CLEARLY, ZIONISM IS one way that religion has entered public life, although there are ways of thinking about Zionism that are obviously antireligious, including ways of defining Jewishness for the purpose of Israeli citizenship that are shorn of explicit religious references. Indeed, the category of “Jewish” proves complex in these debates, since rabbinic law defines Jewishness for an apparently secular state law in Israel that in other respects distinguishes itself emphatically from rabbinic law. How does this ambiguity affect the more general discussions of religion and public life that seem to be so much with us during these times?
Doubtless, we have to be very careful when we refer to “religion” in public life, since it may not be possible finally to talk about religion as a category in this sense. Depending on which religion we have in mind, its relation to the public will be different. Indeed, there are a variety of religious positions on public life and a variety of ways of conceiving public life within religious terms. If we begin by asking about “religion” in “public life” we run the risk of simply filling in the category “religion” with a variety of specific religions; and the sphere of “public life” somehow remains stable, enclosed, and outside of religion. If the entry of religion into public life is a problem, then it would seem we are presupposing a framework in which religion has been outside public life, and we are asking about how it enters and whether it enters in a justifiable or warranted way. But, if this is the operative assumption, it seems we have to ask first how religion became private and whether the effort to make religion private ever really succeeded. If one implicit question of this inquiry presupposes that religion belongs to a private sphere, we have first to ask, “which religion” has been relegated to the private, and which, if any, circulate without question in the public sphere. Perhaps then we might have another inquiry to pursue, namely, one that differentiates between legitimate and illegitimate religions, that is, those that are considered to implicitly support a secular public sphere and those that are considered to threaten the secular public, or, equivalently, those that, like Christianity, are understood to provide the cultural preconditions of the public, whose symbols circulate freely within the public, and those that are considered to threaten the foundation of secular life, whose symbols circulating within the public are considered ostentatious or threatening to democracy itself. If the public sphere is a protestant accomplishment, as several scholars have argued, then public life presupposes and reaffirms a dominant religious tradition as the secular. And if there are many reasons to doubt whether secularism is as liberated from its religious makings as it purports to be, we might ask whether these insights into secularism also apply, in some degree, to our claims regarding public life in general. In other words, some religions are not only already “inside” the public sphere, but they help to establish a set of criteria that distinguish the public from the private. This happens when some religions are relegated to the “outside”—either as “the private” or as the threat to the public as such—while others function to support and delimit the public sphere itself. If we could not have the distinction between public and private were it not for the protestant injunction to privatize religion, then religion—or one dominant religious tradition—underwrites the very framework within which we are operating. This would indeed constitute quite a different point of departure for a critical inquiry into religion in public life, since both public and private would form a disjunctive relation that would be, in some important sense, “in” religion from the start.
My point is not to rehearse the questions about secularism, which have been ably expounded by Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, Michael Warner, William Connolly, Charles Taylor, Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, and Charles Hirschkind. On the basis of this new scholarship, it is clear that secularization may be a fugitive way for religion to survive; we always have to ask, which form and path of secularization do we mean? My point is to suggest, first, that any generalizations we make about “religion” in “public life” are suspect from the start if we do not think about which religions are being presupposed in the conceptual apparatus itself, especially if that conceptual apparatus, including the notion of the public, is not understood in light of its own genealogy and secularization projects. It makes a different kind of sense to refer to a secular Jew than to a secular Catholic; whereas both may be presumed to have departed from religious belief, there may be other forms of belonging that do not presume or require belief; secularization may well be one way that Jewish life continues as Jewish.1 We also make a mistake if religion becomes equated with belief, and belief is then tied to certain kinds of speculative claims about God—a theological presumption that does not always work to describe religious practice. That effort to distinguish the cognitive status of religious and nonreligious belief misses the fact that very often religion functions as a matrix of subject formation, an embedded framework for valuations, and a mode of belonging and embodied social practice. Of course, the legal principle of the separation of state and religion haunts any and all of our discourses here, but there are many reasons to think that the juridical conception is insufficient to serve as the framework for understanding the larger questions of religion in public life. Also insufficient are the debates about religious symbols and icons that have produced widespread disagreement about first amendment rights, on the one hand, and the protection of religious minorities against discrimination and persecution, on the other hand.2
I enter this fray with another problem, namely, the tension that emerges between religion and public life when public criticism of Israeli state violence is taken to be anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish, as it so often is. For the record, I would like to make clear that some of those criticisms do employ anti-Semitic rhetoric and argument and so must be opposed absolutely and unequivocally. But the legitimate criticisms, and there are many, do not. Included among them are criticisms of Israeli state violence that emerge from within Jewish struggles for social justice (which are not the same as struggles for social justice only for Jews). Jewish opposition to Zionism accompanied the founding proposals made by Herzl at the International Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basel, and it has never ceased since that time.3 It is not anti-Semitic or, indeed, self-hating to criticize the state violence exemplified by Zionism. If it were, then Jewishness would be defined, in part, by its failure to generate a critique of state violence, and that is surely not the case. My question is whether the public criticism of state violence—and I know that term is yet to be explained—is warranted by Jewish values, understood in noncommunitarian terms.
One asks this question because if one openly and publicly criticizes Israeli state violence, then one is sometimes, and in certain circumstances almost always, considered anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish. And yet to openly and publicly criticize such violence is in some ways an obligatory ethical demand from within Jewish frameworks, both religious and nonreligious, that sustain necessary ties to broader movements against state violence of this kind—thus Jewish and departing from Jewishness at once. Of course, you will already see a second set of quandaries introduced by this formulation. As Hannah Arendt made clear in her early writings, Jewishness is not always the same as Judaism.4 And, as she made clear in her evolving political position on the State of Israel, neither Judaism nor Jewishness necessarily leads to the embrace of Zionism.
My aim is not to repeat the claim that Jews differ among themselves on the value of Zionism, on the injustice of the occupation, or on the military destructiveness of the Israeli state. These are complex matters, and there are vast disagreements on all of them. Nor is my point to say simply that Jews are obligated to criticize Israel, although in fact I think they are or, rather, we are; given that Israel acts in the name of the Jewish people, casts itself as the legitimate representative of the Jewish people, there is a struggle over what is done in the name of the Jewish people and so all the more reason to reclaim that tradition and ethics in favor of a politics that prizes social and political justice above a nationalism that depends fundamentally on military violence to sustain itself. The effort to establish the presence of progressive Jews runs the risk of remaining within certain identitarian and communitarian presumptions; one opposes any and all expressions of anti-Jewish anti-Semitism and one reclaims Jewishness for a project that seeks to dismantle Israeli state violence and the institutionalization of racism. This particular form of the solution is challenged, however, if we consider that there are several ethical and political frameworks in which such a critique is obligatory.
Moreover, as I have sought to suggest, Jewishness can and must be understood as an anti-identitarian project insofar as we might even say that being a Jew implies taking up an ethical relation to the non-Jew, and this follows from the diasporic condition of Jewishness where living in a socially plural world under conditions of equality remains an ethical and political ideal. Indeed, if the relevant Jewish tradition for waging the public criticism of Israeli state violence is one that draws upon cohabitation as a norm of sociality, then what follows is the need not only to establish an alternative Jewish public presence (distinct from AIPAC, to be sure, but also from J Street) or an alternative Jewish movement (such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Independent Jewish Voices in the UK, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, to name but a few), but to affirm the displacement of identity that Jewishness requires, as paradoxical as that may first sound. Only then can we come to understand the mode of ethical relationality that informs some key historical and religious understandings of what it is to “be” a Jew. In the end, it is not about specifying the ontology of the Jew over and against some other cultural or religious group—we have every reason to be suspicious of any effort to do such a thing. It is rather a question of understanding the very relation to the non-Jew as the way of configuring religion in public life within Judaism. The point is not simply to scatter geographically, but to derive a set of principles from scattered existence that can serve a new conception of political justice. That conception would entail a fair doctrine on the rights of refugees and a critique of nationalist modes of state violence that sustain the occupation, land confiscation, and the political imprisonment and exile of Palestinians. It would also imply a notion of cohabitation whose condition of emergence would be the end of settler colonialism. More generally formulated, it is on the basis of this conception of cohabitation that the critique of illegitimate nation-state violence can and must be waged—with no exceptions.
There are, of course, both risks and obligations of public criticism. It remains true that the criticism of Israeli state violence, for instance, can be construed as a critique of the Jewish state on the same grounds as those one would use to base criticism of any other state that engaged in the practices of occupation, invasion, and the destruction of a livable infrastructure for a subjugated or minority population. Or it can be construed as a critique of the Jewish state, emphasizing the Jewishness of that state and thus prompting the fear that it is because the state is Jewish that it is criticized. What is usually feared then is that an anti-Jewish impetus drives the criticism. But such a fear often deflects from the legitimate concern articulated here, namely, that it would be unjust for any state to insist on one religious and ethnic group maintaining a demographic majority to create differential levels of citizenship for majority and minority populations (even internally valorizing Ashkenazi origins and narrative accounts of the nation over Sephardic and Mizrachi cultural origins within its mandated educational curriculum and public discourse). If, then, the problem is this last one, it is still difficult to enunciate this in public, since there will be those who suspect that really something else is being said or that anyone who calls into question the demand for Jewish demographic majority in particular is motivated by insensitivity to the sufferings of the Jewish people, including the contemporary threat they experience, or by anti-Semitism, or both.
