Arendt, the post-war ‘Jewish Question’ and the federal moment in the Second World War

Before turning to examine Arendt's thought on Zionism in the 1940s, it is important first to establish the basic facts about Arendt's relationship to Zionism before the war. Arendt was first drawn to Zionism, the Jewish question and political concerns more generally in the late 1920s. It was then that she formed a close friendship with Kurt Blumenfeld, president of the German Zionist Federation, who exposed Arendt to the Zionist critique of Jewish assimilation.Footnote ¹¹ By 1931, with the tide of anti-Semitism in Germany rising, and following a series of Nazi electoral victories, Arendt, by her own admission, adopted many of Blumenfeld's views as her own. She shared the Zionist belief in the futility of assimilation –‘it is possible to assimilate only by assimilating into antisemitism also’, she wrote – and remained apprehensive about the dangers awaiting German Jews.Footnote ¹² After Hitler's accession to power, Arendt solemnly declared that the chapter of assimilation in the history of German Jews had come to an end, and, following the burning of the Reichstag, she volunteered to carry out illegal work on behalf of the German Zionist Organisation.Footnote ¹³ Later that year, Arendt fled Germany, first to Geneva, then to Paris, where for several years she worked for a number of Zionist organisations facilitating the immigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine until her second experience of exile, as a refugee arriving at the shores of New York in May 1941.

Arendt's brand of Zionism, as it developed in the 1930s, is difficult to characterise. She was sympathetic to those Zionists who wished to migrate to Palestine – her close friend Hans Jonas would be one of them – yet never contemplated emigrating to Palestine herself and generally refrained from engaging with any of the political debates concerning Jewish settlement in Palestine. Nor did Arendt belong to the cultural strands of Zionism that emphasised the rejuvenation of Jewish culture as precondition for national revival, though she admired some of its leading proponents.Footnote ¹⁴ In this sense, she differed from the milieu of central European Zionists who are commonly associated with Brit Shalom. Arendt's Zionism was thus more the product of an emotional and intellectual conviction, resulting from the convergence of two socio-historical premises. First, there was her belief in the failure of Jewish assimilation into European society and, second, the necessarily collective character of Jewish identity as an inassimilable outcast, or pariah as Arendt would put it, in the age of the nation-state. Blumenfeld referred to this type of Zionism as ‘post-assimilatory’.Footnote ¹⁵

Throughout the 1930s, and primarily after her arrival in France, Arendt's espousal of Zionism meant primarily solidarity with other Jewish refugees and support for anti-fascism. After the outbreak of war, and especially following the occupation of France, Arendt begun to seriously consider the form Jewish life would take after the war. Only at this point did she begin writing about the question of Palestine. It is important to emphasise that throughout the war Arendt viewed the post-war Jewish question as an essentially European question and thus considered the future of Palestine only as part of this more general question. To properly understand Arendt's wartime views on Zionism we should thus turn first to examine how she viewed the post-war Jewish question in Europe.

Arendt's first recorded engagement with the post-war Jewish question took the form of an essay she sent her friend Erich Cohn-Bendit in the summer of 1940, entitled ‘The Minority Question’. ‘The Minority Question’ is both an inquiry into the conditions of the exceptional weakness of Jews in the interwar years and a proposal for a solution to this problem after the war. Jews were exceptionally weak, Arendt argued, because they lacked a nation state. In the political reality that characterised interwar Europe – where nation states and ethnic minorities took the place of the former Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman multi-ethnic empires – only those minorities that had a homeland could enjoy protection. Jews, she claimed, were the only minority without a homeland and thus were not a minority at all. Without state protection, there were no consequences to harming them and nowhere to go once they were persecuted and became stateless.Footnote ¹⁶

Arendt outlined three possible solutions to the Jewish predicament in Europe after the war. The first was assimilation, although this option was no longer viable: ‘There is no longer any such thing as assimilation in Europe – nation states have grown too developed and too old’, she wrote, ‘the chance of assimilation during the nineteenth century . . . was based in a reorganisation of peoples that arose out of the French Revolution and in their development as nations. This process has now come to an end’.Footnote ¹⁷ The second solution was that of population transfers. In 1939 Hitler signed an agreement with Mussolini concerning the German minority in South Tyrol that called for their resettlement in Germany. Many intellectuals and statesmen, including some with formidable liberal credentials, viewed this agreement favourably and maintained that the resettlement of minorities in their ethnic homeland could offer a blueprint for the resolution of minority conflicts after the war.Footnote ¹⁸ Arendt, keenly aware of how this precedent might set an example for future policy, warned against the implications of such ideas for the Jews. ‘As for the Jews’, Arendt wrote, ‘these newest methods are especially dangerous for them because they cannot be reimported to any motherland, to a state where they are a majority. For them it can only be a matter of deportation . . . one should never sign one's own death warrant.’Footnote ¹⁹

