Macron, nos 80 anos do Dia Mais longo da História

 Macron cita Hannah Arendt em seu discurso dos 80 ans do Dia D, a propósito da reconstrução da Europa sob a democracia  e as liberdades, hoje ameaçadas por um novo tirano. Allons enfants, continuez à resister au totalitarisme et à l’oppression! 

Merci Macron!

Quando Einstein e Hannah Arendt condenaram israelenses - 1948

Quando Einstein e Hannah Arendt condenaram israelenses

No dia 2 de dezembro de 1948, o jornal americano The New York Times publicou uma carta, assinada por Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt e Sidney Hook, entre outros, condenando as ações de Menachem Begin, líder do novo Partido da Liberdade, em visita aos Estados Unidos.                                                                                                                   

Entre os fenômenos políticos perturbadores de nossos tempos está a emergência no recém criado Estado de Israel do ''Partido da Liberdade'' (Tenuat Haherut), um partido político estreitamente assemelhado em sua organização, métodos, filosofia política e apelo social aos partidosl Nazista e Fascista.

Ele foi formado a partir de membros e seguidores do antigo Irgun Zvai Leumi, uma organização terrorista, facção direitista e organização chauvinista na Palestina.

A visita atual de Menachem Begin, líder deste partido, aos Estados Unidos é, obviamente, calculada no sentido de dar a impressão de apoio americano ao seu partido, por ocasião do advento das eleições israelitas e para cimentar laços políticos com os elementos Sionistas conservadores dos Estados Unidos.

Vários americanos de reputação nacional têm emprestado seu nome para dar boas vindas a sua visita. É inconcebível que aqueles que se opõem ao fascismo no mundo, se corretamente informados sobre a história política e perspectivas de Mr. Begin, possam acrescentar seus nomes e apoio ao movimento que ele representa.

Embora esse irreparável perigo ocorra pela forma de contribuições financeiras, manifestações públicas a favor de Begin ou pela criação na Palestina da impressão de que um grande segmento da América apóia os elementos fascistas em Israel, o público americano deve ser informado sobre a historia e os objetivos do Sr. Begin e do seu movimento.

As promessas públicas do Partido de Begin não correspondem, quaisquer que sejam, ao seu caráter real. Hoje falam de liberdade, democracia e antiimperialismo, enquanto até recentemente pregavam abertamente a doutrina do Estado Fascista. É em suas ações que o partido terrorista denuncia o seu caráter real; de suas ações do passado podemos julgar o que dele pode ser esperado fazer no futuro.

Ataque sobre Deir Iassin

Um exemplo chocante foi seu comportamento na vila árabe de Deir Iassin. Esta vila, distante das principais estradas e circundada por terras judaicas,p não tomou nenhuma parte na guerra e chegou a contrariar o lado árabe que queria usar a vila como sua base.

Em 9 de abril (The New York Times) bandos terroristas atacaram esta vila pacifista, que não era um objetivo militar na luta, matando a maioria de seus habitantes — 240 homens, mulheres e crianças — e mantiveram alguns deles vivos para desfilarem como cativos através das ruas de Jerusalém.

A maior parte da comunidade judaica ficou horrorizada com aquela ação e a Agência Judaica mandou um telegrama de pesar ao Rei Abdulah da Trans-Jordânia. Contudo, os terroristas, longe de se envergonharem de seu ato, ficaram orgulhosos com aquele massacre, divulgado amplamente e convidaram os correspondentes estrangeiros no país para testemunharem os cadáveres amontoados e a devastação geral em Deir Iassin.

O acontecimento de Deir Iassin exemplifica o caráter e as ações do Partido da Liberdade.

No interior da comunidade judaica eles têm propugnado uma mistura de ultra nacionalismo, misticismo religioso e superioridade racial. Como outros partidos fascistas eles têm sido usados para esmagar as greves e têm-se dedicado à destruição de sindicatos livres. Em seu lugar eles têm proposto sindicatos corporativistas no modelo fascista italiano.

Durante os últimos anos da esporádica violência antibritânica, os grupos IZL e Stern inauguraram um reino de terror na comunidadel Judaica Palestina. Professores foram espancados por se pronunciarem contra eles, adultos foram alvejados por não deixarem suas crianças juntar-se a eles. Por métodos de gangsterismo, açoites, quebra-vidraças e roubos em larga escala, os terroristas intimidavam a população e exigia-lhe pesado tributo.

Os membros do Partido da Liberdade não têm nenhuma participação nos logros construtivos na Palestina. Eles não reivindicam nenhuma terra, nenhuma construção de habitações e apenas depreciam a atividade defensiva judaica. Seus esforços de imigração muito propagandeado foram diminutos e devotados principalmente para atraírem compatriotas fascistas.

Discrepâncias Observadas

As discrepâncias entre os bravos clamores que estão sendo feitos agora por Begin e seu partido e a história de sua performance no passado da Palestina não portam a marca de um partido qualquer. Este é o selo de um Partido fascista, pelo qual o terrorismo e o embuste são os meios e o ''Estado Regente'' é o objetivo.

À luz das considerações anteriores, é imperativo que a verdade sobre o Sr. Begin e seu movimento seja tornado conhecido neste país. É de toda maneira trágico que a liderança maior do Sionismo Americano tenha se recusado a participar da campanha contra os esforços de Begin, ou mesmo de expor aos seus constituintes os perigos para Israel do apoio a Begin.

Os abaixo assinados, portanto, através deste meio de publicidade apresentam alguns fatos salientes que dizem respeito a Begin e seu Partido; e recomendam a todos os interessados a não apoiarem esta última manifestação do fascismo.

