El Desafío a Un Estado Hannah Arendt vs Israel

Idith ZertalA 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 v̂ dth both just qualities and repu-tations she burst into the national classroom to wreak havoc as Israel'smythical founder and political leader, David Ben-Gurion, was holdinghis last great national undertaking, the Eichmann trial. Indeed, whenshe came to Jerusalem to cover the trial for The New Yorker, everythingabout her was exceptional: she was an utterly independent, critical intel-lectual acting vwthin a tightly structured pohtical space; a prominentwoman scholar in a discipline reserved at the time exclusively for men.She was also an exilic Jewess who was perceived as having intrudedinto a highly national, cathartic Israeli event; a sole elderly woman whopositioned herself fi-om the outset in defiance of the young nationalist-coUectivist state that was celebrating its statehood and sovereignty bymeans of the trial. ,

What I intend to focus on in this essay is Arendt's challenge to thepolitical, nationalist character of the organized event of which she wasone of the protagonists—if 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 termMamlachtiut, a mixture of kingship and royalism) and its practices. Andthrough the slits of her criticism of the way the trial was conducted and

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of the state institutions that performed it, one could perceive, I believe,her older and more conceptual consideration of the European kindof nation-state, namely her profound hostihty toward and mistrust ofthe concept and practice of the nation-state in particular and nationalsovereignty in general.

The nation-state, according to the European model as adoptedby the Jewish state, meant for Arendt a state not only subordinatedto the idea of the nation but which was actually "conquered" by thenation: a state with a ruling homogeneous population unified bycommon history, language, culture, memories, and traditions; a statethat marginalizes, discriminates, and acts to the effective exclusion ofethnic minorities. "In the name of the vwll of the people the state wasforced to recognize only 'nationals' as citizens, to grant full civil andpolitical rights only to those who belonged to the national communityby right of origin and fact of birth," Arendt wrote in her master workon totalitarianism (Arendt, 1968:230). But more important even for thepresent argument was the perception and mobilization by the rulingpopulation and state institutions of the law and the entire legal systemexclusively in the service of the nation, and not in the service of theentire citizenry. The meaning of this, she wrote, was "that the statewas partly transformed from an instrument of law into an instrumentof the nation" (Arendt, 1968: 230).̂ Furthermore, according to Arendt,the one-party dictatorship was lurking not far from the multipartysystem of the nation-state, and was "only the last stage in the devel-opment of the nation-state in general and of the multiparty systemin particular," as she would vwite (Arendt, 1963b: 265-266). Thus, thenation-state presented a political case always pregnant wath the mostdisastrous form of political government in modem times, the one shestudied thoroughly in The Origins ofTotalitarianism. It is noteworthy thatthe Israel of the early 1960s, when the trial was held in Jerusalem—stillunder the spell of the authoritarian rule of Ben-Gurion and with theprevaihng cult of national unity and unanimity she had dreaded sincethe inception of statehood—represented for her the potential danger ofsliding dovm the slope toward a totahtarian regime.^

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JUDGING ISRAELThe 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 thefigure—or in the disguise—of the observer that she took upon herselfthroughout 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 embodiedthe conscious outcast qualities.^ With regard to the trial and the pros-ecuting body—Israel—she acted as an analyst as well as a survivor ofJewish history, and as a feminine and perpetual refugee figure withinthe context of the nation-state's patriarchal-masculine self-image andpublic display of sovereignty, authority, and control.^

Surely, she came to Jerusalem not to submerge herself intothe unified, embracing togetherness that the trial melted out of thepell-mell of diasporas, cultures, languages, and political faiths thatcomprised the Israeli society; neither was she inclined to assimilateherself into the hegemonic discourse of power that the spokespersonsof the trial yielded. She brought with her the erudition that has madeher name, her strong ideas, her diasporic qualities, her self-inflictedmarginality, and her universality, as well as her idiosyncratic, powerfullanguage that "tries to speak the truth to power," to borrow EdwardSaid's words on the intellectual (Said, 1996: xvi). And in choosing togo to Jerusalem and in reporting on the trial she took, consciously, thevantage point of the rebellious outsider who already assumes, in a kindof foresight, the role of the outcast. What she most expected from thetrial 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 sheexpressed her foreknovm impatient frustration clearly and loudly inwhatever tools she could master.

Arendt prepared herself to go to Israel with great expectationsand deep fears. As was ofren written and said, she believed that thiswas going to be the last major trial of a Nazi major criminal. "I would

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never be able to forgive myself if I didn't go and look at this walkingdisaster face-to-face in all his bizarre vacuousness," she wrote to theGerman 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 healingof this traumatic past, something she apparently experienced fromthe beginning of the trial, and more so while she was writing herreport (Arendt to Vassar College [1/2/1961], quoted in Young-Bruehl,1982: 329; Arendt-Bluecher [4/15/1961], 2000: 355). To her friend MaryMcCarthy she wrote: "I have never admitted—namely that I wrotethis book in a curious state of euphoria. And that ever since I didit, I feel—after twenty years [since the war]—lighthearted about thewhole matter" (for the healing effect see Arendt and McCarthy, 1995:168).̂