Arendt dismissed these two solutions, as well as demands for better international guarantees for minority rights. As a prescient student of interwar minority politics, Arendt had little faith in leaving the rights of minorities in the hands of ethnic nation states. Instead, she espoused a third solution: federalism. ‘Our only chance’, she wrote, ‘indeed, the only chance of all small peoples – lies in a new European federal system’. Arendt continued:

Federalism, Arendt affirmed with excitement, would offer a new and radical solution to both the minority question in general and the Jewish question in particular. Specifically, federalism would serve to detach the category of state membership from that of ethnic membership, and thus create a political community in which cultural difference would not translate into political difference. ‘National liberation’, Arendt wrote two years later, ‘can presumably be realised this time only in a federated Europe . . . the French revolution, which brought human rights to the Jews at the price of their national emancipation, is about to take its second great step’.Footnote ²¹

Arendt's support for federalism must be understood as part of a rich wartime political context. Indeed, federalism was a significant political movement during the first years of the war. And while the idea of a European federation dates back to the nineteenth century, the outbreak of the war and the general sense among intellectuals and statesmen that the political order in Europe had been irrecoverably shattered served as a catalyst for the emergence of various new schemes for a post-war federation, or several regional federations, in Europe and around the world. Rather than denoting a specific political programme, federalism was a loosely defined slogan that various groups drew upon to advance a wide array of differing political goals and visions for the future of Europe in the post-war period. Common to all these groups was the conviction that the excesses of ethnic nationalism and the precariousness of small states were ultimately responsible for the disintegration of the interwar political system. A more stable post-war order, they contended, must in the future be based on the renunciation of some aspects of national sovereignty and the creation of larger state units.Footnote ²²

More specifically, when Arendt first espoused federalism in the summer of 1940, she may have been responding to an ongoing debate in France and Britain over the prospects of a Franco-British Union as a first step toward a European federation.Footnote ²³ During the late 1920s and 1930s, France emerged as the intellectual and political centre of support for European unity. In June 1940, in a last bid to bolster the morale of the disintegrating French army and dissuade the French government from concluding a separate armistice with Germany, the British government issued a declaration on a post-war Franco-British Union. ‘The two governments declare that France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations’, the British declaration read, ‘but one Franco-British Union’.Footnote ²⁴ Discussions over a British-French federation petered out soon after the occupation of France, but the spirit of federalism lived on, primarily among European émigrés in London and New York and resistance movements across Europe. For them, support for a European federation was not only a call for a new kind of political post-war arrangement in Europe, but also an assertion of a new found pan-European identity based on the rejection of the Nazi ‘New Order’.Footnote ²⁵ In the United States, too, support for federalism was widespread during the war and intersected with debates on American leadership in the post-war world and visions for a revamped international organisation. Clarence Streit's 1939 book Union Now, for instance, which called for a world federation of democracies, had become one of the greatest wartime bestsellers in the United States and the inspiration for a grassroots movement with thousands of members across the country.Footnote ²⁶ In the British Empire, the question of federalism was central during the war as well. Facing growing demands from colonial subjects for national self-determination, British imperialists had begun to formulate new ideas seeking to reinvigorate the British Empire through granting greater autonomy to its subjects. One of the most well known spokeswomen of this vision was South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, who called for the transformation of the British Empire into a more inclusive, federalist Commonwealth of Nations.Footnote ²⁷

