Reading Hannah Arendt’s Zionism Reconsidered eighty years after it was written is a strange experience. Some of it feels remarkably prescient. Some of it feels dated. And some of it is fascinating precisely because Arendt was making predictions that, in 1944, seemed perfectly reasonable—and that history would soon overturn.

Arendt wrote the essay while the Holocaust was still taking place and before the State of Israel existed. European Jewry was still the overwhelming demographic center of Jewish life. The British Empire still dominated the Middle East. The European nation-state system, which had already produced one world war and was now producing another, appeared to be collapsing under the weight of nationalism, statelessness, and totalitarianism.

From that vantage point, Arendt’s skepticism about Zionism was not irrational. Indeed, some of her objections were extraordinarily serious. What is striking is how many of the premises underlying those objections were themselves about to disappear.

The result is a peculiar kind of historical conversation: Arendt is often asking exactly the right questions, but the Jewish world that eventually had to answer them was not the world she imagined.

The Zionism Arendt was confronting

Arendt begins with a striking claim about the direction Zionism had taken by 1944. The American Zionist movement had adopted a demand for a Jewish commonwealth encompassing “the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished.” To Arendt, this represented the triumph of what she called the Revisionist program.

But she was not merely objecting to territorial maximalism. She believed Zionism had gradually adopted the political categories of nineteenth-century European nationalism.

She describes Zionism as one of the great European ideologies that had once carried genuine political passion but had now, in her view, “outlived their political conditions.” She places Zionism alongside socialism and nationalism as movements whose original historical circumstances were disappearing.

This is an important key to the entire essay.

Arendt is not simply asking whether a Jewish state would be well governed. She is asking whether the nation-state itself is still the right political form.

And from her perspective in 1944, that was a very reasonable question.

A Jewish future beyond the nation-state

Arendt had watched the multinational empires collapse after the First World War and the successor nation-states struggle with enormous minority populations. She had experienced statelessness herself. She had then watched Nazi Germany demonstrate the catastrophic consequences of defining political belonging in racial and national terms.

From this perspective, Zionism seemed to her to be arriving at exactly the wrong moment.

Why, Arendt effectively asks, should Jews respond to the failures of European nationalism by creating another nation-state?

Instead, she writes that the problem of organizing political life would ultimately be solved by “either the form of empires or the form of federations.” Federations, she argues, might give small peoples a reasonably fair chance of survival.

It was a reasonable question in 1944.

But it turned out to be a bad forecast.

The nation-state did not die.

Instead, the postwar world became even more heavily organized around sovereign states. Decolonization created dozens of new countries. The United Nations institutionalized a world of states. The Soviet Union eventually dissolved into states of its own. Yugoslavia broke apart along national lines. New states continued to appear.

And, in the middle of this process, Israel was created—and survived.

There is something almost ironic about this. Arendt saw the Jewish state as an attempt to revive a political form that history was supposedly leaving behind. Yet the nation-state proved remarkably durable, while the empires and multinational political orders that seemed permanent in her lifetime disappeared.

That does not make Arendt’s analysis useless. Her questions about nationalism, minorities, sovereignty, and statelessness remain important. But the historical experiment went differently than she expected.

Revolution as an alternative to Zionism

One of the most revealing parts of the essay is Arendt’s account of the path not taken. She is sharply critical of the Zionist decision to seek the protection of established powers, especially Britain. Her metaphor of the “lion and the lamb” captures the concern: an alliance with a great power may protect a small people, but the great power ultimately has interests of its own.

Arendt thinks there was another possibility. Rather than seeking to be protected by governments, Jews could have allied themselves with the revolutionary movements transforming Europe. She praises Bernard Lazare, the French Jewish socialist, as essentially the only Zionist who seriously contemplated this path. The choice, as Arendt puts it, was between Jews who would “achieve freedom instead of being transported to freedom.”

That is a beautiful formulation of her political philosophy. It is also where I think her radicalism deserves more scrutiny.

A revolution does not end when the old regime falls. Revolutionaries have to build a coalition capable of overthrowing the existing order, decide what replaces it, construct institutions for the new society, resolve conflicts among competing revolutionaries, and ensure that the new society does not become worse than the old one. That is an extraordinary number of contingencies.

Arendt is very good at identifying the danger of entrusting Jewish security to a great power such as Britain. She writes that “protection by these interests supports a people as the rope supports for hanging.” And Britain eventually demonstrated........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)