She claimed as well, against the judgment of her best friendsand colleagues, that Israel had the right to speak for the victims,because "the larger majority of them (300,000) are living in Israel nowas citizens," and thus the trial will be held "in the country in whichthe injured parties and those who happened to survive are" and thatfor the sake of these victims "Palestine became Israel" (Arendt-Jaspers[12/23/1960], 1992: 417). She recognized Israel's right to put Eichmannon trial, if only for the reason that "Eichamnn was responsible forJews and Jews only, regardless of their nationality," and also forwant of any other, theoretically or legally more suitable framework(Arendt-Jaspers [12/23/1960], 1992: 417). "Israel is the only politicalentity we have. I don't particularly like it but then there's not muchI 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 her—meaning that the issue atstake (Eichmann's own as well as the Nazi dictatorship's enormouscrimes) could not be adequately represented either in legal or politi-cal terms, and that it was "in the nature of the case" that there wereno other tools except legal ones with which one had to judge thislegally 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 anddimensions it was taking, even before it started. In the knowledgeable,feverish correspondence between her and Jaspers during the monthsthat preceded the trial, they discussed at length the nefarious aspectsand displacements that the much revered public stage in the cloakof a proper legal procedure might expose. They were both aware andcritical of the political purposes of the trial, its propagandist aims,the transference of the totally immeasurable and incomparable Nazicrimes on to the Middle East reality, and the context of the Arab-Israeliconflict.^ Arendt expressed her fears that precisely the possible impec-cability of the legal procedures of the trial, for which she was hopingwholeheartedly, would enable Eichmann to prove that no countrywanted the Jews, "just the kind of Zionist propaganda that Ben-Gurionwants and that I consider a disaster," and would also demonstrate towhat "a huge degree the Jews helped organize their own destruction"(Arendt-Jaspers [12/23/1960,1992: 417). This was "the naked truth," shewrote to Jaspers, "but if not rightly explained, it could stir up moreanti-Semitism" than anything else related to the affair (Arendt-Jaspers[12/23/1960,1992: 417).

HYSTERICAL ATMOSPHEREAnother, rather unexpected matter worried and intrigued Arendt whileshe was preparing herself to go to Israel. Unexpected because she wasthe only one to have mentioned it, and even in recent studies of thetrial the matter has not received the attention it deserves, if indeed ithas received any. I refer here to the allusion in one of her letters to whatwas known in Israel as the "Lavon affair." Her reference to the "affair"is svdft, short, not detailed, and extremely harsh. She presents the issueto Jaspers as no less than a "second Dreyfus affair in its structure," andgoes on to say that the Lavon affair is about "what a clique does," or cando, such as blaming "someone who doesn't belong to the clique in orderto 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 senseout of this Arendtian outburst, but to no avail. Admitting that thewhole thing was "entirely new" to him, he wondered if it was not theHistadrut, the Labor movement's social-economic-industrial-tradeunion huge conglomerate that, while being the infrastructure of thepolitical power of Ben-Gurion's ruling Mapai party, had neverthelessbecome a sort of "a state within the state" and, now headed by PinhasLavon, 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 forBen-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 powerwas just the pretext for the affair. Its real, hidden demon was the grow-ing military-security establishment which, together wdth the army wasalready 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, falseaccusations, forged signatures and documents, perjuries, the shatteringof 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 neededhere, to recount even if in a brief way the details of an extraordinarily

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complex affair that poisoned Israel's politics for many years and was ina way its emblem.

In July 1954, while Britain was preparing to evacuate its forcesfrom the Suez Canal zone, and President Gamal Abdel Nasser's newregime was planning to nationalize the zone as part of its strugglefor independence, a series of terrorist acts shook up Eg3^t. Americanlibraries and information centers in Alexandria and Cairo and cinemasand a post office in Cairo were the targets. Later it became known thatthe climax of the scheme was to detonate bombs simultaneously indifferent public places in Cairo on July 23, the anniversary day of theFree Officers' revolution. But one of the devices carried by a memberof the terrorist group started to emit smoke; the man was caught, andhis capture led to the round up of the whole ring. On October 5, theEg5^tian minister of the interior announced the breakup of an Israeliterrorist and spy ring. Two months later the suspects were brought totrial. Israel's pohtical estabhshment and the press were outraged andindignant, crjdng out "anti-Semitism!" Prime Minister Moshe Sharettdeclared at the Knesset that a "wicked plot [was] hatched in Alexandria,"argued that it was a "show trial," and spoke of "false accusations ofimaginary crimes against innocent Jews" {Jerusalem Post, December 12,1954). The Labor daily Davar claimed that the Egyptian regime "seemsto 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 MilitaryIntelligence, Colonel Binyamin Gibli, was meant to fake anti-Britishand anti-American incidents, to make it plain to the Western powersthat the Nasserite regime could not be trusted to respect and protectWestern interests and facilities. The whole scheme was kept top secret,under strict censorship, so much so that even Gibli's direct boss atthe time. Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon, and Israel's prime minister,Moshe Sharett, knew nothing of it. All of the accused, except for oneIsraeli agent who committed suicide in his prison cell, were youngEgyptian 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 otherswere sentenced to long terms of imprisonment and "forgotten" by theIsraeli establishment that tried for years to distance itself from this"mishap"—the euphemistic name given to the operation in Eg5^t—ofwhich these Zionist, Egyptian Jews were the living admonition. Onlyyears later, within the Israeli-Egj^tian exchange of prisoners of war inthe wake of the 1967 war, were they to be liberated and sent to Israel.

