The prophetic Hannah Arendt

JVL Introduction

Hannah Arendt, a German-Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, is one of the C20th century’s towering political and ethical thinkers.

She wrote extensively about the nature of power and evil, as well as on politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. But, in the words of her publisher, “she probably wrote more about Jewish issues than any other topic”.

“After moving to France in 1933, she helped Jewish youth immigrate to Palestine… After France fell, Arendt escaped from an internment camp and made her way to America. There she wrote articles calling for a Jewish army to fight the Nazis. After the war, she supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in a binational (Arab-Jewish) state of Israel.”

This short extract, written in 1944, is from her essay ‘To save the Jewish homeland’ in The Jewish Writings , published by Schocken Books in 2007, pp.396-7.

It shows just how prophetic she was.

Extract from ‘To save the Jewish homeland’

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 inside ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defence 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 centre around military strategy; economic development would be determined exclusively by the needs of war.

And all of 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 neighbours.

Under such circumstances (as Ernst Simon has pointed out) 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 defence interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large numbers 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 become plain that at this moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland.