How Hannah Arendt Would Respond to Israel Being Accused of Crimes Against Humanity
Arendt, who fled the Nazis and famously covered the Eichmann trial, firmly believed in an international criminal court as a protection against genocide. So would she have supported the potential ICC arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders?
Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Hannah Arendt. In the half-century, and especially the now over half-year that has passed since October 7, 2023, the Jewish thinker and refugee from Nazi Germany, though she would find little reason for hope, would nevertheless refuse to resign herself to despair.
As she declared in The Human Condition, "The life span of man running toward death would inevitably carry everything to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent in action like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin. "
Just such an interruption occurred with the announcement last week by the International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan, requesting arrest warrants against the political and military leaders of both Hamas and Israel. Reasonable grounds exist, he declared, that not just Yahya Sinwar, Muhammad Deif, Ismail Haniyeh, but also Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.
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By way of explaining this judicial shot heard around the world, Khan declared, "If we do not demonstrate our willingness to apply the law equally, if it is seen as being applied selectively, we will be creating the conditions for its collapse."
The outrage sparked by Khan's decision has been overwhelming among both Israeli and diasporic Jews. It is reminiscent of the firestorm of controversy that followed the publication, in 1963, of Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In effect, Arendt offered both a chronicle and commentary of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who had been charged with crimes against humanity and the Jewish people for his pivotal role in the unfolding of the Final Solution.
Two concepts employed by Arendt in the book—complicity and banality—proved especially combustible. It is with the former term, Arendt accused the Judenräte, the Nazi-appointed Jewish councils, of enabling the catastrophe that struck European Jewry. While Arendt was often harsh and judgmental about the councils, she was also mostly right about the consequences of their collaboration with Nazi officials.
As for banality, rarely has one word led to so much indignation and incomprehension. Arendt used the term, which appears just once in the book, to underscore Eichmann's thoughtlessness—his utter inability to see the world from another's perspective. It was this unremarkable quality that allowed him to commit his unspeakable crimes. But a third concept introduced by Arendt, plurality, has vital relevance for the charges against Hamas and Israeli leaders named by Khan in his warrant request to the International Criminal Court.
Towards the very end of her account, Arendt states that the Nazi regime, in its wish to "make the entire Jewish people disappear from the face of the earth that the new crime, the crime against humanity – in the sense of a crime 'against the human status,' or against the very nature of mankind – appeared." This crime is unlike other crimes, she insists, because it is "an attack on human diversity as such…without which the very words 'mankind' or 'humanity' would be devoid of meaning."
In her later writings, Arendt substitutes "plurality" for "diversity," but her point remains the same. The term has nothing to do with its current meaning—one's identification with a specific ethnic, linguistic, or religious group. Indeed, it means just the opposite: the deep and vital differences that exist not merely between groups, but between every one of us. Human plurality implies we are all of us fully equal and fully unique. This explains why she famously concludes "no one, that is, no member of the human race" can be expected to share the earth with those who seek to eradicate our shared and plural humanity.
The radical evil embodied by Nazi Germany—"making human beings as human beings superfluous," she explained to her mentor and friend Karl Jaspers—required the creation of a new legal category: crimes against humanity. By this term, which she used interchangeably with "genocide," Arendt did not mean a specific law, but instead an umbrella term covering all international crimes. The proper forum for such cases, she affirmed, was an international criminal court. As she told Jaspers, "I would be all in favor of an international court with appropriate powers."
As no such institution existed in 1961, Arendt resigned herself to the legitimacy of an Israeli court. But she continued to press for the expansion of international law and the founding of an international criminal court. If yet other crimes against humanity are "an actual possibility of the future," she warned in the epilogue to Eichmann in Jerusalem, "then no people on earth—least of all, of course, the Jewish people, in Israel or elsewhere—can feel reasonably sure of its continued existence without the help and protection of international law."
This passage should remind the world that Israel's initial response to the Hamas massacre was not just understandable, but also utterly justifiable. No people on earth, to echo Arendt, have a greater right to fear for its continued existence than the Jewish people. The past, as the massacre of October 7 also reminds us, will never be past, much less dead for Jews in Israel and elsewhere.
But Arendt, who was rightly preoccupied over the place of Palestinians in postwar Zionist thought, would hasten to add there are other and equally grim reminders. Most important, she would likely support the detailed charges brought by the ICC prosecutor, based on evidence that arguably goes beyond a reasonable doubt, that while Israel has the right to defend itself, it failed in its duty to comply with international law. This comprehends not just its disproportionate level of killing and destruction—which would include this week's missle strike on a refugee camp in Rafah—and the deliberate use of starvation of the civilian population.
Ironically, Israeli and Palestinian critics have found common ground in deriding these charges because they reflect a moral equivalency between Hamas and Israel's actions.
But Arendt would reply that the most vital of common grounds instead lies in the "paradoxical plurality of unique beings." Just as Hamas ended the lives of 1,200 unique beings on October 7, Israel has ended the lives of tens of thousands of unique beings, many of them civilians, in the months that have followed. The absolute equivalency of all these unique lives, Arendt would insist, is the only equivalency that matters.
Robert Zaretsky teaches in the Honors College, University of Houston, and is a columnist with the Jewish Daily Forward. His new book, "Victories Never Last: Reading and Caregiving in Time of Plague" was published in March 2022 by the University of Chicago Press. https://x.com/MashadiArash/status/1795041486859345982
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