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13 Aug 06

In time of war: reason amid rockets Fred Halliday - openDemocracy

www.opendemocracy.net/...arendt_deutscher_3813.jsp - Preview

arendt deutscher israel middle-east opendemocracy palestina politics

In this regard, ethnic and religious diasporas are among the last people who can offer rational explanation or moral compass in regard to such events.
They are crimes on the basis of universal principles – of law, decency, humanity – and should be identified as such.
3 more annotations...
- And this ethnicisation of the victims was, at the same time, deemed to convey a particular right, if not responsibility, on the state that lay claim to representing those victims, namely Israel. This was what Hannah Arendt identified.
- Much more controversial (and neglected) is Arendt's critique of the legal and moral case made by the Israeli prosecutors against Eichmann. For, whereas the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi war criminals had been conducted under what at least purported to be some form of "international" law – the precursor of later codes of universal jurisdiction, crimes against humanity and the International Criminal Court – Adolf Eichmann was prosecuted for the taking of Jewish lives and in a Jewish court.
- Deutscher's approach rested on three clear and courageous premises:
  
  that both leaderships, Arab and Israeli, were guilty of demagogy and misleading their own people, above all by promising a victory that was unattainable and by stoking hatred of other peoples and religions
  that the antecedent histories of both peoples (genocide in Europe for the Jews, and denial of national rights for the Palestinians) could not be deployed to legitimate the maximal current claims of either side
  that – a principle Deutscher resolutely adhered to – the Israelis and Palestinians were peoples with legitimate claims, which should be recognised on a sensible, and lasting, territorial and political basis.