Idith Zertal

A State on Trial:
Hannah Arendt vs.
the State of Israel
WHETHER SHE LIKED IT OR NOT, ARENDT WAS AN EXCEPTIONAL WOMAN
in her own way, as much as she was, apparently, malgre elle, an "excep-
tion Jewess."^ And equipped precisely v^dth both just qualities and repu-
tations she burst into the national classroom to wreak havoc as Israel's
mythical founder and political leader, David Ben-Gurion, was holding
his last great national undertaking, the Eichmann trial. Indeed, when
she came to Jerusalem to cover the trial for The New Yorker, everything
about her was exceptional: she was an utterly independent, critical intel-
lectual acting vwthin a tightly structured pohtical space; a prominent
woman scholar in a discipline reserved at the time exclusively for men.
She was also an exilic Jewess who was perceived as having intruded
into a highly national, cathartic Israeli event; a sole elderly woman who
positioned herself fi-om the outset in defiance of the young nationalist-
coUectivist state that was celebrating its statehood and sovereignty by
means of the trial. ,
What I intend to focus on in this essay is Arendt's challenge to the
political, nationalist character of the organized event of which she was
one of the protagonistsif only as a side actor, a close-range observer;
or more generally her open, public defiance of the Ben-Gurionian "king-
dom" (it is no accident that Ben-Gurion's etatism got the Hebrew term
Mamlachtiut, a mixture of kingship and royalism) and its practices. And
through the slits of her criticism of the way the trial was conducted and
social research Voi 74 : No 4 : Winter 2007 1127
of the state institutions that performed it, one could perceive, I believe,
her older and more conceptual consideration of the European kind
of nation-state, namely her profound hostihty toward and mistrust of
the concept and practice of the nation-state in particular and national
sovereignty in general.
The nation-state, according to the European model as adopted
by the Jewish state, meant for Arendt a state not only subordinated
to the idea of the nation but which was actually "conquered" by the
nation: a state with a ruling homogeneous population unified by
common history, language, culture, memories, and traditions; a state
that marginalizes, discriminates, and acts to the effective exclusion of
ethnic minorities. "In the name of the vwll of the people the state was
forced to recognize only 'nationals' as citizens, to grant full civil and
political rights only to those who belonged to the national community
by right of origin and fact of birth," Arendt wrote in her master work
on totalitarianism (Arendt, 1968:230). But more important even for the
present argument was the perception and mobilization by the ruling
population and state institutions of the law and the entire legal system
exclusively in the service of the nation, and not in the service of the
entire citizenry. The meaning of this, she wrote, was "that the state
was partly transformed from an instrument of law into an instrument
of the nation" (Arendt, 1968: 230).^ Furthermore, according to Arendt,
the one-party dictatorship was lurking not far from the multiparty
system of the nation-state, and was "only the last stage in the devel-
opment of the nation-state in general and of the multiparty system
in particular," as she would vwite (Arendt, 1963b: 265-266). Thus, the
nation-state presented a political case always pregnant wath the most
disastrous form of political government in modem times, the one she
studied thoroughly in The Origins ofTotalitarianism. It is noteworthy that
the Israel of the early 1960s, when the trial was held in Jerusalemstill
under the spell of the authoritarian rule of Ben-Gurion and with the
prevaihng cult of national unity and unanimity she had dreaded since
the inception of statehoodrepresented for her the potential danger of
sliding dovm the slope toward a totahtarian regime.^
1128 social research
JUDGING ISRAEL
The challenging and judging of the state of Israel while it was imple-
menting the highly s5Tnbolic act of putting on trial the Nazi arch-
criminal was performed by Arendt in a series of public acts: first as the
figureor in the disguiseof the observer that she took upon herself
throughout the trial itself, then as the writer of the report of the trial,
and finally as an active participant in the controversy her report raised.
In doihg so she consciously acted as the Jewish pariah who embodied
the conscious outcast qualities.^ With regard to the trial and the pros-
ecuting bodyIsraelshe acted as an analyst as well as a survivor of
Jewish history, and as a feminine and perpetual refugee figure within
the context of the nation-state's patriarchal-masculine self-image and
public display of sovereignty, authority, and control.^
Surely, she came to Jerusalem not to submerge herself into
the unified, embracing togetherness that the trial melted out of the
pell-mell of diasporas, cultures, languages, and political faiths that
comprised the Israeli society; neither was she inclined to assimilate
herself into the hegemonic discourse of power that the spokespersons
of the trial yielded. She brought with her the erudition that has made
her name, her strong ideas, her diasporic qualities, her self-inflicted
marginality, and her universality, as well as her idiosyncratic, powerful
language that "tries to speak the truth to power," to borrow Edward
Said's words on the intellectual (Said, 1996: xvi). And in choosing to
go to Jerusalem and in reporting on the trial she took, consciously, the
vantage point of the rebellious outsider who already assumes, in a kind
of foresight, the role of the outcast. What she most expected from the
trial was a sober, stem analysis of the central, moral, legal, and politi-
cal phenomenon of the century, not the collective, self-indulging bath-
ing in the redemptive narrative yielded by the Israeli powers. And she
expressed her foreknovm impatient frustration clearly and loudly in
whatever tools she could master.
Arendt prepared herself to go to Israel with great expectations
and deep fears. As was ofren written and said, she believed that this
was going to be the last major trial of a Nazi major criminal. "I would
Arendt vs. the State of Israel 1129
never be able to forgive myself if I didn't go and look at this walking
disaster face-to-face in all his bizarre vacuousness," she wrote to the
German philosopher Karl Jaspers (Arendt-Jaspers [12/2/1960], 1992:
409-410). She also considered going to Jerusalem both an "obligation"
she owed to her own history and even some sort of a belated healing
of this traumatic past, something she apparently experienced from
the beginning of the trial, and more so while she was writing her
report (Arendt to Vassar College [1/2/1961], quoted in Young-Bruehl,
1982: 329; Arendt-Bluecher [4/15/1961], 2000: 355). To her friend Mary
McCarthy she wrote: "I have never admittednamely that I wrote
this book in a curious state of euphoria. And that ever since I did
it, I feelafter twenty years [since the war]lighthearted about the
whole matter" (for the healing effect see Arendt and McCarthy, 1995:
168).^
She claimed as well, against the judgment of her best friends
and colleagues, that Israel had the right to speak for the victims,
because "the larger majority of them (300,000) are living in Israel now
as citizens," and thus the trial will be held "in the country in which
the injured parties and those who happened to survive are" and that
for the sake of these victims "Palestine became Israel" (Arendt-Jaspers
[12/23/1960], 1992: 417). She recognized Israel's right to put Eichmann
on trial, if only for the reason that "Eichamnn was responsible for
Jews and Jews only, regardless of their nationality," and also for
want of any other, theoretically or legally more suitable framework
(Arendt-Jaspers [12/23/1960], 1992: 417). "Israel is the only political
entity we have. I don't particularly like it but then there's not much
I can do about that," she said (Arendt-Jaspers [12/23/1960], 1992: 415).
