'In order to gain some historical perspective on today's ruling version of Zionism, it helps to remember two facts of immense importance in any discussion of Israel. First, free and far ranging discussions of Zionism are presently more common in the better Israeli newspapers such as Ha'aretz than in newspapers such as The New York Times or The Los Angeles Times; and second, we would have to relegate Jewish intellectuals such as Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and Judah Magnes to the ranks of antisemites if we insist on making dogmatic judgments about their criticisms of political and state Zionism. In some respects, Noam Chomsky and other Jewish intellectuals are reviving this older critique of state Zionism-- and they have also been slandered in familiar terms.This is essentialy a debate about nationalism, militarism and human rights. Consequently, this debate is international-- and properly historical. In that spirit, certain passages in Elizabeth Young-Bruehl's biography of Hannah Arendt are worth special attention (Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, Yale University Press, 1982). Young-Bruehl sought to distinguish the views of Hannah Arendt and Judah Magnes-- but also to emphasize how much they had in common.
"Whenever Arendt wrote about Palestine, she repeated her prophecy that political organization in the postwar world might take one of two forms, empires or federations, and that the Jewish people would only have a chance for survival if federations were formed. She had desperately urged her people to avoid establishing a Jewish state which would only be a 'sphere of interest' in foreign powers' empires..."
For his part, Judah Magnes and a small group of colleagues "offered a general proposal for a binational state in Palestine in which neither Jews nor Arabs would be a minority and both would have equal rights... Magnes accepted the State of Israel after its May eighteenth birth, but he did not abandon his dream of Jewish-Arab cooperation."In 1948, Arendt wrote, "Local self-government and mixed Jewish-Arab municipal and rural Councils, on a small scale and as numerous as possible, are the only realistic political measures that can eventually lead to the political emancipation of Palestine." To prevent the ascendancy of Jewish and Arab terrorists to power, Arendt also hoped to forestall the partition of Palestine. Thus she supported President Truman's proposal-- and Count Bernadotte's second proposal (before his assassination)--for an interim United Nations trusteeship of Palestine. Arendt hoped such a UN trusteeship would give all people in Palestine the time to learn to live as neighbors.
Magnes and Arendt corresponded with respect on both sides, and worked together politically as far as possible. As Young-Bruehl wrote:
"The two choices Arendt saw were stark: Bernadotte's second proposal for a UN trusteeship or a Jewish -Arab confederation along Magnes' lines. Hannah Arendt, invoking feasability, had argued for the first.
"Judah Magnes died on the morning of 27 October [1948] without having answered his own question about the way out. For his supporters, it was clear that their own work could not go on without him, though they tried for a time to keep his ideas alive through the Judah Magnes Foundation. Hannah wrote to Magnes' old friend Hans Kohn, who was teaching at Smith College, on 12 November: 'Magnes's death is a real tragedy at this moment. Nobody has his moral authority. I don't see anybody, moreover, who lives really in the Jewish world and who is prominent in a Jewish institution who would have the courage to speak up against what is going on now.' All that she herself could do was to join a group of prominent intellectuals, including Albert Einstein, who submitted a letter of protest to The New York Times when the Jewish terrorist, Menachem Begin, came to America in search of support for the Revisionists of his Herut party. The protest flatly compared the Revisionists 'to the Nazi and Fascist parties' and repudiated the blend in their ideology of 'ultranationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority.' "
As Young-Bruehl mentioned in her biography of Arendt (footnote #41, page 513), "Arendt may have drafted this letter, as one of the signers, Zellig Harris, thanked her for it in an undated letter to her; Library of Congress."'
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