The most elaborate wartime discussions and planning on federalism centred on the future of east-central Europe. As a region of small and weak states lying between Germany and Russia, the question of federalism appeared to be most pertinent there.Footnote ²⁸ In numerous pamphlets and émigré newspapers, such as New Europe and Austria's Voice, east-central European intellectuals and politicians agitated for a post-war federation in the region. In their analysis, the political void created by the collapse of the Habsburg Empire was responsible for the instability of the interwar order in the first place. The federalist plans they thus advocated were motivated by the attempt to restore the political balance of the region before the First World War in one form or another. Beginning in 1941, such plans had begun to receive British, and to a lesser extent also American, political backing. With British support, the exiled governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia in London negotiated a plan for the establishment of a post-war confederation, reaching agreement in 1942. At the same time, the exiled governments of Greece and Yugoslavia worked on a plan for a post-war Balkan Union, which was signed in London that same year.Footnote ²⁹ None of these plans involved a commitment by either side to renounce its sovereignty in any significant way. In fact, and rather ironically, east-central European governments in exile promoted federalist plans for the region as they worked to create more ethnically homogenous states by advocating the transfer of Germans and other minorities they deemed disloyal after the war. Their support for federalism, however, should not be considered merely as lip service to the liberal public and governments. It reflected a genuine fear over German and Soviet dominance in the region and underscored the realisation that eastern European states had to cooperate, as well as tie Britain and the United States more firmly to the region, in order to preserve their political independence after the war.

Arendt's support for federalism was thus part of a much larger wartime debate on the subject. Yet she did not base her support for federalism only on post-war plans, but also on her original analysis of her contemporary political reality. Indeed, by the end of 1941, Arendt would make the case that the war was being waged between the principles of the racial state and the multi-ethnic federal political community. The three major allies, the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, all professed forms of federal political organisation and served as viable models for Arendt's vision of federalism. The United States, to which Arendt fled in 1941, was the first country that succeeded, in her words, in creating a federal structure and overcoming the ‘majority-minority’ problem – thus offering a viable solution to the Jewish question.Footnote ³⁰ Excited by the wartime discussions regarding a post-war British Commonwealth of Nations, Arendt believed that after the war, the British Empire would have to reform itself into a more inclusive federation. And the Soviet Union, she maintained, was a federal organisation that solved its nationalities problem by creating ‘a union of nationalities, each with equal rights regardless of size’,Footnote ³¹ thereby becoming the first political structure in which Jews were both ‘legally and socially “emancipated”, that is, recognized and liberated as a nationality’.Footnote ³²

Arendt's celebration of the United States, the British Empire and the Soviet Union as exemplary models of federalism is rife with intellectual blind spots. In the United States, racial minorities, particularly African-Americans, were still subject to tremendous legal and social discrimination. Despite liberal imperialist talk of a Commonwealth of Nations, Britain affirmed a commitment to the preservation of its empire the 1944 Imperial Conference.Footnote ³³ And Arendt's reading of both the nationalities policy and the status of Jews in the Soviet Union was at once misguided and optimistic, as some of her contemporaries pointed out.Footnote ³⁴ Despite the shortcomings of these models, however, they demonstrated for Arendt that federalism was not an exceptional and utopian vision in the West during the war, but a viable contender to the model of the ethnic nation state that drew its inspiration from existing political models.

Arendt, Zionism and the Arab Federation, 1942–1945

Arendt's preoccupation with the federalism question in Europe had significant implications for her vision for Palestine during and after the war. Yet it was only in late 1942, and mainly in response to two major developments, that Arendt began to engage with the question of the political status of Palestine. The first of these developments was the espousal of the Biltmore programme in May 1942 by a wide coalition of major American Zionist groups and Zionist delegates from Europe and Palestine. This programme called for the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine after the war and for the unlimited immigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine to be fully regulated by the Jewish Agency. The second was the subsequent establishment of the Ihud association by Judah Leon Magnes. The Magnes group fiercely rejected the Biltmore programme and advocated the creation of an Arab-Jewish binational state in Palestine that would be incorporated into a larger Arab federation in the Middle East. Arendt rejected both programmes and based her rejection of them on her commitment to federalism. To fully understand why Arendt rejected both programmes and the sense in which she considered federalism distinct from them it is important first to carefully examine the programmes.

