Letter from Albert Einstein to Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India, June 13, 1947 :
"Long before the emergence of Hitler I made the cause of Zionism mine because through it I saw a means of correcting a flagrant wrong....The Jewish people alone has for centuries been in the anomalous position of being victimized and hounded as a people, though bereft of all the rights and protections which even the smallest people normally has...Zionism offered the means of ending this discrimination. Through the return to the land to which they were bound by close historic ties...Jews sought to abolish their pariah status among peoples... The advent of Hitler underscored with a savage logic all the disastrous implications contained in the abnormal situation in which Jews found themselves. Millions of Jews perished... because there was no spot on the globe where they could find sanctuary...The Jewish survivors demand the right to dwell amid brothers, on the ancient soil of their fathers.” — Letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India, June 13, 1947 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_Albert_Einstein#:~:text=Einstein was a prominent supporter,Jews the sense of community. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_Albert_Einstein#:~:text=Einstein%20was%20a%20prominent%20supporter,Jews%20the%20sense%20of%20community.>) - “(...) The attempts to use Arendt—uses that are always highly selective—to support contemporary positions vis-à-vis Israel almost always get her wrong. And yet to parse her views on Zionism is important. Most of the things she cared (and worried) about—nationalism, sovereignty, resistance, collaboration, freedom, justice, judgment—are entwined with her writings on Zionism, the Shoah, and Israel. "Arendt wrestled with Zionism, and then with Israel, for over three decades: with force and passion, respect and scorn. She wrote hundreds of thousands of words, scores of articles and essays, and, most famously, the book Eichmann in Jerusalem. She derided Jewish political sovereignty yet argued fervently for a Jewish army and Jewish self-defense, the Jewish right to Palestine, and the creation of a specifically Jewish politics and a specifically Jewish world. (“A people can be a minority somewhere only if they are a majority elsewhere,” she observed.) Arendt was a scathing opponent of assimilation and an ardent admirer of Zionist accomplishments—economic, political, intellectual, and social—in Palestine and, later, in Israel, though she also expressed disgust at actually-existing Zionism. She opposed the partition of Palestine and became a critic of Israel after the state was founded, though she unambiguously supported Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars. In short, her attitudes toward Zionism oscillated: not only between months or years or decades, but within them. These attitudes cannot be whittled down to “pro” or “anti,” despite the efforts of reductionists to do so. (...)” (Susie Linfield, https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2020/07/13/hannah-arendt-on-zionism/) - So Keith, kindly refrain from instrumentalising major Jewish figures by attempting to shoehorn them into your antisemitic worldview. Which does not mean that Israel has not gone sorely astray. But only useful critique, in the name of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, is of any worth. Joe. > Le 10 avr. 2024 à 20:07, Keith Sanborn via nettime-l > <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> a écrit : > > This is a beautiful sentiment, but… > > Ask Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, this is not a shift in values, but the > triumph of some of the worst values at the earliest formation of the Israeli > nation state. Of course, there are other values of righteous compassion at > the core, but like the US, there is a history of genocide and indifference to > the indigenous and the other. -- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: https://www.nettime.org # contact: nettime-l-ow...@lists.nettime.org
