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hannah arendt
Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Böll Would Despise What's Been Done to Masha Gessen
Gessen’s real sin was the recognition that the exterminating impulse is not unique to one set of villains and victims.
Dec 21, 2023
Pro-Palestinian speech is routinely punished in the liberal Western world — in the name of democracy, of course. Now, the memories of German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt and German writer Heinrich Böll have been violated in a way that both would despise.
Masha Gessen (pronouns they/them), the Russian-Jewish émigré best known for in-depth reporting on their former country, has been denied the honor of a ceremony after receiving the Hannah Arendt Prize from Germany’s Heinrich Böll Stiftung (foundation).
Why? In the December 9 issue of The New Yorker, Gessen wrote:
… the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.
Cue the predictable blowback. Gessen wasn’t factually wrong; instead, the outrage was driven by context. It is culturally verboten in Germany (and the US) to equate any aspect of the Holocaust to the suffering endured by any other people – especially when that suffering is being inflicted by Israel. As others have noted, Arendt faced similar attacks over her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, which wasbased on reporting for the same New Yorker magazine.
What’s important is the idea that evil can seem ordinary, and that totalitarianism... can make a monster of almost anyone.
The Heinrich Böll Stiftung’s statement is a masterpiece of deflection and the use of the passive voice. It says that Gessen’s essay “led to heated debates in many places,” and that:
Against this background, the Senate of the City of Bremen has decided to cancel the event and award ceremony that was to take place on December 14th, 2023 and, as a consequence, the event has lost its venue.
The city’s decision is disgraceful but hardly surprising, given the German government’s expressed determination to crack down on pro-Palestinian voices. In fact, several Muslim countries have already brought complaints against Germany before the United Nations human rights forum over that issue.
In an attempt to deny the obvious, the foundation says:
We will try to organise a different type of event with Masha Gessen, an event enabling a nuanced dialogue – including about certain statements made by Gessen that we do not fully endorse – as today such dialogue is more important than ever before.
Why “different”? The foundation could have found another venue. Or it could have held the ceremony in a bus station some other public place, which would have made a dramatic statement against censorship. It would also have been very much in the spirit of its namesake, the writer and pacifist Heinrich Böll.
Böll was president of P.E.N. International, a group dedicated to protecting writers’ freedom of speech, and was fearless in expressing unpopular opinions of his own. Most famously, Böll defended the right to a fair trial of the much-loathed Red Army Faction (the so-called “Baader-Meinhof gang”) rather than trial by tabloid headline and mass media. For that, he weathered a firestorm of criticism that equaled Arendt’s.
Any organization bearing Böll’s name might be expected to defend unpopular speech. But the Stiftung is a political institution, not a moral or literary one. It is a wing of Germany’s Green Party, a formerly left-leaning and pro-environmental group that has become increasingly hawkish, tacking to the right of even the “centrist” Social Democrats on military matters.
But then, what’s in a name? The Greens have even pushed to re-open coal plants.
Like other elite-led ‘liberal’ institutions, the Greens have an organizational imperative to spout the language of inclusion, even when (as in this case) they suppress dissenting voices. This is how they presented their decision notto honor Gessen:
We want to make it very clear that this withdrawal does in no way mean that we are distancing ourselves from Gessen, nor that we want to strip Gessen of the award, or that we no longer value Gessen’s works.
We aren’t distancing ourselves from Masha Geffen, says the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. We just won’t honor them. And, of course, Geffen won’t be allowed to give a speech. But we do hope to permit a ‘nuanced dialogue,’ wherein Gessen will no doubt be forced themselves against a tribunal of hostile interlocutors. That’s ‘dialogue,’ Star Chamber-style.
Does anybody think this would have happened if that recent New Yorker article had not been published? And does anyone think the Greens would have refused Gessen a ceremony and a speech if the article had praised, rather than criticized, Israel?
We aren’t distancing ourselves from Masha Geffen, says the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. We just won’t honor them.
