Spare Us From Deep Thinkers and Their Profoundly Bad Ideas

In a review of Deborah Lipstadt's new book about the Eichmann trial, David Pryce-Jones writes re deep thinker Hannah Arendt's skewed perceptions:

Ms. Lipstadt shows how Eichmann's self-portrait as an insignificant clerk, though contrary to the facts, came to be widely accepted. In large measure, she says, it was Hannah Arendt's doing. A German Jew who had fled her homeland for France and then the U.S. during the war, Arendt was by 1960 firmly established as a public intellectual in America. She reported on the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker magazine and produced a book, "Eichmann in Jerusalem" (1963), in which she coined the phrase "the banality of evil."

For Arendt, Eichmann was just an ordinary man, and any ordinary man might have done what he did. This was a perverse reading of human nature. As I can testify from my attendance in that court, Eichmann was a cold figure, though often snarling with righteousness and resentment. "Banal" was not a term applicable to someone unable to recognize his limitless moral depravity.

Arendt accepted that Israel did have the right to kidnap, try and even execute Eichmann, but her own prejudices diverted her from central principles. She didn't even engage fully with the proceedings. After only four weeks of a trial that lasted from mid-April to mid-August, Ms. Lipstadt notes, Arendt was already away vacationing in Switzerland. Returning briefly to Jerusalem, she again left so early that she missed Hausner's cross-examination of Eichmann.

Jews, Arendt felt, had let her down. Instead of resisting, they had accepted what the Nazis had imposed on them. They believed that Eichmann had victimized them as Jews but she knew better—that he had invented the new and revolutionary "crime against humanity" that happened to have been perpetrated against Jews. After the war, the Jews in Israel, she thought, adopted the wrong kind of Zionism. Ms. Lipstadt describes her as "flippant," "cruel" and "glib."

The thrust of Arendt's critique is that Israel ought to have a higher national purpose than providing a refuge from anti-Semitism. These days, that critique is tediously familiar...

Indeed. Just the other week, in fact, I heard a renowned Israeli intellectual say that we should defer being proud of Israel pending that day some time in the distant future when Israel inculcates certain Judaic (but not religious) moral and ethical principles it has not yet internalized; when it becomes Jewtopia, so to speak (my coinage, not his). Then and only then will it be appropriate for Diaspora Jews to be proud of it, and only then will Jews and the world be drawn to it, like a moth to a flame. (You won't be surprised to learn that this individual, though a "torah chachum," situates himself firmly on the left end of the political spectrum, the area of wishful thinking and suicidal delusion.)

Such errant nonsense, I thought afterwards. Worse--dangerous nonsense, since demanding of Israel that it adhere to a different, a much higher, standard (or "a higher national purpose"), is exactly the same impossible demand that Israel's eliminationist-minded enemies make of it.

No, I prefer the Bridget Jones way of looking at it: Israel may not be perfect (what country is?), but it's certainly good enough and a whole sight better than the places surrounding it, and we Jews should be able to be proud of it just as it is.