The Blogs: Reading Hannah Arendt After Israel

Reading Hannah Arendt’s Zionism Reconsidered eighty years after it was written is a strange experience. Some of it feels remarkably prescient. Some of it feels dated. And some of it is fascinating precisely because Arendt was making predictions that, in 1944, seemed perfectly reasonable—and that history would soon overturn.

Arendt wrote the essay while the Holocaust was still taking place and before the State of Israel existed. European Jewry was still the overwhelming demographic center of Jewish life. The British Empire still dominated the Middle East. The European nation-state system, which had already produced one world war and was now producing another, appeared to be collapsing under the weight of nationalism, statelessness, and totalitarianism.

From that vantage point, Arendt’s skepticism about Zionism was not irrational. Indeed, some of her objections were extraordinarily serious. What is striking is how many of the premises underlying those objections were themselves about to disappear.

The result is a peculiar kind of historical conversation: Arendt is often asking exactly the right questions, but the Jewish world that eventually had to answer them was not the world she imagined.

The Zionism Arendt was confronting

Arendt begins with a striking claim about the direction Zionism had taken by 1944. The American Zionist movement had adopted a demand for a Jewish commonwealth encompassing “the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished.” To Arendt, this represented the triumph of what she called the Revisionist program.

But she was not merely objecting to territorial maximalism. She believed Zionism had gradually adopted the political categories of nineteenth-century European nationalism.

She describes Zionism as one of the great European ideologies that had once carried genuine political passion but had now, in her view, “outlived their political conditions.” She places Zionism alongside socialism and nationalism as movements whose original historical circumstances were disappearing.

This is an important key to the entire essay.

Arendt is not simply asking whether a Jewish state would be well governed. She is asking whether the nation-state itself is still the right political form.

And from her perspective in 1944, that was a very reasonable question.

A Jewish future beyond the nation-state

Arendt had watched the multinational empires collapse after the First World War and the successor nation-states struggle with enormous minority populations. She had experienced statelessness herself. She had then watched Nazi Germany demonstrate the catastrophic consequences of defining political belonging in racial and national terms.

From this perspective, Zionism seemed to her to be arriving at exactly the wrong moment.

Why, Arendt effectively asks, should Jews respond to the failures of European nationalism by creating another nation-state?

Instead, she writes that the problem of organizing political life would ultimately be solved by “either the form of empires or the form of federations.” Federations, she argues, might give small peoples a reasonably fair chance of survival.

It was a reasonable question in 1944.

But it turned out to be a bad forecast.

The nation-state did not die.

Instead, the postwar world became even more heavily organized around sovereign states. Decolonization created dozens of new countries. The United Nations institutionalized a world of states. The Soviet Union eventually dissolved into states of its own. Yugoslavia broke apart along national lines. New states continued to appear.

And, in the middle of this process, Israel was created—and survived.

There is something almost ironic about this. Arendt saw the Jewish state as an attempt to revive a political form that history was supposedly leaving behind. Yet the nation-state proved remarkably durable, while the empires and multinational political orders that seemed permanent in her lifetime disappeared.

That does not make Arendt’s analysis useless. Her questions about nationalism, minorities, sovereignty, and statelessness remain important. But the historical experiment went differently than she expected.

Revolution as an alternative to Zionism

One of the most revealing parts of the essay is Arendt’s account of the path not taken. She is sharply critical of the Zionist decision to seek the protection of established powers, especially Britain. Her metaphor of the “lion and the lamb” captures the concern: an alliance with a great power may protect a small people, but the great power ultimately has interests of its own.

Arendt thinks there was another possibility. Rather than seeking to be protected by governments, Jews could have allied themselves with the revolutionary movements transforming Europe. She praises Bernard Lazare, the French Jewish socialist, as essentially the only Zionist who seriously contemplated this path. The choice, as Arendt puts it, was between Jews who would “achieve freedom instead of being transported to freedom.”

That is a beautiful formulation of her political philosophy. It is also where I think her radicalism deserves more scrutiny.

A revolution does not end when the old regime falls. Revolutionaries have to build a coalition capable of overthrowing the existing order, decide what replaces it, construct institutions for the new society, resolve conflicts among competing revolutionaries, and ensure that the new society does not become worse than the old one. That is an extraordinary number of contingencies.

