Zionism and Nazism Theme Analysis

Arendt’s report on Eichmann’s trial obviously critiqued the nationalistic thinking that led Germans to endorse the Third Reich’s campaign of war and mass murder across Europe. But, more subtly and far more controversially, Eichmann in Jerusalem also rejected the Israeli state’s incorporation of Eichmann’s trial into a nationalist narrative: it portrayed Eichmann’s punishment as retribution for all Jews against all Nazis. The egregious lies on the part of the Israeli prosecutor and press—as well as the latter’s unabashed attacks on Arendt, a former Zionist, after she initially published this book—demonstrate that Eichmann’s story became a tool for Israel to justify its own existence, its occupation of Palestinian Arabs’ land, and even many of its people’s cooperation with the Nazi regime and surprising contributions to the Holocaust. Arendt’s critique of Germany and Israel intersect in her skepticism of both nationhood defined on ethnic grounds and especially of their propagandistic campaigns to win popular support for their rulers’ absolute authority. One of her central, although more covert, aims in Eichmann in Jerusalem was to warn Israelis against the possibility that their own government was arcing toward totalitarianism.

The Eichmann trial was a litmus test for Israel’s political authority to speak for all Jews. Its function was fundamentally propagandistic: to consolidate the Israeli state’s power by showing that it had defeated its greatest enemy. From the start, Arendt declared Eichmann’s appearance a “show trial” orchestrated by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion with the help of the prosecutor and Israeli Attorney General, Gideon Hausner, who gave an inordinate number of press conferences. Everything about the proceedings, from the usher’s shout at the beginning of each session to the glass box in which Eichmann sat, seemed theatrically coordinated to maximize the trial’s dramatic effect on the audience.

Israeli public opinion strongly favored trying Eichmann in Jerusalem over in an international court; because his crime was chiefly against the Jews, Israelis believed that only an Israeli court with Israeli judges could render judgment on him. But Israel also blocked many potential defense witnesses from testifying and prevented Eichmann’s lawyer Robert Servatius from accessing important documents, which meant that—even though the evidence against Eichmann was damning—the trial was still far from fair. According to Arendt, Ben-Gurion wanted to blame “the nations of the world” for the Holocaust and not just Germany; he aimed to position the Holocaust not as a unique horror but as the latest in a long legacy of anti-Semitic persecution, and Israel as the Jewish people’s only legitimate chance of salvation. Hausner emphasized the “heroism” of Israel, arguing that European Jews died silently and without rebellion in order to suggest that Israel has transformed Jews.

The prosecution’s desire to speak with a unified voice on behalf of all Jews led it to numerous lies, omissions, and distortions of the truth that ultimately did a disservice to the trial’s only true aim: justice. Throughout the trial, Hausner foregrounded Jewish suffering—as when the first 53 witnesses described their experiences in Eastern concentration camps where Eichmann had no authority—but ignored stories of resistance, as well as the suffering of other groups persecuted during the Holocaust. Yet he still claimed to “make no ethnic distinctions” with regard to Eichmann’s crimes; Arendt points out that Israel gives Jews disproportionate rights, even forbidding marriage to Gentiles, which ironically mirrors a provision in the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws.

The prosecution’s relentless anti-German tirades also hid the troubling connection between Nazism and Zionism: many of the first Jews who illegally settled in Palestine were wealthy or privileged Europeans who bought their freedom from the Nazis; indeed, Eichmann—an enthusiastic Zionist himself—helped coordinate passage for many of these early migrants, who sold out poorer Jews in exchange for their freedom. In fact, the prosecution consistently tried to hide Jewish Councils’ cooperation with the Nazis: these organizations of prominent and powerful community members drew up lists of people for deportation and were rewarded by the Nazis for their assistance, which Arendt calls “undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.” And, most significantly, Hausner continually inflated Eichmann’s responsibility for the Holocaust, painting him as its chief engineer even though his job mostly involved coordinating train schedules.

Arendt’s criticisms of Israel are often remarkably similar to hers of Nazi Germany, suggesting that she sees traces of totalitarian governance in the Jewish state she previously spent decades fighting for. She draws clear parallels between Ben-Gurion and Hausner’s rhetorical strategies and the propagandistic “language rules” that Nazis used to win the support of the German population. Israel’s capture of Eichmann in Buenos Aires was also unquestionably illegal under international law, but Arendt suggests that the prosecution and judges might have considered it an “act of state”—the same principle used in Eichmann’s defense—and that Eichmann could ultimately be extradited only because of his “de facto statelessness”—the same principle the Nazis used to decide which Jews to send directly to extermination camps.

Ultimately, Israel’s deepest perversion of justice for Arendt reflects its insistence on putting politics above truth: the Israeli Supreme Court threw out Judge Moshe Landau’s balanced decision that Eichmann was guilty, even if not the Holocaust’s mastermind, and writes a new decision that parrots the prosecution by claiming that he “gave all orders in matters that concerned Jewish affairs,” “eclipsed in importance all his superiors,” and singlehandedly caused the deaths of millions through his “fanatical zeal” and “unquenchable blood thirst.” This uncannily mirrors the way German courts eagerly changed their interpretations and standards to match Hitler’s most recent declarations and expand his power.

Despite Arendt’s criticisms of Israel (which were even more prominent in her later work), she obviously never argued or implied that its misdeeds in any way approached those of Nazi Germany. However, she did show parallels that suggested a deeper, underlying problem in the power structure and ideology of contemporary, ethnically defined nation-states that protect their “own” people at the expense of the rest of humanity. Ultimately, for Arendt, only one factor saved the Jerusalem trial from becoming a complete ideological farce: the remarkable evenhandedness and humanity of the judges, led by Moshe Landau, who remained loyal to justice and the truth above the Israeli state. But, with their judgment overturned and replaced with nationalist propaganda, Israel clearly showed that it was more interested in flexing its power and proclaiming Jews liberated from their persecution than building a new, more humane form of governance than the one that subjected them to the worst genocide the world had ever seen.