Revy
11th November 2009, 10:22
An excerpt from the New Left Review article on Arendt called "Zion's Rebel Daughter (http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2696)". Cassandra was a figure in Greek mythology, who after rejecting Apollo's advances, was cursed to know the future but to be powerless to convince anyone of what would happen.
Cassandra’s warning
In retrospect, ‘The Crisis of Zionism’ can be read as a prelude to Arendt’s outstanding 15,000-word essay, ‘Zionism Reconsidered’, first published in Menorah Journal in October 1944. It was prompted by the congress of the World Zionist Organization’s American section in Atlantic City, which demanded a Jewish state that would ‘embrace the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished’. Arendt grasped the significance of this victory for the hard-line ‘revisionist’ position with striking clarity:
This is a turning point in Zionist history; for it means that the Revisionist programme, so long bitterly repudiated, has proved finally victorious. The Atlantic City Resolution goes even a step further than the Biltmore Programme (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. [24] (http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2696#_edn24)
In her view, the outcome at Atlantic City reflected ‘the tremendously increased importance of American Jewry and American Zionism within the wzo.’ [25] (http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2696#_edn25) What the Resolution unmasked was ‘the unanimous adherence of all Zionist parties’ to ultimate aims ‘the very discussion of which was still taboo during the 1930s’, but which, so it seemed, ‘only opportunist reasons had prevented the Zionist movement from stating’; the result was to forfeit any chance of Arab interlocutors, leaving ‘the door wide open for an outside power to take over’. In effect, ‘the Zionists have now indeed done their best to create that insoluble “tragic conflict” which can only be ended through cutting the Gordian knot’—though it would be ‘very naive to believe that such a cutting would invariably be in the Jewish advantage’, or ‘result in a lasting solution’:
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 power is certainly worse . . . the Zionists, if they continue to ignore the Mediterranean peoples 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 the foreign big powers in that region but had actually plotted it and hence are guilty of the consequences. [26] (http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2696#_edn26)
It was a politics that she scathingly denounced as a return to ‘the traditional methods of shtadlonus’—Zionists now ‘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.’ Their hope was that ‘if Palestine Jewry could be charged with a share in the caretaking of American interests in that part of the world, the famous dictum of Justice Brandeis would come true: you would have to be a Zionist in order to be a perfect American patriot.’ [27] (http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2696#_edn27)
In another major paper at the time of the 1948 War, Arendt denounced the massacre of Deir Yassin and the killings in Jaffa and Haifa as deliberate measures of terror by the Revisionist wing of Zionism to drive the Arab populations out of Palestine. The building of a separate Jewish economy by the mainstream labour wing of Zionism—which had been its pride—she saw as the curse that made possible the expulsion of the Arabs (‘almost 50 per cent of the country’s population’) without loss to the Jews. [28] (http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2696#_edn28) In the Middle East, surrounded by a vastly larger Arab population, the result could only be a continual inner insecurity. ‘A home that my neighbour does not recognize and respect is not a home.’ The newly created state of Israel would be a land ‘quite other than the dream of world Jewry, Zionist and non-Zionist’—an armed and introverted society, in which ‘political thought would centre around military strategy’, degenerating into ‘one of those small warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply informed us since the days of Sparta’, leaving the Arabs ‘homeless exiles’, and the Arab problem as ‘the only real moral and political issue of Israeli politics’. [29] (http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2696#_edn29)
A final section of Arendt’s Jewish Writings comprises five texts focused around the Eichmann in Jerusalem controversy, among them her famous reply to Gershom Scholem. More unexpected is a hitherto unpublished reply to written interview questions, apparently commissioned for Look magazine in 1963, on the reaction to her book; it might have been written today, in the context of the pro-Israeli hordes ganging up on anyone whose views stray from the Zionist Decalogue: ‘I was not surprised by the “sensitivity of some Jews,” and since I am a Jew myself, I think I had every reason not to be alarmed by it . . . However, the violence and, especially, the unanimity of public opinion among organized Jews (there are very few exceptions) has surprised me indeed. I conclude that I hurt not merely “sensitivity” but vested interests, and this I did not know before.’ [30] (http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2696#_edn30)
