[thanks, Harry!] ‘Hannah Arendt”s ‘thoughtful’ hasbara Amidst the hoopla over German director Margarethe von Trotta's new film, Hannah Arendt, just released in New York City to critical accolades (see: A. O. Scott in the New York Times), I find myself increasingly aware of the insidiousness, and incensed at the danger, of Israeli hasbara. Although its propaganda function is more difficult to detect than that of, say, the comparatively straightforward The Gatekeepers, Hannah Arendt is undeniably a product of hasbara that is non-threatening to the Israeli state. This Israeli co-produced film, made by one of the more conservative directors associated with the historical New German Cinema, does not place into question either the Jewish character of the state of Israel or its settler-colonial foundations. Hannah Arendt herself was at best a cultural Zionist (like Judah Magnes, Ahad Ha'am, and Martin Buber); she did not doubt the existence of a Jewish "ethnicity" or "peoplehood," even if she refused patriotic fealty to it and to the British imperial interests she believed its Zionist incorporation was meant initially to help preserve. full piece at Mondoweiss