The year 2006 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Hannah Arendt, one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the twentieth century. She was also a Jew, a supporter of Israel, and an outspoken critic of Israeli militarism whose early analysis of the dangers facing a Jewish state that discriminated against Palestinians predicted the current crisis. At the center of Arendt’s critique was an emphasis on cooperation over domination and forgiveness over vengeance. Unfortunately, this ideological legacy has been tainted by slanderous and sexist criticisms of Arendt’s personal integrity and her allegiance to the Jewish people. Today, as Zionism finds itself in its deepest crisis of legitimacy to date, it is appropriate to recall Arendt's contributions to Jewish politics and peace in the Middle East.

Arendt’s Early Affiliations

Although Arendt never joined a Zionist organization, as a young woman she was closely associated with the Zionist movement. Arendt supported the notion of a Jewish homeland, but she had no passion to go there, thinking of herself as European, and of the Jews as a European people. From the 1920s on, Arendt was a close friend of Kurt Blumenfeld, the President of the German Zionist Association.  Just weeks after the Nazis rise to power, she was detained for eight days  for helping Blumenfeld prepare a report on anti-Semitism for an international Zionist Congress.  After fleeing Germany in 1933, Arendt took up a social work position with Youth Aliya in Paris. 

Arendt remained active in Zionist politics all of her life; but she was associated with Brit Shalom—the union of intellectuals centered around Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, and Henrietta Szold—which advocated peaceful co-existence and cooperation in the form of a secular federated state of Jews and Palestinians. Like most other Zionists before World War II, Arendt wanted a Jewish homeland, but not a state for Jews only. Arendt emphasized the potential for cooperation, especially on small projects at the local level, believing that this synergy of cultures would create an economic miracle in Palestine, and establish a model of secular government and religious tolerance for the region.

When the World Zionist Organization called for the creation of Israel as an explicitly Jewish State in 1944, Arendt wrote that this act alone undermined fifty years of cooperative efforts because it signaled to Palestine’s Arab population that the Jews did not intend to share the land.  If Israel was to be a Jewish state instead of a secular federation, she wrote, then inevitably Arabs would be second-class citizens; and if there is anything the Jews should have learned from the example of the Nazis it is the immorality and folly of reducing any group to second-class citizenship.  In essays published in 1945, Arendt argued presciently that as an explicitly Jewish state, Israel would squander its human and capital resources on militarism, that it would be dependent on a foreign power which would be widely disliked in the region, that terrorists would arise to positions of leadership on both sides, and that in the long run some further disaster for the Jewish people might be expected.

Eichmann in Jerusalem

Arendt’s criticism of Israeli policies left her increasingly an outsider in Jewish politics.  The 1963 publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem pushed her further to the margins. A landmark combination of academic and journalistic writing, Eichmann In Jerusalem was a philosophical study of the nature of evil that took as its starting point the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the SS “Jewish Specialist” who orchestrated the brutal transportation of millions to concentration camps. In 1961, Israeli intelligence kidnapped Eichmann in Buenos Aires, smuggled him across international borders, and tried him for crimes against humanity in Jerusalem. 

Arendt covered the trial for the New Yorker, attending many of its sessions and researching it assiduously. In the final analysis, she agreed that Eichmann deserved to be executed, but she did not see him as a monster. More frighteningly, Arendt thought, the trial had shown that the horrors of the Third Reich had been committed by ordinary, small-minded people motivated less by hatred of Jews or blood lust than by the desire to succeed, be good soldiers, and do their duty with intelligence and efficiency. 

Earlier, when Arendt had written Origins of Totalitarianism, she argued that participation in a totalitarian regime involved ideological commitments reinforced by propaganda in the foreground and terror in the background. Upon seeing Eichmann close up, Arendt came to the opposite conclusion: that he might not ever have read Mein Kampf or much of anything else, and that ideology was less central to his Nazi activities than selfishness and thoughtlessness.

Eichmann in Jerusalem also criticized the Jewish leadership in pre-war Europe for its accommodations to the Nazis, and in post-war Israel for its lack of regard for the legitimate human rights of Palestinians.  Essential to Arendt’s argument is the notion that the evil that arises from ordinary human hopes, aspirations, impulses, and emotions may turn up unrecognized anywhere—even among victims, even among Jews, even perhaps in the State of Israel. 