Nova York, 2 de dezembro de 1948

Isidore Abramowitz,

Albert Eistein

Hannah Arendt,

Abraham Brick,

Rabino Jessurun Cardozo,

Herman Eisen,

Hayim Fineman,

M. Gallen,

HH. Harris,

Zelig S. Harris,

Sidney Hook,

Fred Karush,

Bruria Kaufman,

Irma L. Lindheim,

Nachman Maisel,

Seymour Melmam,

Myer D. Mendelson,

Harry M. Oslinsky,

Samuel Pitlick,

Fritz Rohrlich,

Louis P. Rocker,

Ruth Sagis,

Itzhak Sankowsky,

I.J. Shoenberg,

Samuel Shuman,

M. Singer,

Irma Wolfe,

Stefan Wolfe.

A versão deste documento online foi copiada de um microfilme da edição impressa do The New York Times, pesquisada pela professora universitária Laura Nader e outros acadêmicos na Universidade de Berkeley, Califórnia. Uma versão escaneada pode ser vista, em formato .pdf, em Proquest: University Microfilms

A tragédia de Hannah Arendt no caso Eichmann - Daniel Maier-Katkin, Nathan Stoltzfus (The American Scholar, 2013)

BOOK ESSAY - SUMMER 2013

Hannah Arendt on Trial

The 1963 publication of her “Eichmann in Jerusalem” sparked a debate that still rages over its author’s motivations

By Daniel Maier-Katkin and Nathan Stoltzfus | 

The American Scholar, June 10, 2013

https://theamericanscholar.org/hannah-arendt-on-trial/#

Fifty years ago, The New Yorker published a series of articles that became one of the most controversial books of the 20th century: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The articles dealt with the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer who coordinated the logistics of transporting millions of European Jews to their death during World War II. Arendt portrayed Eichmann and other Nazi criminals not as hate-filled, anti-Semitic monsters but as petty bureaucrats and spoke openly about the role played by Jewish councils in the deportation and destruction of their own people. Arendt’s central insight into what she called “the banality of evil”—that great crimes can arise from mindless conformity and thoughtlessness about the humanity of others—came paired with sharp criticism of Israeli insensitivity to legitimate Palestinian claims and disregard for the rights of minorities and neighbors.

Arendt suffered ferocious personal attacks that continue today, 37 years after her death. Criticism of her Eichmann book inevitably incorporates some variant of the assertion that she felt herself to be more German than Jewish and was a self-hating, anti-Semitic Jew—a strange charge against a woman who worked on behalf of Jewish organizations most of her life. The 50-year battle over Arendt’s reputation has pitted her defenders against those who would deflect her criticism of Israel as anti-Jewish, thus turning people away from her ideas about democratic pluralism and regional cooperation without having to discuss them.

Soon after the Eichmann pieces began to appear, civil rights activist Henry Schwarzschild warned Arendt that Jewish organizations in New York were furiously planning a campaign against her and that she should expect to be the object of great debate and animosity.

Siegfried Moses, a friend from Arendt’s youth who had immigrated to Israel and risen to the position of state comptroller, sent a note to Arendt on behalf of the Council of Jews from Germany, declaring war on her and her Eichmann book. Moses then flew to Switzerland to meet with Arendt and demanded that she stop the book’s publication. She refused, warning him that the intensity of criticism was “going to make the book into a cause célèbre and thus embarrass the Jewish community far beyond anything that she had said or could possibly do.” Indeed, literary critic Irving Howe would describe the vitriolic public dispute that ensued as “violent,” while novelist Mary McCarthy would liken it to a pogrom.

It began on March 11 with a memorandum distributed by the Anti-Defamation League alerting its members to “Arendt’s defamatory conception of Jewish participation in the Nazi Holocaust,” by which they meant her reporting that evidence at the trial showed that leaders of Jewish communities across Europe had negotiated the orderly demise of their communities with Eichmann. The ADL followed up with a pamphlet, “Arendt Nonsense,” which called the Eichmann articles evil, glib, and trite.

On May 19, 1963, The New York Times published a highly critical review of Eichmann in Jerusalem by Michael A. Musmanno, a retired Navy rear admiral who had served as a judge at the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunals and was then a sitting justice on Pennsylvania’s supreme court. Musmanno had also appeared as a witness for the prosecution at the Eichmann trial. In her book Arendt had disparaged Musmanno’s testimony that Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop told him at Nuremberg that Hitler’s madness had come about because he had fallen under Eichmann’s influence. Even the prosecution knew this was a fabrication. Musmanno wrote in the Times that Arendt was motivated by “purely private prejudice. She attacks the State of Israel, its laws and institutions, wholly unrelated to the Eichmann case.”

That summer New York intellectuals weighed in. A review by playwright and critic Lionel Abel in Partisan Review accused Arendt of having portrayed the Nazis as more aesthetically appealing than their victims. Journalist Norman Podhoretz’s review in Commentary concluded that Arendt had exemplified “intellectual perversity [resulting] from the pursuit of brilliance by a mind infatuated with its own agility and bent on generating dazzle.” Zionist activist Marie Syrkin wrote in Dissent that Eichmann was the only character who came out better in the book than he went in and accused Arendt of manipulating the facts with “high-handed assurance.” Arendt had published often in all three journals.

In July, when she came home from Europe, where she had been traveling since the articles appeared, Arendt wrote to a friend, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, that her “apartment was literally filled with unopened mail … about the Eichmann business.” Much of it bordered on hate mail, like the letter from a woman in New Jersey who began with a declaration that she had never read the Eichmann book and “would never read such trash” and concluded with the hope that “the ghosts of our six million martyrs haunt your bed at night.”

More measured criticism came in a letter from Gershom Scholem, a friend from Arendt’s youth and then a professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He affirmed his “deep respect” for Arendt but characterized the tone of her book as “heartless,” “flippant,” “sneering and malicious,” replacing balanced judgment with a “demagogic will-to-overstatement.” He could never think of her, he wrote, as anything other than “a daughter of our people” but admonished her for insufficient Ahabath Israel, love of the Jewish people: “In you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who come from the German Left, I find little trace of this.”