And of course, it makes a difference whether one is criticizing the principles of Jewish sovereignty that have characterized political Zionism since 1948 or whether one’s criticism is restricted to the occupation as illegal and destructive (and so situating itself in a history that starts with 1967) or whether one is more restrictively criticizing certain military actions in isolation from both Zionism and the occupation, such as the assault on Gaza in 2008–9, which included clear war crimes, or the growth of settlements, continuing forms of land confiscation of other kinds, or the policies of the current right-wing regime in Israel. But in each and every case, there is a question of whether the criticism can be registered publicly as something other than an attack on the Jews or on Jewishness. Depending where we are and to whom we speak, some of these positions can be heard more easily than others. And yet, as we know, there are contexts in which none of these criticisms can be heard without an immediate suspicion that the person who articulates them has something against the Jews or, if Jewish herself, has something against herself. Moreover, in every case we are confronted with the limits on audibility by which the contemporary public sphere is constituted. There is always a question: should I listen to this or not? Am I being heard or misconstrued? The public sphere is constituted time and again through certain kinds of exclusions: images that cannot be seen, words that cannot be heard. And this means that the regulation of the visual and audible field—the regulation of the senses more generally—is crucial to the constitution of what can become a debatable issue within any version of the “legitimate” sphere of politics.5
If one says that one would be opposed to any state that restricted full citizenship to any religious or ethnic group at the expense of indigenous populations and all other coinhabitants, then one might well be charged with not understanding the exceptional and singular character of the State of Israel and, more importantly, the historical reasons for claiming that exception. But if the state is “excepted” from international standards of justice, or if it clearly abrogates principles of equality and nondiscrimination—to draw attention at this moment only to its infractions against liberalism—then its existence is bound to a contradiction that it can “resolve” only through violence or radical transformation. For Arendt, the call to rethink federal authority or binationalism for the region to politically embody principles of cohabitation envisages a way out of violence rather than a path that would lead to the destruction of any of the populations on that land. The political point is that one cannot defend the Jewish people against destruction without defending the Palestinian people against destruction. If one fails to universalize the interdiction against destruction, then one pursues the destruction of the “Other” with the assumption that only through that destruction can one oneself survive. But the truth remains that the destruction of Palestinian lives and livelihoods can only increase the threat of destruction against those who have perpetrated it, since it gives ongoing grounds for a resistance movement that has its violent and nonviolent versions. One does not need to be an advanced student of Hegel to grasp this point. And if someone counters with the claim that I fail to consider the faults of the Palestinian in this scenario, my reply is that there are surely better and worse ways of waging a resistance movement to colonial occupation. But any evaluation of Palestinian strategies would have to take place within the framework of political resistance. The positions have never been equal, and so it makes no sense to treat the relations between Israel and Palestine as “two sides” of a conflict. Those models that assume equal contributions of Israel and Palestine build equality into their explanatory model and so efface the inequality on the ground. Once political conditions of equality are established, we can then perhaps begin to talk within terms of equality, but only then.
In this spirit I propose thinking about Hannah Arendt, whose political views made many people doubt the authenticity of her Jewishness. Indeed, as a result of her salient criticisms of political Zionism and the State of Israel in 1944, ’48, and ‘62, her claim to belong to the Jewish people was severely doubted, most famously by Scholem.6 As I indicated in the introduction, Scholem more quickly embraced a conception of political Zionism, whereas Buber in the teens and twenties actively and publicly defended a spiritual and cultural Zionism that, in his early view, would become “perverted” if it assumed the form of a political state. By the 1940s, Arendt, Buber, and Magnes argued in favor of a binational state, proposing a federation in which Jews and Arabs would maintain their respective cultural autonomy. It is worth noting as well that Franz Rosenzweig also elaborated a diasporic opposition to Zionism in his The Star of Redemption, where he wrote that Judaism is fundamentally bound up with waiting and wandering, but neither with the claim of territory nor the aspirations of a state.
As I indicated in chapter 1, Edward Said proposed that Palestinians and Jews have an overlapping history of displacement, exile, living as refugees in diaspora among those who are not the same. This is a mode of living in which alterity is constitutive of who one is. Said did not clarify in what way these traditions of exile might be overlapping, but he was careful not to draw strict analogies. Does this suggest that one history might inform or interrupt another in ways that call for something other than comparison, parallelism, and analogy? Were Buber and Arendt thinking about a similar problem when, for instance, mindful of the massive numbers of refugees after the Second World War, they expressed their concerns about the establishment of a Jewish state in 1948 that would be based on the disenfranchisement and expulsion of Arabs as a national minority—one that turned out to expel more than seven hundred thousand Palestinians from their rightful homes—now more often estimated as nine hundred thousand? Arendt refused any strict historical analogy between the displacement of the Jews from Europe and those of the Palestinians from a newly established Israel; she surveyed a number of historically distinct situations of statelessness to develop the general critique of the nation-state in The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951. There she attempted to show how, for structural reasons, the nation-state produces mass numbers of refugees and must produce them in order to maintain the homogeneity of the nation it seeks to represent, in other words, to support the nationalism of the nation-state. This led her to oppose any state formation that sought to reduce or refuse the heterogeneity of its population, including the founding of Israel on principles of Jewish sovereignty, and it is clearly one reason she reflected on the postsovereign and postnational promise of federalism. She thought that any state that failed to have the popular support of all its inhabitants, and that defined citizenship on the basis of religious or national belonging, would be forced to produce a permanent class of refugees; the critique extended to Israel, which, she thought, would find itself in endless conflict (and heighten the danger to itself) and would perpetually lack legitimacy as a democracy grounded in a popular will, especially in light of its continued reliance on “superpowers” to maintain its political power in the region. That Arendt moved from an analysis of a series of stateless conditions to a consideration of Palestine as a stateless condition is significant. The centrality of the European refugee situation both under fascist Germany and after its demise informs her politics here. But this is certainly not to say that Zionism is Nazism. She would have refused such an equation, and we should, too. The point is that there are principles of social justice that can be derived from the Nazi genocide that can and must inform our contemporary struggles, even though the contexts are different, and the forms of subjugating power clearly distinct.
If cohabitation may be understood as a form of convergent exiles, it will be important not to take this convergence as a form of strict analogy between separate terms. Edward Said made that claim about the exilic condition of both Palestinian and Jewish people, and Arendt made it differently when she wrote that the conditions of statelessness under the Nazi regime require a larger critique of how the nation-state perpetually produces the problem of mass refugees. She did not say that the historical situation under Nazi Germany was the same as the situation in Israel. Not at all. But the former was part, not all, of what led her to develop a historical account of statelessness in the twentieth century and to derive general principles that oppose the reproduction of stateless persons and persons without rights. In some ways she invoked the repetition of statelessness as the condition from which a critique of the nation-state had to take place, in the name of heterogeneous populations, political plurality, and a certain conception of cohabitation. It is clear that Jewish history comes to bear on Palestinian history through the impositions and exploitations of a project of settler colonialism. But is there yet another mode in which these histories come to bear upon one another, one that sheds another kind of light?
One persistent question is, what is finally Jewish about Arendt’s thought, if anything? Although I think there are some religious sources for Arendt’s political thought, I am in a minority in this regard.7 It is clear that her early work on Augustine, for instance, focuses on neighborly love.8 And, in the early writings on Zionism, she seeks recourse to the famous formulation of Hillel, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?” In 1948 she wrote an essay, “Jewish History, Revised,” in which she assesses the importance of Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, published two years before. There she considers the importance of the messianic tradition for establishing the notion of God as “impersonal” and “infinite” and as linked less with stories of creation than with accounts of emanation.9 Commenting on the “esoteric character” of such mystical ideas, Arendt underscores a more important legacy of mysticism in the notion that humans participate in the powers that shape the “drama of the world,” thus delineating a sphere of action for humans who saw themselves as obligated to a broader purpose. As messianic hopes proved less credible and legal exegesis less efficacious, this resolution of the mystical tradition into a form of action became more important. But this idea of action depended on the exilic existence of the Jewish people, a point explicitly made by Isaac Luria, which Arendt cites: “Formerly [the Diaspora] had been regarded either as a punishment for Israel’s sins or as a test of Israel’s faith. Now it still is all this, but intrinsically it is a mission; its purpose is to uplift the fallen sparks from all their various locations” (309). To uplift the fallen sparks is not necessarily to gather them again or to return them to their origin. What interests Arendt is not only the irreversibility of “emanation” or dispersal, but the revalorization of exile that it implies. Is there perhaps also a way to understand that the embrace of heterogeneity is itself a certain diasporic position, one conceptualized in part through the notion of a scattered population? The kabbalistic tradition of scattered light, of the sephirot, articulated this notion of a divine scattering that presupposes the dwelling of Jews among non-Jews.
Although Arendt scorned explicitly political forms of messianism, the exilic tradition from which and about which she wrote was also bound up with a certain version of the messianic, one that interested her, for instance, in Benjamin’s reading of Kafka. Over and against the messianic version of history Scholem later adopted, which provided a redemptive historical narrative for the establishment of the State of Israel, Arendt was clearly closer to Benjamin’s countermessianic view (or alternative form of the messianic, depending how one reads it). In his view, the history of the suffering of the oppressed flashes up during moments of emergency, which interrupts both homogeneous and teleological time. Here I agree with Gabriel Piterberg’s argument that Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” constituted “an ethical and political drive to redeem humanity’s oppressed,”10 over and against Scholem, who finally understood the messianic as implying a return of the Jews to the land of Israel, a return from exile to history. As an effort to reverse the devalorization of “exile” (and galut) within Zionist historiography, several scholars, including, prominently, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin,11 focus their reading of Benjamin on the recognition and remembrance of the dispossessed. No one people could claim a monopoly on dispossession. The exilic framework for understanding the messianic provides a way to understand one historical condition of dispossession in light of another. Forms of national historiography that presuppose an internal history of the Jews are able to understand neither the exilic condition of the Jews nor the exilic consequences for the Palestinians under contemporary Zionism.12 Redemption itself is to be rethought as the exilic, without return, a disruption of teleological history and an opening to a convergent and interruptive set of temporalities. This is a messianism, perhaps secularized, that affirms the scattering of light, the exilic condition, as the nonteleological form that redemption now takes. This is a redemption from teleological history. But how, we might surely ask, does the remembrance of one exile prompt an attunement or opening to the dispossession of another? What is this transposition? If it is something other than historical analogy, how is to be described? And does it take us to another notion of cohabitation?