Furthermore, and perhaps more than anything else, the philosophi-
cal aporia the trial represented for hermeaning that the issue at
stake (Eichmann's own as well as the Nazi dictatorship's enormous
crimes) could not be adequately represented either in legal or politi-
cal terms, and that it was "in the nature of the case" that there were
no other tools except legal ones with which one had to judge this
legally and politically unrepresentable "something"was for her a
1130 social research
source of great intellectual "excitement" (Arendt-Jaspers [12/23/1960],
1992: 417).8
Yet at the same time she deeply dreaded the event, the form and
dimensions it was taking, even before it started. In the knowledgeable,
feverish correspondence between her and Jaspers during the months
that preceded the trial, they discussed at length the nefarious aspects
and displacements that the much revered public stage in the cloak
of a proper legal procedure might expose. They were both aware and
critical of the political purposes of the trial, its propagandist aims,
the transference of the totally immeasurable and incomparable Nazi
crimes on to the Middle East reality, and the context of the Arab-Israeli
conflict.^ Arendt expressed her fears that precisely the possible impec-
cability of the legal procedures of the trial, for which she was hoping
wholeheartedly, would enable Eichmann to prove that no country
wanted the Jews, "just the kind of Zionist propaganda that Ben-Gurion
wants and that I consider a disaster," and would also demonstrate to
what "a huge degree the Jews helped organize their own destruction"
(Arendt-Jaspers [12/23/1960,1992: 417). This was "the naked truth," she
wrote to Jaspers, "but if not rightly explained, it could stir up more
anti-Semitism" than anything else related to the affair (Arendt-Jaspers
[12/23/1960,1992: 417).
HYSTERICAL ATMOSPHERE
Another, rather unexpected matter worried and intrigued Arendt while
she was preparing herself to go to Israel. Unexpected because she was
the only one to have mentioned it, and even in recent studies of the
trial the matter has not received the attention it deserves, if indeed it
has received any. I refer here to the allusion in one of her letters to what
was known in Israel as the "Lavon affair." Her reference to the "affair"
is svdft, short, not detailed, and extremely harsh. She presents the issue
to Jaspers as no less than a "second Dreyfus affair in its structure," and
goes on to say that the Lavon affair is about "what a clique does," or can
do, such as blaming "someone who doesn't belong to the clique in order
to cover up the methods it uses itself." The whole affair, she added.
Hannah Arendt vs. the State of Israel 1131
shows how rotten this state is and what a dangerous 'idealist'
this Mr. Gurion [sic] is, who is of course ultimately respon-
sible for the whole business. You will say that this has noth-
ing to do with the Eichmann trial. I'm not so sure, because
the Lavon affair has created the atmosphere in the coun-
try. And to conduct this trial in such an atmosphere. . . .
(Arendt-Jaspers [2/5/1961], 1992: 423; emphasis mine).!"
It was Jaspers who tried in his response to make some sense
out of this Arendtian outburst, but to no avail. Admitting that the
whole thing was "entirely new" to him, he wondered if it was not the
Histadrut, the Labor movement's social-economic-industrial-trade
union huge conglomerate that, while being the infrastructure of the
political power of Ben-Gurion's ruling Mapai party, had nevertheless
become a sort of "a state within the state" and, now headed by Pinhas
Lavon, could be perceived as a political threat to Ben-Gurion's hith-
erto unquestioned prominence (Arendt-Jaspers [2/14/1961], 1992: 425).
"For years now I have had a prejudice against the Histadrut and for
Ben-Gurion (although I in no way approve of his conception of Israel),"
wrote Jaspers (Arendt-Jaspers [2/14/1961], 1992: 425). Yet the Histadrut,
another original creation of Ben-Gurion (in 1920, as part of his nation-
and political force-building in Palestine), and its autonomous power
was just the pretext for the affair. Its real, hidden demon was the grow-
ing military-security establishment which, together wdth the army was
already in the process of swallovwng the Israeh state altogether.
All the necessary ingredients converged into this affair: espionage,
sabotage, executions, suicides, political and personal power-struggles,
the military acting on its own and in defiance of state institutions, false
accusations, forged signatures and documents, perjuries, the shattering
of the entire ruling political establishment in Israel, and on top of this,
a paradigmatic victim, a S5mibolic scapegoat who did not belong to the
"chque" and thus had to bear the burden. A short diversion is needed
here, to recount even if in a brief way the details of an extraordinarily
1132 sociai research
complex affair that poisoned Israel's politics for many years and was in
a way its emblem.
In July 1954, while Britain was preparing to evacuate its forces
from the Suez Canal zone, and President Gamal Abdel Nasser's new
regime was planning to nationalize the zone as part of its struggle
for independence, a series of terrorist acts shook up Eg3^t. American
libraries and information centers in Alexandria and Cairo and cinemas
and a post office in Cairo were the targets. Later it became known that
the climax of the scheme was to detonate bombs simultaneously in
different public places in Cairo on July 23, the anniversary day of the
Free Officers' revolution. But one of the devices carried by a member
of the terrorist group started to emit smoke; the man was caught, and
his capture led to the round up of the whole ring. On October 5, the
Eg5^tian minister of the interior announced the breakup of an Israeli
terrorist and spy ring. Two months later the suspects were brought to
trial. Israel's pohtical estabhshment and the press were outraged and
indignant, crjdng out "anti-Semitism!" Prime Minister Moshe Sharett
declared at the Knesset that a "wicked plot [was] hatched in Alexandria,"
argued that it was a "show trial," and spoke of "false accusations of
imaginary crimes against innocent Jews" {Jerusalem Post, December 12,
1954). The Labor daily Davar claimed that the Egyptian regime "seems
to have taken its inspiration from the Nazis" (Davar, December 13,1954)
and Haaretz v^rote about "fantastic accusations" used by the Eg5^tian
"military junta" as "diversions" {Haaretz, December 13,1954).
The operation itself, mounted and cleared by the head of Military
Intelligence, Colonel Binyamin Gibli, was meant to fake anti-British
and anti-American incidents, to make it plain to the Western powers
that the Nasserite regime could not be trusted to respect and protect
Western interests and facilities. The whole scheme was kept top secret,
under strict censorship, so much so that even Gibli's direct boss at
the time. Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon, and Israel's prime minister,
Moshe Sharett, knew nothing of it. All of the accused, except for one
Israeli agent who committed suicide in his prison cell, were young
Egyptian Jews, ardent Zionists, who had been recruited for the opera-
Hannah Arendt vs. the State of israei 1133
tion. Eventually two of them were executed for high treason; the others
were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment and "forgotten" by the
Israeli establishment that tried for years to distance itself from this
"mishap"the euphemistic name given to the operation in Eg5^tof
which these Zionist, Egyptian Jews were the living admonition. Only
years later, within the Israeli-Egj^tian exchange of prisoners of war in
the wake of the 1967 war, were they to be liberated and sent to Israel.