Arendt replied that she came not from the German Left but from the tradition of German philosophy and that of course she was a daughter of the Jewish people and had never claimed to be anything else: “I have always regarded my Jewishness as one of the indisputable actual data of my life, and I have never had the wish to change or disclaim facts of this kind. There is such a thing as basic gratitude for everything that is as it is.” But you are quite right, she told him, in what you say about Ahabath Israel. “I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective—neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.”

In the full flush of the attack, Mary McCarthy stepped forward as Arendt’s champion. Writing in the Winter 1964 issue of Partisan Review, she observed that the hostile reviews and personal attacks on Arendt were written almost entirely by Jews.  She dismissed Lionel Abel’s assertion that Arendt made Eichmann aesthetically palatable: “Reading her book, he liked Eichmann better than the Jews who died in the crematoriums. Each to his own taste. It was not my impression.”

Fevered discourse continued to rage across the pages of Partisan Review’s next issue. Marie Syrkin accused McCarthy of intellectual irresponsibility and ignorance, and writer and historian Harold Weisberg characterized her defense of Arendt as wholly lacking in charity and logic. Poet Robert Lowell countered that Arendt’s only motive was a “heroic desire for truth.” Journalist and critic Dwight Macdonald called Eichmann in Jerusalem a masterpiece of historical journalism and defended McCarthy’s “brilliant” observation that the split over the book was between Christians and Jews, especially “organization-minded Jews.”

In 1965, Jacob Robinson, an adviser to the prosecution in the Eichmann trial, published a 400-page denunciation of Arendt’s scholarship, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight: The Eichmann Trial, The Jewish Catastrophe and Hannah Arendt’s Narrative. With the assistance of teams of researchers in New York, London, Paris, and Jerusalem, Robinson scoured Arendt’s book and found 400 “factual errors,” including such minutiae as the misspelling of a first name. Some of the things he listed, it turned out, were not errors at all. Nevertheless, an essay by historian Walter Laqueur in The New York Review of Books asserted that Arendt lacked the factual knowledge needed to make a scholarly contribution. Laqueur characterized Robinson as “formidable,” an eminent authority on international law, an erudite polymath with knowledge of many languages and unrivalled mastery of sources. Robinson’s motivation for undertaking a full-scale refutation of “Miss Arendt’s” flippant display of cleverness, Laqueur wrote, was the natural “resentment felt by the professional against the amateur.”

Arendt had been reluctant to react publicly to the controversy, preferring to let her work speak for itself. In January 1966, however, she responded, in The New York Review of Books, to Laqueur’s essay. Laqueur, she wrote, was so overwhelmed by Robinson’s “eminent authority” that he had failed to acquaint himself with the facts. For a start, she had not written a narrative about the Jewish catastrophe, but only a report about a trial. She criticized the prosecution for repeatedly raising questions about why there had not been more Jewish resistance during the Holocaust—a line of questioning she dismissed as Israeli militarist propaganda. She also pointed out that Robinson was not a historian but a lawyer who had published practically nothing prior to his book. The honorific of “eminent authority” had been attached to him only after he joined the chorus of critics attacking her. What is formidable about Robinson, Arendt concluded, is that his words were amplified by the Israeli government with its consulates, embassies, and missions throughout the world, along with the American and World Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith, and the ADL, in a coordinated effort to characterize her book as a posthumous defense of Eichmann and her as the evil person who wrote it.

Arendt worried that the backlash against the Eichmann book had blown the controversy out of proportion and that partially informed people would believe “all the nonsense” critics were spouting. At the height of the scandal, however, Jaspers assured her that she would emerge with her reputation intact: any fair-minded person who read the Eichmann book would see her seriousness of purpose, honesty, fundamental goodness, and passion for justice. “A time will come that you will not live to see, when Jews will erect a monument to you in Israel, as they are doing now for Spinoza,” he wrote. “They will proudly claim you as their own.” Now, as the debate began to subside, Jaspers wrote that though she had suffered greatly, the critical uproar was adding to her prestige.

Arendt wrote back that she had been warmly received by the mostly Jewish students who had turned out in substantial numbers for her lectures on politics at Yale, Columbia, Chicago, and other universities. “The funny thing,” she told Jaspers, was that after speaking her mind openly about “the formidable Mr. Robinson,” she was once again “flooded with invitations from all the Jewish organizations to speak, to appear at congresses, etc. And some of these invitations are coming from organizations that I singled out to attack and named by name.”

In the next few years she would collect a dozen honorary degrees from American universities and be inducted into both the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which awarded her its Emerson-Thoreau Medal for distinguished achievement in literature. In Denmark, where Jews had been heroically protected during the Nazi occupation, Arendt in 1975 received the Sonning Prize (worth the equivalent of roughly $200,000 today) for “commendable work that benefits European culture.”

For a long moment, which lasted another quarter-century after her death in 1975, Arendt had beaten back her detractors, with her reputation intact. New Yorker editor William Shawn wrote that Arendt’s death had removed “some counterweight to all the world’s unreason and corruption,” that she had been “a moral and intellectual force that went beyond category,” and that her influence “on intellectuals, artists, and political people around the world was profound.”

More recently, though, the battle over Arendt’s reputation and the value of her work, especially Eichmann in Jerusalem, has been joined again, rekindled by evidence in Arendt’s papers that as a young woman, she had a love affair with the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. It was known that Arendt had been Heidegger’s student, but the posthumous revelation of their romantic relationship by Arendt’s biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, came as a bombshell.

Arendt and Heidegger were lovers for about six months, beginning in November 1924. She was an 18-year-old philosophy student; he was 35, married with two children, and was in something of a creative frenzy writing Being and Time, the all but inscrutable masterpiece that established his position as an existentialist. Arendt thought she was his muse. The love affair cooled by summer, when Heidegger withdrew into family and professional life, and there was less and less contact. Arendt appears to have suffered the bittersweet longings of unrequited love.

