Parting Ways Too Soon: Arendt contra Butler on Zionism

ABSTRACT

In this article, I discuss the way Judith Butler builds on Hannah Arendt’s political thought for her critique of Zionism. While her critique is valuable in many ways, I argue that it also obscures the complexity of Arendt’s position on Zionism. Instead of Butler’s portrayal of Arendt as a proto-anti-Zionist, along the lines of Butler herself, I suggest that Arendt was a radical Zionist. Arendt, I contend, offered a radical critique of Zionism but at the same time she supported the establishment of a national home for Jews in Palestine, without losing sight of the different streams within Zionism or the different paths that were possible at every juncture in the years leading to the foundation of the state. By contextualizing Arendt’s position on Zionism against the background of her broader political thought, I attempt to show that, while her engagement with the Zionist movement largely ceased in the late 1940s, her support of Zionism continued to inform her major writings, from her recognition of the need of individuals to belong to a national community to her emphasis on the artificiality of any collective achievement. Through this reconstruction of Arendt’s views of Zionism I attempt to show that she provides us with important sources for engaging with Zionism in a critical way without dismissing and rejecting it, as Butler and other progressives do, as a settler-colonialist enterprise.

KEYWORDS:

• Butler
• Arendt
• Zionism
• settler-colonialism
• cohabitation

Notes

All quotations from Arendt’s essays and articles are from Arendt, The Jewish Writings, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007).

1. Butler, Parting Ways. Hereafter page references are cited in the text.

2. Butler, Precarious Life, 120.

3. As is well known, Israel claims it “disengaged” from Gaza in 2005. However, most human rights organizations and other legal authorities reject this claim, as Israel retains what is called “effective control” of the territory, though its soldiers are no longer stationed there. See, for example, The Office of the Prosecutor, The International Criminal Court, Report on Preliminary Examination Activities, 2016, https://www.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/otp/161114-otp-rep-PE_ENG.pdf, p. 25; Gisha: Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, “Scale of Control: Israel’s Continued Responsibility in the Gaza Strip,” November 2011, http://gisha.org/publication/1660; Kevin Jon Heller, “The OTP Concludes Israel Is Still Occupying Gaza,” Opinio Juris, November 5, 2014, http://opiniojuris.org/2014/11/05/otp-concludes-israel-still-occupying-gaza/.

4. See, e.g., Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs.

5. See, e.g., Butler, Parting Ways, 4, 19, 24, 121–22. In other places Butler presents a more complex understanding of Zionism. See, e.g., the distinctions she draws in Butler, “Response,” 392–93.

6. On Arendt’s engagements with Zionism, see, in particular, Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question; Kessler, “Politics of Jewish Identity”; Farganis, “The Chosen People”; Piterberg, “Zion’s Rebel Daughter; Raz-Karkotzkin, “Jewish Peoplehood”; Jacobson, “Why Fid Hannah Arendt”; Rubin, “From Federalism to Binationalism.”

7. Arendt, “Antisemitism,” 50, 51 (original emphasis).

8. Arendt, “Ceterum Censeo,” 143–44.

9. See, e.g., Arendt, “Crisis of Zionism,” 331.

10. Arendt, “With Our Backs to the Wall,” 165.

11. Arendt, “Crisis of Zionism,” 180–81.

12. Ibid., 181–182. On Arendt’s radical democratic leanings in this early period, see also Lederman, “Hannah Arendt’s Critique of the Judenräte.”

13. Arendt, “Jewish Politics,” 242–43.

14. Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” 343. See also Ashcroft, “Jewishness and the Problem of Nationalism,” 440.

15. Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” 343–48.

16. Arendt, “Peace or Armistice in the Near East,” 425.

17. Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” 343.

18. Ibid., 344.

19. Arendt, “Ceterum Censeo,” 143.

20. Arendt, “The New Face of an Old People,” 213.

21. Arendt, “To Save the Jewish Homeland,” 394.

22. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 120.