Raz-Krakotzkin writes that the tradition of Benjamin’s “Theses” does not mobilize the memory of the oppression of the Jews in order to legitimate the particularist claims of the present, but serves as a catalyst for building a more general history of oppression; the generalizability and transposability of that history of oppression is what leads to a politics that broadens the commitment to alleviating oppression across various cultural and religious differences.13
Although Arendt rejected all messianic versions of history, it is clear that her own resistance to the progressive narrative of political Zionism was formed in part within terms offered by Benjamin. In her introduction to Benjamin’s Illuminations, Arendt remarks that, in the early 1920s, Benjamin’s turn to baroque tragic drama in the Trauerspiel seemed to parallel, if not draw upon, Scholem’s turn to the Kabbalah. Arendt suggests that throughout the Trauerspiel Benjamin affirms that there is no “return” either to German, European, or Jewish traditions in their former condition. And yet, something from Judaism, namely, the exilic tradition, articulates this impossibility of return. Instead, something of another time flashes up in our own. Arendt writes that there was in his work of this time “an implicit admission that the past spoke directly only through things that had been handed down, whose seeming closeness to the present was thus due precisely to their exotic [perhaps esoteric?] character, which ruled out all claims to a binding authority.” She understood as “theologically inspired” Benjamin’s conclusion that the truth could not be directly recovered and so could not be “an unveiling which destroys the secret, but the revelation that does it justice.”
The revelation that does the secret justice does not seek to recover an original meaning or to return to a lost past, but rather to grasp and work with the fragments of the past that break through into a present marked by oblivion, where they become episodically available. This view seems to find resonance in that remark in the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that “the true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (TPH, 255). If, as I argued in the last chapter, what flashes up is a memory of suffering from another time, then it interrupts and reorients the politics of this time. This would not be rightly described as a transgenerational memory, since the generational line is traversed by a memory that crosses over from one population to another, thus assuming a break in both filial linearity and the temporal continuity of national belonging. In fact, Benjamin makes clear in the seventeenth thesis that this flashing up makes possible an interruption of established forms of historical development; it constitutes a “cessation of happening” (TPH, 263) and so a calling into question of progressive historiography itself. Only such a cessation of happening, he tells us, can produce “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” (TPH, 263). Modes of progressive history, including those that assume the progressive realization of political ideals (Zionism among them), reinstitute amnesia with every step “forward.” Thus, stepping forward has to be stopped if the history of the oppressed is to come to the fore. The point is not for that history to lead to revenge (which would be a cyclical form of history that Benjamin would reject), but rather to an active battle against those forms of political amnesia that “found” progress.14 If one temporality emerges within another, then the temporal horizon is no longer singular; what is “contemporary” are forms of convergence that are not always readily legible.
Arendt agreed with the necessity to criticize certain forms of historical progress. Whereas Benjamin seemed to have the progressive claims of capitalism in mind when he sought to redefine historical materialism and describe the increasing quantification of value, Arendt was clearly thinking of more teleological forms of historical materialism when she contested the notion of progress as an inevitable unfolding of political ideals. For Arendt, politics would be a matter of action, and action could only be understood on the basis of political plurality. Although her ideas of plurality and cohabitation are formulated in many published texts, there is one formulation that emerges in her book on Eichmann, published in 1962, that has special relevance to this discussion.
According to Arendt, Eichmann thought that he and his superiors might choose with whom to cohabit the earth and failed to realize that the heterogeneity of the earth’s population is an irreversible condition of social and political life itself.15 This accusation against him bespeaks a firm conviction that none of us should be in the position of making such a choice. Those with whom we cohabit the earth are given to us, prior to choice and so prior to any social or political contracts we might enter through deliberate volition. In fact, if we seek to make a choice where there is no choice, we are trying to destroy the conditions of our own social and political life. In Eichmann’s case, the effort to choose with whom to cohabit the earth was an explicit effort to annihilate some part of that population—Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, communists, the disabled and the ill, among others—and so the exercise of freedom upon which he insisted was genocide. If Arendt is right, then it is not only that we may not choose with whom to cohabit, but that we must actively preserve and affirm the unchosen character of inclusive and plural cohabitation: we not only live with those we never chose and to whom we may feel no social sense of belonging, but we are also obligated to preserve those lives and the plurality of which they form a part. In this sense, concrete political norms and ethical prescriptions emerge from the unchosen character of these modes of cohabitation. To cohabit the earth is prior to any possible community or nation or neighborhood. We might sometimes choose where to live, and who to live by or with, but we cannot choose with whom to cohabit the earth.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she clearly speaks not only for the Jews, but for any other minority who would be expelled from habitation on the earth by another group. The one implies the other, and the “speaking for” universalizes the principle even as it does not override the plurality for which it speaks. Arendt refuses to separate the Jews from the other so-called nations persecuted by the Nazis in the name of a plurality that is coextensive with human life in any and all its cultural forms. Is she subscribing here to a universal principle, or does plurality form a substantial alternative to the universal? And is her procedure, in some ways, related to the problem of convergent and interrupting histories mentioned by Said and Benjamin in different ways?
Perhaps we can say there is a universalization at work in her formulation that seeks to establish inclusiveness for all human society, but posits no single defining principle for the humanity it assembles. This notion of plurality cannot be only internally differentiated, since that would raise the question of what bounds this plurality; since plurality cannot be exclusionary without losing its plural character, the idea of a given or established form for plurality would pose a problem for the claims of plurality. For Arendt, nonhuman life already constitutes part of that outside, thus denying from the start the animality of the human. Any present notion of the human will have to be differentiated on some basis from a future one. If plurality does not exclusively characterize a given and actual condition, but also always a potential one, then it has to be understood as a process, and we will need to shift from a static to a dynamic conception.
Following William Connolly, we could then speak of pluralization.16 Only then can the differentiation that characterizes a given plurality also mark those sets of differences that exceed its givenness. The task of affirming or even safeguarding plurality would then also imply making new modes of pluralization possible. When Arendt universalizes her claim (no one has the right to decide with whom to cohabit the earth; everyone has the right to cohabit the earth with equal degrees of protection), she does not assume that “everyone” is the same—at least not in the context of her discussion of plurality. One can surely see why there would be a Kantian reading of Arendt, one that concludes that plurality is a regulative ideal, that everyone has such rights, regardless of the cultural and linguistic differences by which anyone is characterized. And Arendt herself moves in this Kantian direction, though mainly through the extrapolation of Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgment rather than his moral philosophy.
The distinction between pluralization and universalization is important for thinking about unchosen cohabitation. Equal protection or, indeed, equality is not a principle that homogenizes those to whom it applies; rather, the commitment to equality is a commitment to the process of differentiation itself. One can surely see why there can be a communitarian reading of Arendt, since she herself elaborates the right to belong and rights of belonging. But there is always a redoubling here that dislocates the claim from any specific community: everyone has the right of belonging. And this means there is a universalizing and a differentiating that takes place at once and without contradiction—and that this is the structure of pluralization. In other words, political rights are separated from the social ontology upon which they depend; political rights universalize, although they do so always in the context of a differentiated (and continually differentiating) population. And though Arendt refers to “nations” or sometimes communities of belonging as the component parts of this plurality, it is clear that the principle of pluralization applies as well to these parts, since they are not only internally differentiated (and differentiating), but they are themselves defined in relation to variable and shifting relations to the outside.
Indeed, this is one point I have been underscoring about the problem of Jewishness. It may be that the sense of belonging to this group entails taking up a relation to the non-Jew that requires departing from a communitarian basis for political judgment and responsibility alike. It is not that “one” (over here) approaches the “other” (over there), but that these two modes of existence are radically implicated in one another, for good and bad reasons.17 “Here” and “there” as well as “then” and “now” become internally complicated modalities of space and time that correspond to this notion of cohabitation.18 Moreover, if Jewishness mandates this departure from communitarian belonging, then “to belong” is to undergo a dispossession from the category of Jewishness, a formulation as promising as it is paradoxical. It also obligates the development of a politics that exceeds the claims of communitarian belonging. Although Arendt herself values the way exile can lead to action in the service of broader purposes, here we might read dispossession as an exilic moment, one that disposes us ethically. Paradoxically, it is only possible to struggle to alleviate the suffering of others if I am both motivated and dispossessed by my own suffering. It is this relation to the other that dispossesses me from any enclosed and self-referential notion of belonging; otherwise, we cannot understand those obligations that bind us when there is no obvious mode of belonging and where the convergence of temporalities becomes the condition for the memory of political dispossession as well as the resolve to bring such dispossession to a halt.