Arendt is very good at identifying the danger of entrusting Jewish security to a great power such as Britain. She writes that “protection by these interests supports a people as the rope supports for hanging.” And Britain eventually demonstrated exactly the kind of conditionality she feared: its policies restricted Jewish immigration and eventually it abandoned the Mandate.

Yet there is an irony in the historical outcome. Despite those failures, British involvement helped create some of the political and institutional conditions from which the Jewish state emerged. In that limited but important sense, the dangerous alliance with Great Britain somehow worked.

That does not make Arendt wrong about the danger. It does, however, raise a question about her preferred alternative. Why should the revolutionary lion have been safer than the imperial one? Britain could abandon Zionism when British interests changed. A revolutionary movement could abandon Jewish particularity when its conception of the new society changed. A Jewish revolutionary might enthusiastically participate in the transformation of Europe and still discover that Jewish religious identity, Jewish nationalism, or Jewish communal institutions had no place in the society that emerged.

The Zionist alternative was considerably less utopian. It rested on an essentially modest proposition:

we do not know what Europe will become, what Britain will become, what the Arab world will become, or what the next political ideology will become. Therefore Jewish security should not depend entirely on the ability to predict or control those transformations.

That is not necessarily a rejection of political action. It is an argument about the limits of political control.

Arendt was right that antisemitism is political

This is where I think Arendt makes one of her strongest arguments. She rejects the idea that antisemitism can simply be treated as an eternal hatred that exists independently of politics. She argues that both assimilationists and Zionists too often avoided the “arduous task of fighting antisemitism on its own grounds,” because those grounds were political.

She was right about that. Antisemitism is historically and politically adaptable. Its particular claims change with the society in which it appears. The conspiracy theories of nineteenth-century Europe were not identical to the Nazi version, which was not identical to Soviet anti-cosmopolitanism, which is not identical to contemporary forms of antisemitism. Understanding those differences matters because political responses have to address the particular form the hostility takes.

But there is a subtle problem with Arendt’s confidence in political analysis. The fact that antisemitism is politically intelligible does not mean that it is politically conquerable.

Indeed, the very adaptability that makes antisemitism intelligible also makes it extraordinarily difficult to defeat through Jewish political action. Jewish weakness can be interpreted as evidence of Jewish parasitism; Jewish political organization can be interpreted as evidence of Jewish conspiracy; Jewish assimilation can be interpreted as concealment.

This creates an important limit on the kind of political confidence that runs through Arendt’s essay. Understanding the political causes of antisemitism can make Jewish political action more intelligent. But it cannot guarantee that Jewish action will produce the desired political interpretation.

And that, in turn, makes the Zionist argument more complicated than Arendt allows. The question is not simply whether Jews can find the right political strategy for making European society safe for them. It is whether Jewish security should depend so heavily on successfully managing the political transformations of other societies in the first place.

The Jewish Army problem

Arendt’s argument becomes particularly interesting when she discusses the Jewish Army.

She is furious that Zionist leaders did not make Jewish military participation in the Second World War a central political demand. She states, “That an early distinct and demonstrable participation of Jews as Jews in this war would have been the decisive way to prevent the antisemitic slogan which, even before victory was won, already represented Jews as its parasites.”

There was a powerful argument for this.

Jews should not simply appear as passive victims waiting for other nations to save them. A Jewish military force could demonstrate Jewish political agency and dignity, but Arendt’s reasoning reveals the danger in assuming that Jewish political action will necessarily undermine antisemitic ideas.

Suppose Jews had created a major Jewish Army during the war. It could have demonstrated Jewish courage. It could also have been incorporated into another antisemitic narrative:

The Jews are not merely victims. They are an international political and military force pursuing collective Jewish interests.

The point is not that Jews therefore should have remained passive. It is that antisemitism is capable of interpreting both Jewish power and Jewish powerlessness through its own premises.

That is why the malleability of antisemitism should produce both political analysis and political humility.

Arendt is right that Jews should not simply shrug and say, “Antisemitism is eternal, therefore there is nothing to understand.”

But the Zionist response does not have to be that antisemitism is metaphysically eternal.

A stronger formulation is:

Antisemitism is historically variable, but Jewish vulnerability to the political transformations of other societies is itself a recurring historical pattern.