Irony upon irony: A nonbinary Jew who was forced to leave illiberal Russia for its anti-LGBTQ environment is being punished by establishment liberals acting in the name of two free speech advocates. Why? For criticizing a country (Israel) that denies basic freedoms to millions and where same-sex (and interfaith) marriages cannot be performed, by law.
There’s no time to adjudicate all the arguments surrounding Eichmann in Jerusalem but, whatever the criticisms, itis clearly the spiritual sibling of Gessen’s essay. The onslaught of accusations against Arendt was front page news at the time, resulting in what Israeli journalist Amos Elon likened to an “excommunication.” For one thing, as Elon writes, Arendt had fallen away from the Zionism of her youth and concluded that,
like other nineteenth-century nationalisms, Zionism had already outlived the conditions from which it emerged and ran the risk of becoming, as Arendt once put it, a “living ghost amid the ruins of our times.’”
A “living ghost” … that was heretical in 1963. It still is today.
Elon writes that Arendt also foresaw “the difficulty of confronting, morally and politically, the plight of the dispossessed Palestinians.” As he puts it, “The Palestinians bore no responsibility for the collapse of civilization in Europe but ended up being punished for it.”
Irony upon irony: A nonbinary Jew who was forced to leave illiberal Russia for its anti-LGBTQ environment is being punished by establishment liberals acting in the name of two free speech advocates.
Rereading Eichmann in Jerusalem, as I did recently, it was more striking than ever to consider the courage it took to write it. Less than two decades after the Holocaust, Arendt was challenging an already-established orthodoxy, one which Elon describes this way:
“... in Israel, the Holocaust was long seen as simply the culmination of a long unbroken line of anti-Semitism, from pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar to Hitler and Arafat.”
Arendt saw the role that this orthodoxy played in the conduct of the trial, writing of the prosecutor:
Like almost everybody else in Israel, he believed that only a Jewish court could render justice to Jews, and that it was the business of Jews to sit in judgment on their enemies. Hence the almost universal hostility in Israel to the mere mention of an international court ...”
This has never been an abstract intellectual debate. The immensity and horror of the Holocaust wields tremendous moral force, as it should. Israel’s leadership had by then developed an ideology based on the centrality of Jewish victimhood and the idea that only Jewish military might could protect Jews from future pogroms. Arendt saw that agenda at work in the Eichmann trial and describes it this way:
The Jews in the Diaspora were to remember how Judaism, “four thousand years old, with its spiritual creations and its ethical strivings, its Messianic aspirations,” had always faced “a hostile world,” how the Jews had degenerated until they went to their death like sheep, and how only the establishment of a Jewish state had enabled Jews to hit back, as Israelis had done in the War of Independence, in the Suez adventure, and in the almost daily incidents on Israel’s unhappy borders.
This argument was used to justify Israeli military actions. It also imbued Diaspora Jews, especially those living comfortably in the West, with the feeling that they had it too easy. They should be in Israel, fighting its wars and plowing the land. They certainly should never question its decisions.
To reinforce this argument, some Jewish victims of Nazism were judged as weak and compliant, in contrast with Israel’s vigor and strength. Arendt was attacked for criticizing Jewish leaders who cooperated with the Nazis, but the opposite is true: she challenges the prosecution’s implication that some Jews were to blame for their own suffering – which reinforces the idea that Jews must “hit back.”
Arendt saw things differently. To her, Nazism and the Holocaust reflected a crisis of modernity and totalitarianism, rather than a uniquely Jewish-centered phenomenon. It can be both, of course. But to deny that Jewishness and only Jewishness drove the Holocaust was to deny the Israeli state the moral impunity it sought.
To say that anti-Semitism is the sine qua non of Nazism also diminishes the suffering of Nazism’s other victims, including the Roma community, leftists, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ people like Gessen. It also preemptively renders the suffering of the Palestinian people invisible. Arendt wasn’t willing to do that.
She also points out that those questions have nothing to do with the guilt or innocence of Adolf Eichmann, who – in the spirit of Heinrich Böll– she insists should receive a fair trial. “On trial are his deeds,” she wrote, “not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.” She criticizes the prosecutor as a media hound and Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion for orchestrating a “show trial,” but shows genuine respect for the judges and their devotion to justice.
