Thursday, December 20, 2007

"It was a politics that she scathingly denounced as a return to ‘the traditional methods of shtadlonus’—Zionists now ‘knew no better place politically than the lobbies of the powerful, and no sounder basis for agreements than their good services as agents of foreign interests.’ Their hope was that ‘if Palestine Jewry could be charged with a share in the caretaking of American interests in that part of the world, the famous dictum of Justice Brandeis would come true: you would have to be a Zionist in order to be a perfect American patriot.’ [27] In another major paper at the time of the 1948 War, Arendt denounced the massacre of Deir Yassin and the killings in Jaffa and Haifa as deliberate measures of terror by the Revisionist wing of Zionism to drive the Arab populations out of Palestine. The building of a separate Jewish economy by the mainstream labour wing of Zionism—which had been its pride—she saw as the curse that made possible the expulsion of the Arabs (‘almost 50 per cent of the country’s population’) without loss to the Jews. [28]" (thanks May)