The Arendt Syndrome: Seeing What We Want To See
Writing about the Israel-Hamas War, I find myself continually struck by how facts take second place to promiscuous and untruthful use of images and words as cudgels.
A few examples:
* The accusation of "genocide." I checked the number of births and reported deaths. Even using Hamas's numbers for deaths, adding the regular number of fatalities in pre-war Gaza, and using WHO estimates of births, the Gazans will end a year of war with a larger population than they had on October 7, 2023. Are you aware of any other accusation of "genocide" under conditions of population growth? (See details in the addendum below.)
* The assumption that "The Jews are White, Palestinians are Of Color" with all of the connotations in progressive discourse. Here are two populations regularly filmed and presented in the media, and you can see how physically similar they are. You can't tell them from each other on the street, yet so many people see racial differences at work.
Something is happening that has little to do with what people actually see. Call it the Arendt Syndrome. Bettina Stragneth, in her book "Eichmann Before Jerusalem," diagnosed it brilliantly. "Eichmann Before Jerusalem" is her re-examination of Hannah Arendt's book published in 1963, "Eichmann in Jerusalem." For Arendt, Eichmann, the mass murderer, was a numbingly ordinary person. She coined the phrase "banality of evil" to describe him. Stragneth shows how Eichmann outfoxed her by presenting a bland face to his bottomless evil. While his was a mediocre mind and hers a brilliant one, he possessed a talent for role-playing: a powerful and intimidating SS commander in WW2 Hungary; a retired, distinguished SS veteran in post-WW2 Argentina; and in Jerusalem, the bland corporate cog perceived by Arendt. Why did she, one of her time's most influential social thinkers, fall for it? Stragneth explains:
Susie Linfield revealed another broader aspect of the Arendt Syndrome in her book "The Lion's Den," a survey of the Left and its relationship to Zionism. Her point about Arendt applies to the wave of Left-Wing hysteria directed at Israel since October 7:
To describe it in its simplest form, the Arendt Syndrome is the desire to impose abstract political theories on a situation without having the intellectual courage to truth-test our impressions.
Judith Butler is a contemporary example of the Arendt Syndrome. On the October 7th attack, she said:
Butler has a painful relationship with Judaism and Zionism. The fact that she characterizes October 7 as an act of "armed resistance" is less of a problem. "Armed resistance" is a state of affairs, not an ethical evaluation. Logically, an act can be one of "armed resistance" (e.g. Nazi soldiers fighting the Allied invasion of Germany in 1945) and part of contemptible antisemitic terror (e.g. the political program they fought to support). However, to suggest in the face of all evidence that terror is not the tactic chosen and carried out by Hamas on October 7 or that the attack was not antisemitic is counterfactual and morally depraved.
Finally, we have the Volker Türk response to the beeper attack on Hezbollah. Türk is the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. An Austrian lawyer with a 30-year career in the UN system focused mainly on refugee issues, his appointment was criticized because of his bland, diplomatic, bureaucratic style. His response to the beepers illustrates the Arendt Syndrome so very well:
The statement is obviously untrue, although we should not expect Türk to truth-test it. From the moment the beepers were purchased by Hizballah and distributed to their personnel, they were part of a weaponized system and, therefore, a legitimate target. Think of the radio set located in a tank or carried by an infantry soldier. According to the UN press release, he went on to make an overbroad and clearly inaccurate statement:
Caught up in the UN's chronic and morally corrupt ideological need to see illegitimacy in whatever Israel does, i.e., the "abstract theoretical political theory," Türk stood the significance of the internal Hizballah distribution on its head. It was because the devices were purchased by Hizballah and distributed to its personnel, that Israel had excellent knowledge of who would be "in possession of the targeted devices." The IDF carried out a sharply focused attack on an enemy force.
Like so many at the UN, Hannah Arendt had eccentric opinions about Israel. Perhaps her greatest contribution to the country was her ideologically obsessed failure to evaluate what she saw with her own eyes, when that was not what she wanted to see. Just as her contemporary Lou Gehrig gave his name to a disease with which he was afflicted, she gives us her syndrome so that we can better understand the danger of ideological obsession.
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Addendum
I am not a demographer. What follows is simply an examination of readily available numbers drawn from international organizations and HAMAS. The numbers raise questions about the promiscuous use of the term “genocide.”
This calculation is not simple for two reasons. First, it deals with a grim business, tracking losses in war. Second, it is likely inaccurate because even in the best of circumstances, available statistics about the Gazan Palestinian population are not precise. I searched the Internet for estimates of the pre-war population of Gaza. I found the following: (UNRWA) 2,100,000; (NPR) 2,200,000; (Reuters) 2,226,544; (Anera) 2,230,000; (CIA World Factbook): 2,242, 643; (Al Jazeera) 2,300,000. The difference between the highest and lowest is 200,000. The average comes out to about 2,200,000.
The ordinary death rate is low at 2.9/1000 because the population is young. Over the past year, the Gazans would have anticipated about 6,400 deaths had the war not intervened. Let’s assume that these would be primarily elderly and ill people and that, sadly, they probably died as nature took its course with them.
The HAMAS Ministry of Health estimates that as of 15 August 2024, 40,005 Palestinians have died since the war began. If correct, this would suggest that about 4,000 Palestinians fell every month, so to account for the time from 15 August until this blogpost is published, we may grimly add another 6,000. That brings a total estimate of fatalities, adding the natural deaths to HAMAS’ claimed death toll (although we cannot tell whether HAMAS’ numbers already include them), and an estimated prorating of the death toll over the month and a half since HAMAS made its announcement to about 52,400 total fatalities.
My estimate of total fatalities is probably high since I use unverifiable HAMAS statistics, I may be double-counting those who died without connection to the war, and I prorate an estimate of fatalities over that month and a half.
The Gazan birth rate is very high. UNICEF estimated that a baby was born every 10 minutes during the war. The WHO suggested 180 were born daily, which would mean one every 8 minutes. Using these estimates, we can suggest that between 52,560 and 65,700 infants were born over the year of war.
The Gazans have suffered greatly. But it seems incontestable that the population of Gazans is very moderately larger after a year of war. So far as I have been able to find out, and in sharp contrast to Rwanda, for example, where Hutu extremists killed about 77% of Tutsis, or the Holocaust where Nazis eliminated about 66% of European Jews, Gaza is the only case of population growth during a war that has been labeled a “genocide.” The word does not apply.
Thank you for this. I never understood people's obsession with Arendt. I found her midling at best and totally self absorbed refusing to see the truth of what was before her. I think of life long love of a nazi truly left her with blinders.
What a great post. Thanks for your insights and history lesson. Demographics lesson is a nice bit of research.