For years, under heavy censorship that prevented the Israelisfrom knowing anything of what has happened in Egj^t, Pinhas Lavonfought for his innocence, claiming that the order for the failed oper-ation was not his. Colonel Gibli, on the other hand, swore to havereceived the order directly from Lavon, at his home. Gibli was memberof a powerful group within the Defense Ministry, headed at the time bythe moderate Prime Minister Sharett. which often acted independently,and in open defiance of the cabinet. This was not the only case. Most ofthe Israeli "reprisal campaigns" in Arab territories, the Kibbya massa-cre among them," were conducted by military units without the priorknowledge, much less the approval of the cabinet. Leading members inthis group were Moshe Dayan, then Israel Defense Force (IDF) chief ofoperations and later chief of staff; Shimon Peres, the general director ofthe Defense Ministry; and others, all of them Ben-Gurion's proteges andyoung allies, who perpetuated his hard-line, "activist" policies whilehe was temporarily resting at his retreat in the desert. To make thingsmore complex, Lavon himself was no saint either. "A brilliant mind in afoul soul" as one of his colleagues described him, Lavon was known as amoderate, even close to pacifism up to the moment Ben-Gurion handedhim the defense portfolio. Fascinated and apparently intoxicated by theboundless power-machine he found at his command, he lost controland was continually dreaming up schemes to use this formidable forcein order to expand Israel's territory, invade neighboring countries, andcrush once and for all Arab's will to annihilate Israel.^^ Lavon did notgive 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 offorgeries emerged almost fortuitously during a trial only loosely related


to the affair. Lavon, then head of the Histadrut, demanded that PrimeMinister 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 exoneratedLavon, 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" (NewYork Times, February 10, 1961). Yet Ben-Gurion continued to demandLavon'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 Universityprofessors declared that Ben-Gurion represented a real danger toIsrael's democracy and accused him of creating a hysterical, irrationalatmosphere in the country in order to impose his views and dictato-rial policies. The affair rocked the ruhng estabhshment. Feuding publicopinions forced new elections and contributed largely to Ben-Gurion'seventual dechne and final retreat from public hfe."

We do not know Arendt's sources of information with regard tothe affair. Articles in foreign press were more abundant and detailedthan the information available in Israel. Arendt's knowledge of thecrisis, the details of which were censored and tightly kept as statesecrets, with scant information emerging, is further proof of her closeand anxious observation of and concern for Israel's unfolding history,and of her despair in face of that "tradition of the nation-state" toidentify power "with the monopoly of the means of violence" (Arendt,1963b: 256) that led to the use of doubtful military means for settlingpolitical issues. The fact that she was intuitively able to compare thisafFair vdth the Dreyfus affair was revealing of her deep disillusion withregard to Israel before the trial even started. The older affair, aboutwhich she vwote at length in The Origins of Totalitarianism, representedfor her among other things the ominous convergence of a corruptparhament, "the dry rot" of a cohapsing society, and the state function-aries' lust for power (Arendt, 1942: 200). Talking now about the Lavonaffair and its connection to the coming trial, she used almost the same


words, equating it with the crisis that shattered the very foundations ofthe French republic at the end of the nineteenth century.

"I dread the hysterical atmosphere I'll be going into in Israel," shewrote to Jaspers just before taking her flight, and quoted an Israeh diplo-mat, "a decent, intelligent man," who publicly said that if Eichmannwere not to be executed, it "would cost significantly more lives; therewouldn't be a village in Israel where heavy rioting won't break outimmediately!" (Arendt-Jaspers [3/27/1961], 1992: 430-431). Thirteenyears 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 infectioninto every related issue" (Arendt, 1978b: 182; 2007: 392). Later, afterhaving been in the country for some time and having v^dtnessed theearly legal procedures at Bet Ha'am (the People's Hall, the newly builtauditorium 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 thetrial simmered with the thrill of the moment as well as deep appre-hensions, a testimony among other things to the formidable grip ofthe 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, forthe simple, rare grandeur needed in order to grasp the enormity anduniqueness of the event. "That this [establishing of historical facts andserving as a reminder of those facts for humanity, hearing of vdtnessesto history, and collecting of documents] is being done in the guise of atrial is, granted, unavoidable," wrote Jaspers to Arendt.

But it is shot through with incorrect attitudes, because ofeverything connected with it. . . . What I fear, too, is thatremarkably intelligent reflections, complicated discus-sions that lead off into limitless fields, and a lack of simplic-


ity will not let the human greatness needed to deal withsuch facts emerge. What is needed is the spirit of the greatold prophets—Âmos, Isaiah, Jeremiah—but that can't beexpected 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 friendserved also as a sort of intimate workshop, where she could examineand sharpen again and again her ideas concerning the very ability tojudge the Final Solution and the proper legal frame to deal with the newconcept of crimes against humanity, with the totalitarian man, nation-alism, Jewish response during and after the Judeocide, Zionism, andIsrael. She was also probing, groping for her ovra, precise positioningvis-a-vis the trial: how should she proceed, would she act as a witness ofNazism 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 propagandistcharacter the trial was apparently going to take and because he knewso well her temperament so well,̂ ^ she promised that she was going toIsrael "as a simple reporter.... That means that I bear no responsibil-ity whatsoever for what goes on." As a reporter, she added, "I have theright 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 greata distance I want to put between myself and these very questions youcan 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 amoment was she a distanced observer or a simple reporter while inIsrael, 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 inboth her later written report on the trial and in her immediate letters


to Jaspers and to her husband Heinrich Bluecher. In the wake of thetrial's first week, she wrote to Bluecher that the "whole thing is sodamned banal and indescribably low and repulsive" (Arendt-Bluecher[4/20/1961], 2000: 357).i» While she gradually changed her mind aboutthe proceedings, thanks particularly to the admirable way she felt thejudges 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 anddiligent observance of what she believed were the instructions of thestage director of the whole organized manifestation—Ben-Gurion—shesaw the unbearable mixture of national narcissism on the one handand servility on the other, of "ghetto mentality, with tanks and militaryparades" (Arendt-Bluecher [4/20/1961], 2000: 358).

