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Article Excerpt
WHETHER SHE LIKED IT OR NOT, ARENDT WAS AN EXCEPTIONAL WOMAN in her own way, as much as she was, apparently, malgre elle, an "exception Jewess." (1) And equipped precisely with both just qualities and reputations 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 intellectual acting within a tightly structured political 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 from the outset in defiance of the young nationalist-collectivist 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 protagonists--if only as a side actor, a close-range observer; or more generally her open, public defiance of the Ben-Gurionian "kingdom" (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 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 hostility 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 will 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). (2) 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 development of the nation-state in general and of the multiparty system in particular," as she would write (Arendt, 1963b: 265-266). Thus, the nation-state presented a political case always pregnant with the most disastrous form of political government in modern times, the one she studied thoroughly in The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is noteworthy that the Israel of the early 1960s, when the trial was held in Jerusalem--still under the spell of the authoritarian rule of Ben-Gurion and with the prevailing cult of national unity and unanimity she had dreaded since the inception of statehood--represented for her the potential danger of sliding down the slope toward a totalitarian regime. (3)
JUDGING ISRAEL
The challenging and judging of the state of Israel while it was implementing the highly symbolic act of putting on trial the Nazi arch-criminal was performed by Arendt in a series of public acts: first as the figure--or in the disguise--of 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 doing so she consciously acted as the Jewish pariah who embodied the conscious outcast qualities. (4) With regard to the trial and the prosecuting body--Israel--she 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. (5)
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, stern analysis of the central, moral, legal, and political phenomenon of the century, not the collective, self-indulging bathing in the redemptive narrative yielded by the Israeli powers. And she expressed her foreknown 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 often written and said, she believed that this was going to be the last major trial of a Nazi major criminal. "I would 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). (6) 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 admitted--namely that I wrote this book in a curious state of euphoria. And that ever since I did it, I feel--after twenty years [since the war]--lighthearted about the whole matter" (for the healing effect see Arendt and McCarthy, 1995: 168). (7)
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 "Eichmann 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 philosophical aporia the trial represented for her--meaning 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 political 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 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. (9) Arendt expressed her fears that precisely the possible impeccability 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 swift, 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...
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