander was criticizing Arendt for being too judgmental of the European Jewish leadership. It should be pointed out that the quote used by Alexander accuses Jewish leaders of complicity but says nothing about their motives. It must be remembered that all of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were under severe pressure. Jewish leaders may have acted as they did from a variety of motives, some good, some bad. Many observers believed that Arendt was too harsh and sweeping in her indictment of the European Jewish leadership.

Michael A. Mussmanno, a witness at the Eichmann trial and a U.S. judge at the earlier Nuremburg trials, wrote a review of Eichmann in Jerusalem which appeared in the New York Times Book Review of May 19, 1963. Among other things, Judge Mussmanno wrote: "There will be those who will wonder how Miss Arendt, after attending the Eichmann trial and studying the record and pertinent material, could announce, as she solemnly does in this book, that Eichmann was not really a Nazi at heart, that he did not know Hitler’s program when he joined the Nazi party...and that, all in all, Eichmann was really a modest man."

Arendt Criticized

Judge Mussmanno harshly criticized Arendt for seeming to sympathize with Eichmann’s claims of innocence. In Arendt’s defense, Dr. Alexander points out that, "In her epilogue, Arendt deals with the objections that had been raised to the capture (by kidnapping) of Eichmann in Argentina and to his trial by an Israeli court...She also takes it upon herself to say how she would have addressed Eichmann in pronouncing the death sentence against him (a sentence in which, it is often forgotten, she concurred.)"

Reviewing the heated controversy which took place about Eichmann in Jerusalem, Tony Judt, writing in The New York Review of Books (April 6, 1995) provides this assessment: "It was this cultural abyss, as much as the substance of the work, that explains the otherwise absurd furor over Eichmann in Jerusalem. At thirty years’ distance the book seems much less controversial. Copious research on the Judenräte, the Jewish Councils of Nazi-dominated Europe, suggests what should have been obvious at the time: Arendt knew little about the subject, and some of her remarks about Jewish ‘responsibility’ were insensitive and excessive, but there is a troubling moral question mark hanging over the prominent Jews who took on the task of administering the ghettos. She was not wrong to raise the matter, nor was she mistaken in some of her judgments."

Beyond this, Judt argues that, "Ben-Gurion was less interested in establishing Eichmann’s responsibility, or even in extracting revenge, than in educating a new generation about the past sufferings of the Jews, and thereby further strengthening the foundations of the still fragile Jewish state. Arendt was thus raising fundamental questions about memory, myth, and justice in the postwar world. Her critics, like Lionel Abel and Norman Podhoretz, could score ‘debater’s points’ as Mary McCarthy scornfully put it in a sympathetic letter, but they had no clue about what she was trying to accomplish and probably still don’t. Like so many others in the initial postwar decades they were dependent on what Karl Jaspers called ‘life-sustaining lies’...Today, with much of Europe taken up with issues of guilt, memory, past responsibility, ‘gray zones’ of compliance and collaboration, and the problem of individual and collective retribution, Arendt’s concerns are once again central."

Nazis and Zionists

If Hannah Arendt was harsh in her assessment of Nazism and Communism, she was equally critical of the Zionism to which she was initially drawn. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she pointed to the intimate connection between Nazis and Zionist leaders, who were the only Jews in the early months of the Hitler regime to associate with the German authorities and who used their position to discredit Jews who were opposed to the Zionist idea. According to Arendt, they urged the adopting of the slogan, "Wear the yellow star with pride" to end Jewish assimilation and to encourage the Nazis to send Jews to Palestine. She points to the then-secret agreement between the Jewish Agency for Palestine and Nazi authorities to assist in Zionist plans for illegal immigration into the Holy Land, toward which end even the Gestapo and the SS were willing to cooperate, for this was another method removing Jews from Europe.

In a letter to Protestant theologian Karl Jaspers, her long time teacher and friend, Hannah Arendt reflected that "even good and, at bottom, worthy people have, in our time, the most extraordinary fear about making judgments. This confusion about judgment can be found in those not remarkable for their intelligence."

Hannah Arendt was not afraid to judge, and she applied her principles equally. Her changing attitude toward Zionism was no exception. Tony Judt expressed a widespread view when he concluded that, "She made a good many little errors, for which her many critics will never forgive her. But she got the big things right, and for this she deserves to be remembered."