For years, under heavy censorship that prevented the Israelis
from knowing anything of what has happened in Egj^t, Pinhas Lavon
fought for his innocence, claiming that the order for the failed oper-
ation was not his. Colonel Gibli, on the other hand, swore to have
received the order directly from Lavon, at his home. Gibli was member
of a powerful group within the Defense Ministry, headed at the time by
the moderate Prime Minister Sharett. which often acted independently,
and in open defiance of the cabinet. This was not the only case. Most of
the Israeli "reprisal campaigns" in Arab territories, the Kibbya massa-
cre among them," were conducted by military units without the prior
knowledge, much less the approval of the cabinet. Leading members in
this group were Moshe Dayan, then Israel Defense Force (IDF) chief of
operations and later chief of staff; Shimon Peres, the general director of
the Defense Ministry; and others, all of them Ben-Gurion's proteges and
young allies, who perpetuated his hard-line, "activist" policies while
he was temporarily resting at his retreat in the desert. To make things
more complex, Lavon himself was no saint either. "A brilliant mind in a
foul soul" as one of his colleagues described him, Lavon was known as a
moderate, even close to pacifism up to the moment Ben-Gurion handed
him the defense portfolio. Fascinated and apparently intoxicated by the
boundless power-machine he found at his command, he lost control
and was continually dreaming up schemes to use this formidable force
in order to expand Israel's territory, invade neighboring countries, and
crush once and for all Arab's will to annihilate Israel.^^ Lavon did not
give the order for the operation in Egypt, but he created the precondi-
tions that made this kind of operation possible and even welcome.
The affair came to light in September 1960, when evidence of
forgeries emerged almost fortuitously during a trial only loosely related
1134 social research
to the affair. Lavon, then head of the Histadrut, demanded that Prime
Minister Ben-Gurion personally clear his name. Ben-Gurion refused,
claiming he was not a judge. Dayan and Peres attacked Lavon for blas-
pheming the army. In December 1960, the Israeli cabinet exonerated
Lavon, against its prime minister's position, of all guilt in the "disas-
trous security adventure in Egypt." The attorney general found "conclu-
sive evidence of forgeries and false testimonies in earlier inquiries" (New
York Times, February 10, 1961). Yet Ben-Gurion continued to demand
Lavon's head. Both resigned from their respective offices. Israeli soci-
ety broke into two camps, the Lavonards against the Ben-Gurionards.
Demonstrations and petitions were the order of the day. On January 11,
1961, an assembly of 200 leading intellectuals and Hebrew University
professors declared that Ben-Gurion represented a real danger to
Israel's democracy and accused him of creating a hysterical, irrational
atmosphere in the country in order to impose his views and dictato-
rial policies. The affair rocked the ruhng estabhshment. Feuding public
opinions forced new elections and contributed largely to Ben-Gurion's
eventual dechne and final retreat from public hfe."
We do not know Arendt's sources of information with regard to
the affair. Articles in foreign press were more abundant and detailed
than the information available in Israel. Arendt's knowledge of the
crisis, the details of which were censored and tightly kept as state
secrets, with scant information emerging, is further proof of her close
and anxious observation of and concern for Israel's unfolding history,
and of her despair in face of that "tradition of the nation-state" to
identify power "with the monopoly of the means of violence" (Arendt,
1963b: 256) that led to the use of doubtful military means for settling
political issues. The fact that she was intuitively able to compare this
afFair vdth the Dreyfus affair was revealing of her deep disillusion with
regard to Israel before the trial even started. The older affair, about
which she vwote at length in The Origins of Totalitarianism, represented
for her among other things the ominous convergence of a corrupt
parhament, "the dry rot" of a cohapsing society, and the state function-
aries' lust for power (Arendt, 1942: 200). Talking now about the Lavon
affair and its connection to the coming trial, she used almost the same
Hannah Arendt vs. the State of Israel 1135
words, equating it with the crisis that shattered the very foundations of
the French republic at the end of the nineteenth century.
"I dread the hysterical atmosphere I'll be going into in Israel," she
wrote to Jaspers just before taking her flight, and quoted an Israeh diplo-
mat, "a decent, intelligent man," who publicly said that if Eichmann
were not to be executed, it "would cost significantly more lives; there
wouldn't be a village in Israel where heavy rioting won't break out
immediately!" (Arendt-Jaspers [3/27/1961], 1992: 430-431). Thirteen
years earlier she wrote that "mass unanimity is not the result of agree-
ment, but an expression of fanaticism and hysteria Unanimity does
not stop at certain well-defined objects, but spreads like an infection
into every related issue" (Arendt, 1978b: 182; 2007: 392). Later, after
having been in the country for some time and having v^dtnessed the
early legal procedures at Bet Ha'am (the People's Hall, the newly built
auditorium in Jerusalem where the trial was being held), she remarked,
in yet another display of what could be deemed as a hasty judgment,
that "the country's interest in the trial has been artificially whetted"
(Arendt-Jaspers [4/13/1961], 1992: 435).^"
The correspondence between Arendt and Jaspers regarding the
trial simmered with the thrill of the moment as well as deep appre-
hensions, a testimony among other things to the formidable grip of
the historical event on the correspondents' lives and consciousnesses.
Both, each in her or his own way, were profoundly shaped and condi-
tioned by this event, and both, despite their basic, pungent criticism,
were hoping for a kind of transcendence in the unfolding of things, for
the simple, rare grandeur needed in order to grasp the enormity and
uniqueness of the event. "That this [establishing of historical facts and
serving as a reminder of those facts for humanity, hearing of vdtnesses
to history, and collecting of documents] is being done in the guise of a
trial is, granted, unavoidable," wrote Jaspers to Arendt.
But it is shot through with incorrect attitudes, because of
everything connected with it. . . . What I fear, too, is that
remarkably intelligent reflections, complicated discus-
sions that lead off into limitless fields, and a lack of simplic-
1136 social research
ity will not let the human greatness needed to deal with
such facts emerge. What is needed is the spirit of the great
old prophets^Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiahbut that can't be
expected from Jewish orthodoxy, from Jewish total assimi-
lation into modern nationalism (and from the abandon-
nient of the Jews for the sake of the Israelis) (Arendt-Jaspers
[12/12/1960], 1992:
For Arendt, the epistolar exchange vdth her mentor and friend
served also as a sort of intimate workshop, where she could examine
and sharpen again and again her ideas concerning the very ability to
judge the Final Solution and the proper legal frame to deal with the new
concept of crimes against humanity, with the totalitarian man, nation-
alism, Jewish response during and after the Judeocide, Zionism, and
Israel. She was also probing, groping for her ovra, precise positioning
vis-a-vis the trial: how should she proceed, would she act as a witness of
Nazism although not a direct survivor of its crimes, as a critical scholar,
a detached observer, a mere reporter? In response to her correspon-
dent's worries for her because of the political and the propagandist
character the trial was apparently going to take and because he knew
so well her temperament so well,^^ she promised that she was going to
Israel "as a simple reporter.... That means that I bear no responsibil-
ity whatsoever for what goes on." As a reporter, she added, "I have the
right to criticize their reasoning but not to make suggestions to them.
If I wanted to do that, a reporter is the last thing I could be. How great
a distance I want to put between myself and these very questions you
can judge from the fact that I will be reporting for a non-Jewish publica-
tion" (Arendt-Jaspers [12/23/1960], 1992: 417-418).
