A SINGLE STATE SOLUTION
Perhaps the most gifted of Heidegger’s students, Hannah Arendt is best known as one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century. What is perhaps not so well known was her early involvement in the Zionist movement during the 1930’s and 1940’s. Though she helped children escape to Palestine, she herself had little interest in settling there. When she fled Germany in 1933, her destination was Paris, not Jerusalem. When she arrived in Paris, she posed the question to herself: “What can I specifically do as a Jew?” Her answer was to get involved in politically “Jewish work.”
Her searching lead her to Zionism because this movement was alone in bringing Jews into active engagement with the political. With the existential threat of annihilation imminent, Arendt believed Jews needed to affect a shift in perception: they must not only stop seeing themselves as “helpless victims” but also begin to respond constructively. She saw that Jews could no longer rely on the rule of law, or human decency, but must become responsible political actors and defend themselves as Jews when attacked as Jews. To the degree Zionism shared this insight Arendt was a Zionist.
But from the beginning she was critical of those elements of the Zionist movement which were racist and cynically nationalistic. In her most scathing attack, “Zionism Reconsidered” (1944) she lays out a contrast in aims:
"The end result of fifty years of Zionist politics was embodied in the recent resolution of the largest and most influential section of the World Zionist Organization. American Zionists from left to right adopted unanimously, at their last annual convention held in Atlantic City in October 1944, the demand for a “free and democratic Jewish commonwealth…[which] shall embrace the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished.” This is a turning point in Zionist history; for it means that the Revisionist program, so long bitterly repudiated, has proved finally victorious. The Atlantic City resolution goes even a step further than the Biltmore Program (1942), in which the Jewish minority had granted minority rights to the Arab majority. This time the Arabs were simply not mentioned in the resolution, which obviously leaves them the choice between voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship…These aims now seem completely identical with those of the extremists as far as the future political constitution of Palestine is concerned. It is a deadly blow to those Jewish parties in Palestine itself that have tirelessly preached the necessity of an understanding between the Arab and the Jewish peoples."
One thing that is immediately striking is the use of the term revisionist to describe the extremist position that the Jewish state should include the whole of Palestine. The fact that this term is used today to describe “revisionist” accounts of the holocaust is a bitter irony.
But the larger issue alluded to is the complete and total denial of the indigenous Arab population. Arendt was keenly aware that “voluntary emigration” really meant the mass transfer of the Arab population to surrounding countries and the creation of a new stateless people, the Palestinian refugee:
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 problem 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 refugee, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. (Origins of Totalitarianism, 290)
Arendt emphatically argued that a lasting peace would require direct negotiations between Arabs and Jews, and not the imposition of Jewish domination. She attacks the “cynical and deep rooted conviction that all gentiles are anti-semitic, and everybody and everything is against the Jews.” She speaks of this as “plain racist chauvinism,” and claims that the mood of Palestinian Jews is one in which “ terrorism and the growth of totalitarian methods are silently tolerated and secretly applauded.”
On the eve of war in May of 1948, Arendt wrote another critical piece that reiterated her conviction that violence was not inevitable. What is perhaps most prophetic is her speculation concerning what might happen if the Jews did win the war:
"And even if the Jews were to win the war, its end would find the unique possibilities and unique achievements of Zionism in Palestine destroyed. The land that would come into being would be something quite other than the dream of world Jewry, Zionist and non-Zionist. 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. The growth of a Jewish culture would cease to be the concern of the whole people; social experiments would have to be discarded as impractical luxuries; political thought would center around military strategy; economic development would be determined exclusively by the needs of war. And all this would be the fate of a nation that – no matter how many immigrants it could still absorb and how far it extended its boundaries (the whole of Palestine and the Transjordan is the insane Revisionist demand) – would still remain a very small people greatly outnumbered by hostile neighbors."
Source: Long-Sunday