23. Ibid., 290.

24. Ibid., 299.

25. As Shafir points out, “[m]any theorists have pointed to the crucial significance of the nation-state as a vehicle for winning rights in the modern worlds, but Hannah Arendt has probably done so most forcefully.” Shafir, “Citizenship and Human Rights,” 23.

26. O’Brien, “Politics of Blood,” 117.

27. Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah,” 297.

28. Arendt, “Crisis of Zionism,” 181, 221.

29. Arendt presents this alternative in many essays, including, “Can the Jewish-Arab Question Be Solved?” and “The Minority Question.”

30. Arendt, “To Save the Jewish Homeland,” 400. Arendt’s proposals might easily seem unrealistic. It is worth bearing in mind, however, Raz-Krakotzkin’s observation that “Arendt’s ideas became ‘unrealistic’ only when ‘reality’ proved her right.” Raz-Krakotzkin, “Jewish Peoplehood,” 63.

31. For a comprehensive exploration of the role of the citizen councils in Arendt’s political thought, see Lederman, Hannah Arendt and Participatory Democracy.

32. Arendt uses this expression most famously in her exchange with Gershom Sholem, but it appears in her writings already in 1948 to describe opposition from non-Zionists who are nevertheless part of Zionist politics. See Arendt, “To Save the Jewish Homeland,” 393.

33. Lederman, “Making the Desert Bloom.”

34. Butler rightly attributes this kind of argument to Martin Buber but overlooks its recurrence in Arendt’s early writings. See Butler, Parting Ways, 36.

35. Arendt, “Crisis of Zionism,” 184 (emphasis added).

36. Arendt, “Peace or Armistice in the Near East,” 432.

37. Ibid., 435.

38. See also Butler, Parting Ways, 121.

39. Arendt, “Can the Jewish-Arab Question Be Solved?” 197.

40. Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” 372.

41. Rubin, “From Federalism to Binationalism,” 403–4.

42. Arendt, “Can the Jewish-Arab Question Be Solved?” 193.

43. Ibid., 194.

44. Arendt, “The Eichmann Controversy: A Letter to Gershom Scholem,” 470.

45. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 263–64.

46. See also Butler, Parting Ways, chap. 6.

47. Arendt, “Can the Jewish-Arab Question Be Solved?” 195.

48. Arendt to Jaspers, March 26, 1966, in Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 632.

49. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 455.

50. Ashcroft, “Jewishness and the Problem of Nationalism,” 442.

51. On the close relation between Arendt’s engagement with Zionism and more broadly “Jewish” themes and her later political theory, see, e.g., Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question; Ashcroft, “Jewishness and the Problem of Nationalism.”

52. Arendt, “Peace or Armistice in the Near East,” 435.

53. Ibid.

54. Arendt, The Human Condition, 138.

55. Arendt, “Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future, 208–9.

56. See also Lederman, “Making the Desert Bloom.”

57. D’Entreves, Political Philosophy, 144.

58. See Arendt, “Totalitarian Imperialism”; Arendt, On Revolution; Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” in Crises of the Republic, 231. See also Lederman, “Centrality of the Council System.”

59. See, e.g., Arendt’s 1963 essay “Nation-State and Democracy,” in Thinking without a Banister, 255–61.

60. See Wolfe’s influential formulation in his “Settler Colonialism.”

61. Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” 372.

62. See, e.g., Loewenstein and Moor, After Zionism.

63. This in contrast to the ability of such pressure to change Israeli positions regarding the Occupation, which is, in my view, great indeed. Paradoxically, the dominant discourse within the left tends to dismiss the possibility of a two-state solution in light of the expansion of Israeli settlements, which is supposedly irreversible, while at the same time holding that the very identity of the Israeli state, supported as it is by the majority of Jewish citizens, can be fundamentally changed with enough international pressure.

64. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy.

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Shmuel Lederman

Shmuel Lederman is a research fellow at the Weiss-Livant Center for Holocaust Studies and Education at the University of Haifa, Israel. He teaches in the International MA Program in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa, as well as in the Department of History, Philoshopy and Judaic Studies at the Open University of Israel. His first book, Hannah Arendt and Participatory Democracy: A People’s Utopia, has recently been published by Palgrave Macmillan.