A State on Trial: Hannah Arendt vs. the State of Israel

Idith Zertal A State on Trial: Hannah Arendt vs. the State of Israel W HETHER SHE LIKED IT OR NOT, ARENDT WAS AN EXCEPTIONAL W OMAN in her own way, as much as she was, apparently, malgre elle, an “excep­ tion Jewess.”1And equipped precisely with 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 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 nationalistcollectivist 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 ofthe 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 Vol 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 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 devel­ opment 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 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 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 1128 social research JUDGING ISRAEL The challenging and judging of the state of Israel while it was imple­ menting the highly symbolic act of putting on trial the Nazi arch­ criminal was performed by Arendt in a series of public...