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Abstract
This article discusses an aspect of Hannah Arendt’s treatment of the conflict between the Zionists and the Palestinians that has thus far been overlooked in scholarship: her justification of Zionism through the achievements of the Jewish pioneers in cultivating the land, in contrast to the Palestinians’ failure to do so. The inability of natives to cultivate their land was a familiar argument in the history of colonialism, used to legitimize the colonialists’ right to settle a land and often to displace the natives. How should we understand Arendt’s use of this argument? I show that Arendt’s argument should be understood in the context of, first, the recurrence of this argument in Western political thought and practices. Second, the Zionists’—Arendt included—need of legitimizing Jewish settlements in Palestine. And third, the influence of Arendt’s own political philosophy on her understanding of culture in general, and Palestinian culture in particular.
Acknowledgement
The author wishes to thank Professor Roger Berkowitz and The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College, New York, for the opportunity to carry out his research at the Center.
Notes
1. Jimmy Casas Klausen, “Hannah Arendt’s Antiprimitivism,” Political Theory 38.3 (June 2010): 397.
2. Anne Norton, “Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of Hannah Arendt,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (Pennsylvania, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).
3. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Andre Deutsch, 1986), 192.
4. Klausen, “Hannah Arendt’s Antiprimitivism,” 415.
5. See, in particular, Richard Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996); Gabriel Piterberg, “Zion’s Rebel Daughter: Hannah Arendt on Palestine and Jewish Politics,” New Left Review 48 (2007): 39–57; Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “‘Jewish Politics,’ and Political Responsibility: Arendt on Zionism and Partitions,” College Literature 38.1 (Winter 2011): 57–74; Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), esp. chap. 5; Eric Jacobson, “Why did Hannah Arendt Reject the Partition of Palestine?” Journal for Cultural Research 17.4 (2013): 358–81; Gil Rubin, “From Federalism to Binationalism: Hannah Arendt’s Shifting Zionism,” Contemporary European History 24.3 (2015): 393–414.
6. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis of Zionism,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 184.
7. Hannah Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” in The Jewish Writings, 344.
8. Hannah Arendt, “A Way Towards the Reconciliation of Peoples,” in The Jewish Writings, 263.
9. Hannah Arendt, “Ceterum Censeo,” in The Jewish Writings, 144.
10. Arendt, “Ceterum Censeo,” 144.
11. Arendt, “A Way Towards the Reconciliation of Peoples,” 261–62.
12. Hannah Arendt, “The Jewish State,” in The Jewish Writings, 383.
13. Hannah Arendt, “Peace or Armistice in the Near East?” in The Jewish Writings, 437.
14. Arendt, “Peace or Armistice,” 434.
15. See, for example, Michael Makovsky, Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 123.
16. See, for example, Jorg Lehmann, “Fraternity, Frenzy, and Genocide in German War Literature, 1906–36,” in German Colonialism and National Identity, ed. Michael Perraudin and Jurgen Zimmerer (New York: Routledge, 2011), 115.
17. Cole Harris, “How did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94.1 (2004): 170.
18. John Locke, Two Treaties of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 113.
19. Locke, Two Treaties of Government, 111.
20. Locke, Two Treaties of Government, 114. As Peter Hulme puts it: “Therefore, the central division for Locke lies between those who ‘improve’ and those who merely ‘collect’: only the former are fully rational and therefore fully human.” See “The Spontaneous Hand of Nature,” in The Enlightenment and Its Shadows, ed. Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova (London: Routledge, 1990), 30. Similarly, Stephen Buckle writes that “this whole picture depends on the workmanship model in that it recognizes only improving activities as labour, and also by presupposing an original community designed specially to meet the needs of the workmanship model.” See Stephen Buckle Natural Law and the Theory of Property: Grotius to Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 152.
21. Locke, Two Treaties of Government, 116.
22. See in particular Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defense of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
23. Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2011), 121; see also Andrew Fitzmaurice, “Anticolonialism in Western Political Thought: The Colonial Origins of the Concept of Genocide,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010).
24. Arneil, John Locke and America, 169–70. See also Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 52.
25. Makere Stewart-Harawira, The New Imperial Order: Indigenous Responses to Globalization (New York: Zed Books, 2005), 65.
26. Which came rather quickly: “From a very early stage in the process of Zionist colonization,” writes historian Rashid Khalidi, “the establishment of a new Jewish colony frequently led to confrontations with the local populace.” Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 98.
27. “During the First Aliyah [the first wave of Jewish settlement in Palestine in the 1880s],” writes historian Anita Shapira, “Jews regarded their right to Palestine as self-evident and requiring no proof. That attitude was based… on the historical right of the Jews. … Members of the Second Aliya [1904–1914] found it difficult to accept that approach. … They argued that the historical right provides nothing but the primary right to settle there and that the ultimate right to the land would be determined by actual labor on the land. That approach now became a central strand in the line of Zionist argumentation in general and crucial component in the justifications advanced by the Zionist Labor movement in particular.” Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 65.