Can we now think about the transposition that happens from the past to the future? Precisely because there is no common denominator among the plural members of this stipulated humanity, except perhaps the ungrounded right to have rights, which includes a certain right to belonging and to place, we might only begin to understand this plurality by testing a set of analogies that will invariably fail. In fact, precisely because one historical experience of dispossession is not the same as another, the right to have rights invariably emerges in different forms and through different vernaculars. If we start with the presumption that one group’s suffering is like another group’s, we have not only assembled the groups into provisional monoliths—and so falsified them—but we have launched into a form of analogy building that invariably fails. The specificity of the group is established at the expense of its temporal and spatial instability, its constitutive heterogeneity, and for the purpose of making it suitable for analogical reasoning. But analogy fails because specificities prove obdurate. The suffering of one people is not exactly like the suffering of another, and this is the condition of the specificity of the suffering for both. Indeed, we would have no analogy between them if the grounds for analogy were not already destroyed. If specificity qualifies each group for analogy, it also defeats the analogy from the start. And this means that another sort of relation must be formulated for the problem at hand, one that traverses the inevitable difficulties of translation.
The obstruction that thwarts analogy makes that specificity plain and becomes the condition for the process of pluralization. Through elaborating a series of such broken or exhausted analogies, the communitarian presumption that we might start with “groups” as our point of departure meets its limit, and then the internally and externally differentiating action of pluralization emerges as a clear alternative. We might try to overcome such “failures” by devising more perfect analogies, hoping that a common ground can be achieved in that way (“multicultural dialogue” with an aim of perfect consensus or intersectional analysis in which every factor is included in the final picture). But such procedures miss the point that plurality implies differentiations that cannot be (and should not be) overcome through ever more robust epistemological accounts or ever more refined analogies. At the same time, the elaboration of rights, especially the right of cohabitation on the earth, emerges as a universal that governs a social ontology that cannot be homogenized. Such a universalizing right has to break up into its nonuniversal conditions; otherwise it fails to be grounded in plurality.
Arendt seeks something other than principles to unify this plurality, and she clearly objects to any effort to divide this plurality, although it is, by definition, internally differentiated. The difference between division and differentiation is clear: it is one thing to repudiate some part of this plurality, to bar admission of that part into the plurality of the human, and to deny place to that portion of humanity. And it is another to recognize the failed analogies by which we have to make our way politically. One suffering is never the same as another. At the same time, any and all suffering by virtue of forcible displacement and statelessness is equally unacceptable.
If, following Benjamin, we are to allow the memory of dispossession to crack the surface of historical amnesia and reorient us toward the unacceptable conditions of refugees across time and context, there must be transposition without analogy, the interruption of one time by another, which is the counternationalist impetus of the messianic in Benjamin’s terms, what some would call a messianic secularism that relates clearly to his work on translation: how does another time break into this time, through what vessel, and through what transposition? One time breaks into another precisely when that former time is a history of oppression at risk of falling into oblivion. This is not the same as the operation of analogy, but neither is it precisely the same as the temporality of trauma. In trauma the past is never over; in historical amnesia the past never was, and that “never was” becomes the condition of the present. One can, of course, claim that unacknowledged histories of oppression can never be part of the past, but continue as spectral dimensions of present time. Of course, that is right. But though there are historical traumas that have this character, what is lost and what is gained by reducing a history of oppression to the discourse of trauma? Although the struggle for the history of the oppressed is surely assisted by the acknowledgment and working through of trauma, sometimes the history of the oppressed continues in the present forms of oppression—one need only consider the recurrent history of land confiscation by the State of Israel. In those cases, it is not just the trauma of the catastrophic displacement of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 that must be documented, but the ongoing practices of land confiscation that make it wrong to relegate such a practice to the past alone.
I have been arguing that the very possibility of ethical relation depends upon a certain condition of dispossession from national modes of belonging. We are outside ourselves, before ourselves, and only in such a mode is there a chance of being for another. In Frames of War I suggested that we are already in the hands of the other before we make any decision about with whom we choose to live. This way of being bound to one another is precisely not a social bond that is entered into through volition and deliberation; it precedes contract, is mired in interdependency, and is often effaced by those forms of social contract that presume and instate an ontology of volitional individuals. Thus, it is even from the start to those who are not readily identifiable as part of “one’s community” that we are bound, the one, or the ones, we never knew, and never chose, whose names may be difficult to remember or pronounce, who live in different lexicons of the everyday. If we accept this sort of ontological condition, then to destroy the other is to destroy my life, that sense of my life that is invariably social life. And this does not mean that, if I destroy the other, the chances are increased that I myself will be destroyed (although this makes good sense as a calculation). The point is rather that this very selfhood is bound up with what we call the Other in ways that do not allow me to differentiate the value of my persistence from the value of the persistence of any others.19 This may be less our common condition, conceived existentially, than our convergent condition—one of proximity, adjacency, up-againstness, being interrupted and constituted by the memory of someone else’s longing and suffering, in spite of oneself—ways of being bound by spatial and temporal relations that articulate the present moment. The co of cohabitation cannot be thought simply as spatial neighborliness: there is no home without adjacency, without a line that demarcates and binds one territory to another and so no way to reside anywhere delimited without the outside defining the space of inhabitation. The co of cohabitation is also the nexus where convergent temporalities articulate present time, not a time in which one history of suffering negates another, but when it remains possible that one history of suffering provides the conditions of attunement to another such history and that whatever connections are made proceed through the difficulty of translation. In sum, cohabitation implies an affirmation that one finds the condition of one’s own life in the life of another where there is dependency and differentiation, proximity and violence; this is what we find in some explicit ways in the relation between territories, such as Israel and Palestine, since they are joined inextricably, without binding contract, without reciprocal agreement, and yet ineluctably. So the question emerges: what obligations are to be derived from this dependency, contiguity, and proximity that now defines each population, which exposes each to the fear of destruction, which, as we know, sometimes incites destructiveness? How are we to understand such bonds, without which neither population can live and survive, and to what postnational obligations do they lead?
Practically, I think none of these views can be dissociated from the critique of the ongoing and violent project of settler colonialism that constitutes political Zionism. To practice remembrance in the Benjaminian sense might lead to a new concept of citizenship, a new constitutional basis for that region, a rethinking of binationalism in light of the racial and religious complexity of both Jewish and Palestinian populations, a radical reorganization of land partitions and illegal property allocations, and even minimally a concept of cultural heterogeneity that extends to the entire population and is protected rather than denied by rights of citizenship. Now one might argue against all these propositions that they are unsuitable to be spoken in public, that they carry too much risk, that equality would be bad for the Jews, that democracy would stoke anti-Semitism, and that cohabitation would threaten Jewish life with destruction. But perhaps such responses are only utterable on the condition that we fail to remember what Jewish means or that we have not thought carefully enough about all the possible permutations of “never again”; after all, remembrance does not restrict itself to my suffering or the suffering of my people alone. The limit on what can be remembered is enforced in the present through what can be said and what can be heard, the limits on the audible and the sensible that contingently constitute any public sphere. For remembrance to break through into that public sphere would be one way for religion, perhaps, to enter into public life. A politics, Jewish and not Jewish and, indeed, not restricted to that binary, indeed extending, as it must, to a field of open differentiation uncontained by the universalization that it supports. This politics might then emerge in the name of remembrance, both from and against dispossession, and in the direction of what may yet be called justice.
HANNAH ARENDT AND THE END OF THE NATION-STATE?
Hannah Arendt has never been easy to categorize and that probably has to do in part with her rather insistent critique of settled categories within her political writings of the 1930s and 1940s. There are a series of divisions that she sought to evade and reconceptualize in her early political thinking. They include, for instance, the ostensible differences between Zionism and assimilationism, Zionism and anti-Semitism, the nation-state and the rights of man, and even the polar positions of left and right within the political spectrum. She was engaged in a very particular kind of critical practice, one that sought to underscore the political paradoxes of the nation-state. For instance: if the nation-state secures the rights of citizens, then surely the nation-state is a necessity; but if the nation-state relies on nationalism and invariably produces massive numbers of stateless people, it clearly needs to be opposed. And: if the nation-state is opposed, then what, if anything, serves as its alternative? Arendt refers variously to modes of “belonging” and to conceptions of the “polity” that are not reducible to the idea of the nation-state. She even refers, in her early writings, to the idea of a “nation” that might be delinked from both statehood and territory. As such we might ask: does she settle on an answer to the question of whether there is an end to the nation-state? Or does she only unsettle a number of assumptions about political life as she tries to approach and evade this problem?
Let us consider two quotations that bring us into a critical encounter with a certain kind of equivocation that marks her political thinking in this domain. She was once asked, are you a conservative? Are you a liberal? And she replied this way: “I don’t know. I really don’t know and I’ve never known. And I suppose I never had such a position. You know the left think that I am conservative, and the conservatives think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say that I couldn’t care less. I don’t think the real questions of this century will get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.”20
The second quotation makes clearer what is at stake in her refusal of a certain kind of positioning of political place and, indeed, with the spectrum of right and left that it is up against. It emerges in the course of a correspondence in 1963 with Gershom Scholem that I cited in chapter 1. It is fairly well-known, but in my view not extremely well understood. The background is that Arendt had taken at least two public positions that irked Scholem. One of them had to do with her critique of the founding of the State of Israel in the late forties and early fifties. But the other was the publication and defense of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963. Her phrase “the banality of evil” enraged many members of the Jewish community who thought that the description refused the exceptional evil at work in the camps and worried that her formulation risked banalizing our understanding of the catastrophic extermination of over six million Jews by the Nazi genocidal regime.
