Hannah Arendt on Palestine

Uniquely among 20th-century political philosophers, Hannah Arendt sought to recover a distinctive place for politics in the world. Though one might legitimately question the success of her approach, it is interesting to note that her aversion to sovereignty, coupled with her love of political action amid the human condition of plurality, led her to reflect on the zionist project in Palestine in a series of prescient journal articles written in the 1940s. These were posthumously reprinted under the somewhat unhappy title, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and the Politics of the Modern Age (Grove Press, 1978, now seemingly out of print).

In these essays she believed that the zionist enterprise in Palestine would be mortally threatened if the Jewish settlers sought to establish unilaterally a sovereign Jewish state. Warning that this would result in a permanently marginalized Arab community with irredentist ambitions, she believed it wiser to work for a bi-national federation in Palestine as a joint project of Jews and Arabs. This dual character would extend from the central government all the way down to local municipal councils. More than half a century later it is difficult to argue with her.

It is, of course, possible that by 1948 this had already become impracticable, given the hostility that had grown between the two groups. Yet Arendt (herself a Jew) understood better than most that politics cannot be reduced to a mere instrument for realizing the aspirations, however legitimate, of a particular ethnic group. Politics, in her view, has everything to do with the fact that people's interests are multiple and that power is created, not by the possession of superior arms, but by ordinary people acting in concert within the public realm.

To harness politics to ethnic ambitions is to reduce the public realm to the status of a private household where people are constrained to behave rather than free to act. This is the antithesis of genuine politics as she understood it.

Conspicuous by its absence in Arendt's political thought is the concept of justice. Yet as a refugee (twice!) from nazi-controlled Europe, she understood what it was to be stateless and to have no place of one's own in this world. Therefore she believed Palestine would have to be home to two peoples and not only one.