However, I don’t trust her when she writes ironically about Jews, or repeats certain unverified myths and prejudices. For example, when she writes about Heydrich, she treats him as a Jew in denial. Historians rebutted the myth the Heydrich was half-Jewish,, yet Arendt considers what she should have known was merely a rumour as fact and fits it as such into the narrative she makes up about his “repentance” on his deathbed.

Another incident, tucked away unnoticed in her report about the Eichmann trial, made me sceptical about her clear-minded analysis when it came to Israel and its Jews. She was describing the crowds that milled about outside the court, as black eyed, dark skinned grinning Sephardic Jews, whom she could not differentiate from Arabs, and whose appearance and demeanour she found alarming.

Having read this, I asked myself how much of her support for a bi-national state was in fact predicated upon her perception that the Jews of then very young Israel and the Arabs were so alike that it made no sense to treat them as two disparate peoples.

Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, and of how Diaspora affects the evolution of a people, is very incisive, unflinching, and important. She is less confident when it comes to her own Jewishness and her attitude about it.

Also, never forget that she came out against de-segregation, or that she never denounced Heidegger, who was much more worthy of her critical gaze that Gershom Sholem. The logic of the Law of Return as “affirmative action” would not have much purchase with her.

I often wonder about the bitter irony of Arendt being the very incarnation of the “exceptional Jew” which bothered her sense of decorum and rightness so much. I don’t believe she could have been oblivious of this ambiguity within herself.

All of which is to say, that in my humble opinion, on the question of Israel and Zionism, Arendt cannot exactly serve as a disinterested, neutral thinker whose analysis is strictly based on universal principles of justice. I actually prefer Toni Judt, whose positions are open and explicit. He is intelligible, easier to understand and ultimately, to reject.

Addendum:

“At the concluding session, another jarring moment occurred when Steven Wasserman, a New York literary agent, recounted Arendt’s response to Gershom Scholem’s accusation that she didn’t love the Jewish people. Her response was that she couldn’t love the Jewish people or any people, because it makes no sense to love an abstract construct.”

The Jewish people is not an abstract construct, except for those who wish desperately to escape this Jewish “stickiness”. To claim that it is means the Nazis did not extreminate a people but rather got rid of an abstract notion. It also accepts Ahmadinejad’s sophistry when he claims that it’s not Israel that he means to wipe out but rather the “Zionism” ,an ideology, not a community of people, a living, breathing nation.

Ethicist Martha Nussbaum is helpful in the way she addresses the attempt to deny the natural affiliation and concern a person feels for his/her people (which she explains as one’s “cherished relationships and projects “):

““I do not go about fearing any and every catastrophe anywhere in the world, nor (so it seems) do I fear any and every catastrophe that I know to be bad in important ways. What inspires fear is the thought of damages impending that cut to the heart of my own cherished relationships and projects. What inspires grief is the death of someone beloved, someone who has been an important part of one’s own life…. the emotions … take their stand in my own life, and focus on the transition between light and darkness there, rather than on the general distribution of light and darkness in the universe as a whole.” (“Upheavals of Thought”)