In scholarship on the history of Zionism the adoption of the Biltmore programme is generally portrayed as a watershed moment, reflecting a shift from a decades-long policy of deliberate obscurity concerning the ultimate goal of the Zionist movement to an espousal of a political programme aimed at the creation of a state. This major policy shift, scholars agree, was a result of two factors: first, the attempt of Zionist leaders to counter the British White Paper policy by formulating a clear alternative for the future of Palestine; and second, a growing realisation among Zionist leaders, particularly after mid-1941, of the enormous scale of the post-war Jewish refugee problem in Europe and an understanding among them that only a Jewish state could facilitate the migration of millions of Jewish refugees to Palestine after the war.Footnote ³⁵

The scholarship on the Biltmore programme has overlooked the rich federalist context in which the programme emerged and to which it responded.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, the influence of federalism on the Biltmore programme is evident from the fact that Zionist leaders entirely avoided employing the term ‘state’ in the Biltmore resolution and instead called for the establishment of a ‘Jewish Commonwealth as part of the structure of the postwar democratic world’.Footnote ³⁷ While American and Zionist leaders already used the term ‘Jewish commonwealth’ during the First World War and occasionally during the 1920s, it resurfaced during the Second World War in direct relationship to the federalist discourse. Some wartime observers noted and criticised the deliberate ambiguity of the term ‘Jewish commonwealth’. International lawyer Natan Feinberg, for example, chided Zionist leaders for not clearly articulating their demands, arguing that a ‘commonwealth’ was in no way a sovereign state but either ‘a part of a federal state . . . the federal states itself, or the unique structure of the nations and states united in the British Empire.’Footnote ³⁸ Yet it would be wrong to assume that Zionist leaders merely used the term ‘commonwealth’ in order to conceal a demand for a state in the federalist vocabulary of the day. Throughout the war, both Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion repeatedly suggested that the post-war Jewish commonwealth would be part of the future British Commonwealth of Nations or placed under some other form of international oversight.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, it must be kept in mind that the only post-war constellation that could be conducive to Zionist goals was based on British victory in the war and continued British hegemony in the Middle East. Regardless of how fiercely Zionist leaders opposed the White Paper Policy, they thus still had to think about a future arrangement for Palestine that reconciled Zionist goals with British imperial interests in the region.Footnote ⁴⁰ Writing to political confidante and friend Blanche Dugdale in January 1943, Weizmann explained the choice of the term commonwealth much along these lines:

More importantly, the centrality of federalism to understanding the Biltmore programme can be discerned from the fact that the very call for a Jewish state in Palestine in late 1942 was aimed to counter an alternative vision for the Middle East that gained currency during the war, namely the establishment of a post-war Arab federation. While the idea of an Arab federation originated in attempts to redesign the Middle East political order following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, it had become a widely discussed political vision and a major political trend in the early years of the Second. As Britain had become increasingly reliant on Arab support for its war effort in the Middle East, Arab leaders believed they could extract far-reaching concessions for the cause of Arab independence and advanced visions for pan-Arab political unity. In the summer of 1941 Britain had publically announced its support for the cause of Arab unity in a speech delivered by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. And while British support for an Arab federation was intended primarily as a way to galvanise Arab public opinion in favour of the Allied invasion of Syria, discussions over an Arab federation proliferated in Arab political circles and in the press in Britain and the United States.Footnote ⁴²

Zionist leaders like Weizmann and Ben-Gurion were deeply alarmed by the British support for an Arab federation. Some two months after Eden's speech, Weizmann sent a heartfelt letter to Smuts protesting Eden's position, in which he laid out, likely for the first time outside Zionist circles, the demand for the establishment of a Jewish state after the war.Footnote ⁴³ Ben-Gurion, too, was prompted to publicly express his support for a Jewish state only in the summer of 1941, as it appeared to him that British post-war policy in the region was taking shape without regard to the Zionist position.Footnote ⁴⁴ Ben-Gurion and Weizmann, it is important to note, did not categorically oppose an Arab federation. In fact, throughout the 1930s and early in the war they supported plans that called for the incorporation of Palestine as an autonomous Jewish region into an Arab federation, hoping that such a solution would offset Arab fears over a Jewish majority in Palestine.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet by late 1941 it appeared to them that any plan for Jewish autonomy in Palestine was off the table and that Britain was firmly committed to the cause of Arab nationalism.