28. Derek J. Penslar, “Zionism, Colonialism and Postcolonialism,” in Israeli Historical Revisionism: From Left to Right, ed. Anita Shapira and Derek J. Penslar (Portland, OR: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003), 86.
29. Warren W. Smith Jr., China’s Tibet? Autonomy or Assimilation (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008), 22.
30. Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 5.
31. David Day, Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9.
32. Harris, “How did Colonialism Dispossess?” 174.
33. Patrick Wolfe, “Structure and Event: Settler Colonialism, Time, and the Question of Genocide,” in Moses, Empire, Colony, Genocide, 113.
34. James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 103–4.
35. Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 17–18.
36. Quoted in Jens Hanssen, “Translating Revolution: Hannah Arendt in Arab Political Culture,” Ausgabe 1.7 (November 2013): 14; at: http/www.hannaharendt.net.
37. “For this ‘solution’ of the Jewish question, the conundrum of a people without land in search of a land without people—practically speaking, the moon, or a folktale free from politics—would finally have become meaningless” (Hannah Arendt, “The Minority Question,” in The Jewish Writings, 130).
38. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 176.
39. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin. 2006), 206.
40. Margret Canovan, “Hannah Arendt as a Conservative Thinker,” in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (London: The MIT Press, 1996), 14.
41. Maurizio Passerin D’Entreves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (London: Routledge, 1994), 144.
42. Klausen, “Hannah Arendt’s Antiprimitivism.”
43. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 138.
44. Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” 208–9.
45. Arendt, The Human Condition, 138–39.
46. Arendt, The Human Condition, 139.
47. Arendt, The Human Condition, 138–39, 139, 173.
48. Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” 206, 215.
49. Arendt to Heidegger, 28 October 1960, in Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: Letters 1925–1975, ed. Ursula Ludz, trans. Andrew Shields (New York: Harcourt Inc., 2004), 124.
50. For detailed studies of Heidegger’s philosophical influence on Arendt, see Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger, trans. and ed. Michael Gendre (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997).
51. Arendt, The Human Condition, 173.
52. Arendt, “Peace or Armistice in the Near East?” 435.
53. Hannah Arendt, “To Save the Jewish Homeland: There is Still Time,” in The Jewish Writings, 395.
54. Arendt, “Peace or Armistice in the Near East?” 435.
55. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1953), 248.
56. Hannah Arendt, “Can the Jewish-Arab Question Be Solved?” in The Jewish Writings, 197.
57. Hannah Arendt, “Achieving Agreement between Peoples in the Near East: A Basis for Jewish Politics,” in The Jewish Writings, 235.
58. Hannah Arendt, “New Proposals for a Jewish-Arab Understanding,” in The Jewish Writings, 219.
59. Arendt, “To Save the Jewish Homeland,” 389.
60. As Rubin points out correctly, Arendt’s consistent support was for a federal arrangement within a multiethnic community, while her support for a binational state was a later development and a more ambiguous one—a point most scholars ignore. See Rubin, “From Federalism.”
61. Butler, Parting Ways, 119.
62. Hannah Arendt, “Achieving Agreement between Peoples in the Near East—a Basis for Jewish Politics,” in The Jewish Writings, 236.
63. Hannah Arendt, “Can the Jewish-Arab Question Be Solved?” in The Jewish Writings, 197.
64. Arendt, “New Proposals for a Jewish-Arab Understanding,” 221.
65. Arendt, “To Save the Jewish Homeland,” 400.
66. Arendt, “To Save the Jewish Homeland,” 401.
67. A notable exception is Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question.
68. See Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
69. See Martin Buber, “An Open Letter to Mahatma Gandhi,” in Nation and World: Essays on Contemporary Issues (The Jewish Agency Publications, 1961) (Hebrew), 17. See also in the same collection: “National Home and National Policy,” 308–10.
70. Butler, Parting Ways, 36.
71. It should also be noted that the full scope of Arendt’s engagement with “Jewish themes,” the Zionist enterprise included, was revealed only with the 2007 publication of her “Jewish Writings.” This collection of essays by Arendt, I would argue, remains a relatively underexplored resource for her political thought and her positions on various issues.
72. Raz-Krakotzking, “Jewish Politics,” 72; Butler, Parting Ways, 139.
73. Hannah Arendt to Heinrich Blücher, 15 April 1961, in Within Four Walls: The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher, 1936–1968, ed. Kotte Kohler, trans. Peter Constantine (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2000), 354–55.
74. Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, 13 April 1961, in Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers: Correspondence, 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company 1992), 435.