That is a much more modest, and perhaps much more defensible, claim.

Arendt’s focus on the European Jew

Perhaps the deeper problem in Zionism Reconsidered is demographic.

Arendt writes about “the Jewish people,” but the Jewish people she has most immediately in mind are European Jews.

That was understandable. She was a European Jew writing in the middle of the destruction of European Jewry. For much of modern Jewish history, European Jews had constituted the overwhelming majority of world Jewry and had produced the political movements with which Arendt was arguing.

But this makes some of her arguments look very different after 1948. The Jewish population of Israel would not remain predominantly European.

Jews would arrive in enormous numbers from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iran, and other countries. Israel would become a society containing Jews whose families had lived for centuries in civilizations very different from the Europe that occupies so much of Arendt’s intellectual landscape.

This is especially significant because Arendt argues that Zionism mistakenly places the Jewish people outside the history and culture of Europe.

But Israel’s subsequent history suggests another possibility.

Perhaps Zionism did not simply move European Jews from one civilization to another. Perhaps it created a political center capable of bringing together Jewish populations from several different civilizations.

That is a very different conception of Israel. It is not merely the European Jewish nation transplanted to Palestine. It is a place where European, Middle Eastern, North African, and other Jewish histories converge.

“The fierce outburst of popular hatred”

This is also where one of the essay’s most fascinating predictions comes back to haunt it.

In Section IX, Arendt writes that the “fierce outburst of popular hatred” predicted by Zionism did not occur in the way Zionists expected. Instead, she says, government action proved even more destructive.

She was right about the distinction she was making. Nazi antisemitism was not merely a spontaneous eruption of popular hatred. It became state policy.

But after Arendt wrote those words, another enormous transformation took place.

Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa experienced persecution, discrimination, violence, political upheaval, and mass displacement. Hundreds of thousands of Jews eventually left countries in which Jewish communities had existed for centuries, with Israel becoming the destination for many of them.

Israel was becoming not simply a refuge for European Jews. It was becoming a refuge and home for Jews from across the Middle East and North Africa as well.

Arendt could not have known this when she wrote the essay.

And this produces an important challenge to her conception of Zionism. Israel was not ultimately only a European Jewish response to European antisemitism. It became a destination for Jews whose historical experiences were not European at all.

“Surely they cannot survive”

Section X is particularly striking from the perspective of the subsequent Arab-Israeli wars.

In 1944, the idea of establishing a Jewish state against the wishes of the surrounding Arab population looked extraordinarily dangerous.

Arendt imagines the consequences of Jewish sovereignty as, “the Arabs turn against the Jews as the Slovaks turned against the Czechs in Czechoslovakia, and the Croats against the Serbs in Yugoslavia.”

She also makes a broader argument: even if all Arabs were removed from Palestine, a Jewish state without genuine sovereignty and surrounded by hostile Arab peoples would remain dependent upon outside political support.

This was not a foolish prediction.

Imagine telling Arendt what would happen next.

Israel would declare independence in 1948, and several Arab armies would invade.

Israel would survive.

In 1956, Israel would fight another war.

It would survive.

In 1967, Israel would fight Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and emerge with a stunning military victory.

Then, in 1973, Egypt and Syria would launch a surprise attack.

Israel would survive that too.

If someone had given Arendt this sequence of events in 1944, it is difficult to imagine that she would have concluded that Israel was therefore destined to become a stable and permanent country. Four major wars in its first twenty-five years would have seemed like confirmation that the fundamental political problem was insoluble.

Yet Israel survived long enough to change the problem itself.

Egypt eventually made peace with Israel. Jordan followed. The question gradually shifted from whether Arab states would accept the existence of a Jewish state to whether the region could establish a workable system of coexistence among states that had previously fought one another.

This does not mean that the Arab-Israeli conflict was solved. It plainly was not. Nor does Israeli survival vindicate every Zionist policy or answer the Palestinian question.

But it does demonstrate something Arendt’s 1944 analysis could not fully imagine: the existence of a Jewish state did not necessarily mean permanent war between Jews and Arabs.

States could change their interests. Governments could change. Strategic realities could change.

The Jewish state could survive long enough for its enemies to reconsider the wisdom of trying to destroy it.

The question Arendt asks about America

This is where the essay becomes especially relevant to American Jewish life.