Arendt felt that totalitarianism must be understood and punished as totalitarianism, because it’s both a crime against humanity and a global threat. That was her main complaint about the trial. Arendt was not alone in this interpretation. Bruno Bettelheim, the psychologist and concentration camp survivor, was among the public figures who agreed with her. Bettelheim wrote a glowing review of Eichmann in Jerusalem in which he called totalitarianism “the greatest problem of our time” and “the most important issue of our day.”
To Bettelheim the survivor, Eichmann personified a horror that was universal and a threat that was existential. In describing the value of Arendt’s book, Bettelheim wrote, “the best protection against oppressive control and dehumanizing totalitarianism is still a personal understanding of events as they happen.”
Arendt despised Eichmann but, correctly or not, she didn’t see him as specifically anti-Semitic. To her he was a dimwitted bureaucrat, a cog in a totalitarian machine, a personality type that had become common in the modern world. She thought he embodied a more universal and institutionalized depravity. (Gessen describes Vladimir Putin similarly: as dim and self-seeking, more of a pencil pusher than the incarnation of evil.)
The attacks on Arendt followed a blueprint that’s still used today. She was repeatedly described as a “self-hating Jew” — a phrase that has never gone out of currency — as when an author described both her and Bettelheim as suffering from “an essentially Jewish phenomenon...self-hatred.”
The attacks were well-organized, as Amon Elon writes:
A nationwide campaign was launched in the United States to discredit her in the academic world. There was a startling disproportion between the ferocity of the reaction and its immediate cause. A group of lecturers—some flown in from Israel and England-toured the country decrying Arendt as a “self-hating Jew,” the “Rosa Luxemburg of Nothingness.”
Four separate Jewish organizations hired scholars to go through her text, line by line, in order to discredit it and to find mistakes though most of them turned out to be minor: incorrect dates and misspelled names. A review of the book in the Intermountain Jewish News was headlined “Self-hating Jewess writes pro-Eichmann book.”
Arendt emphasized the universal nature, and universal threat, of totalitarianism. Her book’s controversial subtitle, “A Report on the Banality of Evil,” makes that clear. If evil can be ordinary—if it can be done by people who don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, by people who follow the rules—that might implicate anyone.
There have been endless debates about Arendt’s use of the word “banality,” but what matters most is not whether it’s the best label for Eichmann. What’s important is the idea that evil can seem ordinary, and that totalitarianism—whether it’s the old-fashioned, jackbooted kind, or the seemingly democratic misdirection of Prof. Sheldon Wolin’s “inverted totalitarianism”—can make a monster of almost anyone.
Journalists who censor themselves. Politicians who curry favor for campaign cash. Executives at Lockheed or Boeing. US government officials who ship antipersonnel weapons bound for Gaza. The leaders of Heinrich Böll Stiftung. Citizens who won’t question their own preconceptions. You. Me.
Bettelheim, like Arendt, was not afraid to implicate his adopted country. In his review of her book he wrote,
... it is also totalitarianism when a nation plans for atomic destruction on a grand scale, even if that nation is democratic and plans only for defense. This is because such plans fail to set limits within the human scope. To entertain the possibility of risking atomic destruction for millions is to toy with totalitarianism because it implies the right of a state to pursue its goals no matter what.
Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine provides a vivid glimpse of the architects of global destruction at home in their bureaucratic habitat.
In the end, the word “banality” suggests that the Nazis were not as different from the rest of us as we’d like to believe. Masha Gessen’s real sin, like Arendt’s, was the recognition that the exterminating impulse is not unique to one set of villains and victims. It can arise and be executed anywhere, by anyone, at any time — in this country and its allies, among people who look and act like us, on a day like today. Even here, even now, even as these words are being written.
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German Group Won't Present Arendt Prize to Masha Gessen Over Gaza Essay
"The irony of calling for the suspension of a prize named after an anti-totalitarian political theorist in order to appease the authoritarian government of a rogue state currently committing genocide against an already-subjugated people seems to be lost," said one critic.