What she saw of Israel outside the court or what she allowedherself to see, despaired her no less. The special blend of romanticnationalism and militarism she already foresaw in her texts from thelate 1940s on Palestinian Zionism was tangible and resonating in theIsraeli reality. At least this is what her necessarily selective critical gazehad caught and recorded. The proximity in time of the trial with Israel'sthirteenth independence day {Bar Mitzva—namely, the age of a boy'scelebrated initiation to manhood) endowed both events with heavysjmibolism. The military parade had become Israel's central annualdisplay of regained statehood and power was for her both ominousand farcical. "There was a big tankparade here today, which I didn't goto see," she wrote to Bluecher. She was also deterred by the vision ofyoung Israelis sitting around campfires, the essence of the new Israehtyat 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 whenwe were young," she wrote. "The parallels are fatal, particularly inthe details" (Arendt-Bluecher [4/20/1961], 2000: 357). Her remarks ina letter to Jaspers about the Israeli police and crowd were even morescreeching for their racist overtones, and their not-so-subliminal allu-sions to what the whole trial was about, as well as about totahtarianismin general. "Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the


creeps, speaks only Hebrew, and looks Arabic. Some downright brutaltypes among them. They would obey any order. And outside the doors,the oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiaticcountry" (Arendt-Jaspers [4/13/1961], 1996:435; emphasis

FORTRESS IN VIGILANCERight from the beginning of her report she launches her defiance.The Bet Ha'am auditorium where the trial is held, with its orchestraand gallery, with proscenium and stage and side doors for the actors'entrance, "is not a bad place for the show trial David Ben-Gurion, PrimeMinister of Israel, had in mind.. ." (Arendt, 1963a: 4).̂ " The audienceof this show "was to be the world," and the play was to be "the hugepanorama of Jevdsh suffering" (Arendt, 1963a: 8). The high fences thatsurrounded the site of the trial, the heavily armed pohce that guardedthe premises "from roof to cellar," and the meticulous frisking of thepublic at the gates of the auditorium transformed into a courthouse,all of which Arendt took special care to depict in detail, enhanced theimpression of a fortress in vigilance (Arendt, 1963a: 4). The attorneygeneral, Gideon Hausner, is for her his master's voice, namely the voiceof Ben-Gurion, "the invisible stage manager of the proceedings" (Arendt,1963a: 5). Representing the government, "[the attorney general] doeshis 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 servesthe State of Israel" (Arendt, 1963a: 5).

While Arendt was focusing on the nonlegal aspects of the trialand its orchestrated character of a grand show, she was unaware of astep taken by the Israeli government to ensure that the show wouldgo on regardless of the circumstances might be. Just a few monthsbefore the trial opened, the government submitted to the Knesseta bill amending the Courts (Offenses Punishable by Death) Law. Theamended law suggested major changes in trials whose only possibleverdict was the death penalty. According to the Israeh legal procedure,which adopted British tradition, a defendant who pleaded guilty wasautomatically convicted, and the court could only debate the sentence.


Yet the state would not aUow itself to let Eichmann set the rules of thecoming trial by pleading guilty. In order to prevent the trial from beingcut short before it achieved its educational and political effect, the newlaw, unofficially called "the Eichmann Law," stated that "in case theaccused pleads guilty as charged, the court may continue the proceed-ings as if the accused had not pleaded guilty." The bill was passed in anespecially swift process.^^

Furthermore, Arendt was apparently innocent of any knowledgeof what the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote Mdth regardto the coming trial. His comments were much more radical than anyof Arendt's utterances concerning the pedagogic-propagandist char-acter of the event. Yet they came from an authoritative male voice inthe 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 universallyaccepted, while Arendt's words unleashed a memorable, fierce contro-versy.̂ 2 "To Mr. Ben-Gurion, Eichmann is a symbol, and his trial is to besymbolic..." 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'sown lifetime and out of which the present State of Israel was born."That way the Holocaust was represented as a necessary, indeed crucialphase in a teleological process that brought about the state of Israel.Moreover, as Trevor-Roper put it, in guiding the campaign that sweptEichmann to Israel and by organizing the trial almost single-handedly,Ben-Gurion "re-created, for a time at least, his own original image asthe 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 socredexperience in the history of Israel.... [Thus] if long enoughto prove justice, [the trial] may be too long to be effective aspropaganda: the solemn act of historical vindication may besubmerged in legal questions of procedure or competence(Trevor-Roper, 1961; emphasis


SURVIVOR AMONG SURVIVORSBack in the courtroom, Arendt chose to position herself in the audiencewith "survivors,"

middle-aged and elderly people, immigrants from Europe,like myself, who knew by heart all there was to know, andwho were in no mood to learn any lessons and certainly didnot need this trial to draw their own conclusions. As witnessfollowed witness and horror was piled upon horror, theysat there and listened in public to stories they would hardlyhave been able to endure in private, when they would havehad to face the storyteller (Arendt, 1963a: 8).̂ ''