What seemed a final break between them occurred when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Arendt fled Germany, and Heidegger very publicly joined the Nazi Party and was elevated to the position of Rektor at Freiburg University. He resigned after one year, having fired the Jewish faculty, disbanded the university senate in favor of a Führer system of governance, and exhorted students to military service, often ending his speeches, right arm stretched out and up in salute, with “Heil Hitler,” repeated three times. After the war he downplayed the significance of all this and told transparent lies about the past, claiming to have done it all in an effort to protect the university.

Nevertheless, five years after the war, Arendt reconciled with Heidegger. She was in Germany directing a State Department project to preserve and distribute unclaimed Jewish cultural property looted by the Nazis—mostly books and religious artifacts—to synagogues and Jewish museums, libraries, and universities around the world. Passing through Freiberg, she sent a note to Heidegger, who came to see her. A lifelong friendship and affectionate correspondence ensued. After the affair became public, Heidegger’s reputation as a Nazi seeped into the Eichmann controversy, giving new shape to the old calumny that Arendt was a pathologically self-hating Jew, whose opinions about Israel and Jewish politics were not to be taken seriously.

Arendt’s latter-day critics maintain that she was so blinded by schoolgirl love that she either could not see what a bad man Heidegger was or did not care; that she so adored him and the German intellectual tradition he represented that she was driven to forgive him; that her affection for Heidegger and everything German explains how she could distort Eichmann into something banal and display such shocking insensitivity toward Jewish victims.

It is as if Arendt’s detractors conflate Heidegger with Eichmann, a mass murderer whose execution Arendt supported. Whatever his sins, Heidegger was not one of the leaders of the Third Reich, nor was he involved in planning or executing war crimes or crimes against humanity. He was, after 1934, an increasingly irrelevant professor of philosophy. Despite his early enthusiasm for Nazism, there is little evidence suggesting Heidigger was ever an anti-Semite. Granted, he was never forthcoming about his past, not even in a final interview published by prior agreement after his death. Still, he was not Adolf Eichmann.

Arendt understood the distinction, once referring to Heidegger as a man who lied at the drop of a hat in order to manage a situation. Heidegger nurtured fantasies of power as the foremost Nazi intellectual and had grandiose ambitions to restore philosophy to a state of grace not known since the Greeks, but his ignorance of the world, Arendt concluded, prevented him from seeing that the Nazis were interested only in people who thought as they did. In a public address honoring Heidegger on his 80th birthday, Arendt referred to his Nazi time as a mistaken “escapade,” spent primarily in “avoiding” (which implies willfully looking away from) the reality “of the Gestapo’s secret rooms and the torture cells of the concentration camps.”

Her critique was not strong enough for Heidegger’s most severe critics, nor for Arendt’s. Heidegger scholar Emmanuel Faye asserts that Heidegger’s texts reveal an inveterate Nazi not only during the Hitler years but before and after as well. Faye finds that even Being and Time, written 10 years before the Nazis came to power, is so thick with veiled proto-Nazi messages that it should be shelved next to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Literary critic Carlin Romano, in a 2009 review of a book Faye wrote about Heidegger, laid the philosopher’s guilt at Arendt’s feet, identifying her among the acolytes who venerated the “pretentious old Black Forest babbler.” Journalist Ron Rosenbaum adds that it will never be possible to think about Arendt or her “intellectually toxic relationship” with Heidegger the same way again because of her “lifelong romantic infatuation with the Nazi-sympathizing professor.” He dismisses the “banality of evil” as the “most overused, misused, abused pseudo-intellectual phrase in our language” and finds Arendt’s use of it “deceitful,” “disingenuous,” and “utterly fraudulent” in relation to Eichmann, concluding that the man responsible for the “logistics of the Final Solution” simply could not be “a banal bureaucrat.”

Deborah Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial (2011) concludes that Arendt was just plain wrong about Eichmann. On the basis of “new” evidence that Eichmann was a bully, braggart, and liar, Lipstadt proposes to supplant Arendt’s image of the banal bureaucrat with a hate-filled, mad-dog, anti-Semitic monster.

Arendt was wrong, Lipstadt declares, to think that Eichmann “did not really understand the enterprise in which he was involved.” But this is certainly not what Arendt meant when she concluded that the trial had been a “long course in human wickedness [that] had taught us the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.” Lipstadt’s insight into Arendt’s supposed misjudgment of Eichmann is based on the reporting of a French journalist, Joseph Kessel, who was present at the trial on a day when Arendt was not. When damaging depositions of SS officers were read aloud, Kessel could detect “the passion and rage of the true Eichmann” beneath the “hollow mask” of a bumbler that he held up to the world.

Why does Lipstadt think Arendt was unable to detect Eichmann’s true character? Because, she tells us, Arendt was writing for only one person, the only person whose approval mattered to her: Martin Heidegger. A more plausible understanding of Heidegger’s significance in the history of the Eichmann book is that during her first postwar encounter with her former mentor, in 1950, Arendt intuitively recognized the banality of evil: Martin was still Martin. He had behaved despicably, but she recognized his humanity and admired his genius. The epiphany when she saw Eichmann a decade later was that, even at that level of culpability (so far beyond Heidegger’s), the motives for direct participation in mass murder were still fundamentally banal: not blood lust but ambition to advance one’s career, to enjoy status and opportunity, to fulfill an oath of loyalty, to be regarded as capable, a leader, a good fellow, perhaps to have a place in history.

The more recent battles over Arendt’s reputation and her criticism of Israeli policy and Jewish politics have taken a desperate turn with their focus on her love affair with Heidegger. Everything else about their relationship was known in 1963. The assertion that Arendt was hard-hearted and uncaring is supported by nothing new and is no stronger now than it was 50 years ago.

