The Jewish catastrophe in World War II, and the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees it left in its wake, rendered more urgent than ever the Jewish need for a homeland. The vision of that homeland was whole-heartedly supported even by as critical a Jewish philosopher as Hannah Arendt. The post-Holocaust world provided, she said, a rare opportunity for Jewish rehabilitation. However, while she had welcomed the foundation of a Jewish homeland, Arendt remained critical of many aspects of this vision, as conceived by the Zionist leadership, as well as the national myths at the basis of this vision, particularly those that were, in her eyes, thwarting the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians and the Arab world. The most powerful myth, according to Arendt, was that throughout history the Jews, in contrast to all other nations, “were not history-makers but history-sufferers, preserving a kind of eternal identity of goodness whose monotony was disturbed only by the equally monotonous chronicle of persecutions and pogroms.” Arendt believed that this view was an attempt to discharge the victim of responsibility, and that it extracted problems of Jewish identity and suffering from history, from their very historicity by essentializing Jewish victimhood. Such a view, Arendt said, cut off Jewish history from European and world history, and created a state of mind that she defined as “worldlessness.”

Involvement, responsibility, and historicity are key concepts in Arendt's political thought.