She should have known herself better than that. Not for a
moment was she a distanced observer or a simple reporter while in
Israel, whether in the courtroom or out of it. People who were pres-
ent in the courtroom stiU remembered in 1999 her agitated behavior,
her incessant, rather loud remarks during the legal proceedings.^^
This frenzied commitment to her preconceived attitudes is echoed in
both her later written report on the trial and in her immediate letters
Hannah Arendt vs. the State of israei 1137
to Jaspers and to her husband Heinrich Bluecher. In the wake of the
trial's first week, she wrote to Bluecher that the "whole thing is so
damned banal and indescribably low and repulsive" (Arendt-Bluecher
[4/20/1961], 2000: 357).i While she gradually changed her mind about
the proceedings, thanks particularly to the admirable way she felt the
judges were handling them, and after having heard some of the testi-
monies, she never budged from her initial disdain for the prosecutor.
In his personality, his shallow, too easy theatricality, his pomposity and
diligent observance of what she believed were the instructions of the
stage director of the whole organized manifestationBen-Gurionshe
saw the unbearable mixture of national narcissism on the one hand
and servility on the other, of "ghetto mentality, with tanks and military
parades" (Arendt-Bluecher [4/20/1961], 2000: 358).
What she saw of Israel outside the court or what she allowed
herself to see, despaired her no less. The special blend of romantic
nationalism and militarism she already foresaw in her texts from the
late 1940s on Palestinian Zionism was tangible and resonating in the
Israeli reality. At least this is what her necessarily selective critical gaze
had caught and recorded. The proximity in time of the trial with Israel's
thirteenth independence day {Bar Mitzvanamely, the age of a boy's
celebrated initiation to manhood) endowed both events with heavy
sjmibolism. The military parade had become Israel's central annual
display of regained statehood and power was for her both ominous
and farcical. "There was a big tankparade here today, which I didn't go
to see," she wrote to Bluecher. She was also deterred by the vision of
young Israelis sitting around campfires, the essence of the new Israehty
at the time that had been cultivated in the ranks of the Palmach (the
"Striking Forces" of the Yishuv prior to the establishment of the state),
and singing "sentimental songs, just as we knew it and hated it when
we were young," she wrote. "The parallels are fatal, particularly in
the details" (Arendt-Bluecher [4/20/1961], 2000: 357). Her remarks in
a letter to Jaspers about the Israeli police and crowd were even more
screeching for their racist overtones, and their not-so-subliminal allu-
sions to what the whole trial was about, as well as about totahtarianism
in general. "Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the
1138 social research
creeps, speaks only Hebrew, and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal
types among them. They would obey any order. And outside the doors,
the oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic
country" (Arendt-Jaspers [4/13/1961], 1996:435; emphasis
FORTRESS IN VIGILANCE
Right from the beginning of her report she launches her defiance.
The Bet Ha'am auditorium where the trial is held, with its orchestra
and gallery, with proscenium and stage and side doors for the actors'
entrance, "is not a bad place for the show trial David Ben-Gurion, Prime
Minister of Israel, had in mind.. ." (Arendt, 1963a: 4).^" The audience
of this show "was to be the world," and the play was to be "the huge
panorama of Jevdsh suffering" (Arendt, 1963a: 8). The high fences that
surrounded the site of the trial, the heavily armed pohce that guarded
the premises "from roof to cellar," and the meticulous frisking of the
public at the gates of the auditorium transformed into a courthouse,
all of which Arendt took special care to depict in detail, enhanced the
impression of a fortress in vigilance (Arendt, 1963a: 4). The attorney
general, Gideon Hausner, is for her his master's voice, namely the voice
of Ben-Gurion, "the invisible stage manager of the proceedings" (Arendt,
1963a: 5). Representing the government, "[the attorney general] does
his best, his very best, to obey his master," she writes in contempt
(Arendt, 1963a: 5). And if "his best ofren turns not to be good enough,"
it is because the judges serve justice "as faithfully as Mr. Hausner serves
the State of Israel" (Arendt, 1963a: 5).
While Arendt was focusing on the nonlegal aspects of the trial
and its orchestrated character of a grand show, she was unaware of a
step taken by the Israeli government to ensure that the show would
go on regardless of the circumstances might be. Just a few months
before the trial opened, the government submitted to the Knesset
a bill amending the Courts (Offenses Punishable by Death) Law. The
amended law suggested major changes in trials whose only possible
verdict was the death penalty. According to the Israeh legal procedure,
which adopted British tradition, a defendant who pleaded guilty was
automatically convicted, and the court could only debate the sentence.
Hannah Arendt vs. the State of Israel 1139
Yet the state would not aUow itself to let Eichmann set the rules of the
coming trial by pleading guilty. In order to prevent the trial from being
cut short before it achieved its educational and political effect, the new
law, unofficially called "the Eichmann Law," stated that "in case the
accused pleads guilty as charged, the court may continue the proceed-
ings as if the accused had not pleaded guilty." The bill was passed in an
especially swift process.^^
Furthermore, Arendt was apparently innocent of any knowledge
of what the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote Mdth regard
to the coming trial. His comments were much more radical than any
of Arendt's utterances concerning the pedagogic-propagandist char-
acter of the event. Yet they came from an authoritative male voice in
the field of the history of Nazism, and they were undoubtedly echo-
ing Ben-Gurion's own views, sometimes replicating them verbatim.
They were then immediately translated into Hebrew, and universally
accepted, while Arendt's words unleashed a memorable, fierce contro-
versy.^2 "To Mr. Ben-Gurion, Eichmann is a symbol, and his trial is to be
symbolic..." Trevor-Roper vwote on the eve of trial. "It will commemo-
rate at its highest crisis the struggle which has lasted ah Mr. Ben-Gurion's
own lifetime and out of which the present State of Israel was born."
That way the Holocaust was represented as a necessary, indeed crucial
phase in a teleological process that brought about the state of Israel.
Moreover, as Trevor-Roper put it, in guiding the campaign that swept
Eichmann to Israel and by organizing the trial almost single-handedly,
Ben-Gurion "re-created, for a time at least, his own original image as
the Joshua who finally established his people in their Promised Land"
(Trevor-Roper, 1961). For Ben-Gurion, wrote Trevor-Roper,
the trial is not so much [about] the punishment of a particu-
larly odious criminal as [it is about] the exposure of a socred
experience in the history of Israel.... [Thus] if long enough
to prove justice, [the trial] may be too long to be effective as
propaganda: the solemn act of historical vindication may be
submerged in legal questions of procedure or competence
(Trevor-Roper, 1961; emphasis
1140 social research
SURVIVOR AMONG SURVIVORS
Back in the courtroom, Arendt chose to position herself in the audience
with "survivors,"
middle-aged and elderly people, immigrants from Europe,
like myself, who knew by heart all there was to know, and
who were in no mood to learn any lessons and certainly did
not need this trial to draw their own conclusions. As witness
followed witness and horror was piled upon horror, they
sat there and listened in public to stories they would hardly
have been able to endure in private, when they would have
had to face the storyteller (Arendt, 1963a: 8).^''
The fact that she positioned herself amid the survivors, those exilic
Jews who were the direct bearers of the memories of the catastrophe,
is loaded vdth meaning. In the context of the staged display of national
sovereignty and authority, concerned with the national lessons of
the catastrophe more than with the meaning of the unprecedented
catastrophe itself, this spatial choice could be read as an act of mark-
ing her territory and claiming her alignment, already thrusting her
direct challenge at the discourse of the "state." Hence the prosecutor's
rhetorical, repeated question presented to the survivor witnesses
"why did not you rebel?"enraged her not just because it served, so
she thought, as a smokescreen camouflaging the more vital question
that of the Jewish cooperation with their persecutors (Arendt, 1963a:
124-125)but because rebellion was for her utterly impossible under
the Nazi murderous terror and thus the realm of the very few and the
very young (Arendt, 1963a: 123). She never saw the Jevwsh masses in the
diaspora as an anonjmious, passive object with no will of their OV^TI the
way activist, statist Zionism did. And unlike her critics she explicitly
took their side, whether they were victims of the great massacre or
its survivors. The prosecutor's questions reflected for her the state's
haughty, judgmental attitude toward those tortured Jews who experi-
enced with their bodies and saw wdth their own eyes what no human
being ought ever to experience and see.^*
Hannah Arendt vs. the State of Israel 1141
She was also critical about the choice of the prosecution's
witnesses. Most of the witnesses were chosen not because they were
directly relevant to the crimes of the accused, not as the direct bearers
of specific memories related to Eichmann's deeds, but in order to bring
to the court the "huge panorama of Jevwsh suffering" on the one hand,
and to tell the story of the Zionist redemption in Israel on the other.