The fact that she positioned herself amid the survivors, those exilicJews who were the direct bearers of the memories of the catastrophe,is loaded vdth meaning. In the context of the staged display of nationalsovereignty and authority, concerned with the national lessons ofthe catastrophe more than with the meaning of the unprecedentedcatastrophe itself, this spatial choice could be read as an act of mark-ing her territory and claiming her alignment, already thrusting herdirect challenge at the discourse of the "state." Hence the prosecutor'srhetorical, repeated question presented to the survivor witnesses—"why did not you rebel?"—enraged her not just because it served, soshe 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 underthe Nazi murderous terror and thus the realm of the very few and thevery young (Arendt, 1963a: 123). She never saw the Jevwsh masses in thediaspora as an anonjmious, passive object with no will of their OV̂ TI theway activist, statist Zionism did. And unlike her critics she explicitlytook their side, whether they were victims of the great massacre orits survivors. The prosecutor's questions reflected for her the state'shaughty, judgmental attitude toward those tortured Jews who experi-enced with their bodies and saw wdth their own eyes what no humanbeing ought ever to experience and see.̂ *


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 ornot. "The bulk of the witnesses, fifty-three, came from Poland andLithuania, where Eichmann's competence and authority had beenalmost nil," she wrote (Arendt, 1963a: 224-225). Some, veterans ofthe Zionist project in Palestine and deeply rooted Israelis who hadbeen assigned in the wake of the war to coordinate the search for andassembling of Holocaust survivors in Europe and to bring them tothe shores of Palestine, were summoned by the attorney general "tocomplete his picture" by telling the tale of redemption of those survi-vors, the only redemption possible for a Jew: going to and living inIsrael. About these testimonies she wrote that they "perhaps smackedmore 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 import. . . be left in abeyance." And "justice," she added,"proves to be a much sterner master than the Prime Minister with allhis power" (Arendt, 1963a: 5).


The trial, however, offered Arendt some rare precious momentsthat moved her deeply. It is not fortuitous that these moments were fewand exceptional, and that she saw in them a sort of countemarrative,which was undermining the main national narrative of the trial. Shewas captivated by one of the heroines of the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion.Trivia Lubetkin, "a woman of perhaps forty, still beautiful, completelyfree of sentimentality or self-indulgence, her facts well organized, andalways quite sure of the point she v^dshed to make," and whose accounton 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 strongindependent woman—^who did not align herself with the prosecution'stactics and the state's authority and who stayed faithful to her OMTI

words—Ârendt could see the emblem of the conscious pariah who forher was not only the bearer of all vaunted Jevdsh qualities,^^ but thesavior of humanity and of the world by her very existence and refusal ofthe world as it was. Without saying, she saw in Lubetkin a reflection ofherself, the woman rebel in her OV̂ TI right.

Although legally immaterial for building the case againstEichmann—and although the political intentions behind them and thesummoning 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 itmight still be worth while to save your honor" (Arendt, 1963a: 122)—forArendt, Lubetkin's testimony, as well as that of Jewish insurgents andunderground fighters, were messages of hope, fiashes of an alternativehistory that could have been, and she was grateful for and empoweredby them. These rebels were not playing the role assigned them by theattorney-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 hereyes—of this tiny minority of Jewish resistance fighters the trial broughtto the forefront for its own purposes, because "it dissipated the haunt-ing specter of universal cooperation, the stifhng, poisoned atmospherewhich had surrounded the Final Solution" (Arendt, 1963a: 123).


One rebel recounted another rebel's story, the story of AntonSchmidt, in yet another shining moment of the trial. Abba Kovner, aJewish partisan, happened to tell almost by accident the story of theGerman sergeant who rebelled against his OV̂ TI country, his own army,his military command, and his friends and to assist the Jews in Poland'sforests. For five long months Anton Schmidt helped the Jewish under-ground with supphes, forged papers, and trucks. He did it for no prizeother than upholding his personal, moral integrity. In March 1942 hewas arrested and executed. Kovner's rendering of the story was briefand subdued, but by telling the story of Anton Schmidt he not onlyrescued 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 ofsheer humanity. "In those two minutes," she wrote, "which were like asudden 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, inIsrael, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of theworld, if only more such stories could have been told" (Arendt, 1963a:230-231).

THE TRUTH OF THE REFUGEEBut the perfect witness, the perfect storyteller for Arendt, was no rebel,no hero, not an emblematic Israeli, no bearer of "lessons," just "an oldman, wearing the traditional Jewish skullcap, small, very frail"—ZindelGr3mszpan, father of Herschel Grynszpan,^^ who told his story vdth theutmost simplicity and directness. Along with other non-naturalizedJews, Grynszpan and his family were deported from Germany, wherethey lived for 27 years, on October 27, 1938, to the Polish border. ThePoles 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 thishumble refugee, Zindel Grynszpan, the unacknowledged, the transpar-ent, the superfiuous human being, an emblem of the century of massdestruction and of the stateless and the rightless, was for Arendt theholder of a unique truth about the world and about history, a truth that


was apparently marginal, if not altogether redundant in the context ofthe state's main nationalist narrative of the trial. Indeed, it seems thatonly Arendt's insistent dwelling on Giynszpan's testimony extracted itfrom oblivion. It is noteworthy that her reaction to Grynszpan's testi-mony was immediate, spontaneous, and that she verbalized it the sameday almost word for word as she would so movingly put it later in herbook. 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 myself—even ifthe only result was that a simple person, who would other-vdse never have such an opportunity, is given the chanceto 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 heightof the massacre of European Jewry in one of her most poignant textsto fully understand her being conquered in such a unique way byGrynszpan'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 theirunpopularity one priceless advantage: history is no longera closed book to them and politics is no longer the privilegeof Gentiles. . . . Refugees driven from country to countryrepresent the vanguard of their peoples—if they keep theiridentity (Arendt, 1978c: 66; Arendt, 2007: 274).