Dec 13, 2023
A left-wing German political foundation said Wednesday that it will no longer give a prestigious award to Masha Gessen over an essay the Russian American journalist wrote drawing parallels between the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany and Palestinians today under what many critics say is a genocidal assault by Israel.
The Heinrich Böll Foundation—which is affiliated with Alliance90/The Greens, a leftist political party in Germany—and the Senate of Bremen agreed to withdraw from awarding the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought to Gessen, Literary Hubreported, citing a German-language article in Die Ziet.
Instead, the prize will be presented to Gessen without the participation of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
The Hannah Arendt Prize, named after the eponymous 20th-century German American historian and philosopher, "was created to honor individuals who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by presenting their opinion in controversial political discussions," the Heinrich Böll Foundation explained on its website.
According to Die Zeit, the move came in response to an essay Gessen published earlier this week in The New Yorker in which they highlighted similarities between Palestinians living in Gaza—often described as the world's largest open-air prison and, sometimes, it's biggest concentration camp—and Jews in Eastern European ghettos during the Third Reich.
Gessen wrote:
For the last 17 years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every 10 minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of 10 Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.
The Bremen chapter of the German-Israeli Society (DIG) reportedly took exception with Gessen's essay and argued that honoring them "would contradict the necessary decisive action against the growing antisemitism."
As Literary Hub noted, Gessen is Jewish; their grandfather survived the Holocaust.
"The irony of calling for the suspension of a prize named after an anti-totalitarian political theorist in order to appease the authoritarian government of a rogue state currently committing genocide against an already-subjugated people seems to be lost on the Bremen DIG," Dan Sheehan wrote at Literary Hub.
Saddled with guilt over perpetrating arguably the most notorious genocide in human history, Germany has made defending Israel a critical component of its national mission. In doing so, it has often conflated criticism of Israeli policies and practices or advocacy for Palestine with antisemitism. Ironically, that often means silencing Jewish voices that speak out against Israeli apartheid, occupation, colonization, and now, what many critics around the world say is a genocide in Gaza. A disproportionate number of the silenced are artists and other creators like Gessen.
"The German government has come under intense criticism over the past two months for its unqualified support for Israel's war on Gaza, as well as for its aggressive crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism and advocacy," Sheehan added. "This silencing of Palestinian voices has been acutely felt within Germany's cultural community, where museum shows, book prizes, and artist commissions have all been canceled in recent weeks."
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Defending and Respecting Rashida Tlaib’s Standpoint Does Not Mean Abandoning My Own
In the same spirit of real engagement with which I have defended her, I also take issue with some of what she has been saying.
Nov 15, 2023
Rashida Tlaib has been long been demonized and denounced for her general outspokenness and her strong and unyielding defense of Palestinian rights and Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. In the weeks since Hamas’ vicious October 7 attacks, the vitriol leveled against her has increased exponentially.
I consider the attacks on her nasty, intellectually unserious, and contrary to a basic principle of pluralist democracy—the principle that fellow citizens with whom one disagrees are not thereby existential enemies to be attacked and defeated. I also think that the refusal to listen to Tlaib, and understand where she is coming from, is an awful way to respond to the ongoing crisis in Israel-Palestine, by blinding U.S. foreign policy to Palestinian perspectives and deafening U.S. political leaders and citizens to the criminal death and destruction now being rained down on Gaza by the Israeli military, even as Hamas continues its dangerous but much less deadly rocket attacks and continues to hold over 200 innocent civilians hostage in the manner of a terroristic pirate gang.
For these reasons I have defended Rashida Tlaib in three recently published pieces, insisting that censuring her means censuring democracy and seeking to silence the U.S. Congress’s only Palestinian voice, and also insisting that it is essential more generally to distinguish between pro-Palestinian activism and antisemitism, and to stop demonizing the former.