They were chosen for their pohtical affiliations, for their Zionist back-
ground, for their country of origin, and for the stature and vocation
they had made for themselves in their new state.
The procession started . . . with eight witnesses from
Germany, all of them sober enough, but they were not
'survivors'; they had been high-ranking Jewish officials in
Germany and were now prominent in Israeli public life,
and they had all left Germany prior to the outbreak of war
(Arendt, 1963a: 224).
Each country had one or several representatives among the witnesses,
whether this country was in the field of Eichmann's operations or
not. "The bulk of the witnesses, fifty-three, came from Poland and
Lithuania, where Eichmann's competence and authority had been
almost nil," she wrote (Arendt, 1963a: 224-225). Some, veterans of
the Zionist project in Palestine and deeply rooted Israelis who had
been assigned in the wake of the war to coordinate the search for and
assembling of Holocaust survivors in Europe and to bring them to
the shores of Palestine, were summoned by the attorney general "to
complete his picture" by telling the tale of redemption of those survi-
vors, the only redemption possible for a Jew: going to and living in
Israel. About these testimonies she wrote that they "perhaps smacked
more strongly of propaganda than anything heard previously" (Arendt,
1963a: 225). "Justice," she said, "demands that the accused be pros-
ecuted, defended and judged, and that all the other questions of seem-
ingly greater i mport . . . be left in abeyance." And "justice," she added,
"proves to be a much sterner master than the Prime Minister with all
his power" (Arendt, 1963a: 5).
1142 sociai research
The trial, however, offered Arendt some rare precious moments
that moved her deeply. It is not fortuitous that these moments were few
and exceptional, and that she saw in them a sort of countemarrative,
which was undermining the main national narrative of the trial. She
was captivated by one of the heroines of the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion.
Trivia Lubetkin, "a woman of perhaps forty, still beautiful, completely
free of sentimentality or self-indulgence, her facts well organized, and
always quite sure of the point she v^dshed to make," and whose account
on the witness stand was for Arendt "the purest and clearest" possible
(Arendt, 1963a: 121). Arendt devotes only a few lines to the appear-
ance on the stand and to the testimony of this rebel. Yet in the strong
independent woman^who did not align herself with the prosecution's
tactics and the state's authority and who stayed faithful to her OMTI
words^Arendt could see the emblem of the conscious pariah who for
her was not only the bearer of all vaunted Jevdsh qualities,^^ but the
savior of humanity and of the world by her very existence and refusal of
the world as it was. Without saying, she saw in Lubetkin a reflection of
herself, the woman rebel in her OV^TI right.
Although legally immaterial for building the case against
Eichmannand although the political intentions behind them and the
summoning of them to testify were transparent, clearly to prove that
"whatever resistance there had been had come from Zionists, as though,
of all Jews, only the Zionists knew that if you could not save your life it
might still be worth while to save your honor" (Arendt, 1963a: 122)for
Arendt, Lubetkin's testimony, as well as that of Jewish insurgents and
underground fighters, were messages of hope, fiashes of an alternative
history that could have been, and she was grateful for and empowered
by them. These rebels were not playing the role assigned them by the
attorney-general when they were telling the court that all Jewish orga-
nizations and parties were partners in some measure in the resistance.
More important for Arendt was the very existence"miraculous" in her
eyesof this tiny minority of Jewish resistance fighters the trial brought
to the forefront for its own purposes, because "it dissipated the haunt-
ing specter of universal cooperation, the stifhng, poisoned atmosphere
which had surrounded the Final Solution" (Arendt, 1963a: 123).
Hannah Arendt vs. the State of Israel 1143
One rebel recounted another rebel's story, the story of Anton
Schmidt, in yet another shining moment of the trial. Abba Kovner, a
Jewish partisan, happened to tell almost by accident the story of the
German sergeant who rebelled against his OV^TI country, his own army,
his military command, and his friends and to assist the Jews in Poland's
forests. For five long months Anton Schmidt helped the Jewish under-
ground with supphes, forged papers, and trucks. He did it for no prize
other than upholding his personal, moral integrity. In March 1942 he
was arrested and executed. Kovner's rendering of the story was brief
and subdued, but by telling the story of Anton Schmidt he not only
rescued him forever from anonymity and gave him a life afrer death;
he also recreated in court a rare act of courage, grace, and generosity.
For Arendt and the entire courtroom it was a sublime experience of
sheer humanity. "In those two minutes," she wrote, "which were like a
sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable dark-
ness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question
how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in
Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the
world, if only more such stories could have been told" (Arendt, 1963a:
230-231).
THE TRUTH OF THE REFUGEE
But the perfect witness, the perfect storyteller for Arendt, was no rebel,
no hero, not an emblematic Israeli, no bearer of "lessons," just "an old
man, wearing the traditional Jewish skullcap, small, very frail"Zindel
Gr3mszpan, father of Herschel Grynszpan,^^ who told his story vdth the
utmost simplicity and directness. Along with other non-naturalized
Jews, Grynszpan and his family were deported from Germany, where
they lived for 27 years, on October 27, 1938, to the Polish border. The
Poles refused to let them in, and they stayed there, in a no man's land,
devoid of any rights or state protection, the ultimate refugees. Yet this
humble refugee, Zindel Grynszpan, the unacknowledged, the transpar-
ent, the superfiuous human being, an emblem of the century of mass
destruction and of the stateless and the rightless, was for Arendt the
holder of a unique truth about the world and about history, a truth that
1144 social research
was apparently marginal, if not altogether redundant in the context of
the state's main nationalist narrative of the trial. Indeed, it seems that
only Arendt's insistent dwelling on Giynszpan's testimony extracted it
from oblivion. It is noteworthy that her reaction to Grynszpan's testi-
mony was immediate, spontaneous, and that she verbalized it the same
day almost word for word as she would so movingly put it later in her
book. Grynszpan's performance was in total opposition to the theatri-
cality of the attorney general, and Arendt was deeply grateful for it:
No gesticulating. Very impressive. I told myselfeven if
the only result was that a simple person, who would other-
vdse never have such an opportunity, is given the chance
to say what happened, publicly, in ten sentences and with-
out pathos, then this whole thing will have been worth it
(Arendt-Bluecher [4/25/1961], 2000: 359).