Scholem calls Arendt “heartless” for criticizing the Jewish politics at the time, suggesting that the criticism she leveled had to be read as evidence of a failure of love. Arendt’s text was controversial, of course, on a number of accounts. There were those who thought she misdescribed the relevant history for the trials, including the history of the Jewish resistance under fascism, and those who wanted her to name and analyze Eichmann himself as an emblem of evil. Her account of those trials, however, tries to debunk speculations on psychological motives as relevant to judgments that are in the service of justice. And, though she agreed with the final decision of the Israeli court that Eichmann was guilty and deserved the death penalty, she took issue with the proceedings and with the grounds on which that judgment was finally based. Some objected to her public criticism of the Israeli court, arguing that it was untimely or unseemly to criticize Israeli political institutions. Others wanted her to take the occasion of the trial to level a stronger indictment of anti-Semitism. That she finds Eichmann careerist, confused, and unpredictably “elated” by various renditions of his own infamy failed to satisfy those who sought to find in his motivations the logical culmination of centuries of anti-Semitism reflected in the policies of the Final Solution that sought the full extermination of the Jews.
Arendt refused all these interpretations (including other psychological constructs like “collective guilt”) in order to establish (a) that “one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann,” and if he is in this sense “banal,” he is not for that reason “commonplace” and (b) that accounts of his action on the basis of “deeper explanations” are debatable, but that “what is not debatable is that no judicial procedure would be possible on the basis of them” (EJ, 290).
As mentioned in chapter 1, Scholem continued his criticism by famously impugning Arendt’s own motives, accusing her of coming from the German left and not loving the Jewish people. She responded by remarking that her love was for persons, not people.
Arendt is notably devoid of a certain pathos in her reply, but why? Do we know what it means to say she was a Jew as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument? Was she saying that she was only nominally a Jew: a matter of genetic inheritance or historical legacy or a mixture of the two? Was she saying that she was sociologically in the position of the Jew? In response to Scholem calling her a “daughter of the Jewish people,” Arendt writes, “I have never pretended to be anything else or to be in any way other than I am, and I have never felt tempted in that direction. It would have been like saying that I was a man and not a woman—that is to say, kind of insane” (JW, 466). She goes on to term “being Jewish” an “indisputable fact of my life” and adds: “there is such a thing as a basic gratitude for everything that is as it is; for what has been given and not made; for what is physei and not nomos” (JW, 466). What is remarkable here is that being a woman and a Jew are part of physei and, so, naturally constituted rather than part of any cultural order or cultural practice. But does she overstate the case?
In other words, are such categories given or made, and is there a “making” of what is “given” that complicates the apparent distinction between physei and nomos? One can, after all, refuse those categories, disown Jewishness or change gender, or one can affirm them in a mode of gratitude, as Arendt claims she does. But the very fact that one could be ungrateful or unhappy with either of those particular assigned categories suggests that how one comes to approach the category becomes central to its significance. As a result, an equivocation emerges between physei and nomos, suggesting that it is not always possible to stabilize the distinction between the two. It matters that we understand she is defending herself not in a court of law but in a letter addressed to Scholem, who has, with his own accusation, appointed himself to represent “the Jewish people.” In elaborating the sense in which she is Jewish, Arendt invariably declares and constitutes her Jewishness in a specific way. We can read the letter as one such instance of discursive self-constitution, if you will. In this way, it seems important to consider that in the writing of this letter, as in her publications throughout the thirties and forties, Arendt is presenting herself as a Jew who can take such a stand. It would be difficult to read her response to Scholem as something other than an effort to make sense of, or give a particular construction to, the physei that she is. And if she is doing that, physei is subject to a cultural crafting.
Indeed, one can see in her Jewish Writings that, from the 1930s through the 1960s, Arendt is struggling with what it means to be Jewish without strong religious faith and why it might be important to distinguish, as she does, between the secular and the assimilated Jew. After all, she marks herself as a Jew, even expresses gratitude for that fact of her life and so takes distance from an assimilationist view. Not all forms of secular Jewishness are assimilationist. In an unfinished early piece on “Anti-Semitism” dated around 1939, Arendt argues that both Zionism and assimilationism emerge from a common dogmatism. Whereas assimilationists think that Jews belong to the nations that host them, Zionists think that the Jews must have a nation because every other nation is defined independently of its Jewish minorities. Arendt rebukes them both: “these are both the same shortcoming, and both arise out of a shared Jewish fear of admitting that there are and always have been divergent interests between Jews and segments of the people with whom they live” (JW, 51). For Arendt, the persistence of “divergent interests” does not constitute grounds for either absorption or separation. Both Zionists and assimilationists “retain the charge of foreignness” leveled against the Jews: the assimilationists point to this foreign status and seek to rectify it through gaining entrance into the host nation as full citizens, whereas the Zionists assume that there can be no permanent foreign host for the Jewish people, that anti-Semitism will visit them in any such arrangement, and that only the establishment of a specifically Jewish nation could provide protection and place. Both positions subscribe to a certain logic of the nation that Arendt starts to take apart, first in the 1930s in her investigations into anti-Semitism and the history of the Jews in Europe and then throughout the forties in her published writings in Aufbau, the German Jewish newspaper, on Palestine and Israel, and in her trenchant critique of the nation-state and the production of stateless persons in The Origins of Totalitarianism in the early fifties.
Obviously, it would be an error to read her response to Scholem as an espousal of assimilationism. She was a secular Jew, but that secularity did not eclipse the Jewishness; secularism functioned, rather, as a way of historically specifying that Jewishness and even resisting assimilation. The Jewish form of secularism to which she subscribed is accordingly specific; in her own words, she lived in the wake of a certain lost faith (although in 1935 she praised Martin Buber for renewing Judaism’s religious values). Her experience of German fascism, her own forced emigration to France in the thirties, her escape from the internment camp at Gurs and subsequent emigration to the U.S. in 1941 formed a historically specific perspective on refugees, the stateless, and the transfer and displacement of large numbers of peoples, a position that made her critical of nationalism and its pathos and gave rise to a set of vexed reflections on the status of the nation-state.
That she was not a nationalist does not mean that she was not a Jew: on the contrary, hers was a specific critique of nationalism that emerged, in part, from the historical situation of exile and displacement. For her, this was not exclusively a “Jewish” problem, but we can see that this conclusion emerges from the ability—even the political obligation—to analyze and oppose deportations, population transfers, and statelessness—in ways that refuse a nationalist ethos. On this basis, then, one can make sense of her critique of certain forms of both Zionism and assimilationism. With these considerations on the historical parameters of her Jewishness in mind, let me return to the apparent nominalism of her final remark to Scholem, that she neither “loves” the Jews nor “believes” in them, but merely “belongs” to them “as a matter of course and beyond dispute or argument.” In this sentence, both “love” and “belief” are housed in quotation marks, but I wonder whether it is not also the generality, “the Jews,” to which she objects. After all, she has said she can love no people, only persons (though she once wrote of “the love of the world” as both possible and obligatory). What is wrong with the notion of loving a people? In the late 1930s, Arendt argued that the efforts to “emancipate” the Jews in nineteenth-century Europe were invested less in the fate of “the Jews” than in a certain principle of progress, one requiring that the Jews be thought of as an abstraction: “liberation was to be extended not to Jews one might know or not know, not to the humble peddler or to the lender of large sums of money, but to ‘the Jew in general’” (JW, 62).
Just as there were Jews considered to be exceptional, such as Moses Mendelsohn, who came to stand for “the Jews in general,” so the “Jew” came to stand for the progress of human rights. The abstract Jew required that a distinction be drawn and secured between the exceptional and ordinary Jew. This distinction, in turn, formed the basis of an anti-Semitism that would consistently cast the ordinary Jew as noxious. We might see here a certain formulation in which a progressive enlightenment opposition to anti-Semitism severed the principle from the persons, providing a certain schizoid formation of the anti-Semitic opposition to anti-Semitism. Arendt argued that “the classic form in which the Jewish question was posed in the Enlightenment provides classic anti-Semitism its theoretical basis” (JW, 64).
When Arendt refuses to love “the Jewish people,” she is refusing to form an attachment to an abstraction that has served questionable purposes. Generated by a historical logic that insistently separates the abstract principle, “the Jewish people,” from the living plurality of beings it claims to represent, this version of the Jewish people can only reinforce both anti-Semitism and its wrong-minded opponents. Presumably “the Jewish people” includes those who are lovable and those who are not, most of whom are not known well enough to decide the matter of their lovability. In any case, the idea that love could be sustained for an abstraction called “the Jewish people” presumes a logic that, for Arendt, belongs to the history of anti-Semitism, which is reason enough to refuse the formulation. It is this principle of abstraction that she refuses in refusing Scholem’s language, as well as his nationalism. Scholem’s rebuke is especially problematic here since he is writing from Israel in 1963 and objecting to Arendt’s quite merciless account of the Israeli court procedures at the Eichmann trial. So he is not only accusing her of not loving the Jewish people, but presuming as well that Israel and its courts—and perhaps also its strategies of demonization—legitimately “represent” those people. Effectively, he is excluding the diasporic or non-Zionist Jew—a rather large population that happens to include Arendt herself—from “the Jewish people” in whose name he writes.
Arendt herself is no less complicated. Although she claims in 1963 that being Jewish is simply something given and indisputable, she has earlier opposed those who “loftily declare themselves above ties to nations.” So is Jewishness a fact of existence or a national mode of belonging? She argued as well that if one is attacked as a Jew, one must fight back as a Jew (though she rejected the Sartrean formulation that held that anti-Semitism has produced the Jew). As a result, even if to be a Jew is a matter of physei, it does not sanction assimilation or individualism. But can it imply national belonging? Indeed, she describes the Jews as a nation throughout her writings in the 1930s and ’40s. For Arendt, the key was to think this mode of belonging in a way that refuses nationalism and escapes the bad dialectical logic that spawns abstract idealization, on the one hand, and particularist denigration, on the other, both of which support classical formulations of anti-Semitism. Could Arendt be speaking for the Jews as a nation even when she opposes certain forms of Zionism and nationalism and, eventually, even when she opposes the idea of a Jewish nation-state?