Twenty-three years after the event, Zindel Grynszpan told hisstory 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 over—thesenseless, needless destruction of twenty-seven years


in less than twenty-four hours—one thought foolishly:

Everyone, everyone should have his day in court. Only to

find out. . . how difficult it was to tell the story, that—at

least outside the transforming realm of poetry—it 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 underscorethe disease, indeed the plague of the century: the constant and massivereproduction of exiles and refugees by the nationalisms of states thathave been creating these transparent, forsaken human figures crowd-ing and thrusting themselves on states' political borders, in the globe'sno-man's-lands.

And while writing about the plight of the refugee Grynszpanand reproducing the testimony of the Jewish exile in his ov̂ m land,the ex-refugee Arendt must have thought about the refugee problemcreated by the solving of the Jewish refugee issue, and about how theefforts to heal one tragedy had helped to create another.

After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, whichwas considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered terri-tory—but this solved neither the problem of the minoritiesnor the stateless

she would write in the late 1940s (Arendt, 1968: 290). "The solutionof 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). Shemay have been thinking also about the rightless people who havestayed behind in 1948, the Arab minority living within the bordersof the state of Israel, who legally enjoyed Israeli citizenship but infact have become strangers in their homeland, who have had to


endure military rule and were exposed to arbitrary injustice andviolence.^^

The great national project of the trial was not theirs. They wereexcluded from the unifying, gratifying national experience. It wasan all-Jewish matter in which they had no part. And if the past of allJewish parties involved in the trial, either directly or indirectly, wasquite similar, the present was multiple, different. If for Ben-Gurion,for Israel, and for world Jewry in general the trial was mainly about anational revival out of the ashes, the climax of "a sacred experience" inthe history of Israel, as Trevor-Roper had put it, a moment of collectivecatharsis, 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 settlingaccounts that reigned in Israel during the trial, especially in its inaugu-ral stage and later on in the grand finale of Eichmann's execution thatshe nevertheless strongly supported (Arendt, 1963a: 279). Althoughshe confessed later to Mary McGarthy, as was already mentioned, thatshe 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 Felmanspeaks, of Arendt's book as a book of mourning that is "inhabited byArendt's mourned and unmoumed ghosts" (Felman, 2002:158). I wouldsuggest that the subtext underlying Arendt's book and what gives itits unique poignancy and also its disturbing, although often misunder-stood and misinterpreted tone and wording, is a tale of separation andloss, the story of her estrangement from the project that had hauntedand excited her for years, Zionism and Israel, and that the trial, thewriting of the report, and the controversy it raised were for her a sortof divorce, the beginning of a hberating departure from what had beenone of her main intellectual concerns and emotional drives.

The way Israel conducted the trial, the aims and lessons that thetrial produced, the fact that the trial missed the meaning of the totalnovelty and the unprecedentedness of the Nazi crimes, and the factthat "none of the participants ever arrived at a clear understanding ofthe actual horror of Auschwitz" (Arendt, 1963a: 267) precisely because


of the trial's misplaced uses of the past were for Arendt but one aspectof the problematic profile and practices of the Jewish state, for whichshe could not feel responsible anymore.^^ Throughout the trial she sawhow her deep fears for the Jevâsh homeland were materializing in thestate of Israel.^^ The dangers of a self-secluding nationalism blendedwith militarism, the fascination with death on the altar of the state,and a sort of suicidal messianism along with conformity and unanimitythat 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. "Themoment 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 theJewish state to be bom. "By 'Victory or Death,'" she would write in TheOrigins, 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 herbook on the trial in Jerusalem, as if representing Eichmann's thoughtsand voice, she spoke now, in 1948, in the collective voice of the newIsraelis the way she understood it, causing then and afterward, becauseof this conscious "literary" act, havoc and rage among her readers:

The Arabs—all Arabs are our enemies. . . . Jewish experi-ence in the last decades—or over the last centuries, or overthe last two thousand years—has finally awakened us andtaught us to look out for ourselves; this alone is reality.. .. We are ready to go down fighting, and we vdll consideranybody who stands in our way a traitor and anything doneto hinder us a stab in the back (Arendt, 1978b: 181; 2007:391).