Arendt’s insight into the banality of evil remains undiminished: human character is malleable, not fixed; in the right circumstances masses of otherwise ordinary, decent, law-abiding people can be transformed into collaborators and perpetrators of reprehensible crimes against humanity.

Likewise, her depiction of the Eichmann trial as political theater is still cogent. Arendt was not alone in her criticism of the prosecution: the Israeli judges also complained that the prosecutor relied on survivors’ inflammatory testimony about the horrors of the Holocaust without showing a connection to the defendant. What Arendt hoped to learn in Jerusalem was how Eichmann had done his work, how the mass murders had been organized and implemented. Who had said and done what with and to whom? But the prosecutor’s ambition was to capture the imagination of Israeli youth and world Jewry with a retelling of the suffering of the Holocaust.

Real justice, in Arendt’s view, requires full disclosure, including self-disclosure, not only retribution for Nazi crimes against humanity but also an effort to understand how political systems can produce the complicity of perpetrators, bystanders, and even victims. If evil is banal, it can turn up anywhere, even among victims, even among Jews, even in Israel.

Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.

Daniel Maier-Katkin and Nathan Stoltzfus coauthored this article. Maier-Katkin is the author of Stranger From Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness. Stoltzfus is the author of Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protests in Nazi Germany. Both are on the faculty at Florida State University.

Why Does Hannah Arendt's 'Banality of Evil' Still Anger Israelis? - Michal Aharony (Haaretz)

Os israelenses não perdoam Hannah Arendt por sua cobertura, para a New Yorker, sobre o julgamento do criminoso nazista Adolf Eichmann, sequestrado pelo Mossad em Buenos Aires em 1960, numa das mais espetaculares ações do famoso serviço secreto (ou de inteligência e ação, inclusive para eliminar inimigos de Israel e assassinos de judeus), e julgado em Jerusalém um ano depois. Ela teria sido "complacente" com o criminoso nazista, sob o famoso conceito de "banalidade do mal". Não sei se foi apenas por isso, ou se também contou sua amizade com Heidegger, o filósofo que se tornou aliado do regime nazista por conveniência.

Em todo caso, o autor deste longo artigo discute amplamente o papel de Hannah Arendt no contexto do debate sobre o Holocausto e a própria noção de judaísmo, para uma laica como ela era.

Fica a sugestão de leitura. Agradeço ao mestre Celso Lafer ter me habilitado o acesso ao artigo abaixo, para o qual eu mesmo lhe chamei a atenção, uma vez que recebo as chamadas do Haaretz, sem ser assinante do jornal. Meu outro amigo judeu, Fabio Koifman, também me mandou o mesmo artigo. Aos dois, obrigado.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasília, 14 de maio de 2019

Why Does Hannah Arendt's 'Banality of Evil' Still Anger Israelis?

Nearly 60 years after she attended and wrote about the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt remains a controversial figure among intellectuals in Israel

By  

Michal Aharony 

Haaretz,  May 11, 2019

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-why-does-hannah-arendt-s-banality-of-evil-still-anger-israelis-1.7213979

“A time will come, that you will not live to see, when Jews will erect a monument to you in Israel… and they will proudly claim you as their own,” the philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote to his close friend Hannah Arendt in 1963. That monument remains unbuilt in Israel 2019. Nearly 60 years have gone by since the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and Arendt’s name continues to generate fierce criticism among many Israeli intellectuals. Although she is considered by many one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, and even though she was a Holocaust survivor and a Zionist (at least for a certain period) – she was boycotted in Israel for many years and most of her writings have only recently been translated into Hebrew.

The strong feelings that Arendt, who died in 1975, arouses in scholars, especially Israelis, spring primarily from her 1963 book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.” Based on a series of articles Arendt wrote for The New Yorker, the book is critical of the way Israel conducted the Eichmann trial and the way the defendant was portrayed. Instead of the murderous, anti-Semitic monster the prosecution sought to paint, Arendt saw something very different: a new type of mass murderer, but without malicious, necessarily lethal, motives, who neither considered the significance of his deeds or accept responsibility for them. She attributed to Eichmann what she termed “thoughtlessness,” an inability to think from the other’s point of view.

Her book immediately sparked bitter controversy that persisted throughout the 1960s. Arendt was denounced, including by some of her closest friends, as anti-Zionist and said to an example of “Jewish self-hatred.” She was accused of being favorably disposed toward Eichmann and of absolving him of guilt and responsibility for his crimes. Her good friend, the kabbala scholar Gershom Scholem, wrote to her that she lacked “love for the Jewish people.” Relations between them were severed in the wake of her response to his letter. 

For long decades, Arendt was unofficially ostracized in Israel. Her books were not translated into Hebrew and her work was not discussed, in either the academic or public spheres. She was effectively subjected to political-intellectual excommunication. It was not until 2000 that “Eichmann in Jerusalem” was published here, and the Hebrew-reading public had the opportunity to judge the text for itself.

More recently, Arendt’s status in Israel has begun to change. Though trenchant criticism is still leveled at her, over the past two decades, a process has been underway that reflects new approaches to her thought. She is no longer taboo: Her writings are the subject of critical and more favorable consideration by Israeli scholars, among them Adi Ophir, Michal Ben-Naftali and Leora Bilsky.

One reason for her gradual inclusion in public discourse is the dominance of post-Zionist and postmodern discourse in academic circles beginning in the 1990s. The first international conference on Arendt to be held in Israel took place in Jerusalem in 1997, with its lectures later issued as a collection of articles (in English), written mainly by scholars from abroad, edited by historian Prof. Steven Aschheim.