The same ethos of “thinking from the standpoint of the other” that should ethically require Tlaib’s critics to listen to her without demonizing her should also ethically require her to realize that these words genuinely engender fear, anxiety, and even defensive aggressiveness in many Jewish people.
In doing so, I have drawn on something that political theorist Hannah Arendt said long ago about properly political thinking: “The power of judgment finds itself... in an anticipated communication with others with whom I know I must finally come to some agreement. From this potential agreement judgment derives its specific validity... It needs the special presence of others ‘in whose place’ it must think, whose perspectives it must take into consideration...”
This has led some critics to charge me with a kind of “relativism,” and of suspending my own critical faculties in order to lionize the perspective of a victim-claiming Palestinian “Other.” I have been asked: “Why must you validate what Tlaib says simply because she is a Palestinian, and can’t you think for yourself?”
The question is fair. But it rests on a misunderstanding of both Arendt and my appeal to her.
First, Arendt writes about thinking from the standpoint of others, not some singular, essentialized Other. Plurality of opinion is central here, within any group and indeed even within any person, for human beings are very capable of holding a range of opinions that are not always perfectly consistent—something ordinarily called ambivalence, and something that political crusaders of all stripes consider anathema. To listen to and think from the perspective of Rashida Tlaib is to listen to her, what she says, and how and from where she says it, not to imagine that she speaks for all Palestinians or that there is an essential “Palestinian victim” (or that victimhood is the essence of Palestinian identity). It also means trying to understand how what she is saying or doing relates to and differs from what others, including other Palestinians—and especially Hamas–are saying and doing.
Second, to think from the perspective of others, and to take their perspectives “into consideration,” is not simply to submit to those perspectives, to deny one’s own experience and standpoint, or to suspend one’s own critical faculties. It means to understand, and by doing so to expand one’s own perspective, not to uncritically agree with some other perspective. For thinking is a process, and it is possible to seriously consider a range of possibilities before deciding, often provisionally, on one of them. This too political crusaders despise; they prefer always that people respond instantly to triggers and slogans that are easier to mobilize and to drive to extremes.
If Rashida Tlaib were promoting antisemitism, or celebrating the October 7 massacre of Israeli Jews (and not all of the victims were Jews), or extolling the virtues of Hamas, or calling for a Jihad against Jewish people, it would be impossible for me to defend her in the way that I have done—though I would still hold that First Amendment protections apply to her no less than to anyone else, and that the physical threats she receives for saying what she thinks are both immoral and illegal.
But that is not what Rashida Tlaib has been saying.
She has by and large been calling for a cease-fire and a just settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a linkage between the two, insisting that the “resolution” of the current Israel-Gaza war must also address the broader conflict—which has long preceded this war—in a way that ensures the rights and dignity of Palestinians. (And please note: a not insignificant number of her House Progressive and Justice Democrat colleagues, most of them neither Palestinian nor even Arab, have joined with her in this appeal for justice).
Having listened to her, I have defended her because I believe her perspective is important and valuable, but also because I basically agree with most of what she says.
But not all of it. Her recent and much-criticized video made this clear to me and, in the same spirit of real engagement with which I have defended her, I also take issue with some of what she has been saying.
I do not believe the video—in which she accused President Joe Biden of supporting “genocide,” and included footage of a mass pro-Palestinian rally chanting “from river to sea, Palestine will be free”—is antisemitic. Nor do I think it represents a call to drive Israeli Jews into the sea. I believe her when she says that for her the slogan is “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence.” For there is no evidence of her advocating violent attacks on Jews or even Israeli Jews—and not all Jews are Israeli Jews.
But from my perspective—and I do not imagine that she shares this perspective, because she and I are different people—that video is problematic in two ways that are politically consequential and warrant criticism.
The first problem involves questionable political judgment.
