Arendt Reconsidered Zionism

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If you have read any of my previous writings on religion and public life, you will be aware that I am strongly opposed to theocratic structures of power, and vice versa, political structures of faith. I have written against Christian Nationalism, Theocratic Islam, Buddhist nationalism, and of course, Zionism.

Why?

Part of it comes from my Mennonite Brethren upbringing, which positioned faith-communities as groups who identified themselves in the minority. Part of it comes also from a kind of middle-aged wisdom: we better be epistemologically humble because there are just too many variables for one person to speak as an expert on human social and political affairs. In this article, I want to tap into the last major source, who I have spent the last 25 years or so studying: Hannah Arendt.

“Arendt believed she had identified a governing logic: the pursuit of security through domination, reliance on imperial sponsorship, and the presumption that conflict is eternal and unsolvable. In her view, this logic would entrench rather than resolve hostility.”

In 1944, Hannah Arendt published an essay titled “Zionism Reconsidered.” Writing in the shadow of World War II and the unfolding catastrophe of European Jewry, Arendt identified what she believed to be a disastrous turning point in the history of Zionism. The culmination of fifty years of Zionist politics, she argued, had crystallized in a single moment: the Atlantic City Convention of the World Zionist Organization.

At that convention, American Zionists from across the political spectrum united in demanding a Jewish state that would encompass all of Palestine, undivided and undefined. For Arendt, this unanimity marked the triumph of an extremist strand within Zionism. It foreclosed alternative political paths and placed the movement on a trajectory that she believed would end in self-destruction.

Zionism, in its earlier decades, had not been a monolith but a debate. One of its most important internal critics was Ahad Ha’am, who warned that any Jewish national project that ignored the Arab population of Palestine would destroy itself morally and politically. In contrast stood figures such as Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who framed Zionism in terms that often-echoed European colonial logic.

Arendt aligned herself more closely with the cultural Zionists. Reflecting on the Atlantic City resolution, she observed that the Arabs were not even mentioned in its text. Their absence, she noted, effectively left them with a grim choice: voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship. The moral blindness of this omission was precisely what Ahad Ha’am had warned against decades earlier.

In his 1891 essay “Truth from Eretz Israel,” Ahad Ha’am described the behavior of early Zionist settlers during the first aliyah. He accused them of treating Arabs with hostility and cruelty, of trespassing unjustly on their land, beating them without cause, and then boasting of it. He rejected the condescending belief that Arabs were ignorant “desert savages” incapable of understanding what was happening around them. On the contrary, he insisted, they understood Zionist intentions all too well.

Herzl’s rhetoric, by contrast, frequently cast the Zionist project as a civilizational outpost. He envisioned a Jewish state as “a rampart of Europe against Asia,” an outpost of civilization opposed to barbarism. Jabotinsky was even more blunt. In his essay “The Iron Wall,” he argued that Zionist colonization would have to proceed regardless of the native population’s wishes. Every native population, he observed, resists colonization as long as there remains a spark of hope of preventing it. The Arabs of Palestine were no exception and would persist in resistance as long as that hope endured.

For Arendt, it was this Herzl-Jabotinsky strand of Zionism that prevailed in Atlantic City. She saw in its victory a recipe for unending conflict. “Whenonalism is bad enough,” she wrote, “when it trusts in nothing but the rude force of the nation. A nationalism that necessarily and admittedly depends upon the force of a foreign nation is certainly worse.” Herzl had openly embraced reliance on great powers, imagining a neutral Jewish state guaranteed by European nations. Arendt believed such dependence would ensure not security but permanent instability.

“A nationalism that necessarily and admittedly depends upon the force of a foreign nation is certainly worse.”

Even if Jews were to achieve a majority in Palestine, she argued, or even if the Arab population were transferred, the fundamental dilemma would remain. Jews would either have to seek protection from an outside power against their neighbors or arrive at a genuine working agreement with those neighbors. No people, she insisted, can secure its own freedom by denying freedom to another.