Though Arendt did not comment specifically on the term of ‘commonwealth’, her criticism of the Biltmore programme was based to a large extent on what she perceived was the programme's inherent anachronism. In Arendt's view the Biltmore programme called for the establishment of a Jewish state at a time in which nation state nationalism had become intellectually discredited and politically irrelevant. ‘If among Zionists leaders many progressives know and talk about the end of small nations and the end of nationalism in the old narrow European sense’, Arendt wrote in a 1943 essay entitled ‘The Crisis of Zionism’, ‘no official document or programme expresses these ideas’. This was because, Arendt argued,

In Arendt's view, nation-state Zionism had become politically irrelevant because the solution it proposed for the post-war Jewish question, the large-scale immigration of millions of Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine, was out of line with contemporary political developments. As a careful observer of the British Empire, she maintained that the British espousal of an Arab federation should be seen as part of a general attempt to form a British-Muslim alliance across the Middle East and Asia, a point she became increasingly convinced of after the British crushed the Indian rebellion in late 1942 and worked closely with Muhammad Ali Jinnah's Muslim League to restore order in India. Such an alliance would preclude not only the possibility of creating a Jewish state, but also of any other form of large-scale post-war migration of Jews to Palestine. More fundamentally, Arendt argued that nation-state Zionism had become intellectually discredited because the basic Zionist contention ‘that the Jewish question as a whole can be solved only by the reconstruction of Palestine, that the building up of the country will eradicate antisemitism’, had been disproved by the advent of federalism.Footnote ⁴⁷ Reiterating her support for the Soviet Union and the United States as exemplary federal states, Arendt argued that by divorcing the principle of ethnicity from political membership, federal states succeed in offering genuine emancipation to their minorities. A full solution to the post-war Jewish question could thus be found, in Arendt's analysis, only within the framework of a post-war federation.

Contrary to the generally accepted view in scholarship, Arendt's rejection of the Biltmore programme did not lead her to espouse Magnes' Ihud vision. Magnes established Ihud in August 1942 in response to the adoption of the Biltmore programme. His programme must also be understood in the context of wartime federalism. When Magnes publically articulated the Ihud programme in a January 1943 article in Foreign Affairs, he called not simply for the creation of a binational state in Palestine but rather for constitutional parity between Jews and Arabs in Palestine and for the incorporation of Palestine into the envisaged post-war Arab federation, as well as the inclusion of this Arab federation within a broader post-war Anglo-American union.Footnote ⁴⁸ In other words, if the Biltmore programme was in part a rejection the vision of an Arab federation, the Ihud programme must be understood as an endorsement of it. Indeed, Magnes first publicly laid out some of the main tenets of the Ihud programme in a pamphlet published just three weeks after Eden's speech. Entitled ‘Palestine and the Arab Union’, Magnes' pamphlet welcomed the British support for an Arab federation and called for the inclusion of Palestine as a binational state within it.Footnote ⁴⁹

Arendt vehemently rejected Magnes' programme, tellingly, for the same reasons she rejected the Biltmore programme. Both programmes, Arendt maintained in a series of 1943 essays, ‘use the same mode of political thinking’. Whereas advocates of a Jewish Commonwealth were prepared to grant minority rights to Arabs, ‘the existence of a binational state within an Arab federation would mean instead that it would be the Jews who have minority status’.Footnote ⁵⁰ In Arendt's view, Magnes' vision of binationalism was a false form of federalism because it simply replaced the Biltmore vision of Jewish dominance in Palestine with that of Arab dominance. In ‘The Crisis of Zionism’, Arendt elaborated her critique of Magnes along the same lines:

Rejecting both the Biltmore programme and Magnes' binationalism, Arendt asserted in 1943 that the only way Palestine could be saved as the national homeland of the Jews was if it were integrated into a federation. ‘It has become rather fashionable to use the term “federation” for almost any combination of nation states . . .’, Arendt argued, ‘a genuine federation is made up of different, clearly identifiable nationalities . . . . National conflicts can be solved within such a federation only because the unsolvable majority-minority question had ceased to exist’.Footnote ⁵²

Arendt had two specific visions for such a federation in mind. The first would entail incorporating Palestine into a post-war British Commonwealth of Nations and granting Jews, as well as Arabs, a status of member nations of the commonwealth. The second would entail incorporating Palestine into ‘a kind of Mediterranean federation’ that would include the countries of the Middle East and North Africa and, in some way which Arendt does not fully explain, also Spain, Italy and France. Eventually, she argued, such a federation should expand into a federation of European countries.Footnote ⁵³ What ultimately separated Arendt's vision from that of Magnes was her emphasis on Palestine as part of a multi-ethnic federation in which Jews and Arabs would exist alongside other nations. Any alternative, in her view, would consign the Jews to minority status.