As for Jewish nationalism founded on secular presumptions, she is clearly opposed. This doesn’t mean she wants a polity based on religious grounds either. Any polity considered to be just will have to extend equality to all citizens and to all nationalities: that is in many ways the lesson she learns from opposing German fascism and tracing the recurrent patterns of statelessness in the twentieth century. She worries openly about the devolution of Judaism from a set of religious beliefs into a national political identity. She writes, “those Jews who no longer believe in their God in a traditional way but continue to think of themselves as ‘chosen’ in some fashion or other, can mean by it nothing other than that by nature they are wiser or more rebellious or more salt of the earth. And that would be, twist and turn it as you like, nothing other than a version of racist superstition” (JW, 162). She claims at one point that “our national misery” followed from the “collapse of the Shabbetai Tzevi movement. Ever since then we have proclaimed our existence per se—without any national or usually any religious content—as a thing of value” (JW, 137).22 Although she clearly understands the struggle to survive as indispensable to the twentieth-century fate of the Jews, she finds unacceptable the notion that “survival itself” has trumped ideals of justice, equality, or freedom. A politics committed to these latter norms undercuts those national ties whose realization depends upon and exceeds the matter of survival.
If Arendt opposes assimilation and individualism alike, and voices skepticism toward those who understand themselves to be aloof from all notions of nation, how are we to understand, in her terms, in what sense the Jews are a nation and whether they can be a nation without nationalism and without a nation-state? In the late thirties and early forties Arendt thought that the Jews might become a nation among nations, part of a federated Europe; she imagined that all the European nations who were struggling against fascism could ally with one another and that the Jews might have their own army that would struggle against fascism in alliance with other European armies. She argued then for a nation without territory (typical of early cultural Zionist views) that only makes sense in a federated form, a nation that would be defined by its constitutive plurality. This position would lead her to prefer the proposal of a federated Jewish-Arab state in the place of Israel as a state grounded in Jewish sovereignty. In her view of 1943, “Palestine can be saved as the national homeland of Jews only if it is integrated into a federation” (JW, 195).
In the struggle against German fascism, however, she thought that equality was to be found among the nations struggling for freedom and against fascism. Although this is a secular political solution, she states the rationale for such a political organization through recourse to a religious parable within Judaism. ‘As Jews,” she writes, “we want to fight for the freedom of the Jewish people because “‘if I am not for me—who is for me?’ As Europeans we want to fight for the freedom of Europe, because ‘If I am only for me—who am I?’” (JW, 142). This last question is, as I mentioned earlier, the famous question of Hillel, the Jewish commentator from the first century A.D. Interestingly, she does not use that citation when she writes to Scholem, but is it perhaps there, haunting the response? In countering Scholem, she refuses to offer a religious formulation of her own identity. But here and elsewhere, for instance in her discussion of forgiveness in The Human Condition, she draws upon the Jewish religious tradition to formulate political principles that organize the secular field of politics (this is something other than grounding a secular politics on religious principles). We can perhaps discern the ethical disposition that she finds in Hillel in the words she does use: this “love of the Jews” would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect. I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person. And then again, in “and now this people believes only in itself? What good can come out of that?” She cannot be only for herself, for then who would she be? But if she is not for herself, who will be? However important survival may be, it is not the end of an ethical life. One must be for something other than one’s own persistence, even though, we may assume, one cannot continue to be for anything (and so live ethically) without also persisting. And as a constitutive feature of that persistence, that which she cannot, or will not, deny, is her Jewishness. Hence, we might argue, as Jewish, she must be for something that is not the same as herself.
Arendt’s way of negotiating this site of belonging and obligation to others does not escape a paradoxical formulation. Her response to Scholem does not exactly establish her status as an assimilated Jew, but rather as one whose critical task is to oppose the abstraction of the Jewish people that has supported assimilationism, Zionist nationalism, and anti-Semitism alike. Moreover, she seeks recourse to a sense of belonging to the world of the non-Jew, a belonging that is neither radical identification nor radical differentiation and so at once preserves Jewish difference and resists Jewish identitarianism. The preferred non-Jew she has in mind is, of course, the European, and though she will later make some efforts to think about what “belonging” might mean for Jews and Arabs who inhabit the same land, her views throughout this period are emphatically Eurocentric. “We enter this war as a European people” she insisted in the late 1930s. But this is, of course, to skew the history of Judaism, to marginalize the Sephardim, the Jews from Spain and North Africa, and to write out, once again, Mizrachim, the Jews from Arab countries, or Arab Jews, those who receive brief mention as “Oriental Jews” in Eichmann in Jerusalem.23 Indeed, this presumption about the cultural superiority of Europe pervades much of her later writings and becomes most clear in her intemperate criticisms of Fanon, her debunking of the teaching of Swahili at Berkeley, and her dismissal of the black power movement in the 1960s.24 But perhaps the most dramatic example of her European arrogance is found in a letter she wrote to Karl Jaspers in 1961 during the Eichmann trial; she developed a racist typology of what she saw:
My first impression. On top, the judges, the best of German Jewry. Below them, the persecuting attorneys, Galicians, but still Europeans. Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal types among them. They would follow any order. And outside, the oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country. In addition, and very visible in Jerusalem, the peies and caftan Jews, who make life impossible for all the reasonable people here.25
Clearly, the “reasonable people” are neither religious nor Arab, and her reference to “the oriental mob” makes clear that some part of her objection to Israel has to do with the offensive thought that European Jews would be situated in the Middle East, intermixed with Arab and Sephardic Jews. Arendt’s sense of Jewishness was pervasively European, and though she argued that she could only love persons, not “people” of any kind, it would be interesting to know whether she could nevertheless hate “people”—collectivizing them as she did into “oriental mobs” and the like.26 If European Jews had a purchase on “reasonableness” and those from Arab cultures would “follow any order,” then she unwittingly draws a parallel between Eichmann, whom she also accuses of following any order, and the non-European Jews she encounters at a distance at the Jerusalem trial. Both are outside the presumptive culture of reason, and yet Eichmann is very clearly both German and European.
This possibly unconscious linking of the Arab Jew with Eichmann reveals a serious fault line in Arendt’s thinking. There is a certain kind of Jew she does not like (Arab) and a certain kind of German she does not like (Nazi). If both fall outside the domain of reason and would follow any order out of blind obedience, then neither are properly thinking. Proper thinking appears to belong to that subset of Jew and European who is German Jewish, although probably not exclusively. Arendt’s pervasive Eurocentrism (one that could, following Toqueville, make room for the exemplary character of the American Revolution) can be seen as a continuation of a German Jewish connection articulated most dramatically by Hermann Cohen. His essay, “Deutschtum and Judentum,” published in 1915, made the case that Jews did not really need a homeland, since they belonged essentially to the definition of Europe.27 Cohen’s argument was directed against early versions of Zionism (the First Zionist Congress took place in Basel in 1897). But it also affirmed a faith he had in Europe as the proper, even the safest, place for Jews. Of course, Cohen’s article has become increasingly painful to read over time, since he believed that Germany would protect Jews against anti-Semitism. His essay maintains a tenacious belief that Jewishness and Germanness are interlinked, and that it is not possible to think the one mode of belonging without the other. Obviously, Cohen denied the historical evidence for German anti-Semitism available at the time. But, for him, Europe was not the name for all the sociological phenomena that existed within its territories, but for an ideal, mainly Kantian, that he associated with German ethical philosophy. In fact, his ethical philosophy, associated with the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, tried to reconcile certain notions of social justice, derived from Jewish theological resources, with principles of universality derived from Kant. Cohen argued explicitly for a marriage of German humanism and Jewish messianism, a coupling that he understood to yield “a religion of reason.” Although he saw Germany close its doors to eastern European Jews during the First World War, and publicly opposed it, he continued to pledge allegiance to a culture that showed increasing signs that it would not only fail to protect the Jews but endanger them fundamentally. Cohen died in 1918, so what he actually witnessed was rising anti-Semitism in public discourse and increasingly strict immigration quotas. But it remains painful to consider the pledge he made and thought others should make as well.
Of course, it seems like Zionism wins the day, if we consider Cohen’s tragic embrace of Germany as fatherland as the only alternative. Although that is not the path Arendt finally takes, these two thinkers remain cognate. They both maintain a faith in Europe, indeed a strange sort of Eurocentrism, and an identification of what is best in German culture with Kant’s philosophy. In this context, it is interesting to note that during Hitler’s regime, when Arendt was contributing war journalism in Germany and France (where she lived briefly before leaving for New York City and the New School in 1940), she argued in favor of a Jewish army. She called for a Jewish army that would join the fight against National Socialism, and she imagined that it would work in concert with other European armies—as part of a federated collective. Conceived as a nation, the Jews would fight alongside the noncollaborationist French, Dutch, and the antifascist Italians. On the one hand, it was remarkable that Arendt understood the Jewish people as a nation and, especially, a European nation. And on the other hand, it is interesting to note that even here, or perhaps beginning here, she is trying to elaborate a notion of international resistance and cooperation that was neither Marxist nor based on classically liberal notions of individualism.