One should recall here what she wrote about refugees at the height
of the massacre of European Jewry in one of her most poignant texts
to fully understand her being conquered in such a unique way by
Grynszpan's performance of storytelling on the witness stand.
Those few refugees who insist upon telling the truth,
even to the point of "indecency," get in exchange for their
unpopularity one priceless advantage: history is no longer
a closed book to them and politics is no longer the privilege
of Gentiles. . . . Refugees driven from country to country
represent the vanguard of their peoplesif they keep their
identity (Arendt, 1978c: 66; Arendt, 2007: 274).
Twenty-three years after the event, Zindel Grynszpan told his
story in an Israeli court, "spoke clearly and firmly, without embroidery,
using a minimum of words." Grynszpan's story took
no more than ten minutes, and when it was overthe
senseless, needless destruction of twenty-seven years
Hannah Arendt vs. the State of Israel 1145
in less than twenty-four hoursone thought foolishly:
Everyone, everyone should have his day in court. Only to
find out . . . how difficult it was to tell the story, thatat
least outside the transforming realm of poetryit needed
a purity of soul, an unmirrored, unreflected innocence of
heart and mind that only the righteous possess. No one
either before or after was to equal the shining honesty of
Zindel Grynszpan (Arendt, 1963a: 227-230).
It was Grjmspan's story that helped Arendt, once again, to underscore
the disease, indeed the plague of the century: the constant and massive
reproduction of exiles and refugees by the nationalisms of states that
have been creating these transparent, forsaken human figures crowd-
ing and thrusting themselves on states' political borders, in the globe's
no-man's-lands.
And while writing about the plight of the refugee Grynszpan
and reproducing the testimony of the Jewish exile in his ov^m land,
the ex-refugee Arendt must have thought about the refugee problem
created by the solving of the Jewish refugee issue, and about how the
efforts to heal one tragedy had helped to create another.
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 terri-
torybut this solved neither the problem of the minorities
nor the stateless
she would write in the late 1940s (Arendt, 1968: 290). "The solution
of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees,
the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and right-
less by another 700,000 to 800,000 people" (Arendt, 1968: 290). She
may have been thinking also about the rightless people who have
stayed behind in 1948, the Arab minority living within the borders
of the state of Israel, who legally enjoyed Israeli citizenship but in
fact have become strangers in their homeland, who have had to
1146 social research
endure military rule and were exposed to arbitrary injustice and
violence.^^
The great national project of the trial was not theirs. They were
excluded from the unifying, gratifying national experience. It was
an all-Jewish matter in which they had no part. And if the past of all
Jewish parties involved in the trial, either directly or indirectly, was
quite similar, the present was multiple, different. If for Ben-Gurion,
for Israel, and for world Jewry in general the trial was mainly about a
national revival out of the ashes, the climax of "a sacred experience" in
the history of Israel, as Trevor-Roper had put it, a moment of collective
catharsis, it was, for Arendt, with all its shining, humane experiences,
a saddening occasion, a point of departure and of creating distance.
She never could adhere to the general mood of elation and of settling
accounts that reigned in Israel during the trial, especially in its inaugu-
ral stage and later on in the grand finale of Eichmann's execution that
she nevertheless strongly supported (Arendt, 1963a: 279). Although
she confessed later to Mary McGarthy, as was already mentioned, that
she wrote her book "in a curious state of euphoria" (Arendt-McCarthy,
1995: 168), she was undoubtedly writing it also with a sense of renun-
ciation and reconciliation with the unchangeable. Shoshana Felman
speaks, of Arendt's book as a book of mourning that is "inhabited by
Arendt's mourned and unmoumed ghosts" (Felman, 2002:158). I would
suggest that the subtext underlying Arendt's book and what gives it
its unique poignancy and also its disturbing, although often misunder-
stood and misinterpreted tone and wording, is a tale of separation and
loss, the story of her estrangement from the project that had haunted
and excited her for years, Zionism and Israel, and that the trial, the
writing of the report, and the controversy it raised were for her a sort
of divorce, the beginning of a hberating departure from what had been
one of her main intellectual concerns and emotional drives.
The way Israel conducted the trial, the aims and lessons that the
trial produced, the fact that the trial missed the meaning of the total
novelty and the unprecedentedness of the Nazi crimes, and the fact
that "none of the participants ever arrived at a clear understanding of
the actual horror of Auschwitz" (Arendt, 1963a: 267) precisely because
Hannah Arendt vs. the State of Israel 1147
of the trial's misplaced uses of the past were for Arendt but one aspect
of the problematic profile and practices of the Jewish state, for which
she could not feel responsible anymore.^^ Throughout the trial she saw
how her deep fears for the Jev^ash homeland were materializing in the
state of Israel.^^ The dangers of a self-secluding nationalism blended
with militarism, the fascination with death on the altar of the state,
and a sort of suicidal messianism along with conformity and unanimity
that did not tolerate voices of dissent, all of which she had been writ-
ing in the late 1940s, were palpable for her 13 years later in Israel. "The
moment has now come to get everything or nothing, victory or death,"
she v^Tote in 1948 on the bellicose and triumphal state of mind in the
Jewish state to be bom. "By 'Victory or Death,'" she would write in The
Origins, quoting Hobbes, "the Leviathan can indeed overcome all politi-
cal limitations that go with the existence of other peoples" (Arendt,
1978a, 181; 2007: 391; 1968:146). As she wrote some years later in her
book on the trial in Jerusalem, as if representing Eichmann's thoughts
and voice, she spoke now, in 1948, in the collective voice of the new
Israelis the way she understood it, causing then and afterward, because
of this conscious "literary" act, havoc and rage among her readers:
The Arabsall Arabs are our enemies. . . . Jewish experi-
ence in the last decadesor over the last centuries, or over
the last two thousand yearshas finally awakened us and
taught us to look out for ourselves; this alone is reality.. .
. We are ready to go down fighting, and we vdll consider
anybody who stands in our way a traitor and anything done
to hinder us a stab in the back (Arendt, 1978b: 181; 2007:
391).
Nothing was ever to be the same afrer the publication of her
report on the trial. Although when closely scrutinized Arendt's argu-
ments in her book on the trial seem not to have been exceeded anything
that was previously said by others, either in Israel or abroad (see Zertal,
2005, chaps. 3 and 4), her name, reputation, independence, authority,
gender, and unique style made these arguments utterly exceptional and
1148 social research
widely unaccepted and unacceptable at the time and circumstances of
their publication when there was a universal need to construe Israel
and all its practices as "a sacred experience." The estrangement was
reciprocal. Arendt was in effect branded persona non grata by the offi-
cial Israel and in the Israeli academia,^^ but it was her own choice in
the first place. And yet, while she was distancing herself, the possible,
foreseeable ending of the whole project called Israel never ceased to
haunt her, perhaps as a sort of compensation for the discharge she had
allowed herself with regard to it. In October 1969, more than two years
after Israel's 1967 military victory, and precisely at yet another time
of a triumphal and bellicose Jewish state of mind, she returned unex-
pectedly to Israel's "survival business" in a letter she wrote to Mary
McGarthy. In this text one could belatedly find, I would argue, the deep,
far-reaching meaning of the trial as it was conducted and the unique
way Arendt saw it: the paradoxical cult of the catastrophe as a nation-
builder and identity-shaper. She quoted Ben-Gurion, who once said that
he hoped that his sons would live and die in Israel, but that he had
httle hope that this would be true for his grandsons. "If you then ask,"
Arendt viTote,
Why then do you try this nearly hopeless business? The
answer, that is the really Jewish answer, is: A second catas-
trophe (afrer the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D.)
v\dll do for the coming centuries or perhaps millennia
what the first did in the past. The memory will keep the
people together; the people will survive. That is aufond all
that matters... .There is something grand and something
ignoble in this passion; I think I don't share it. But even I
know that any real catastrophe in Israel would affect me
more deeply than almost anything else (Arendt-McGarthy
[10/17/1969], 1995: 249; emphasis original).