While Arendt had clearly articulated her critique of both nation-state Zionism and Zionist binationalism, the alternative vision she proposed remained vague. She did not explain in detail how the post-war federation in which she hoped Palestine would be included should be politically organised, how the pressing issue of Jewish immigration should be handled or whether she believed such a federation was an achievable political goal. Arendt's only outline for the structure of a federation appeared in a 1944 essay entitled ‘Concerning Minorities’.Footnote ⁵⁴ In this essay she argued that ‘the real solution to the nationality and minority problem of our time’ lay in adopting Karl Renner and Otto Bauer's vision of personal cultural autonomy.Footnote ⁵⁵ This early twentieth-century vision emerged from thinkers deeply engaged with the debates over the political organisation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Renner and Bauer, among others, called for the transformation of the Habsburg Empire into a state of multiple nationalities based on a principle of non-territorial personal cultural autonomy whereby individuals could freely associate themselves with a national group that would enjoy full autonomy in all matters pertaining to culture.

Attending to Arendt's espousal of the Bauer-Renner model allows us to better understand her vision of federalism. Arendt's commitment to federalism did not emerge from a liberal universalist point of view that seeks to overcome all forms of nationalism but rather from a commitment to the idea that the federal state should facilitate national pluralism. In this sense, Arendt's view is in line with a longer tradition of Jewish critique of ethnic nationalism and support for a multi-ethnic federation. Indeed, from the late nineteenth century onward, Bundists, diaspora nationalists and Zionists in east-central Europe had called for the transformation of the Habsburg and Romanov Empires into multi-ethnic federations that would grant extensive cultural autonomy to its nationalities. Unlike these groups, Arendt did not base her support for federalism on her commitment to Jewish national culture and the concern that Jews would assimilate into the dominant culture but rather on the fear that Jews would be excluded from a political community dominated by a majority ethnic group, as political events in the 1930s, as well as her own experience as a stateless refugee, had confirmed. In other words, it was the danger of statelessness, not assimilation, that animated Arendt's support for federalism.

In supporting federalism on the basis of the fear of the political exclusion of Jews, Arendt's position was strikingly similar to that advocated by preeminent Jewish historian Salo Baron. Like Arendt, Baron's political worldview was shaped to a large extent by his experience as a stateless refugee: he was expelled from Galicia during the First World War by the advancing Russian army and settled in Vienna, where he continued his studies without legal status.Footnote ⁵⁶ Highlighting the deep affinities between Arendt and Baron's views is useful in demonstrating the extent to which Arendt's position on Zionism and support for federalism emerged out of a deep concern with the Jewish question. While the two had espoused federalism independently from each other, there is reason to believe that they influenced one another during the war. Arendt and Baron first met in New York in November 1941 and developed a close professional and personal relationship that lasted throughout Arendt's life. Baron published Arendt's first scholarly article in the United States and later appointed Arendt as research director of the Commission for European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, which he headed from 1946.Footnote ⁵⁷

Baron's support for federalism must be understood as an integral part of the broader vision of Jewish political history he started to develop during the First World War. As David Engel has shown, Baron regarded the modern period as the most politically volatile and precarious in Jewish history because the rise of nationalism shattered the millennia-old pattern of Jewish existence as a protected minority in a multi-confessional or multi-ethnic political community.Footnote ⁵⁸ ‘Nationalism’, wrote Baron in 1941, ‘has become the greatest danger to the survival of the Jew’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Unlike other major Jewish thinkers who warned against nationalism because they feared it would lead to Jewish assimilation and the loss of Jewish cultural identity, Baron was critical of nationalism primarily because he feared it would lead to the exclusion of the Jew from the political community, and thus from any form of state protection. Speaking in May 1940, probably just a few weeks before Arendt penned her letter to Cohn-Bendit, Baron espoused federalism as the most ‘desirable solution – as far as Jews are concerned’ for the post-war period.Footnote ⁶⁰ ‘If a state of multiple nationality had always proved to be the most hospitable of states for Jewry-in-Exile’, he argued, ‘a confederation of free and equal states and nationalities would be the very epitome of a tolerant and multifarious entity’.Footnote ⁶¹

Like Arendt, Baron's support for a federal solution in Europe went hand in hand with support for a federal solution in Palestine. Speaking in Chicago in June 1942, just one month after the Biltmore conference, Baron implicitly criticised both Biltmore Zionism and Zionist binationalism and laid out his vision for the future of Palestine: ‘A Palestinian state or states constituting a part of a larger commonwealth of nations would offer the best solution for some of the major difficulties inherent in the geographic and social makeup of the country’, he argued.Footnote ⁶² In Baron's view Palestine's future would be most secure for Jews and Arabs alike if it were integrated into some form of a large post-war federation like a greatly expanded Arab federation that would become a dominion of the British Commonwealth of Nations or as part of a revamped post-war international organisation under American and British leadership.