Arendt was particularly troubled by what she saw as Zionism’s willingness to ally itself with imperial powers and even with antisemites in pursuit of statehood. From British imperial sponsorship to later geopolitical alignments, she believed the movement had compromised its original ethical aspirations. In her view, a national movement that began with high idealism had, at critical moments, sold itself to existing powers rather than seeking solidarity with other oppressed peoples.

Her most chilling insight concerned what she described as Zionism’s retreat into a doctrine of eternal antisemitism. If antisemitism is understood as a permanent and ineradicable feature of human society, then Jewish politics becomes a politics of permanent emergency. Once that premise is accepted, politics in the deeper sense collapses. Coexistence appears naïve; emancipation seems futile; separation and force become the only rational strategies.

To illustrate the logic, one might imagine applying it elsewhere. If one were to argue that racism in the United States is eternal and unchangeable, the conclusion would be that the civil rights struggle is pointless and that equality should be abandoned in favor of separation. Such a position would concede the permanence of racist premises rather than challenging them. For Arendt, this was not emancipation but despair. It risked internalizing the very racial worldview that Zionism claimed to oppose.

In later decades, particularly after the Holocaust, some Zionist thinkers argued that the catastrophe had vindicated Zionism’s core premise: that Jews could never be safe in the diaspora. The idea of “catastrophic Zionism” emerged from this conviction. Jewish safety, in this view, is a zero-sum game in a permanently hostile world. Security can be achieved only through sovereign power and military dominance.

Arendt had warned that such a framework would require perpetual crisis to justify itself. If hostility is assumed in advance, then coexistence becomes impossible by definition. Domination appears as the only path to safety. The settlers are not joining an existing society but replacing it. The project becomes one not of integration but of displacement.

To make the dynamic more tangible, one might imagine a hypothetical scenario in which a group of immigrants arrived in an American state and declared their intention to establish an independent nation there, displacing the local population on the grounds that the locals had other states to inhabit. The resistance such a project would provoke is easy to imagine. Arendt believed that ignoring this predictable resistance in Palestine was not realism but self-deception.

She also perceived a deep irony at the heart of modern Zionist rhetoric. The claim that the diaspora is inherently unsafe suggests a moral obligation for Jews to emigrate to Israel. Yet the viability of Israel has long depended on the political, financial, and diplomatic support of Jewish communities abroad, especially in the United States. The diaspora is depicted as unlivable in theory, yet indispensable in practice. The doctrine functions, in this sense, both as destiny and as strategic rhetoric.

Arendt could not have foreseen the precise contours of Middle Eastern politics over the subsequent eight decades. But she believed she had identified a governing logic: the pursuit of security through domination, reliance on imperial sponsorship, and the presumption that conflict is eternal and unsolvable. In her view, this logic would entrench rather than resolve hostility.

Critics who draw on Arendt’s analysis argue that this trajectory has culminated in a system defined by separation, unequal citizenship, territorial expansion, and the displacement or confinement of millions of Palestinians. Security, in this framework, is sought not through shared political life but through walls, raids, and overwhelming force. Equality and coexistence are dismissed as naïve illusions.

Arendt’s warning was not that Jews did not deserve safety or self-determination. It was that safety built on the systematic denial of another people’s political existence would corrode the moral and political foundations of the Jewish project itself. A nationalism born as a response to racial persecution, she feared, could become a mirror image of the racialized domination it once resisted.

Her essay remains unsettling because it challenges comforting narratives. It asks whether a politics rooted in permanent fear can ever produce genuine security. It asks whether liberation for one people can be sustained through the subordination of another. And it insists that the refusal to confront these questions is not prudence but peril.

“Zionism Reconsidered” was, above all, an appeal to recover the possibility of shared political life. Arendt believed that genuine freedom requires mutual recognition and consent. Without them, the pursuit of sovereignty risks hardening into a structure of endless conflict. Whether one agrees with her conclusions or not, the moral seriousness of her challenge endures.

More of my writing critiquing concepts of church and state:

Arendt Reconsidered Zionism

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