NOTES
1. In her biography of Arendt, Ear Love of the World, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
relates that when Arendt was invited in 1959 to Princeton University
Hannah Arendt vs. the State of Israel 1149
to be the "first woman" with the rank of full professor, she threatened
to refuse the invitation because of the imiversity's stressing the "first
woman" aspect in its report to The New York Times. Six years earher
Arendt Mrrote to Kurt Blumenfeld, after a lecture she dehvered at
Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, that she was deeply annoyed
by the gentlemen professors who took pride in having invited, for the
first time, a woman lecturer. "I enhghtened these dignified gentlemen
about what an exception Jew is, and tried to make clear to them that
I have necessarily found myself here an exception woman." Whoever
knew what the concept of the "exception Jew" and its representation
in European history of the last two centuries meant for Arendt, namely
the figure of the pet-Jew for a mostly hostile society, the parvenu, the
privileged social climber who was accepted by that same society only
after having renounced not only his own Jewish qualities but also the
pohtical sohdarity -with his less fortunate fellow Jews, could grasp the
full weight of her refusal to play the role of the exception woman/
Jewess (Young-Bruehl, 1982: 272-273). Yet upon arrival to Israel, she
received VIP treatment, not only because she was writing for The New
Yorker. Thanks to her reputation and connections, she could meet for
long talks with Golda Meir, then minister of foreign affairs, with the
Minister of Justice Pinhas Rosen, and with the presiding judge, Moshe
Landau, who refused any other interview with the press. She v^Tote
about it to Karl Jaspers, asking him for full discretion (see Arendt-
Jaspers [4/25/1961], 1992:437).
2. Arendt's most extensive discussion of the nation-state is to be found
in her book Imperialism, which is the second part of the Origins. Yet as
Margaret Ganovan and others have pointed out, her definitions of it
are sometimes inconsequential and confusing. See Ganovan (1974:
27-31, 35-36,42-43); See also Arendt (1994); and Beiner (2000).
3. Griticizing "the growing unanimity of opinion among Palestinian
Jews," she stressed in 1948 that "terrorism and the growth of totah-
tarian methods are silently tolerated and secretly applauded." And
she added: "Unanimity of opinion is a very ominous phenomenon
It destroys social and personal life, which is based on the fact that
we are different by nature and by conviction." It tends, she noted,
1150 social research
"to eliminate bodily those who differ" (See Arendt, 1978b: 181-182;
see also Arendt, 2007: 390, 391-392). The beginning of my systematic
reading in Hannah Arendt's works coincided with my acquaintance
with Richard Bernstein's work on Hannah Arendt and the Jewish
Question (Bernstein, 1996). I owe a lasting debt to this work.
4. Arendt classified these qualities as "an extraordinary awareness of
injustices... great generosity and a lack of prejudice, and. . . respect
for 'the life of the mind'" (Arendt-Jaspers [9/7/1952], 1992: 200).
5. For an elaboration on the trial as a national display of power, sover-
eignty, and control and as an emblematic antithesis to the total Jewish
helplessness during World War II, see Zertal (2005:95-98). Celebrating
30 days to the trial, the daily Davar wrote that "the tireless striving for
justice, the patience applied in the realization of all the legal proce-
duresare all evidence of psychological heroism, moral robustness,
and even masculine character" (Zertal. 2005: 96).
6. It should be stressed here that the English translation of this passage
may be wrong and misleading. In German it reads: "ich v^merde es
mir nie verziehen haben, nicht zu fahren und mir dies Unheil in
seiner ganz unheimlichen Nichtigkeit in der Realitaet, ohne die
Zwischenschaltung des gedruckten Wortes zu besehen." Hence there
is no mentioning of the "walking disaster" nor to "his bizarre," which
may sound as if she was referring to Eichmann himself, but rather to
"this disaster in live [or "in direct"] in all its uncanny vacuousness,"
which means that she was referring in this passage to the organized
event of the trial, not to the defendant. The letter to her husband,
Heinrich, corroborated this.
7. To Iher husband she wrote that seeing Eichmann in the courtroom,
who looked nicht einmal unheimlich, was startling and in a way a sort of
healing (Young-Bruehl brings this quote from the original German;
the English translation published later is slightly different). This
remark is somewhat puzzling, because based on her research and
insights vfith regard to the totalitarian man, one would assume that
she might not have expected Eichmaim to be monstrous, awesome,
or larger than life, as was the prosecution's aim to prove. See also
note 6 for this.
Hannah Arendt vs. the State of Israel 1151
8. Fourteen years earher, Arendt wrote to Jaspers: "The Nazi crimes, it
seems to me, explode the hmits of the law; and that is precisely what
constitutes their monstrousness. For these crimes, no punishment
is severe enough. It may well be essential to hang Goering, but it is
totally inadequate. That is, this guilt, in contrast to all criminal guilt,
oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems" (Arendt-Jaspers
8/17/1946], 1992: 54). Thus she would later support the execution
of Eichmann, once again, against the judgment of many of her
colleagues and fiiends.
9. Arendt referred to this point bluntly when she wrote that "it's a pretty
sure bet that there'll be an effort to show... that the Arabs were hand
in glove v^dth the Nazis" (Arendt-Jaspers [12/23/1960], 1992:416).
10. It is perhaps noteworthy, vnth all the necessary caution, that in her
book Arendt often refers to Eichmann's rendering of himself as an
"ideahst" (Arendt, 1963a: 41^2).
11. For this event, which occurred in October 1953, and its repercussions,
see Zertal (2005:176-178).
12. In unpublished parts of Sharett's diaries, only recently disclosed
to the Israeh public, there are some puzzling passages. On July 29,
1954, Shared: quoted Shimon Peres saying that Lavon not only gave
the order to cany out the terrorist attacks in Egypt but also said "to
bomb various Middle Eastern capitals to keep things jumping in the
Middle East." On January 25,1955, Sharett wrote: "Lavon proved that
both his character and his mind contain satanic elements. He plotted
atrocities which were averted thanks to the outrage of chiefs of staff,
despite all their readiness for every act of adventurism." He added
that Lavon ordered the army commanders "to spread poisonous
bacteria in the Syrian demihtarized frontier zone" (Segev, 2007).
13. The present, rather generahzed description of the affair is compiled
from several books, among them Teveth (1992) and Shlaim (2000).
14. To her husband she wrote: "To teh the truth, the country is not all
that interested, artificially whipped up" (Arendt-Bluecher [4/15/1961],
2000: 355).