Like Arendt, Baron rejected the idea of establishing a Jewish nation state because he believed nation state nationalism had become politically outdated and that a small state would be militarily and economically precarious, though he did acknowledge that if a federal solution in Palestine failed, ‘one still may some day have to erect side by side a Jewish and an Arab state such as was originally proposed by the Royal Commission’.Footnote ⁶³ And similarly to Arendt, Baron distiguished between a binational state and a federal solution. Only within a large commonwealth of nations could a ‘genuinely binational state emerge’, Baron argued, because ‘an international or federal guarantee would blunt the edge of the majority versus minority problems . . .’.Footnote ⁶⁴ In other words, and similarly to Arendt, it would create a multi-ethnic political framework in which Jews and Arabs are not the only member nations.

Arendt and Magnes, 1948

In the first years after the war, Arendt generally refrained from publicly commenting on the question of Palestine. There seems to be no clear reason why Arendt suddenly disengaged from public debates on the topic, which proliferated as the British contemplated the future of the Palestine mandate against a backdrop of escalating violence between Jews, Arabs and the British. It was only in May 1948, shortly before the declaration of independence by the State of Israel, and in the midst of civil war between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, that Arendt returned to publicly discuss the question of the political status of Palestine in an essay entitled ‘To Save the Jewish Homeland: There is Still Time’, published in the pages of Commentary magazine.

‘To Save the Jewish Homeland’, the most heartfelt and moving of Arendt's writings on Zionism, is a critical and scintillating indictment of Zionist politics, particularly as they evolved during and after the war. Arendt argued that since the adoption of the Biltmore programme, all opposition within the Zionist ranks had steadily disappeared and that all Zionists groups were now committed to the establishment of a nation state, with any opposition being considered treason. Arendt suggested that this shift was a result of a transformation in the ‘Jewish national character’ in the wake of the European catastrophe into one that fears that ‘everybody is against us’.Footnote ⁶⁵ ‘After two thousand years of “Galut mentality”’, Arendt wrote, ‘the Jewish people have suddenly ceased to believe in survival as an ultimate good in itself and have gone to the opposite extreme. Now Jews believe in fighting at any price and feel that “going down” is a sensible method of politics'.Footnote ⁶⁶

Indeed, it is this fear of ‘going down’ that animates Arendt's article. ‘To Save the Jewish Homeland’ was not written to break away from the Zionist ranks – in fact, the article's abstract refers to Arendt as a ‘Zionist of many years standing’ – or to press for a specific and more just alternative to the question of Palestine but rather in order to warn Jews against the grave dangers that faced the Yishuv if it continued to press for a nation state in the existing political realities. With the memory of the European catastrophe still fresh in mind, Arendt warned that declaring independence would lead to an all-out war with the Arabs which could – indeed, Arendt feared it would – result in the destruction of the Yishuv, and as a consequence the possible dissolution of the Jewish people as a whole. The most moving lines in her piece are those in which she introduces this possibility:

As Arendt would write later in the piece with a terrifying irony, ‘this is, certainly, no time for final solutions’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The leadership of the Yishuv should thus refrain, she argued, from taking any steps that are ‘final’ – and by this Arendt meant partition – and adopt any programme which could lead to pacification and which could help avert war.