In the video, Tlaib contravenes the very Arendtian sentiment that I have invoked to defend her, by employing language that has a range of meanings, some of which are obviously very disturbing and triggering to her principal “Others.” I do not agree with some of my Jewish-American friends who assert that “from the river to the sea” is “obviously” an eliminationist call for the conquest and expulsion of Jews or at least the violent defeat and destruction of Israel. But it is obvious that this is how most American Jews and their allies, and virtually all Israeli Jews, interpret this phrase—as not simply a statement to which they might object, but as a rallying cry that threatens them, especially in Israel but not only there, for there is no doubt that the slogan has furnished an occasion for acts of antisemitism in many places in the Middle East but also Europe and the U.S. (There is also no doubt that many of Tlaib’s critics are hypocrites who either support or turn a blind eye to right-wing Zionists who employ a very similar rhetoric to justify their vision of a Jewish state that runs “from the river to the sea”—and these hypocrites are even more culpable, because they are actually making headway in their efforts to dispossess and displace Palestinians.)
And the same ethos of “thinking from the standpoint of the other” that should ethically require Tlaib’s critics to listen to her without demonizing her should also ethically require her to realize that these words genuinely engender fear, anxiety, and even defensive aggressiveness in many Jewish people, who have two good reasons to feel this. One is that the Holocaust was not that long ago, and its intergenerational legacies are no less powerful for Jews than memories of what Palestinians call “the Nakba” are for Palestinians. The other is that the most politically organized force promoting the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is Hamas, a violent, Islamic fundamentalist, and terroristic organization whose charter preaches jihad and is explicitly antisemitic, and whose militants just murdered 1,400 Israeli citizens and kidnapped another 200-plus as hostages.
I agree with Juliette Kayyem, who notes that “by amplifying a loaded slogan, the Michigan representative isn’t helping anyone’s cause.” To be clear, Tlaib’s constituency is distinctive, and her outrage and passion at this moment is surely as valid as any supporter of Israel’s—and there is no shortage of passion and hyperbole these days. But Tlaib’s posting of the video represents an instance of unwise rhetoric and poor political judgment, for it was bound to inflame her adversaries but also to discomfort many allies or potential allies. It is possible that mobilizing her own base is now more important to her. That too is a judgment call. But I believe that Tlaib might do well—for her own sake and for the sake of her cause—to avoid “loaded slogans” and focus more on the concrete injustices that she rightly opposes, for doing so can spare her much grief and allow her to gain more support for what is really a quite reasonable perspective.
It would represent a real contribution if Tlaib would distance herself from many of those supporters who are much more radical than she, not necessarily by issuing blanket denunciations, but simply by being much clearer about what she supports.
At the same time, I also believe that the video’s slogan, even generously interpreted as merely unwise, is problematic in a second and more directly political sense, related to the rhetoric and even the vision of “One Palestine” that it invokes.
I believe that Tlaib speaks sincerely and for a great many when she says that this slogan is “an aspirational call” for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence. But I think Tlaib does not simply mean by this a hope that all the individual human beings who live between the river and the sea will eventually enjoy freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence. For the statement “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” means that from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Palestine, in other words, it will not be Israel.
Tlaib, like a great many, including even some American Jews and Israeli Jews, clearly means that it should become a single, secular democratic state. And in ideal terms this is not simply a legitimate idea but the only idea that corresponds to modern conceptions of liberal democratic legitimacy.
I understand the appeal of such a “one-state solution,” especially for someone like Tlaib. For the so-called “two-state solution” is deeply problematic and has become little more than a platitude. On the one hand it reinforces an illiberal Israeli state that is the state of its Jewish citizens, in which its non-Jewish citizens are second class citizens, while imagining a Palestinian state that is so fragmented, interlaced with Jewish settlements, and powerless as to not be very “statelike” at all. This is normatively problematic. On the other hand, normative problems aside, “the two-state solution” was the product of a time that has long passed, and however desirable it might seem to some, especially among the much-weakened Israeli peace movement and a Biden administration that seems to be grasping at straws, this “solution” seems almost impossible under current circumstances, which include heightened fears and resentments and the weakening of the political forces for political decency and reason on both “sides” of the Israeli-Palestine conflict.