A notable step in introducing Arendt into the Israeli discourse was made by historian Idith Zertal. She researched Arendt’s thought and the controversies surrounding her, and beginning in the 1990s, published articles on these subjects in Israeli journals and newspapers. Prof. Zertal also discussed Arendt extensively in her book “Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood” (published in English in 2005), which dealt with the politics of Holocaust memory. In 2004, in the wake of the first Hebrew-language conference on Arendt, held at Tel Aviv University, a first collection of essays in Hebrew also appeared. In 2010, Zertal’s Hebrew translation of Arendt’s groundbreaking work “The Origins of Totalitarianism” was published.

The Arendt renaissance continued with translations into Hebrew of additional books, among them “The Human Condition” and “The Jewish Writings.” In the past decade, local universities have offered courses on Arendt, a play about her life was staged here and she was the subject of an Israeli documentary film.

Arendt challenged, and continues to challenge, the Jewish and Zionist consensus. The conceptual revolution she fomented with the term “banality of evil” and its relevance 56 years after it first saw the light of day, remain difficult to swallow even in our world today. What is it about that concept that continues to the present to stir such deep unease among Israeli intellectuals?

Arrested by the Gestapo

Arendt was a Holocaust survivor in every sense, even if she did not define herself as such. She was born in 1906 to an assimilated Jewish family in Germany, and studied philosophy from an early age. She was Martin Heidegger’s pupil and wrote her doctoral thesis at the University of Heidelberg under the supervision of Karl Jaspers. In 1933 she was arrested by the Gestapo for engaging in Zionist activity, and was released after a week by a young officer she befriended. She succeeded in fleeing with her mother and reached Paris, where she spent eight years as a refugee. She also worked for Youth Aliyah, organizing groups of children and adolescents for immigration to Palestine. Following the occupation of France, Arendt was arrested and incarcerated in the Gurs camp in the country’s southwest, but managed to escape within a few weeks.

In 1941, Arendt and her husband, Heinrich Bluecher, fled to the United States, for which they had refugee visas, via Lisbon. She became an American citizen in 1951 and lived in the country, pursuing a distinguished academic career, until her death in 1975.

Arendt’s lengthy refugee experience went a long way toward shaping her political thought. Her Judaism and her approach to the Jewish question also played an important part in this context. Arendt espoused a strong affinity for Zionism, even though she was critical of Zionist ideology and was increasingly censorious in regard to Israel.

Why, despite her biography, did her book generate such a stormy controversy? The answer lies, in part, in her critique of the political nature of the Eichmann trial. Arendt saw it as a show trial – a political event with a specific agenda. She took issue with the fact that the majority of the testimonies were not relevant to proving the defendant’s guilt. She also objected to the prosecution’s focus on the legal category of a “crime against the Jewish people,” which was intended to promote a Zionist-historical narrative in which the Holocaust was depicted as another link in a long chain of persecution of Jews. That approach, she argued, attested to the fact that the court did not grasp fully the singularity of Auschwitz. In her conception, the Nazis’ crimes were unprecedented and constituted “crimes against humanity.”

However, the source of most of the anger against her lay elsewhere. What brought about her boycott in Israel was her interpretation of Eichmann and her characterization of the victims of the Shoah.

Arendt objected to the prosecution’s depiction of Eichmann as having been guided by a racist, murderous ideology. She offered an alternative interpretation: Eichmann as a bureaucrat engaged in advancing his career, who avoided contending with the consequences of his own deeds. Arendt contemplated the possible emergence of a “desk murderer” who perpetrates his harrowing crimes from afar, doing no actual killing himself and viewing himself as a law-abiding citizen who obeys his superiors’ orders. This was the context in which she coined her contentious and most widely misunderstood concept of the “banality of evil.”

Though Arendt’s book was subtitled “A Report on the Banality of Evil,” the term itself appears only once in the text, near the end. It has been subjected to endless interpretation. One reason for the initial bewilderment was that Arendt did not explain the term in the book’s first edition. She did so only in a postscript that appeared in a revised and expanded edition published in 1965. Her later references to the term and her personal correspondence with friends shed further light on what she meant.

Arendt explained that she had not attempted in the book to articulate a comprehensive theory of the essence of evil, but rather intended to point to a phenomenon she had noticed during the trial. By “banality of evil,” Arendt had in mind two interconnected ideas. The first is that Eichmann was not a satanic figure or, for that matter, an extreme anti-Semite. He was an ordinary person. He had no motives for his actions other than promoting his own advancement. His deeds were monstrous, but the man himself was banal.

The notion of the “banality of evil” refers to the paradox created by totalitarian society, in which an unprecedented crime is executed optimally by an ordinary bureaucratic apparatus; it suggests the disparity between the vast dimensions of the crime and the unexceptional persona of the criminal. This challenged a long theological, philosophical, moral and legal tradition, extending from Augustine to Kant, which maintained that acts of evil must necessarily be a manifestation of evil intentions, and that the degree of the evil that finds expression in crimes must be consistent with the level of malice of the motives.

The second element that Arendt perceived in Eichmann was “thoughtlessness,” a trait she defined as the “almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view.” But this did not absolve him of responsibility for his deeds. The lesson to be learned from the Eichmann trial, in her view, was that this sort of thoughtlessness, which is “by no means identical with stupidity,” can “wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man.” Her primary argument was that in the atmosphere prevailing in Nazi Germany, Eichmann could not have distinguished between good and evil. Arendt termed him a “new type of criminal,” who commits his crimes “under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.”

What is so difficult to accept about Arendt’s hypothesis of the “banality of evil” – and what generated opposition to the book in Israel – is that she was positing here a new type of conscience. Contrary to the judgment handed down in the trial, Arendt did not believe that Eichmann needed to "close his ears to the voice of conscience," or that he lacked a conscience altogether, but that the voice of conscience of "respectable" German society did not tell him that he should feel guilty for his deeds.

Whereas the law in enlightened states presupposes that the voice of conscience tells everyone, "You shall not kill," the law in Hitler’s state required the voice of conscience to tell everyone, "You shall kill." Indeed, one of Eichmann’s claims in the trial was, Arendt writes, “that there were no voices from the outside to arouse his conscience.”