Cassandra’s warning
In retrospect, ‘The Crisis of Zionism’ can be read as a prelude to Arendt’s outstanding 15,000-word essay, ‘Zionism Reconsidered’, first published in Menorah Journal in October 1944. It was prompted by the congress of the World Zionist Organization’s American section in Atlantic City, which demanded a Jewish state that would ‘embrace the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished’. Arendt grasped the significance of this victory for the hard-line ‘revisionist’ position with striking clarity:
This is a turning point in Zionist history; for it means that the Revisionist programme, so long bitterly repudiated, has proved finally victorious. The Atlantic City Resolution goes even a step further than the Biltmore Programme (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. [24] (http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2696#_edn24)
In her view, the outcome at Atlantic City reflected ‘the tremendously increased importance of American Jewry and American Zionism within the wzo.’ [25] (http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2696#_edn25) What the Resolution unmasked was ‘the unanimous adherence of all Zionist parties’ to ultimate aims ‘the very discussion of which was still taboo during the 1930s’, but which, so it seemed, ‘only opportunist reasons had prevented the Zionist movement from stating’; the result was to forfeit any chance of Arab interlocutors, leaving ‘the door wide open for an outside power to take over’. In effect, ‘the Zionists have now indeed done their best to create that insoluble “tragic conflict” which can only be ended through cutting the Gordian knot’—though it would be ‘very naive to believe that such a cutting would invariably be in the Jewish advantage’, or ‘result in a lasting solution’:
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 power is certainly worse . . . the Zionists, if they continue to ignore the Mediterranean peoples 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 the foreign big powers in that region but had actually plotted it and hence are guilty of the consequences. [26] (http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2696#_edn26)
It was a politics that she scathingly denounced as a return to ‘the traditional methods of shtadlonus’—Zionists now ‘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.’ Their hope was that ‘if Palestine Jewry could be charged with a share in the caretaking of American interests in that part of the world, the famous dictum of Justice Brandeis would come true: you would have to be a Zionist in order to be a perfect American patriot.’ [27] (http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2696#_edn27)
In another major paper at the time of the 1948 War, Arendt denounced the massacre of Deir Yassin and the killings in Jaffa and Haifa as deliberate measures of terror by the Revisionist wing of Zionism to drive the Arab populations out of Palestine. The building of a separate Jewish economy by the mainstream labour wing of Zionism—which had been its pride—she saw as the curse that made possible the expulsion of the Arabs (‘almost 50 per cent of the country’s population’) without loss to the Jews. [28] (http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2696#_edn28) In the Middle East, surrounded by a vastly larger Arab population, the result could only be a continual inner insecurity. ‘A home that my neighbour does not recognize and respect is not a home.’ The newly created state of Israel would be a land ‘quite other than the dream of world Jewry, Zionist and non-Zionist’—an armed and introverted society, in which ‘political thought would centre around military strategy’, degenerating into ‘one of those small warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply informed us since the days of Sparta’, leaving the Arabs ‘homeless exiles’, and the Arab problem as ‘the only real moral and political issue of Israeli politics’. [29] (http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2696#_edn29)
A final section of Arendt’s Jewish Writings comprises five texts focused around the Eichmann in Jerusalem controversy, among them her famous reply to Gershom Scholem. More unexpected is a hitherto unpublished reply to written interview questions, apparently commissioned for Look magazine in 1963, on the reaction to her book; it might have been written today, in the context of the pro-Israeli hordes ganging up on anyone whose views stray from the Zionist Decalogue: ‘I was not surprised by the “sensitivity of some Jews,” and since I am a Jew myself, I think I had every reason not to be alarmed by it . . . However, the violence and, especially, the unanimity of public opinion among organized Jews (there are very few exceptions) has surprised me indeed. I conclude that I hurt not merely “sensitivity” but vested interests, and this I did not know before.’ [30] (http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2696#_edn30)