But to be equally clear: I consider the so-called “one-state solution” to be no more realistic a “solution” to the awful war or the underlying crisis. It has the advantage of sounding more universalist and thus more liberal democratic—and thus more legitimate to everyone who rejects tribalism and is serious about human rights. It has the additional advantage of making young people who want to express their legitimate outrage at the unjust treatment of Palestinians feel like they are actually for something noble and not simply against “Zionism.” But it has these advantages only by obscuring three fundamental problems.
The first is simple: There is no strong political will for this on either side.
As critics have noted, mainstream Zionism has always centered politically on a kind of Jewish ethno-nationalism for which Palestinians are of secondary concern at best. But it is no less true that the driving force of the Palestinian movement has always been Palestinian nationalism and not cosmopolitan universalism—the sincere efforts of public intellectuals like the late Edward Said, and many others, notwithstanding. In an ideal world it should be possible for Jews and Palestinians everywhere “between the river and the sea” to be equal citizens of a liberal democratic state called Israel-Palestine or Palestine-Israel or Canaan or Utopia or whatever—just as Rashida Tlaib and I are equal citizens of the United States. But we do not inhabit such a world. And in theworld in which we live, the major political forces on both “sides” have no interest in a single, secular democratic state. What we have now are two competing forms of nationalism, one of which currently dominates the other, and neither of which has demonstrated anything that can credibly be regarded as a liberal democratic universalism. The situation is tragic. But it is the situation from which any reasonable political solution now and in any foreseeable future must proceed.
This leads to the second, related problem with the notion of one state “between the river and the sea”—the “right of return” to which it is almost automatically linked. During the time when there were serious discussions about mutual recognition linked to a “two-state solution,” some of them involving high-level diplomacy, it was understood that a Palestinian “right of return” would strictly speaking need to be compromised, for a range of reasons of which the most important is rather simple: In order for the Palestinians displaced in 1948 and their millions of descendants to return to the territory of Israel and even to their former homes, it would be necessary for millions of Israelis who have been born and lived and worked in Israel since 1948 to be somehow displaced or relocated. A literal Palestinian right of return would be literally impossible logistically speaking. (To be clear: In my view any just settlement would also require that all notions of Jewish “birthright” and “right of return” be similarly abandoned. There is no just basis, now, to maintain that the return of all Palestinian former-residents of Israel proper is impossible but the fictive “return” of many thousands of Jews whose families have lived in the U.S. or Europe for generations if not centuries is somehow rightful.)
To be fair, many Palestinian activists, and I would count Tlaib among them, are aware of these logistical challenges, and it is reasonable to assume that they might be amenable to forms of real reparation that compromise a literal interpretation of a Palestinian “right of return,” perhaps by building up the West Bank and Gaza as part of a single democratic state.
But as the “two-state solution” has politically languished—in large part due to the awful policies of the Netanyahu governments—the idea of a Palestinian compromise on the right of return seems to have languished as well. In recent days I have seen many videos in which individuals associated with Students for Justice in Palestine declare, in all seriousness, that Palestinians (and their descendants) ought to be restored the property and homes and neighborhoods that they lost in 1948, and that the “European Jews” who now occupy them ought to “go back to where they came from in Europe.” Such ideas are not literally “Nazi,” as some pro-Israeli activists say. Indeed, when coming from the mouths of young American protestors, some even Jewish, they are politically naïve more than anything else. But taken literally, the sentiments very directly threaten the more than 7 million Jewish Israelis who constitute approximately three quarters of the population of Israel, people who have already been legitimately shaken and outraged by the murderous Hamas attack on October 7.
Precisely because hers is a voice for justice, and there are many who support her, she perhaps bears a greater burden of responsibility to unambiguously perform the justice that she rightly seeks.
Further, right now the most powerful Palestinian organization in Palestine or anywhere else, Hamas, is very much committed to realizing this vision of a “Palestinian return” that displaces if not kills Israeli Jews, which it regards as settlers and occupiers everywhere in the territory of Israel-Palestine. And make no mistake, Israeli Jews are Israeli Jews, who have no other home and have no intention of leaving. And simply wishing them away is no more honest than Netanyahu now simply wishing that all Palestinians would simply go away or somehow not die when the IDF drops bombs on them. As a politics, this can mean only mass expulsion and slaughter.
