We Refugees? or: What is a Jewish Political Space

The paper revisits the role of refugees in Hannah Arendt’s critique of the nation-state. By considering the personal story of one asylum-seeker who fled Ghana and reached Tel Aviv, it suggests a contemporary version of the critique. The paper considers Giorgio Agamben’s reformulation of Arendt’s critique in We Refugees, a reading of Arendt’s 1943 essay under the same title. Whereas Agamben’s interpretation indeed encapsulates Arendt’s main ideas on “the refugee problem” in Origins of Totalitarianism, it fails to account for the emphatically personal position in We Refugees. Attention to a genre of protest against the abuse of asylum seekers that evolved in Israel in the last few years, and to the story of the persecution of an African asylum-seeker, offers a fuller understanding of this biographical emphasis in Arendt. As Agamben reiterates, Jews are structurally excluded from the political formation of the nation-state. But for Arendt, this exclusion is expressed, and perhaps resisted, through an attention to the concrete biographies of the excluded. The iteration We Refugees is thus understood as a call for solidarity among those whose life-histories cannot be represented by the state. Today, “post-colonial refugees” are in a position that demands such attention.