Has Hannah Arendt’s thesis on the “Banality of Evil” become an ironic comment on the Israeli zeitgeist?

MESOPOTAMIA NEWS TODAYS OPINION : THE “ZEITGEIST” OF OUR TIMES  

Rima Najjar, activist for justice and equality in Palestine / youtube Video

While reporting for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of the Nazi Adolph Eichmann, the philosopher Hannah Arendt asked and answered the question, “Can one do evil without being evil – i.e., without intending to do evil?” (See What did Hannah Arendt really mean by the banality of evil? – Thomas White | Aeon Ideas) Her answer separated evil deeds from the perpetrator of the deed, as in when we say to a culprit or sinner, I don’t hate you, I hate what you have done – you are not evil, but your actions are.

If by “Israeli zeitgeist” we are referring to the messianic politics of Zionism, it is possible (as many Jewish philosophers have argued) to view the violent founding and continued existence of the Jewish state (i.e., the expulsion and subjugation of Palestinians) as a form of progressive Jewish history that preserves them as Jews against oblivion.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) is framed by the horrific murder of ten million people (among them an estimated 5.6–5.9 million Jews) in Nazi extermination camps. For most Jews, even the liberal among them, the history of Jews in Europe is reason enough to regard the State of Israel as exceptional and singular.

In developing her general critique of the nation state in 1952, Arendt did not make an analogy between the displacement of European Jews after WWII and the dispossession and expulsion of an estimated 800,000 Arab Palestinians (i.e., she did not see Zionism as Nazism, but as two distinct situations).

She rejected the idea that only through the destruction of Palestinians can Jews themselves survive. She generalized the interdiction against the expulsion of minority groups, refusing to separate Jews from other groups who were persecuted by the Nazis – gypsies (the Roma), gays, communists, the incurably sick, Slavs, etc.

To publicly criticize the Jewish state entails taking a risk for both Jews and non-Jews. Most commonly, such critics are quickly dubbed antisemitic or, if they are Jews, “self-hating Jews”. Hannah Arendt’s political views, her criticism of Zionism and the state of Israel in 1944, 1948, and in 1962 made many people question her Jewishness.

Arendt argued in favor of a binational state in which Palestinian Arabs and Jews would keep their respective cultural autonomy, arguing for social and political justice above nationalism, ideas that many now refer to as “Jewish values”. She also believed that neither Judaism nor Jewishness necessarily leads to the embrace of Zionism.

Hanna Arendt secularized the definition of Jewishness, locating it within a cultural, historical, political framework, separate from religion. The Jewish culture to which she referred was European, though, and excluded the Arab culture of Mizrahi Jews or the Spanish, Turkish, North African culture of Sephardic Jews. Hence the anomaly of discrimination against such Jews within the Jewish state.

But bottom line, and perhaps where irony enters the picture, Arendt did embrace a version of Zionism – albeit one that included “two peoples”.

Criticism of Zionism and Israel by Jews, such as that made by Arendt, is complicated. It entails risks as well as an obligation to speak out, because Israel claims to speak and to exist in the name of all Jews.

In Parting Ways, Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (Columbia University Press, 2012), Judith Butler discusses Jewish ethics, thus:

The relation with the non-Jew is at the core of Jewish ethics, which means that it is not possible to be Jewish without the non-Jew and that, to be ethical, one must depart from Jewishness as an exclusive frame of ethics (p. 99). … being a Jew takes up an ethical relation to the non-Jew, and this follows from the diasporic condition of Jewishness where living in a socially plural world under conditions of equality remains an ethical and political ideal. …. then what follows is the need to affirm the displacement of identity that Jewishness requires, as paradoxical as that may sound (p. 117).

Perhaps the above convoluted scenario is the reason why we come across the following baffled question regarding Hannah Arendt as posed by Edward Said in The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle of Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), p. 89:

Consider Hannah Arendt. For many years she was closely associated with the efforts of Judah Magnes and Martin Buber on behalf of binationalism in Palestine. Although she worked for the emigration of Jews to Palestine before the war, she was always critical of mainstream Zionism. As her collection of essays The Jew as Pariah, and her remarks in The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem testify. Yet in 1967 she supported the Jewish Defense League with money and did so again in 1973. This information – presented without any awareness of the contradictions at work here by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl in her biography of Arendt – is remarkable for someone otherwise so compassionate and reflective on the subject of what Zionism did to Palestinians.

Israel’s evil is not an exceptional genre of evil. The evil Israel perpetrates is no more and no less than that perpetrated by any other settler-colonial state.

Arendt: Born in conflict, Israel will degenerate into Sparta, and American Jews will need to back awayhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMWpFp7WYWs&feature=youtu.be

 

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