Arendt sees America as fundamentally different from the European nation-state. America, she argues, can accommodate multiple peoples and identities within one political framework. A Jew can be a fully loyal American while remaining attached to Jewish peoplehood and to Israel.

And this creates a fascinating question about Zionism.

Why should attachment to Israel necessarily contradict American citizenship?

For a religious Jew, the question is even stranger. Jewish attachment to Eretz Yisrael did not begin with Theodor Herzl. It did not begin with political Zionism. It did not even begin with modern nationalism.

The Jewish people existed as a people in exile.

Jews prayed for Jerusalem, studied the laws of the Land of Israel, remembered the Land in daily liturgy, and maintained connections among Jewish communities across enormous distances.

The Jewish relationship to Eretz Yisrael is therefore older than the modern category of nationalism. That means a religious Jew can understand his relationship to Israel in a way that is not equivalent to saying, “Israel is my second country.”

It can instead mean:

Israel is part of the historical, religious, and covenantal identity of the Jewish people to which I belong.

That is a very different proposition.

And yet Arendt’s American warning may be coming true

Here, Arendt’s prediction becomes unexpectedly relevant again.

She worried that Zionism could eventually create a political problem for American Jews: if Zionism demanded political allegiance to another national center, American Jews might be suspected of divided loyalty.

For much of American Jewish history, this tension remained manageable. American Jews could be strongly Jewish, strongly attached to Israel, and strongly American.

But Israel’s increasing polarization within American politics creates a new version of the problem.

The danger today may not be that Zionism inherently prevents American Jews from being Americans. It may be that American political polarization increasingly turns Jewish attachment to Israel into a test of American political identity.

That is an important distinction.

Arendt feared that Zionism would make American Jews look politically foreign. The modern danger may be almost the reverse: that American politics makes an ancient Jewish attachment look like a partisan political allegiance.

The Jew who cares about Israel is increasingly asked, implicitly or explicitly, what that attachment says about his American politics.

But the attachment itself is older than American politics. A Jew in Kansas praying for Jews in Jerusalem is not necessarily expressing a foreign political allegiance. He is simply expressing Jewish peoplehood.

The question is whether American society can continue to accommodate that kind of particularistic identity.

The historical irony

What makes Zionism Reconsidered so compelling today is that Arendt repeatedly takes the political structures of her own moment and projects them into the Jewish future.

She sees European Jewry as the center of Jewish life.

It ceases to be.

She sees the nation-state as a political form approaching exhaustion.

It survives and expands.

She sees the creation of a Jewish state surrounded by hostile Arab states as likely to be disastrous.

Israel survives four major wars and eventually makes peace with two of its most important Arab neighbors.

She sees Zionism primarily through the lens of European nationalism.

Israel becomes increasingly shaped by Jews whose histories are not European at all.

She worries that Zionism will undermine American Jewish belonging.

American Jews remain simultaneously Jewish and American for generations—but now face a different problem, as American political polarization increasingly makes Israel a marker of partisan identity.

And she sees political understanding of antisemitism as a possible route toward political liberation.

Here too, the subsequent history is more ambiguous. Antisemitism can be studied and confronted, but its remarkable ability to adapt means that defeating one political manifestation does not necessarily prevent another from emerging.

None of this means Arendt was foolish, quite the opposite.

Her predictions were often reasonable because they were rooted in the world she actually inhabited. The extraordinary thing is how thoroughly that world changed.

That may be the most valuable lesson of reading Arendt in 2026.

The hardest thing about predicting the future is not imagining what might happen. It is recognizing which parts of the present are temporary.

Arendt saw a Europe whose political order appeared to be dying. She saw a Jewish people whose demographic and cultural center was Europe. She saw a prospective Jewish state surrounded by enemies. She saw America as a political system capable of accommodating Jewish particularity. She believed political movements could transform the conditions that produced antisemitism.

Some of those observations were brilliant, but the Jewish future that emerged was something else.

The nation-state survived.

Israel survived.

European Jewry was devastated.

Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews transformed Israel.

Arab states eventually made peace with Israel.

Antisemitism adapted to new political circumstances.

And American Jews continued to live as both Jews and Americans.

Perhaps that is why reading Arendt after Israel is so useful. It doesn’t simply tell us that she was wrong. It forces us to ask a harder question: