Kalev Crossland
On 4 December 1948, The New York Times published a letter signed by 28 Jewish intellectuals, among them Albert Einstein and the philosopher Hannah Arendt.[1] The letter was not about physics or metaphysics. It was a warning – precise, urgent, and addressed to the American public – about a political movement that had just arrived on their shores.
The movement’s leader was Menachem Begin. He had come to the United States to raise money and build support ahead of Israeli elections. Einstein and Arendt wanted Americans to know who they were dealing with. Begin’s Freedom Party, they wrote, was closely akin in organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.
It had been formed from the membership of the Irgun Zvai Leumi — the paramilitary organisation responsible, among other acts, for the massacre at Deir Yassin, a peaceful Arab village in which approximately 240 men, women and children were killed, their bodies left for foreign correspondents to photograph.
The signatories were not anti-Zionist agitators. They were Jewish intellectuals writing from within the tradition they loved, warning that a specific and identifiable political current within the newly created state of Israel was importing the tools of domination they had spent their lives fleeing.
They were, in the most precise sense, prophets without honour. Seventy-seven years later, the trajectory they identified has arrived at a destination that makes their warning read less like history and more like a roadmap.
The unbroken thread: Jabotinsky to Netanyahu
The thread begins not with Begin but with Zeʼev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism, whose 1923 essay The Iron Wall remains the foundational text of Israeli right-wing politics.[2] Jabotinsky was honest to the point of ruthlessness. The Arab population of Palestine, he argued, would resist colonisation as any native population resists — and resistance could be overcome only by an iron wall of military superiority behind which the Jewish state would be built.
He was not celebrating this. He was describing it as structural necessity — and he framed the iron wall as instrumental rather than permanent, envisaging that once Arab resistance was exhausted, moderate leaders would emerge and genuine coexistence would become possible. His successors have not always preserved that qualification.
In July 2023, at the state memorial ceremony for Jabotinsky at Mount Herzl, Benjamin Netanyahu told the assembled crowd: ‘One hundred years after the iron wall was stamped in Jabotinsky’s writings we are continuing to successfully implement these principles.’[3] It was not a slip or a provocation. It was a statement of continuity — and it was accurate.
The organisational lineage is direct and unbroken. Jabotinsky founded the Irgun, commanded by Begin, who founded Herut in 1948 — the party condemned in Einstein’s letter. Herut merged with other right-wing factions to form Likud in 1973. Netanyahu has led Likud for most of the period since 1993 and has served as Prime Minister longer than any other figure in Israeli history. The thread runs in a straight line across a century.[4]
The ideological continuity is equally direct. Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, was Jabotinsky’s personal secretary and disciple — a historian who argued that Jewish-Arab coexistence was structurally impossible and that the Arab population would never accept a Jewish state regardless of borders or concessions. Benjamin Netanyahu absorbed this worldview at the family dinner table. It is the lens through which he has viewed every negotiation, every American president, every Palestinian interlocutor: not as potential partners but as variables to be managed in a permanent conflict.[5]
Begin himself partially confounded his critics. He signed the Camp David Accords in 1978, returning the Sinai to Egypt and sharing the Nobel Peace Prize with Anwar Sadat. History does not move in straight lines, and individuals are not reducible to their origins. But the political tradition Begin founded — the settlement project, the doctrine of strength without compromise, the explicit rejection of a Palestinian state — has moved in an entirely straight line from his Irgun days to the coalition Netanyahu currently leads, which includes figures whose positions on Arab citizens of Israel and Palestinian civilians the 1948 signatories would have recognised without difficulty.
Arendt’s framework: the banality of the architecture
Hannah Arendt did not merely co-sign Einstein’s letter. She spent the following three decades building the intellectual framework that explains how the trajectory it described was possible — and why warning about it was not enough.[6]
Her concept of the banality of evil, developed from her coverage of the Eichmann trial in 1961, is frequently misunderstood.[7] It does not argue that evil is trivial, or that those who participate in atrocity are ordinary in all respects. It argues something more disturbing: that mass evil does not require monsters. It requires systems, bureaucracies, and the suspension of individual moral thinking — the replacement of genuine judgment with institutional role-playing.
Eichmann did not hate Jews with unusual ferocity. He simply did not think, in Arendt’s full sense of that word. He followed procedures, met targets, and in doing so administered the logistics of industrialised murder without anything she would recognise as moral agency.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt identified the structural features that make this suspension of thinking possible at a societal scale. She traced the origins of European totalitarianism through two streams — antisemitism and imperialism — arguing that the techniques of racial domination developed in colonial Africa were imported back into Europe and applied to Jews. The boomerang had returned.[8]
This framework bears directly on the question the Einstein letter implicitly raised: how did a people who had survived the most systematic attempt at extermination in modern history produce a political movement that the most eminent minds among them recognised, in 1948, as bearing the unmistakable stamp of fascism?
Arendt’s answer is not psychological. It is structural. Fascism is a technology of power. It can be adopted by anyone, regardless of their history of suffering, when the conditions that produce it — the dehumanisation of an outgroup, the cult of strength, the elimination of moral imagination — are reproduced within a new context.
Frantz Fanon, writing from within the decolonisation movements of the 1950s and 1960s, reached a parallel conclusion from a different direction.[9]
Colonial violence does not simply oppress — it psychologically deforms both the colonised and the coloniser. When the colonised achieve power, they risk reproducing the structures they overthrew, because those are the only structures of power they have ever known.
The tragedy of the Revisionist Zionist tradition is that some of its founders were not merely unconscious inheritors of colonial structures. Jabotinsky was a conscious admirer of aspects of Italian Fascism, whose organisational discipline and unapologetic assertion of national interest he found admirable. The ideological borrowing was, in part, deliberate.
The architecture of capture: AIPAC, the military-industrial complex and MAGA
What neither Einstein nor Arendt could have fully foreseen in 1948 was the specific international architecture through which the movement they warned about would eventually extend its influence beyond Israel — capturing a significant portion of American foreign policy machinery and aligning itself with the most powerful nationalist political movement in American history.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is among the most effective single-issue lobbying organisations in the history of American democracy.[10]Its power derives not from hidden conspiracy but from entirely visible institutional mechanics: a large, geographically distributed, politically engaged donor base; simultaneous operation across both major American political parties; and a sophisticated infrastructure for translating financial support into electoral consequence.
Members of Congress who deviate on Israel face concrete, immediate electoral costs. The benefit of independence is diffuse and abstract. This structural asymmetry has produced a political class that performs one position publicly while holding more nuanced views privately — a situation Arendt would recognise immediately as the replacement of genuine political judgment with institutional role-playing.
The binding commonality across AIPAC’s donor coalition — Jewish megadonors, Republican billionaires, evangelical Christians, and corporate defence interests — is not shared cultural or religious affinity with Israel.
It is a shared interest in a particular geopolitical and military architecture: unconditional, unsupervised American military supply to Israel, regardless of Israeli government conduct. AIPAC’s own super PAC spokesperson has confirmed that its red line is not anti-Israel sentiment but conditionality — any candidate who expresses openness to conditioning military aid on Israeli behaviour becomes a target.
The defence industry’s interest is straightforwardly commercial: Iran as a permanent threat environment justifies carrier group deployments, arms sales to Gulf states and Israel, and the entire architecture of forward military basing.
In 2015, Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress in explicit opposition to a sitting American president’s foreign policy on Iran — an almost unprecedented intervention by a foreign head of government.[11]
He faced no meaningful political consequence – indeed, he received a standing ovation.
The architecture AIPAC had built made opposition to him more costly for American legislators than support. This is the same story Eisenhower told in 1961 when he warned about the military-industrial complex:[12] the systematic capture of democratic decision-making by concentrated institutional interests whose structural imperatives diverge from the public interest.
The MAGA movement’s relationship with Israeli maximalism is one of the more historically strange political alliances of our time.
The movement that produced “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville simultaneously produced the most ostentatiously pro-Israel administrations in American history.
The explanation is not contradiction but complementarity. Christian Zionism — the evangelical theological framework requiring Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land as a precondition for the Second Coming — has long provided a domestic American constituency for Israeli territorial maximalism whose support comes without the human rights conditions that liberal Jewish American support traditionally attached.[13]
Netanyahu grasped this perfectly and embraced the alliance without apparent discomfort. He calculated — correctly — that evangelical support for Israeli military policy was more politically durable than liberal Jewish support with inconvenient conditions.
MAGA and extreme Zionism found each other because they share a civilisational framework: the world as permanent conflict between strong, unapologetic nations asserting their interests and weak, cosmopolitan forces of international law and multilateral constraint.
Both movements regard compromise as weakness, international institutions as instruments of their enemies, and military dominance as the natural order of things.
The Iran war and the failure of thinking
Through this architecture, military confrontation with Iran becomes almost over-determined.
It is simultaneously a two-decade strategic objective of the Israeli government; a commercial interest of the defence industry; an ideological imperative of the MAGA civilisational framework; and a domestic political instrument — offering the rally-round-the-flag dynamics, the performance of decisive leadership, and the silencing of institutional dissent in the name of national security that consolidated power requires.
At its strategic core, the conflict is a contest over regional hegemony between the two most capable candidates for that status in the Middle East. Israel possesses the region’s most sophisticated military, undisputed nuclear capability and an unbreakable American security guarantee.
Iran possesses the region’s largest population (outside Egypt), significant conventional military capacity, a ballistic missile programme approaching nuclear threshold status, and a network of proxy forces extending from Lebanon to Yemen.
For Israel, a nuclear Iran ends its military monopoly and its ability to operate with regional impunity. For Iran, permanent Israeli military supremacy backed by the United States forecloses Iranian regional influence indefinitely. Neither framework is adequately captured by the moral packaging — antisemitism, terrorism, democracy versus theocracy — that dominates Western public discourse about the conflict.
What is striking about the public messaging surrounding the Iran conflict is how completely it exemplifies what Arendt meant by the failure of thinking. Thinking, in her full sense, is the capacity for enlarged mentality — the ability to imaginatively inhabit the perspective of those upon whom your decisions will fall, to see consequences from multiple angles, to hold complexity without collapsing it into the satisfying simplicity of domination and submission.
Pete Hegseth’s public communications — the martial bravado, the framing of geopolitical catastrophe as a contest of masculine will, the aesthetic of war as spectacle — display almost none of this capacity.
The observation that he appears to be playing a violent immersive video game is more than a rhetorical flourish. Video games present military conflict as a series of clean decisions with immediate visible feedback, stripped of civilian complexity, historical context, and moral weight.
War becomes a display of dominance rather than a catastrophic instrument of last resort. This is not stupidity. It is the specific failure of moral imagination that Arendt identified as the precondition for institutional atrocity.
The danger is not that Hegseth is evil in any conventional sense. The danger is precisely that he is not thinking — in Arendt’s deep sense — at all. Men who are not thinking, placed in positions of enormous destructive power, supported by an institutional architecture that has no structural interest in their thinking, are among the most historically dangerous actors in political life.
The circle closes
Einstein and Arendt signed their letter in 1948 from inside a tradition they were trying to save from itself. They were not anti-Zionist. They were warning that a specific political current within the Zionist movement — one with explicit ideological debts to European fascism, one that had demonstrated its methods at Deir Yassin — was on a trajectory that, if unchecked, would produce consequences recognisable to anyone who had studied what happens when ethnic nationalism captures state power.
The letter was signed, published, and ignored. Begin became Prime Minister. His Revisionist tradition became the dominant force in Israeli politics. Its ideological successor, the Likud of Benjamin Netanyahu, has governed Israel for most of the past three decades while simultaneously building the international architecture — the AIPAC infrastructure, the evangelical alliance, the MAGA alignment — that insulates it from the external pressure that might otherwise have forced the reckoning the 1948 signatories hoped to catalyse.
Arendt’s most profound insight was that the banality of evil is not a personal failing. It is a structural condition. Individual moral failure is contained by institutions. It is when the institutions themselves are captured — when the systems designed to check the thoughtless functionary instead empower and reward him — that historical catastrophe becomes possible.
The United States is paying an enormous strategic price for this entanglement. Its unconditional support for Israel’s military conduct has cost it the moral authority on which American soft power rested — its claim to speak for a rules-based international order.
It has used its UN Security Council veto repeatedly to shield Israel from censure, dismissed the ICJ’s preliminary finding of plausible genocide, and continued weapons supply after the ICC issued arrest warrants against Israeli leaders.
The cumulative effect, visible across the Global South is that the American argument for a values-based international order has been comprehensively undermined by American conduct. China, which brokered the Saudi-Iran normalisation in 2023 at zero military cost, watches this self-immolation with strategic patience.
That is where the architecture we have described arrives. Not with monsters. With spreadsheets and stock prices, with evangelical eschatology and lobby infrastructure, with a political movement that has decided that thinking — in Arendt’s full sense — is a form of weakness.
And at the centre of it, a man talking about war the way someone talks about a game they are winning.
Einstein and Arendt warned us. The warning was precise, documented, and signed by 28 Jews. It is still there, on microfilm in The New York Times archive, waiting to be read.
Kalev Crossland
Kalev Crossland is the litigation principal at Righteous Law and a member of The Law Association’s Civil Litigation Committee
A note on sources and perspective
The argument in this essay rests on a foundation that is itself Jewish. The warning it takes seriously was issued by 28 Jewish intellectuals, including the two most prominent Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century.
The intellectual framework it applies was developed by a Jewish philosopher whose life’s work was understanding how persecution becomes possible.
The historical lineage it traces is documented by Jewish historians, including Eran Kaplan and the late Benzion Netanyahu himself. The critics of AIPAC’s political architecture cited throughout include former AIPAC staff member M.J. Rosenberg, Jewish Voice for Peace, and a growing number of Jewish-American elected officials who have publicly returned AIPAC donations.
The author is a commercial trial lawyer — nearly four decades in the courts. He has spent his career on the forensic analysis of institutional conduct: who did what, in whose interest, and what the documents actually show. He worked briefly as a good governance lawyer in Vanuatu. He has written for LawNews on law, geopolitics and international relations.