The reaction to Eichmann in Jerusalem from leaders of Jewish and revisionist Zionist organizations was brutal and personal: it was said that Arendt had denigrated the Holocaust as a historical event, and that she, like many German Jews, was more German than Jewish, perhaps even a self-hating Jew and anti-Semite. Influential critics questioned Arendt’s scholarship, judgment, and character, charging that she was more sympathetic to Eichmann than to his victims.  Even Arendt’s long-time friend Gershom Scholem wrote that she had insufficient love for the Jewish people. These condemnations came despite the fact that Arendt did not deny the Holocaust or the magnitude of the harm done, nor the radical nature of totalitarian evil; it was only the motives of perpetrators that she thought might be ordinary.

If it was provocative of Arendt to recognize the banality of Adolf Eichmann, it was even more provocative to criticize the way Israel conducted the trial.  A proper judicial procedure, she wrote, would have to focus on the actual behavior of the defendant whose guilt was to be proven, but the prosecution’s case was not about what Eichmann had done so much as about the suffering of victims.  Arendt felt that Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion’s government had compromised the independence of Israel’s judiciary by staging a show trial to make a political statement: the world still hates and persecutes Jews, who have no alternative but to gather together and fight.

This is the point over which Arendt broke with post-war Zionists. Despite the criticisms against her, she stood her ground calling for Jewish-Arab cooperation and genuine pluralism manifested in the acceptance and appreciation of the other as the only alternatives to continuous war and terrorism.

Arendt was hostile to the mythos of “God’s Chosen People” as being, in its own way, a racist ideal. Preferring political solutions over theological assertions, she objected to any claim to the land based on God’s biblical promises.  In one of Eichmann in Jerusalem’s most controversial passages, she argued that under rabbinical influence, Israeli law prohibited marriage between Jews and non-Jews, thus mandating for Israel the same position on the “mixing of races” as Hitler’s infamous Nuremberg laws.  Arendt opposed the Zionist attitude that all Jews should move to Israel. Taking an entirely contrarian stance towards prevailing discourse on the subject, she expressed a desire for the re-creation of Jewish communities throughout Europe with the liberated countries of Western Europe demonstrating their rejection of fascism and ethnic cleansing through systematic measures to shelter and welcome the return of Jews.  Arendt contended that even those Israeli leaders most committed to peace still did not rise fully to the challenge of building trust and a genuinely egalitarian multi-cultural society.  

The Heidegger Question

In 1982, seven years after Arendt’s death, a new element was added to the discussion of her credibility as a critic of Israeli policy.  Her biographer, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, revealed that in the winter of 1924 and spring of 1925, Arendt had a love affair with philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was later to emerge as a leading National Socialist intellectual. We also know that Arendt reconciled with Heidegger in 1950, when he was still struggling with the disrepute of his Nazi past, and Arendt was approaching her professional zenith. They remained friends for the rest of their lives.

Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in April 1933 just months after Hitler became Chancellor, and was immediately appointed Rektor at Freiburg University, where he abolished the Faculty Senate and instituted a Führer system of governance. During this period, he fired Jewish faculty members, blocked the promotions of anti-Nazis, and made pro-Nazi, pro-Hitler speeches, helping to align the University system with the Nazi regime, and lending intellectual respectability to a band of thugs.

Heidegger distanced himself from the Nazis as early as 1934, but his early embrace of the National Socialist movement was not forgotten.  How, it was asked could Arendt have fallen in love with that Nazi? What might this imply about her moral compass or the credibility of judgments she made about politics or Israel? Arendt’s critics used her relationship with Heidegger to argue that Arendt had a psychologically distorted attraction to Germans and the German way of being, presumably with a parallel and obverse dissatisfaction with her own identity.

This ad hominem argument succeeded insofar as it is now commonplace for academics to speculate as freely on Arendt’s mental condition as on her philosophical positions.  The prominent historian of philosophy Richard Wolin asserts without evidence that Arendt was insensitive to the suffering of the Jewish people because she identified more strongly with the “refined and sublime” German Geist than with her Jewish heritage, and because she had “fallen in love with Martin Heidegger.” In other words, Arendt should not be taken too seriously because a Jewish woman who saw redeeming qualities in Heidegger and problems in Israel must surely be distorted by a pathological hatred of her own Jewish self.

