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Arendt’s Banality of Evil Thesis and the Arab-israeli Conflict y a r o n e z r a h i Following the publication of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, less than two decades after the Holocaust, the early “career” of her thesis concerning the banality of evil met with intense resistance. For Jews, a belief in the banality of evil of the kind committed by Eichmann could only serve Germans in avoiding responsibility for their hideous crimes against the Jews. Arendt’s thesis seemed to suggest to many Jews and non-Jews an unacceptable basis for rationalizing—it was a license for leveling Nazi crimes with other crimes of war, a license for ignoring the genocidal drive behind the extermination of most European Jews, and a license for the unique dehumanizing by efficient mechanical and technological means by which the Nazis carried out the mass executions of the Jews. Beyond the controversy, my concern here is with the potential second “career” of the banality of evil thesis in the profoundly different context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Considering the continual violence between the sides, the urgent problem in this context is not only how to understand evil committed in the past but how to frame it in a way congenial for the social psychology and politics of reconciliation between the antagonistic parties. In the present situation perhaps the greatest obstacle to the politics of reconciliation is the tendency of many Israelis and Palestinians to demonize each other as essential evildoers. Such “essentialization” constitutes perhaps the greatest obstacle to getting the respective national collectives to understand each other and to move toward a more peaceful course and discourse. Currently no local leadership can form reasonable foreign and security policies in the region when its own public is grossly misinformed and profoundly ignorant about the character and drives of its adversary. Israeli and Palestinian leaders who seek compromise are seriously hampered by convoluted public opinions formed largely by a continual strife and some nine wars over sixty Facing: Hannah Arendt’s notes on the front endpaper of her heavily annotated copy of Karl Jaspers’s Rechenschaft und Ausblick. The long paragraph on the inside cover reads: “Jaspers’s attempt to make visible and communicable the ungraspable and the unconditional demands, even [unreadable] the radical relativization of any thing. This relativization is retained as the irrelevance and thanks to the itself ‘unconditioned’ reverence before the tradition.” She then refers to p. 303. Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Collection, Stevenson Library, Bard College. 1 Arendt’s Banality of Evil Thesis years, as well as by a profound distrust of the will and capacity of the other side to change in the future. Hannah Arendt’s thesis provides a key to a new approach stressing the possibility that criminal acts and evil consequences have been and are now committed by individuals having a “noncriminal . . . inner life” or lacking a “diabolical or demonic profundity”; thus, the banality of evil enables us to see the religiously sanctified suicide-murderer as a spiritually empty banal individual .1 While Arendt obviously regards massacres and the brutal killing of defenseless civilians as intrinsically evil—and while she insists that Eichmann deserved the death penalty for his deeds—the gap she sees between evil acts and their terrible consequences on the one hand and the banal inner lives of the agents of evil on the other hand opens up the way for shifting the focus to the question: how do people lacking criminal or diabolic inner life become agents of evil? At first glance, Arendt’s suggestion to replace the inner criminal intent or demonic personality of the agent of evil acts by thoughtlessness and a lack of imagination is irritating. No wonder it provoked such angry protest at the time. But one should not overlook the gravity with which Arendt treats the implications of her insistence that the banal normality of evildoers “is much more terrifying” because of the ease with which many people can become evildoers like Eichmann. In some places all it takes, she suggests, is the enactment of a dehumanizing administrative classification that can lead to what she calls “administrative massacres.”2 In other circumstances it can be the result of the readiness to enact a demonic classification of “infidels” or occupiers as guilty by sheer membership in a collective of another faith or nation. While such circumstances are enormously difficult to change in the short term, recognizing...

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