Unfortunately, too many of those who are currently marching behind “Free Palestine” banners while chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” also regard Israel as nothing more than a gang of colonizing and marauding European settlers, and regard Hamas as a virtuous agent of “liberation.” Such people are not “terrorists” nor are they “accomplices” of terrorists. But they are supporters—whether knowingly or willingly, whether with hate for Zionism in their hearts or love of Palestinians or simple if naïve altruism—of a political project that is inherently dehumanizing and violent. And they are offering rhetorical promotion to a terroristic organization that is little different from the Taliban, whose “liberatory” virtues are on display every day in Afghanistan. I do not support the banning of these kinds of “pro-Palestinian” groups. But I definitely consider their Manichean approach to the conflict, and their uncritical celebration of “resistance” by any means, to be politically noxious and deserving of strong criticism.
But I do not believe that Rashida Tlaib is promoting such a harsh and Manichean approach.
I believe she is a humanist, and a progressive, who is serious about peace with justice and does not support terrorist violence or the ethnic cleansing of anybody, whether Palestinian or Jewish. But I also believe that her video, and her public position as a spokesperson for “Free Palestine,” can easily be mistaken for a position that sounds like it advocates the literal destruction of the Israeli state or the literal uprooting of both its political system and many or all of its Jewish citizens.
And in politics, the way things sound is largely the way they are taken to be. “Perception is politics.”
And so it would represent a real contribution if Tlaib would distance herself from many of those supporters who are much more radical than she, not necessarily by issuing blanket denunciations, but simply by being much clearer about what she supports, and by avoiding the kind of hyperbolic rhetoric that signals or seems to signal support for the complete national liberation of the entire land of “Palestine.”
This would be exceptionally difficult politically, especially at a time when Bibi Netanyahu’s Israel is killing and dispossessing tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and pillaging the West Bank; when she is being viciously attacked for speaking up against this; and when those more radical people are among her most vocal supporters, while many more mainstream Democratic politicians have chosen to demonize her. The pressures Tlaib faces—concern for the safety and well-being of her family on the West Bank, outrage at the IDF bombing of Gaza, and the grief, anger, sadness, and relentless stress that is only exacerbated by her sense of responsibility as a member of Congress who alone “represents” Palestinians—must be enormous.
But the mark of real political leadership is the ability to sometimes do what it is very hard in the name of what is right or even merely politically wise, even when it means distancing yourself from supporters or explaining to them that some of what they are saying and doing is wrong.
I say this as a political ally (with little influence much less power!) who opposes the ongoing Israeli bombing and supports a cease-fire, the return of hostages, and a just peace—though I for one have no idea what this would look like beyond the cessation of the war. I also say this as one of many on the American left who is horrified by the way many young people, in the U.S. and elsewhere, and many “progressive” organizations, like Democratic Socialists of America, have continued to regard Hamas as a “liberation movement” whose murdering and kidnapping of Israeli Jews constitutes a legitimate tactic of “just war” against “Zionism.”
To associate with these positions, or even to seem to associate with them, is to associate with dogmatic idiocy and political barbarism, and to pour gasoline on a fire that is already burning out of control, a fire that indeed threatens to consume us all.
Rashida Tlaib is hardly responsible for either the fire or the gasoline, and those who currently attack her bear a substantial responsibility for both.
All the same, precisely because hers is a voice for justice, and there are many who support her, she perhaps bears a greater burden of responsibility to unambiguously perform the justice that she rightly seeks. This is not necessarily “fair.” It is never fair to hold those who are marginalized to a higher standard than those who do the marginalizing. But the “moral arc of history” does not automatically bend toward justice. To bend in that direction, it must be bent, by savvy political leaders who can speak their truth while also recognizing the limits of that truth, and who can thus transcend it. For only by doing so can such leaders expand the reach of the justice they seek and the alliances necessary to bring it closer to realization.
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