An additional reason for the rancor directed at Arendt was her criticism concerning the image of the victims of the Holocaust. She objected to the prosecution’s systematic evasion of dealing with the cooperation of the leaders of the Judenräte (the Jewish councils) with the Nazis. One of the most difficult allegations to accept in the book is that if the Jews had been less well organized, and if they hadn’t had a leadership, the overall number of victims would not have reached the dimensions it did.

“To a Jew,” Arendt asserts, “this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.” This hypothetical claim is of course unprovable speculation by Arendt.

Moral outrage

Some of Arendt’s detractors understood the term “banality of evil” as a description of the crimes themselves. By this thinking, if the Nazis’ crimes were banal, it follows that they were not unforgivable. Others interpreted her comments about the responsibility of Jewish leaders as a classic instance of blaming the victim. Both groups saw her book as a dangerous blurring of boundaries that could lead to moral nihilism. Criticism of this sort, which was raised immediately upon the book’s publication, is still being voiced.

Israeli historian Anita Shapira, for example, maintains that Arendt’s critical approach reflects moral ambiguity, and this is what has made her a favorite of postmodernists. “‘Nothing is at seems.’ There is no truth, no lies, no victim, no murderer. No one is guilty, none are innocent, there is no hierarchy of values, no value is absolute,” Shapira wrote, in a 2004 article, “The Eichmann Trial: Changing Perspectives.”

Elhanan Yakira, former head of the philosophy department of the Hebrew University, asserted in his book “Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust” (published in English in 2009) that “Eichmann in Jerusalem” is not only Arendt’s worst book, it is also “morally scandalous” and a philosophical-moral failure. In a later article, he explained that his attempt to expose the book’s intellectual failure is part of a broad effort to expose the moral failure of today’s critics of Zionism, who cast aspersions on Israel with “the systematic use of the Holocaust as an ideological weapon.”

One of the flagrant mistakes in Yakira’s book is his claim that Arendt engaged in an "act of suppression" vis-a-vis the Nazis’ crimes. Arendt, he maintains, barely refers to the annihilation itself. It is true that Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism focused more on the concentration camps and less on the death camps, but this in no way stemmed from a “suppression” of the crimes. The atrocities of Auschwitz jolted every fiber of her being. The act of annihilation is present throughout her book on Eichmann and guides her thinking.

One author who went a lot farther is Tzvia Greenfield, a Haredi journalist (and briefly a Knesset member from Meretz). In her 2017 Hebrew-language book “Collapse: The Disintegration of the Political Left in Israel,” she repeats the same baseless accusations against Arendt that were voiced 50 years ago. Time and again she reiterates that according to Arendt, “it was precisely the Jews themselves who effectively brought about the catastrophe of the annihilation” through the cooperation of the Judenräte with the Nazis. Greenfield even maintains that Arendt asserted that “Eichmann is the true victim of the historical events.”

It’s doubtful whether Greenfield, who accuses Arendt of expressing views that “border on Holocaust denial,” no less and no more, read “Eichmann in Jerusalem” carefully. Otherwise, it’s hard to understand how she could fault Arendt for undermining the “implications of the Holocaust” in order to justify Israel’s violent treatment of the Palestinians, in a book that was published four years before the Six-Day War. Greenfield draws a direct line between Arendt’s criticism of David Ben-Gurion and Zionist ideology, and the BDS boycott movement, which she maintains is undermining Israel’s legitimacy.

Let’s set the record straight: Nowhere in the book does Arendt absolve the Nazis in general or Eichmann in particular of guilt. Arendt was vehemently opposed to the “cog in the machinery” theory, according to which Eichmann was supposedly not responsible for his actions. Functionaries are human beings, too, and as such are blameworthy and guilty. Eichmann, she argues, was accused as a human being; an individual human was on trial, not the entire Nazi regime. Nor, in contrast to many of her friends, did she object to the death penalty he received.

Furthermore, Arendt never claimed that the Jews were to blame for their own destruction. Her consideration of the role of the Judenrat is indeed an infuriating and painful part of her book, marked by a harshly judgmental approach and insensitivity. Even though her discussion of the topic covers only 12 pages, it was the issue that sparked the fiercest response and the most intense anger against her. Her views concerning the behavior of the Jewish leadership during the Holocaust were very similar to the dominant approach in Israel during its first two decades of existence. The judgmental approach toward the Jewish Police and the leaders of the Judenräte, and against everyone who was suspected of “collaboration” with the Nazis prevailed in the country. This was reflected in legislation – in particular the Law for the Punishment of Nazis and Their Collaborators (1950); in the Kapo trials in the 1950s, and in the trial of Rudolf Kastner in 1955.

At the same time, Arendt did not censure the victims themselves, who went to their death, supposedly, like “sheep to slaughter.” On the contrary: She was critical of Gideon Hausner, the chief prosecutor, for asking survivor witnesses over and over, “‘Why did you not protest?’ ‘Why did you board the train?’ … ‘Why didn’t you revolt and charge and attack?’” She argued that these were silly, cruel questions, which attested to a total misunderstanding of life under the murderous terror of the Nazi dictatorship.

Moreover, she also made a point of noting that no other non-Jewish population under German occupation behaved differently. Idith Zertal adds in her book that the prosecutor’s approach aimed less at understanding the Jewish situation under Nazi rule, than at serving the needs of the Zionist narrative and self-image.

The stand Arendt took on the side of the survivors was given symbolic expression in her choice to sit among them in the courtroom rather than in the section reserved for VIPs and journalists. The hall, Arendt wrote, “was filled with ‘survivors,’ with 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.” Like many Holocaust survivors, Arendt too thought that the huge crimes committed by the Nazis could not be adequately represented through the trial, but nevertheless acknowledged that there were no other tools with which to judge them.