In her 1995 book Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger, Elzbieta Ettinger argues that Heidegger never loved Arendt, but used her for sex when she was young and respectability when she was old, and that Arendt like many abused women was unable to see through a lying, dishonest, manipulative man. Unfortunately, Ettinger ignores a wealth of evidence in Arendt’s letters and diaries (including a wonderful parable about a fox named Heidegger who outsmarts himself) revealing that Arendt did see Heidegger as deceitful and dishonest, but also saw redeeming qualities and genius. 

Was the young Heidegger with whom Arendt fell in love in 1924 already an anti-Semite and a proto-Nazi? There is no credible evidence for this. Heidegger’s closest friend and professional colleague during these years was Karl Jaspers, who was married to a Jewish woman and who was an exponent of pluralism and multiculturalism.  Many of Heidegger’s graduate students were Jewish (including not only Arendt, but also Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, and Herbert Marcuse); indeed, among Heidegger’s academic detractors within the Nazi Party it was later argued that he been too closely associated with “Jews (and) half-Jews.”

It is more plausible that Heidegger was an opportunist than an ardent Nazi; one of the many leading German intellectuals, industrialists, business leaders and politicians who assumed that the Nazis would need people like them to be able to run the country, and that they would rise to positions of prominence and influence from which they might even lead the leader.  

That Heidegger was among those who got on the Nazi bandwagon is not exculpatory.  There is no honor in having made a criminal of one’s self instead of having been born one; but neither Heidegger’s behavior nor that of millions of Germans who were complicit with the regime between 1933 and 1945 could have been predicted by Arendt or anyone else in 1925, or even perhaps as late as 1932. There was a complete estrangement between Arendt and Heidegger from 1933 until 1950.

Arendt’s critics argue that her reconciliation with Heidegger confirmed that she did not comprehend the magnitude of Jewish suffering or the challenges facing Israel because of her alleged pro-German and anti-Jewish bias. The criticism not only is sexist insofar as it suggests that Arendt’s reason and self-interest were overwhelmed by her feminine emotions. It also fails to place Arendt’s reconciliation with Heidegger in the context of her scholarly work, which puts forward a coherent existential philosophy about the human capacity for forgiveness and new beginnings.  

After the war, Arendt’s highest imperative was to work towards a world in which recognition of pluralism as the fundamental human condition would form the basis for peaceful coexistence among peoples.  Vengeance, she felt, could never lead to new beginnings, because it keeps everyone bound to a process of chain reaction.  Forgiving, in contrast, is not a mere reaction, but an unexpected new act that creates new possibilities for the one who is forgiven, and also for the one who forgives.  In an uncertain world (and this includes both Europe and the Middle East) people can never foretell the irreversible consequences of what they do, and it is not possible to undo what has been done.  Only forgiveness and reconciliation have potential to undo the deeds of the past, she wrote, which otherwise hang like Damocles’ sword over every new generation.

Arendt did not argue that the extremities of evil deserve forgiveness, but she distinguished crimes from trespasses. The principal characteristic of a trespass is not necessarily that it does less injury than willed evil, but that it arises from thoughtlessness, from people acting when they “know not what they do.” It is only through constant willingness to change their minds and start again, that people can be trusted with so great a power as to begin something new.

Hannah Arendt was, as Richard J. Bernstein has concluded in his 1996's Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, "a daughter of the Jewish people.” That this would be in question reflects the scope of the slander against Arendt. Besides marginalizing her views on Zionism in theory and practice, personal attacks against Arendt serve to discredit a system of philosophy centered on genuine respect for the other and the transformative value of new beginnings. The ideals Arendt espoused are oppositional—plurality and cooperation set against racism and domination, personal responsibility against social conformity, and reconciliation over vengeance in both the public sphere and private life. Arendt's thought provides clear insight into her behavior.

Recognizing that demands for conformity can turn civilized nations towards genocide, Arendt accepted the necessity for individuals to be openly critical of collective action.  Believing in plurality and the power of new beginnings she supported the reintegration of Germany into Europe and found a way to make peace with a misguided philosopher.  Looking at Arendt's  life through the lens of her moral philosophy,  we see that far from being a self-hating Jew, she was actually a deeply moral person, an advocate for  peace in Israel through collaboration and genuine respect for the other,  and a firm believer in the transformative power of reconciliation.

Hannah Arendt's Responsibility and Judgment, The Promise of Politics and  Essays and Understandings, 1930-1954 were reissued in 2005 by  Shocken Books.