‘The Moral Failure’ of Hannah Arendt

Abstract

Despite the growing prominence of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt in Israeli public and academic discourse, the discussion regarding her thought still suffers surprising distortions and all-too-common mistakes. This is true particularly with regard to her attitude toward Zionism on the one hand; and the meaning she saw in the term ‘the banality of evil’ on the other. In this article I critically examine one important discussion of Arendt’s thought – by the philosopher Elhanan Yakira. As I show, Yakira’s discussion is paradigmatic of the way Arendt’s political and moral thought is often understood in Israel. It expresses the extent to which the political context in which Arendt is usually discussed in Israel leads even professional scholars to miss essential aspects in her thought. The aim of this article is to shed light on these aspects and by that to offer a more nuanced and fair presentation of Hannah Arendt’s moral and political thought regarding nationalism, Zionism, and the Holocaust.