Nothing was ever to be the same afrer the publication of herreport on the trial. Although when closely scrutinized Arendt's argu-ments in her book on the trial seem not to have been exceeded anythingthat 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


widely unaccepted and unacceptable at the time and circumstances oftheir publication when there was a universal need to construe Israeland all its practices as "a sacred experience." The estrangement wasreciprocal. Arendt was in effect branded persona non grata by the offi-cial Israel and in the Israeli academia,^^ but it was her own choice inthe first place. And yet, while she was distancing herself, the possible,foreseeable ending of the whole project called Israel never ceased tohaunt her, perhaps as a sort of compensation for the discharge she hadallowed herself with regard to it. In October 1969, more than two yearsafter Israel's 1967 military victory, and precisely at yet another timeof a triumphal and bellicose Jewish state of mind, she returned unex-pectedly to Israel's "survival business" in a letter she wrote to MaryMcGarthy. In this text one could belatedly find, I would argue, the deep,far-reaching meaning of the trial as it was conducted and the uniqueway Arendt saw it: the paradoxical cult of the catastrophe as a nation-builder and identity-shaper. She quoted Ben-Gurion, who once said thathe hoped that his sons would live and die in Israel, but that he hadhttle hope that this would be true for his grandsons. "If you then ask,"Arendt viTote,

Why then do you try this nearly hopeless business? Theanswer, 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 millenniawhat the first did in the past. The memory will keep thepeople together; the people will survive. That is aufond allthat matters... .There is something grand and somethingignoble in this passion; I think I don't share it. But even Iknow that any real catastrophe in Israel would affect memore 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-Bruehlrelates that when Arendt was invited in 1959 to Princeton University


to be the "first woman" with the rank of full professor, she threatenedto refuse the invitation because of the imiversity's stressing the "firstwoman" aspect in its report to The New York Times. Six years earherArendt Mrrote to Kurt Blumenfeld, after a lecture she dehvered atPrinceton's Institute for Advanced Study, that she was deeply annoyedby the gentlemen professors who took pride in having invited, for thefirst time, a woman lecturer. "I enhghtened these dignified gentlemenabout what an exception Jew is, and tried to make clear to them thatI have necessarily found myself here an exception woman." Whoeverknew what the concept of the "exception Jew" and its representationin European history of the last two centuries meant for Arendt, namelythe figure of the pet-Jew for a mostly hostile society, the parvenu, theprivileged social climber who was accepted by that same society onlyafter having renounced not only his own Jewish qualities but also thepohtical sohdarity -with his less fortunate fellow Jews, could grasp thefull weight of her refusal to play the role of the exception woman/Jewess (Young-Bruehl, 1982: 272-273). Yet upon arrival to Israel, shereceived VIP treatment, not only because she was writing for The NewYorker. Thanks to her reputation and connections, she could meet forlong talks with Golda Meir, then minister of foreign affairs, with theMinister of Justice Pinhas Rosen, and with the presiding judge, MosheLandau, who refused any other interview with the press. She v̂ Toteabout 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 foundin her book Imperialism, which is the second part of the Origins. Yet asMargaret Ganovan and others have pointed out, her definitions of itare 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 PalestinianJews," she stressed in 1948 that "terrorism and the growth of totah-tarian methods are silently tolerated and secretly applauded." Andshe added: "Unanimity of opinion is a very ominous phenomenonIt destroys social and personal life, which is based on the fact thatwe are different by nature and by conviction." It tends, she noted,


"to eliminate bodily those who differ" (See Arendt, 1978b: 181-182;see also Arendt, 2007: 390, 391-392). The beginning of my systematicreading in Hannah Arendt's works coincided with my acquaintancewith Richard Bernstein's work on Hannah Arendt and the JewishQuestion (Bernstein, 1996). I owe a lasting debt to this work.

4. Arendt classified these qualities as "an extraordinary awareness ofinjustices... great generosity and a lack of prejudice, and. . . respectfor '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 Jewishhelplessness during World War II, see Zertal (2005:95-98). Celebrating30 days to the trial, the daily Davar wrote that "the tireless striving forjustice, the patience applied in the realization of all the legal proce-dures—are 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 passagemay be wrong and misleading. In German it reads: "ich v^merde esmir nie verziehen haben, nicht zu fahren und mir dies Unheil inseiner ganz unheimlichen Nichtigkeit in der Realitaet, ohne dieZwischenschaltung des gedruckten Wortes zu besehen." Hence thereis no mentioning of the "walking disaster" nor to "his bizarre," whichmay 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 organizedevent 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 ofhealing (Young-Bruehl brings this quote from the original German;the English translation published later is slightly different). Thisremark is somewhat puzzling, because based on her research andinsights vfith regard to the totalitarian man, one would assume thatshe might not have expected Eichmaim to be monstrous, awesome,or larger than life, as was the prosecution's aim to prove. See alsonote 6 for this.


8. Fourteen years earher, Arendt wrote to Jaspers: "The Nazi crimes, itseems to me, explode the hmits of the law; and that is precisely whatconstitutes their monstrousness. For these crimes, no punishmentis severe enough. It may well be essential to hang Goering, but it istotally inadequate. That is, this guilt, in contrast to all criminal guilt,oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems" (Arendt-Jaspers8/17/1946], 1992: 54). Thus she would later support the executionof Eichmann, once again, against the judgment of many of hercolleagues and fiiends.

9. Arendt referred to this point bluntly when she wrote that "it's a prettysure bet that there'll be an effort to show... that the Arabs were handin glove v̂ dth the Nazis" (Arendt-Jaspers [12/23/1960], 1992:416).

10. It is perhaps noteworthy, vnth all the necessary caution, that in herbook 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 disclosedto the Israeh public, there are some puzzling passages. On July 29,1954, Shared: quoted Shimon Peres saying that Lavon not only gavethe order to cany out the terrorist attacks in Egypt but also said "tobomb various Middle Eastern capitals to keep things jumping in theMiddle East." On January 25,1955, Sharett wrote: "Lavon proved thatboth his character and his mind contain satanic elements. He plottedatrocities which were averted thanks to the outrage of chiefs of staff,despite all their readiness for every act of adventurism." He addedthat Lavon ordered the army commanders "to spread poisonousbacteria in the Syrian demihtarized frontier zone" (Segev, 2007).