One can clearly see how both Arendt and Cohen seek to restrict the idea of Jewishness to what is European, which becomes a way of denying the existence and importance of non-European Jewish traditions. But, most important, both look to Kant as a way of securing the European intellectual connection for a “reasonable” Jewish culture. This will turn out to be important in Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem when she objects to Eichmann allying himself with Kant’s moral philosophy, a topic we will consider in the following chapter.
Scholem’s difficulties with Arendt seem to have nothing to do, however, with her racist views about Jewish demographics in Israel. He is implicitly raising the question of whether her apparent lack of love for the Jewish people could account for her criticisms of the founding of Israel and her refusal to back its claims of Jewish sovereignty in the period 1944–48. The efforts to place her on “the left” may seem understandable in this regard, but whatever resonance there may be with the left is surely only a partial one. We would misunderstand the line she seeks to walk if we accepted that placement too easily. For instance, in the criticism of the nation-state that she supplied in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she is clear that the modern nation-state is bound up, by a kind of necessity, with the production of massive numbers of refugees or stateless persons. On the other hand, she is quick to criticize as useless and impotent those existing forms of international alliance that seek to secure human rights for the stateless. She offers a long catalogue of failed international efforts to articulate, secure, and enforce human rights outside the framework of the nation-state (OT, 267–302). This has led many readers of Arendt to conclude that the nation-state is inevitable and that, if we care about rights, we will seek to establish, build, and protect nation-states that will articulate and secure the basic human rights of all their inhabitants.
Such views, however, fail to take seriously her proposals regarding federated polities, ones that she developed in relation to Europe and Palestine. Accordingly, one can see a highly ambivalent relationship to Zionism as a result. In the 1930s she maintains a significant paradox within her political thinking: she asserts that national belonging is an important value and she maintains that nationalism is a noxious and fatal political formation. In the early forties she supported the Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine, but only on the condition that Jews also fought for recognition as a “nation” within Europe. In 1935 she praised Martin Buber and the socialist project of the kibbutzim, and another year later she warned against thinking that the Jewish occupation of Palestine could ever work as a permanent protection against anti-Semitism. In the early 1940s she wrote several editorials in which she asked that the idea of nation be separated from that of territory. It was on the basis of this view that she defended the proposal for a Jewish army and leveled a strong criticism of the British government’s “equivocal” relation to the Jews, as evidenced by the famous White Paper of 1939 that limited the number of Jewish refugees permitted into Palestine.28 In the late 1930s, though, she also wrote that “the bankruptcy of the Zionist movement caused by the reality of Palestine is at the same time the bankruptcy of autonomous, isolated Jewish politics” (JW, 59). In 1943 she worried that the proposal for a binational state in Palestine could only be maintained by enhancing the reliance of Palestine on Britain and other major powers, including the United States. She sometimes actively worried as well that binationalism could only work to the advantage of the Arab population and to the disadvantage of the Jews. In 1944, in “Zionism Reconsidered,” she argued forcefully that the risks of founding a state on principles of Jewish sovereignty could only augment the problem of statelessness that had become increasingly acute in the wake of the First and Second World Wars (JW, 343–74). By the early 1950s Arendt openly argued that Israel was founded through colonial occupation and with the assistance of superpowers and on the basis of citizenship requirements that were pervasively antidemocratic. If, in the 1930s, she worried about the Jews becoming increasingly stateless, in the late 1940s and early ’50s she was attuned to the displacement of Palestinians and developed a more comprehensive account of statelessness.
In “Zionism Reconsidered” Arendt offers an interesting historical account of the inception of Zionism and its changes in the mid-twentieth century. There she remarks that it is absurd that a Jewish state should be erected in what she calls a “sphere of interest” of the superpowers. Such a state suffers under the “delusion of nationhood,” and, she concludes, “only folly could dictate a policy which trusts a distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the good will of its neighbors” (JW, 372). On the one hand, she is clearly anxious to find ways for Israel/Palestine to survive and actively worries that the foundations for the polity can only lead to ruin. She writes, “if a Jewish commonwealth is obtained in the near future” (with the assistance of American Jews) and “proclaimed against the will of the Arabs and without the support of the Mediterranean peoples, not only financial help but political support will be necessary for a long time to come. And that may turn out to be very troublesome for Jews in this country, who after all have no power to direct the political destinies of the Near East” (JW, 373).
What Arendt objects to in the nation-state is nationalism and its consequence: the forced exile of those nationalities that are not recognized as the one nation expressed by the state. Given that modern states house increasing numbers of nationalities, the conceit of the nation-state can only be a dangerous one, since it seeks to align nation with state through the expulsion of those nationalities that do not conform to the idea of the nation that sanctions the state. In “The Decline of the Rights of Man and the End of the Nation-State” (1951), Arendt argues that the power of totalitarian denationalization could not be countered by a doctrine of human rights and that that doctrine finally functions as a weak instrument. As in her early writings, she finds most of these international accords to be useless. If there is to be a safeguard for rights, it will have to be found within the context of a polity. This polity would have to be something other than the nation-state. If the nation-state is built upon national assumptions that require the expulsion of national minorities, then it produces the acute vulnerability of stateless persons—understood as disenfranchised minorities—to exploitation and violence. Indeed, Arendt gives as the reason for the rise of European fascism the massive increase in stateless peoples after World War I. Nationalism overwhelms the rule of law, and minority populations become subject to denationalization, expulsion, and extermination.29 The rule of law, understood as something that should apply to all people equally, became less important than the will of the nation; at the same time, the nation, defined racially and ethnically, began to treat the stateless as a population to be managed and controlled. The state thus took on a function unregulated by the rule of law, and, in Arendt’s terms, “denationalization became a powerful weapon of totalitarian politics” (OT, 269).
We might say that this is one of the rhetorical aims of denationalization, to show that depriving groups of their citizenship produces a picture of those deprived as essentially inhuman, and this picture of their inhumanness, their status as scum, conversely serves to justify the policy of denationalization. A stateless person is an “outlaw” by definition and so is not “deserving” of legal protection (OT, 283). Arendt is clear that statelessness was not an exclusively Jewish problem, and those who saw it this way failed to understand that the twentieth-century reduction of “German Jews to a nonrecognized minority in Germany,” the subsequent expulsions of the Jews as “stateless people across the borders,” and then the “gathering of them back from everywhere in order to ship them to extermination camps was an eloquent demonstration to the rest of the world how really to ‘liquidate’ all problems concerning minorities and the stateless” (OT, 290). Thus, she continues, bravely, I might add:
After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely by means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problems of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. And what happened in Palestine within the smallest territory and in terms of hundreds of thousands was then repeated in India on a large scale involving millions of people.
(OT, 290)
Although at the time of the Naqba Arendt could not have known that the number of displaced Palestinians possibly exceeded 900,000 and that the population of displaced persons would increase to 3.5 million, she was clear that such expulsions were bound to happen when states were based on principles of national belonging. Thus Arendt controversially insisted that one has to think about this problem of refugees and the stateless as a repeated problem attached to states that are formed on the model of the nation-state. One might well ask what states are like that are not the same as nation-states, whether nation-states can exist without producing the horrendous consequence of massive numbers of stateless minorities, whether the problem is structural or historical, or both.30 After she conducts her searing critique of the nation-state, we are left with no sign of what the state or a polity might be that would be disjoined from the nation and what a nation might be that would be separated off from territory. And yet she offers us a few comments on “federations” that suggest she thought something might come of them. In 1944 Arendt presciently warned that “even a Jewish majority in Palestine—nay, even a transfer of all Palestine Arabs—would not substantially change a situation in which Jews must either ask for protection from an outside power against their neighbors or come to a working agreement with their neighbors.” The alternative, she writes, is that “Jewish interests will clash with those of all other Mediterranean peoples; so that, instead of one ‘tragic conflict’ we shall face tomorrow as many insoluble conflicts as there are Mediterranean nations” (JW, 345).
In 1943 Arendt wrote against the proposal for a binational state then defended by Judah Magnes and Martin Buber. She thought then that their use of the term federation named the nation-state in a different way. She wrote: “The use of the term ‘federation’ kills its new and creative meaning in the germ; it kills the idea that a federation is—in contrast to a nation—made up of different peoples with equal rights” (JW, 336). If she worried in ‘43 that the Jews would be outnumbered and unprotected by their Arab coinhabitants, she revises this view only a year later in “Zionism Reconsidered.” There she offers an extended criticism of the forms of nationalism upon which Zionism draws and which it fortifies and extends. After acknowledging that Jews have little reason to be happy about the decline of the nation-state or of nationalism, she makes the following prediction: “The resurgent problem of how to organize politically will be solved by adopting either the forms of empire or the form of federations.” She continues: “only the latter [federations] would give the Jewish people, together with other small peoples, a reasonably fair chance for survival. The former may not be possible without arousing imperialist passions as a substitute for outdated nationalism, once the motor to set men into action. Heaven help us if that comes to pass” (JW, 371). In 1948, after the UN sanctioning of the State of Israel, Arendt predicts, “even if the Jews were to win the war, its end would find the … achievements of Zionism destroyed.… The ‘victorious’ Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities” (JW, 396). And, during this same year, she returns to Magnes’s position, remarking that partition cannot work, that the best solution is a “federated state.” This trusteeship, she wrote, would be composed of “small local units composed of Jews and Arabs under the command of higher officers from countries that are members of the United Nations and could become an important school for future cooperative self-government” (JW, 400). Such a federation, in her view, “would have the advantage of preventing the establishment of sovereignty whose only sovereign right would be to commit suicide” (JW, 399).