He is the son of an Estonian refugee who arrived in Australia in 1948 — the same year Einstein and Arendt published the letter this essay examines — and of a British father who immigrated to New Zealand that same year.
His family history was shaped directly by Russian communism: the totalitarian system that drove much of the Jewish refugee experience of the twentieth century, and whose mechanics of institutional capture and suppression of individual moral thinking he encountered first not in a seminar room but at the family dinner table.
He read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago as a teenager, not as literature but as testimony. He has been a student of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History for most of his adult life and is engaged in the long-term project of making that framework accessible to contemporary readers.
He writes from outside the American domestic political framework in which criticism of Israeli government policy is routinely weaponised as a proxy for antisemitism — a conflation long identified by Jewish critics of that conflation, including those cited in this essay.
He writes from outside the US/Israeli-Iranian conflict itself. But he does not write from indifference. He writes from a biographical proximity to the questions Hannah Arendt spent her life asking: what does the failure of moral thinking look like from the inside, and what becomes possible when institutions designed to check it begin instead to reward it.
The essay does not argue that Jewish people are responsible for the situation it describes. It argues that a specific political tradition, traceable to a specific ideological lineage documented in the public record, has constructed a specific institutional architecture with specific and measurable consequences.
Those are forensic claims, susceptible to forensic challenge. They should be engaged as such.
[1]Albert Einstein et al., Letter to the Editors, New York Times, 4 December 1948. Full text: marxists.org/reference/archive/einstein/1948/12/02.htm. Scanned original: Internet Archive. The letter names twenty-eight signatories. The body count at Deir Yassin recorded in the letter is 240; contemporary estimates range from 107 to 254.
[2]Ze’ev Jabotinsky, ‘The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs)’, Rassvyet, 4 November 1923. English text: marxists.org/history/etol/document/mideast/ironwall/ironwall.htm. Wikipedia overview: Iron Wall (essay).
[3]Netanyahu, remarks at the State Memorial Ceremony for Zeʼev Jabotinsky, Mount Herzl, 18 July 2023, cited in Wikipedia, ‘Iron Wall (essay)’: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Wall_(essay); and Counterfire, ‘The Man in Whose Shadow Netanyahu Walks’: counterfire.org.
[4]On the Jabotinsky–Irgun–Herut–Likud–Netanyahu lineage, see Eran Kaplan, ‘Israel’s Iron Wall: A Brief History of the Ideology Guiding Benjamin Netanyahu’, The Conversation, March 2024: theconversation.com/israels-iron-wall.
[5]On Benzion Netanyahu as Jabotinsky’s personal secretary and his intellectual influence on Benjamin Netanyahu, see Wikipedia, ‘Benzion Netanyahu’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzion_Netanyahu (confirming he served as assistant to Jabotinsky’s personal secretary and executive director of the New Zionist Organization of America). See also: counterfire.org. Academic analysis: researchgate.net/publication/399026094.
[6]Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt Brace, 1951). Internet Archive: archive.org. Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org.
[7]Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Viking Press, 1963). Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem.
[8]On Arendt’s imperialism thesis and the colonial boomerang, see Origins of Totalitarianism, Part II. See also Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950). Wikipedia overview: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism.
[9]Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), trans. Constance Farrington (Grove Press). Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wretched_of_the_Earth.
[10]On AIPAC’s lobbying operation and political influence, see OpenSecrets pro-Israel lobbying data: opensecrets.org/industries/indus?ind=Q05. In the 2023–2024 election cycle, AIPAC and its affiliated super PAC spent nearly $127 million, with at least $45.2 million going to members of the current 119th Congress — 65% of whom received AIPAC funding. See Sludge, ‘Here Is All the Money AIPAC Spent on the 2024 Elections’ (January 2025).
[11]On Netanyahu’s 2015 address to Congress opposing the Iran nuclear deal: en.wikipedia.org; https://www.france24.com/en/20150303-netanyahu-us-congress-israel-nuclear-iran
[12]Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, 17 January 1961, Avalon Project, Yale Law School: avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp. National Archives copy: archives.gov.
[13]On Christian Zionism and its theological basis as the primary domestic American constituency for Israeli territorial maximalism, see Stephen Sizer, Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon? (IVP, 2004), the standard academic work on the movement’s historical origins in nineteenth-century British dispensationalism and its political consequences. The full text is available at Internet Archive: archive.org/details/christianzionism0000size. For empirical data on the scale of evangelical pro-Israel sentiment, see Pew Research Center, ‘Modest Warming in U.S. Views on Israel and Palestinians’ (May 2022), which found that 70% of white evangelical Protestants believe God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people — more than twice the proportion of American Jews who hold the same view — and that 86% view the Israeli people favourably: pewresearch.org/religion/2022/05/26. On the evangelical-MAGA alliance more broadly, see John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump (Eerdmans, 2018).
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