Arendt had little patience – neither for Hausner’s theatricalities and nor for the dozens of witnesses whose testimony was heard in the trial. Her rhetoric was at times sharply honed, perhaps excessively so. Her tone was steeped in irony and at times showed a lack of empathy toward some of the testimony, infuriating the Jewish community in Israel and abroad. As the Jewish, Turkish-American philosopher Seyla Benhabib noted, many of the terms Arendt used in her book showed an astonishing lack of perspective and judiciousness, and above all strong emotional involvement and lack of distance from the topic she was examining. She wasn’t able to find "the right public language, the right discourse through which to narrate past sorrow, suffering, and loss."

Zertal, too, believes that Arendt’s rhetoric played a part in rendering the book controversial. “The things themselves," she told me in an interview, "the caustic, compassionless wording, were frequently more than the people of the time and the people of this place could bear.”

But above and beyond that, she says, “What was acceptable and tolerated for the people of the Yishuv, the Zionist collective ‘we,’ was not permissible for the ‘foreign,’ Diaspora, anti-Zionist woman, as her critics termed her. She burst into the midst of the organized event of the trial and disrupted its ideological messages, which were on the brink of theology, about Zionist redemption that sprang from Jewish annihilation. The fact that she was a woman and a groundbreaking thinker, possessing a brilliant intellect, in a realm of knowledge that was completely ruled by men, did not facilitate her acceptance.”

Beyond this, it is worth dwelling on the ambivalent position that Arendt represents as a Jewish refugee, on the one hand, whose life was shaped by virtue of her Jewishness and by her ties with Zionism, and her critique of the Zionist project, on the other hand, as an outside observer. According to the writer and translator Michal Ben-Naftali, who was deeply influenced by Arendt and devoted a book to her, “It is impossible even for a moment to accuse Arendt of being alienated from her Jewishness. Not only is she occupied with the commitment and responsibility that stem from that identity, but from the 1940s onward she writes about Jewish and Zionist matters from a position of involvement and concern, though this never leads to integration or an unequivocal sense of solidarity.”

Ben-Naftali adds, “It seems to me that precisely the uncommon fusion of caring and critical distance generates suspiciousness toward her in the best case, and massive recoil in the less-than-best case.”

Saving the Jewish state

Even though Arendt didn’t see herself as belonging to any political group, and even if it’s hard to tag her as “left” or “right,” her critical writing anticipated some of the central issues that appeared years later in studies conducted by the “New Historians” and “post-Zionists.” Already in early articles from the 1940s, Arendt was critical of the Jewish nation-state, supported binational and multinational political frameworks, and warned about the threat posed to the Arab population of Palestine. In her book about Eichmann she came out against what she perceived as the Zionist project’s exploitation of the memory of the Holocaust. Arendt touched plenty of raw nerves, which continue to generate searing disputes.

In 1948, at the height of Israel’s War of Independence, and long before the Nation-State Law was promulgated and before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented the plans for of Auschwitz-Birkenau at the UN General Assembly, Arendt wrote the following in an article titled “To Save the Jewish Homeland”: “And even if the Jews were to win the war, its end would find the unique possibilities and the unique achievements of Zionism in Palestine destroyed. The land that would come into being would be something quite other than the dream of world Jewry, Zionist and non-Zionist. The ‘victorious’ Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities.

“The growth of a Jewish culture would cease to be the concern of the whole people; social experiments would have to be discarded as impractical luxuries; political thought would center around military strategy; economic development would be determined exclusively by the needs of war.”

Zertal’s 2018 book “Refusal: Conscientious Objection in Israel” (in Hebrew), which deals with the issue of political evil and the possibilities of rising up against it, examines the intellectual, political and historical background of conscientious objection to army service in Israel, particularly in relation to the occupation. “Eichmann in Jerusalem” is the book’s point of departure. Zertal shows how Arendt’s ideas, including the “banality of evil,” “which were rejected and repressed for years, are present in the thinking of young Israelis and influence their choices and their decisions” during their army service and afterward. The book contains interviews with soldiers of various ranks, from reserve officers to former Shin Bet security services director Ami Ayalon, who talk about how they became functionaries who only did their duty in operational actions, in a narrow realm that left them little room for thought.

“She is undoubtedly one of the greatest and most influential thinkers of the 20th century,” Zertal told me. “And she chose consciously not to be a philosopher in the sense of thinking and reflection in isolation from the world, but saw herself as a political thinker whose philosophy is nourished by life’s experiences. She experienced it all first-hand: world wars, Nazism, the Holocaust, totalitarianism, revolutions, postcolonialism, refugeehood and migration. Rare are the thinkers who have introduced into their work so many critical issues for deciphering the world, and did so with an intellectual passion and brilliance and with such uncompromising courage as Arendt.” I asked Ben-Naftali what she thinks makes Arendt unique. She replied that she was drawn to her thought “because of her nonconformist courage and because of her effort to dissolve clichés and norms of thought impartially.” According to Ben-Naftali, “Arendt’s writing is informed by tremendous complexity. It seems to me that many people cannot bear complexity in contexts that they consider to be ‘volatile.’ That tendency renders many of the debates on public issues superficial and effectively superfluous, and not only in this context.

“In a certain sense, Arendt knew that. She knew she was aiming for what was intolerable and was acting just plain tactlessly, touching on things that were not yet ripe to be touched on. There aren’t many people who are capable of doing that and paying the kind of price that she did. In a way, the book was aimed, already when it was published, at the sensibilities of a generation younger than the one Arendt herself was part of. From this point of view, Arendt’s writing still awaits us in years to come.”

Dr. Michal Aharony is a researcher of the Holocaust and political philosophy, and author of “Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Total Domination: The Holocaust, Plurality, and Resistance” (Routledge, 2015). Her website is https://michalaharony.net/.