The idea of federation is clearly an alternative to established ideas about sovereignty in relation to the nation-state. That latter concept relies upon a serious error when it yokes two concepts together: the state, which is supposed to preserve a rule of law that would protect anyone and everyone regardless of nationality, and the nation, understood as a mode of belonging that is based on nationality and so makes exclusions on the basis of those who belong and those who do not. For this reason, she opposed the idea that nation-states should have sovereignty, and she opposed as well those versions of federated power that would give each member nation its own sovereign power. The point was not to distribute sovereignty to multiple nations, but to undo sovereignty through a conception of a federated plurality in which law and policy would be made in common. Sovereignty was not to be distributed among smaller “nations” but dispersed into a plurality that would be irreducible to multiple nationalities. Such a federation undoes the notion of sovereignty as unified and ultimate power and requires a deindividualization of the nation, so that it becomes quite literally impossible to conceive of a nation or its actions outside the context of plural and concerted action. National interests are not the same, she claims, as common interests. A federation might constitute a plurality of nations, but no nation could have sovereignty within the context of that polity. In 1951 a nation is, for her, a sphere of belonging, but certainly not the legitimate basis of the state. As a result, Jews can be imagined as a “nation” within a federation (in Europe or in the Middle East), but they would be committed to a form of political life that would demand power sharing, concerted action, the dissolution of sovereignty into plural power, and a commitment to equality across national ties. In this way, Arendt could conceive of the Jews as a nation only as long as that national status did not give them sovereign power to decide with whom to govern the state, that is, a nation without a nation-state, a nation that could constitute a sphere of belonging within a polity structured as a federated plurality.
By the time she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, Arendt was still hammering away at the problem of statelessness, though both the European and the Palestinian version of the federation fell from her vocabulary. In its place emerges an assertion of “common interest,” one that she formulates over and against a human rights framework that remains committed to an individualist ontology. She reviews a litany of failures that marked the history of international accords and human rights declarations, yet it seems clear that she is not altogether done with the Declaration of the Rights of Man. After all, such declarations were evidence of collective deliberations of humans, in the plural, who allocate to themselves these rights and so declare them, announce them, and, through the power of that declaration, institute them as human accomplishments. The idea was that to declare the rights of man was to establish some protection against despotic political regimes. Those declarations cannot be exercised effectively outside the context of a polity grounded in common interests, but are they, then, altogether useless? In the second part of “The Decline of the Nation-State and the Rights of Man,” Arendt outlines what she takes to be essential preconditions for the exercise of any rights at all. And these preconditions include place and political belonging. She writes, “the fundamental deprivation of human rights is manifested first and above all in the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective” (OT, 296). It would follow that in and through this writing Arendt is seeking to rectify the ineffective rhetoric of human rights by laying out the conditions under which political rhetoric can become and remain effective. She is not only presenting the conditions for the exercise of effective discourse, but wielding discourse effectively—or at least trying to. And though she never says how her own rhetoric is linked to the critique of human rights discourse she offers, she effectively displaces that discourse with her own.
What this means for Arendt’s notion of the social meaning of the human is significant. After all, she is suggesting that our efficacy and the true exercise of our freedom does not follow from our individual personhood, but rather from social conditions such as place and political belonging. This is not a matter of finding the human dignity within each person, but of understanding the human as a social being, as one who requires place and community in order to be free, to exercise freedom of thought as opinion, to exercise political action that is efficacious. It also means understanding that the human becomes politically destitute when these conditions are not met. She certainly sounds like a partisan of a doctrine of human rights grounded in an emphatically social ontology (as well as a critic of the nation-state) when she writes, “the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself” (OT, 298). And yet, the question remains: by what means would humanity guarantee such rights? She gives us no answer, though she does seek to supply the norm with which any answer would have to comply.
For Arendt, freedom is not an attribute of individuals, but an exercise and concerted action that is performed by a “we” and which, in the exercise and performance, institutes that “we” as the social condition of rights themselves. Thus, she writes, “our political life rests on the assumption that we can produce equality through organization, because man can act in and change and build a common world, together with his equals and only with his equals” (OT, 301). We would be making a mistake if we were to imagine a group of individuals amassing together as a collection of individual actors. None of those individuals are human unless and until concerted and collective action becomes possible. Indeed, to be human is a function, a feature of acting on terms of equality with other humans. One can hear the echoes of Heidegger’s mitsein, but also some faint resonance of a leftist collectivity that Scholem suspected in his caricature of her politics. If to be human is to be in a relation of equality with others, then no one can become human outside of relations of equality. Does Arendt not ask us to consider that “human being” is a function or effect of this egalitarianism? Indeed, if there is no equality, no one is human. If equality decides the human, than no human can be human alone, but only with others, and only under conditions that sustain a social plurality in equality.31’
It is doubtless important to note that the idea of “belonging” that informs her writing on “the nation” in the thirties and forties seems to slip away by the time the Eichmann trial arrives and plays out on the public stage. The idea of plurality seems to replace the idea of a nation that belongs to no territory and no state and in its commitment to equality resists absorption into nationalism. The irreducible complexity of the Jews as a people makes it difficult to speak for very long about a “nation,” and Arendt turns her attention to forms of living in contestation and difference. If a notion of belonging still worked for her in the forties and early fifties, it seems already to have been displaced by a more antisolidaristic notion of political organization in On Revolution (1962), where she praises the “communal council system” in the French Revolution, understood as a spontaneously organized embrace of the federal principle. Similarly, Madison’s federalism, which retained but subordinated the power of constituent states, drew a legitimating power from the states, but undid their sovereignty through federated authority. In Arendt’s view, “the federal system was the sole alternative to the nation-state principle” in the American Revolution.32
It is difficult to imagine the hopes that Arendt invested in federated power. It was a way to institutionalize an equality that not only undercut national sovereignty, but eventually led her to leave the idea of the “nation” behind. Equality underwrites not only the social ontology of the human, for Arendt, but the political possibility of a postnational federation or a new and more efficacious human rights framework. If the polity that would guarantee rights is not the nation-state, then it would either be a federation in which sovereignty is undone through a distribution of its power or a human rights framework that would be binding on those who collectively produced its terms. The federation is what she imagined, perhaps naively, for the Jews in Europe in the late 1930s—which is why a Jewish army could represent the “nation” of Jews without having either state or territory as the presupposition of nationhood. It was also what she came to imagine in 1948 for Jews and for Palestinians, in spite of the founding of the State of Israel on nationalist premises and claims of Jewish sovereignty. She might be faulted for her naïveté in both instances, but then we would have to account as well for the prescience of her predictions, dire as they were: the recurrence of statelessness and the persistence of violence. If she had no love for the Jewish people, as Scholem claimed, then perhaps it was because, as a Jewish refugee, she took seriously the history of displacement and exile, and it became the basis of her critical commitment to the difficult task of securing rights for the stateless without resurrecting the nation-state and its ritual expulsions. She writes as a Jew concerned with the claims of refuge, and, precisely because she is concerned with those claims, her analysis cannot be restricted to the Jew (“if I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, what am I?”). Rights and justice cannot be restricted to the Jew or to any particular religious or cultural mode of belonging—and this very argument is made on the basis of Jewish thought.
Her critique of German fascism and nationalism led her to a politics centered not on a Jewish homeland but on the rights of the stateless. If this is Jewish, it is diasporic, and though she does not articulate this position in relation to Scholem, perhaps we can nevertheless see it at work in what she wrote. If she argues for home and for belonging, it is not to build a polity on those established ties of fealty, since a polity, to be legitimate, would have to be based on equality. This last is the only safeguard she can see against recurrent statelessness and its sufferings. Although belonging is a requirement of human life, it can never serve as a legitimate basis for a polity. From this vexed paradox, Arendt develops a critical practice that enters and departs from the category of the “Jewish people” as she articulates the discordant and convergent demands of belonging and universality. If she is a Jewish thinker who comes to oppose the dispossessions that afflict any and every minority, then this is a different kind of Jewish pursuit of justice—different from the one that would of necessity find its representation in the Israeli courts. It would be a position that does not universalize the Jew, but makes use of the historical conditions of displacement to oppose the sufferings of statelessness in every circumstance.
Arendt offers a significantly different set of theoretical resources than those who begin their analysis of contemporary politics through recourse to the idea of sovereignty. Instead, Arendt takes statelessness as her point of departure, a condition that is not always formally or actually linked to the problem of sovereignty. Indeed, her federated vision for Palestine sought to overcome statelessness through a deconstitution of sovereign power. Although those proposals formulated in 1946–47 predated her work on the rights of the stateless in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she had already grasped that the repeated and devastating expulsion of populations from the nation-state produces a crisis that requires the rethinking of nationalism and the nation-state. Her insight implied as well that the refugees from Nazi Germany were part of a larger set of historical expulsions that needed to be understood in their specificity and structural similarity. By insisting that statelessness is the recurrent political disaster of the twentieth century (which now takes on new forms in the twenty-first that she could not have predicted), Arendt refuses to give a metaphysical cast to “bare life.” Those who have been dispossessed of rights are actively dispossessed: they are not jettisoned from the polis into an apolitical realm (that is to let the classical idea of the polis decide all political relations). The rightless and stateless are maintained in conditions of political destitution, especially by forms of military power. And, even when their lives are destroyed, those deaths remain political. Indeed, Arendt writes quite clearly in The Origins of Totalitarianism that the ostensible “state of nature” to which displaced and stateless people are reduced is not natural or metaphysical at all, but the name for a specifically political form of destitution.