13. The present, rather generahzed description of the affair is compiledfrom several books, among them Teveth (1992) and Shlaim (2000).

14. To her husband she wrote: "To teh the truth, the country is not allthat interested, artificially whipped up" (Arendt-Bluecher [4/15/1961],2000: 355).

15. It is worth recalling Ben-Gurion's own utterance regarding thegrandeur of the prophets needed for speakng about the system-


atic annihilation of the Jews by the Nazis. "What we have to say onthe things they [the Nazis] did to us we will say if we need to sayit. . . . We will speak out, when opportunity comes, but preferablynot too early neither too often, because if you do, this v̂ dll arousecontempt. . . . If a new Jeremiah arises—he will have his say"(Ben-Gurion, 1951; emphasis mine). Apparentiy a new Jeremiah arosenow, 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 Vkdllhear 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 withyour own ears" (Arendt-Jaspers [12/12/1960], 1992:411-412).

17. After having delivered a lecture on Arendt's historiography of theHolocaust at an international conference held at Yad Vashem,Jerusalem (January 1999), I was approached by several elderly Israehswho insisted on telling me about Arendt's "outrageous" manners andbehavior during the trial's sessions, which took place almost 38 yearsearlier.

18. Young-Bruehl translated the passage a bit differently: "the wholething is stinknormal, so indescribably inferior, worthless" (Young-Bruehl, 1982: 331).

19. To her husband she viTote about the city [Jerusalem] "which is loudand horrible, filled v̂ dth the oriental mob typical of the Near East,the European element very much pushed into the background, thebalkanization highly developed in every sense" (Arendt-Bluecher[4/15/1961], 2000: 355). The fact that she expressed her disturbingattitude toward the "oriental mob" in almost similar words in twodifferent letters is proof that it was not a shp of the pen or a fieetingwhim. However, one should bear in mind that this sort of talk wasvery much part of the zeigeist at the time of the vmting.

20. Ben-Gurion himself said a few days before the opening of the trialthat "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


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 translatedinto Hebrew and published in Israel only in 2000.

23. The long article was translated in its entirety and published in Mapai'sdaily Davar, two days later, on the day the trial opened.

24. In a letter to Bluecher she mentioned that "for the time being I'msitting 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 inthe 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 thewhole political structure in the 1950s. In a complex way one mightview 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 incidentwas used by the Nazis for launching their largest, organized pogromagainst the Jews in Germany and Austria prior to the war, knovwi asthe "Kristallnacht."

28. On Arendt's ovm storytelling way in her report and the nevermentioned presence in her text of her dead friend, Walter Benjamin,whose piece "The Storyteller" has strongly inspired Arendt in herarguments and her very use of words, see the strong argument inFehnan(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 Arendthas never offered either before or after" (see Ben-Naftah, 2004: 72).

31. Her strange, intriguing remark to Jaspers—"I bear no responsibihtywhatsoever for what goes on"—before she went to cover the trialwas, I would suggest, rather a proof of her deep sense of commitmentand responsibihty (see above note 16).

32. See her articles, "Zionism Reconsidered," and "To Save the JewishHomeland: 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, arecent book published in Israel and the fuss surrounding it provesto 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 HebrewUniversity of Jerusalem, claims that Eichmann in Jerusalem is a "moralscandal," a poorly thought, and badly written "perverse" book by anonimportant philosopher who lacks "compassion" for the victimsof the Holocaust (Yakira, 2006: 197) and whose prominence wassynthetically created and much exaggerated. Arendt is but one ofmany targets of this "ultra-Zionist" pamphlet, whose aim is to defileand brand as traitorous any sort of critical approach to Zionism andIsrael by qualifying it as a denial of Israel's right to define itself as aJevkdsh state or to exist. No means are spared in this vulgarly ideologi-cal campaign in the tradition of the MacGarthyist dark times. Whiletwisting 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 bookdepicts itself as a "journey into the sewers" (Yakira, 2006: 62) whosegoal is to "purify" these gutters. The accused, those responsible forall Israel's malaise, are treated by this scarcely published expert ofSpinoza [sic!] as scoundrels, negationists, or sheer pomographers(this is my lot; see Yakira, 2006:180, referring to Israel's Holocaust). The


book could have easily sunk into oblivion as a perverse joke or just acuriosity. However, after having been rejected by most major Israelipublishers, it was embraced, for ideological-political and personalreasons, by the head of the Weizmann Institute for the Study ofZionism and Israel at Tel Aviv University, and published under itsauspices, with the financial help of the World Zionist Organizationand the Institute for the Study of the Jevdsh National Fund in thedisguise of an academic work (see Yakira, 2006). One should reflecton this phenomenon in the context of a much wider worldwidecampaign to silence critical, dissenting voices with regard to Israel'spolitics in recent decades, namely its prolonged military occupationof the Palestinian lands.

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Said, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage, 1996.Segev, Tom. "Up to No Good." Haaretz. Enghsh ed., August 25, 2007.Shlaim, Avi. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. New York: Norton and

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Yale University Press, 1982.

Zertal, Idith. Israel's Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood. Cambridge:

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