Showing posts with label Nationalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nationalism. Show all posts

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Einstein support us!

I am sure that Einstein would have been our supporter!
Have a look to this interesting essay:

 ALBERT EINSTEIN: SECULAR HUMANISTIC JEW

Here is a quote, emphasis is mine.

"Einstein’s Zionism would be barely recognizable today, because it did not include support for a Jewish state. He favored the creation of a “national home” that would welcome Jewish immigrants and foster Jewish cultural development within the framework of a bi-national state guaranteeing equal rights to Arabs. His model may have been Switzerland, which is divided into regions (“cantons”) where various nationalities enjoy autonomy. In 1938, for example, he asserted that he would “much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state,”2 claiming that statehood was inimical to the “essential nature of Judaism.”
Einstein continued to oppose a Jewish state after World War Two. In testifying before an Anglo-American Committee on the future of Palestine in 1946, he called for an international trusteeship, free immigration of Jewish refugees and eventual independence under conditions of Arab-Jewish equality. However, by 1947, he accepted the necessity of partition and like nearly all Jews and progressive forces in the world, Einstein greeted the establishment of Israel in 1948. After Weizmann’s death in 1952, Einstein declined an offer to run for election for the honorary position of President of Israel.
He remained a supporter of Israel for the rest of his life, but continued to express misgivings about its failure to reach a settlement with its Arab neighbors and cautioned it against over-reliance on military force. At a time when no attention at all was paid to the plight of Arab citizens in Israel, who remained under military rule until 1966, Einstein warned “The attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people.” "

Monday, September 26, 2011

Hannah Arendt “Non-nationalist” Nationalism

Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt and the Paradox of “Non-nationalist” Nationalism

Raluca Munteanu

Eddon Department of Political Science Yale University
Prepared for delivery at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 28 - August 31, 2003.
Copyright by the American Political Science Association
Authors: Munteanu, Raluca.

The opposition to the idea of Jewish sovereignty, which defined Scholem’s involvement in the Brit Shalom in the late 1920s and early 1930s, was a cause Arendt passionately embraced a decade later. The grounds for Arendt’s opposition can be easily gleaned from the historical analysis of the “Jewish Question” she puts forth in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

The solution this group envisioned to their paradoxical condition consisted in an attempt to redefine nationalism so as to eliminate what they considered its morally reprehensible aspects, notably the idea of sovereignty, and thus presumably deprive it of the potential to become an oppressive ideology.

The result was a “non-nationalist” conception of nationalism.

Arendt considered it ill-advised and nearly absurd for the Jews to want to create a nation state of their own, as this would recreate the very structure that, she thought, had failed, and had failed them, so dismally under the political pressures of the 20th century.

The “non-nationalist” nationalism of the Brit Shalom

The one group of German Zionists whose convictions throughout the 1920s and early 1930s mirrored Arendt’s, and for reasons very similar to hers, in 1925 formed an association known as the Brit Shalom, or Covenant for Peace. The goal of the Brit Shalom was to steer the Zionist Organization away from the imperialist interests Arendt so bitterly denounced and to foster Jewish-Arab cooperation and institution-building as an alternative.
Hannah Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered” in JP, 153. 40 See Kedar, “Brit Shalom.”