Arendt argued in her article that the best way to avert war was to establish an international trusteeship over Palestine. In March 1948 the United States reversed its support for the partition of Palestine it had first voiced ahead of the November 1947 vote on the United Nations Partition Plan and called instead for the establishment a United Nations Trusteeship over Palestine. The main thrust of this rather vague political programme was to prevent a political vacuum in Palestine by attempting to maintain the status quo even after the termination of the mandate and the departure of the British.Footnote ⁶⁹ Arendt regarded a trusteeship as an interim solution that would help quell hostilities and lay the ground for future Arab-Jewish cooperation. She commended Magnes for espousing the trusteeship plan, portraying him as the only voice of reason among Jews in Palestine who otherwise beat the drums of war.Footnote ⁷⁰ Once order was restored, she further argued, a federated state such as proposed by Magnes should be established in Palestine. ‘Despite the fact that it [a federated state] establishes a common government for two different peoples’, Arendt now argued, ‘it avoids the troublesome majority-minority constellations, which is insoluble by definition’.Footnote ⁷¹ It is not fully clear why Arendt suddenly reversed her earlier critique of Magnes and maintained that his programme would overcome the majority-minority problem she had repeatedly insisted it would inevitably create. Most strikingly, Arendt now referred to Magnes’ plan as federal even though in her wartime writings she described it as a binational programme that masqueraded as a federal one. What seems most likely to have led Arendt to endorse Magnes' programme in 1948 was less a change in his or her views than a change in political circumstances. With the threat of an all-out war looming, Arendt felt compelled for the first time to take a specific stand and choose between the two main political alternatives, rather than propose a third way. Still, Arendt's support for an Arab-Jewish confederation did not mean that she had given up on the hope of incorporating Palestine into a larger multi-ethnic federal framework. In this and several other articles written during 1948, Arendt insisted that the creation of an Arab-Jewish confederation should be merely a first step toward its later inclusion in a larger federal structure in the Near East or the Mediterranean.Footnote ⁷²

On 14 May, just a few weeks after the publication of her article, the State of Israel declared its independence and the civil war in Palestine transformed into a larger inter-state conflict between Israel and the member states of the Arab League. That same day, US President Harry Truman announced his recognition of the State of Israel. These developments signalled the end of plans for an international trusteeship over Palestine. Facing these new realities, Arendt called for the establishment of an Arab-Jewish confederation in Palestine as part of a negotiated truce, a view that had been advocated by Magnes.Footnote ⁷³ In early June she become politically active in supporting Magnes and his group of followers in the United States. The two corresponded extensively, exchanging some twenty letters over the course of four months, and Arendt commented on and revised some of Magnes' drafts before their publication.Footnote ⁷⁴ In June Magnes laid out a new proposal for a confederation that attempted to contend with the reality of Israeli independence. He called for the creation of a United States of Palestine, a union between Israel and a future Palestinian state (he was indecisive as to whether that state would include Transjordan) that would share common policy in matters relating to the economy, foreign affairs and defence. Magnes cited Austria-Hungary as an instructive historical precedent, though not as a direct political model: ‘two independent entities with separate parliaments, yet . . . certain subjects [were] reserved for the council of delegations’.Footnote ⁷⁵ In October, Arendt assisted Magnes in thoroughly editing a version of the proposal he submitted to Commentary magazine. At the same time, both Arendt and Magnes supported, if only ‘cautiously’, the first peace proposal submitted at the end of June by the United Nations mediator Count Bernadotte, which envisioned a union between Jews and Arabs in the whole of Transjordan with Jewish self-rule over the coastal plain and the Western Galilee. Both considered the Bernadotte proposal as not materially different from the one advocated by Magnes.Footnote ⁷⁶

During October both Arendt and Magnes had come to realise that the prospects for a federation were falling apart. In September Jewish militants assassinated Count Bernadotte. Arendt lamented his death in an article that was published in the first week of October entitled ‘The Failure of Reason: The Mission of Bernadotte’. ‘During the weeks which have passed since [his] assassination’, Arendt wrote, ‘the situation in Palestine has deteriorated steadily’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Arendt praised Bernadotte as a man of reason and peace, but criticised the second proposal he submitted for the resolution of the conflict, which, as she saw it, had ‘granted Israel all the trimmings of sovereignty’ and called for separation between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. The reason for Bernadotte's change of approach, Arendt argued, was his realisation that there was no longer a common denominator among Arabs and Jews in Palestine, and that there was no alternative but to separate the two sides.Footnote ⁷⁸ Magnes was deeply moved by Arendt's article. On 7 October he wrote her, ‘your article depressed me’, and wondered ‘is there really no way out?’Footnote ⁷⁹ Three weeks later Magnes died in New York. Fighting continued, and a confederation increasingly appeared out of date in the face of the reality of a Jewish ethnic national state in Palestine.