15. It is worth recalling Ben-Gurion's own utterance regarding the
grandeur of the prophets needed for speakng about the system-
1152 sociai research
atic annihilation of the Jews by the Nazis. "What we have to say on
the things they [the Nazis] did to us we will say if we need to say
it. . . . We will speak out, when opportunity comes, but preferably
not too early neither too often, because if you do, this v^dll arouse
contempt. . . . If a new Jeremiah ariseshe will have his say"
(Ben-Gurion, 1951; emphasis mine). Apparentiy a new Jeremiah arose
now, and he bore the features of Ben-Gurion.
16. The trial "will be no pleasure for you," Jaspers wrote to Arendt,
"I'm afraid it cannot go well. I fear your criticism" (Arendt-Jaspers
[12/12/1960], 1992:404). And in another letter he said, "What you Vkdll
hear will, I fear, depress you and outrage you. . . . It will stir you up,
but you are always eager to see with your own eyes and hear with
your own ears" (Arendt-Jaspers [12/12/1960], 1992:411-412).
17. After having delivered a lecture on Arendt's historiography of the
Holocaust at an international conference held at Yad Vashem,
Jerusalem (January 1999), I was approached by several elderly Israehs
who insisted on telling me about Arendt's "outrageous" manners and
behavior during the trial's sessions, which took place almost 38 years
earlier.
18. Young-Bruehl translated the passage a bit differently: "the whole
thing is stinknormal, so indescribably inferior, worthless" (Young-
Bruehl, 1982: 331).
19. To her husband she viTote about the city [Jerusalem] "which is loud
and horrible, filled v^dth the oriental mob typical of the Near East,
the European element very much pushed into the background, the
balkanization highly developed in every sense" (Arendt-Bluecher
[4/15/1961], 2000: 355). The fact that she expressed her disturbing
attitude toward the "oriental mob" in almost similar words in two
different letters is proof that it was not a shp of the pen or a fieeting
whim. However, one should bear in mind that this sort of talk was
very much part of the zeigeist at the time of the vmting.
20. Ben-Gurion himself said a few days before the opening of the trial
that "the fate of Eichmann, the person, has no interest for me what-
soever. What is important is the spectacle" (Ben-Gurion, 1961).
21. Courts (Offences Punishable by Death) Law, 5721 -1961, passed by
Hannah Arendt vs. the State of Israel 1153
the Knesset on January 31,1961, and published in The Book of Laws,
325 (February 6,1961: 24). See Rosenthal (1961). A few years later the
"Eichmann Law" was banned fi'om Israel's Book of Laws; see also Zertal
(2005:107).
22. It should be recalled that Arendt's book on the trial was translated
into Hebrew and published in Israel only in 2000.
23. The long article was translated in its entirety and published in Mapai's
daily Davar, two days later, on the day the trial opened.
24. In a letter to Bluecher she mentioned that "for the time being I'm
sitting in the courtroom fi:om morning till night" (Arendt-Bluecher
[4/15/1961], 2000: 356).
25. In that she found herself in the same school of thought as the judge in
the Kastner affair/trial less than a decade earlier, Benyamin Halevi
who, by the way he handled the trial and through his verdict, contrib-
uted to the shaking up of the labor movement establishment and the
whole political structure in the 1950s. In a complex way one might
view the Eichmann trial as a belated correction to, even a compensa-
tion for the "damages" caused by the Kastner affair. See Zertal (2005:
138-139).
26. Namely "the 'Jev^dsh heart,' humanity, humor, disinterested intelli-
gence" (see Arendt-Jaspers, 1992: note 5).
27. Grynszpan the son shot to death on November 7,1938 the third secre-
tary of the German embassy in Paris, Ernst Vom Rath. The incident
was used by the Nazis for launching their largest, organized pogrom
against the Jews in Germany and Austria prior to the war, knovwi as
the "Kristallnacht."
28. On Arendt's ovm storytelling way in her report and the never
mentioned presence in her text of her dead friend, Walter Benjamin,
whose piece "The Storyteller" has strongly inspired Arendt in her
arguments and her very use of words, see the strong argument in
Fehnan(2002:156-166, 236-240).
29. See the case of Kafar Qassim in 1956, about which she wrote to Jaspers
(Arendt-Jaspers [11/16/1958], 1992: 358).
30. For Michal Ben-Naftali, Arendt's reference in her book to language is a
nS4 social research
unique "work of mourning" for her mother tongue, "one that Arendt
has never offered either before or after" (see Ben-Naftah, 2004: 72).
31. Her strange, intriguing remark to Jaspers"I bear no responsibihty
whatsoever for what goes on"before she went to cover the trial
was, I would suggest, rather a proof of her deep sense of commitment
and responsibihty (see above note 16).
32. See her articles, "Zionism Reconsidered," and "To Save the Jewish
Homeland: There Is Still Time," in Arendt (1978a, 2007).
33. Israel's unofficial ostracism of Arendt was documented and writ-
ten about by the author of this essay as well (see Zertal, 2005:
128-163). If it seemed that this chapter belonged to the past, a
recent book published in Israel and the fuss surrounding it proves
to the contrary. The book, Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust: Three Essays
on Denial, Repression and Delegitimation of Israel (Yakira, 2006), written
by a recently appointed professor of philosophy from the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, claims that Eichmann in Jerusalem is a "moral
scandal," a poorly thought, and badly written "perverse" book by a
nonimportant philosopher who lacks "compassion" for the victims
of the Holocaust (Yakira, 2006: 197) and whose prominence was
synthetically created and much exaggerated. Arendt is but one of
many targets of this "ultra-Zionist" pamphlet, whose aim is to defile
and brand as traitorous any sort of critical approach to Zionism and
Israel by qualifying it as a denial of Israel's right to define itself as a
Jevkdsh state or to exist. No means are spared in this vulgarly ideologi-
cal campaign in the tradition of the MacGarthyist dark times. While
twisting and perverting a series of texts written by a group of inter-
nationally published and recognized scholars, authors, or journal-
ists such as Adi Ophir, Moshe Zuckerman, Yitzhak Laor, Amira Hass,
the late Baruch Kimmerling, and myself, to name but a few, the book
depicts itself as a "journey into the sewers" (Yakira, 2006: 62) whose
goal is to "purify" these gutters. The accused, those responsible for
all Israel's malaise, are treated by this scarcely published expert of
Spinoza [sic!] as scoundrels, negationists, or sheer pomographers
(this is my lot; see Yakira, 2006:180, referring to Israel's Holocaust). The
Hannah Arendt vs. the State of Israel 1155
book could have easily sunk into oblivion as a perverse joke or just a
curiosity. However, after having been rejected by most major Israeli
publishers, it was embraced, for ideological-political and personal
reasons, by the head of the Weizmann Institute for the Study of
Zionism and Israel at Tel Aviv University, and published under its
auspices, with the financial help of the World Zionist Organization
and the Institute for the Study of the Jevdsh National Fund in the
disguise of an academic work (see Yakira, 2006). One should reflect
on this phenomenon in the context of a much wider worldwide
campaign to silence critical, dissenting voices with regard to Israel's
politics in recent decades, namely its prolonged military occupation
of the Palestinian lands.
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