If Hannah Arendt lived today, she’d name Israel’s genocide in Gaza for what it is: 'Radical evil'

Two hours before dawn on an August day, the temperature in Gaza is already over 30 degrees and the humidity 88%. It’ll be close to 40 before evening under a relentless sun.

But two hours before the daily death count begins, there’s still time to awaken with a cotton mouth and a sweat-dried body; time to notice the piercing hunger that has come to define the days and nights of an unending tumult.

Soon, the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” will begin bargaining with the hungry — flour for a bullet, cooking oil for blood, dried beans for head and heart.

This week, the death toll from child starvation in Gaza reached 100. The world is shrinking.

Approximately 86.1% of Gaza has been swallowed up by tanks, bulldozers, armoured personnel carriers – the monsters of a modern army; Israel’s fire-breathing pets – grinding, hissing, and spitting their way towards the sea. 

Above the din of bombs, buzz of drones, booms of explosions, above the cries for God and mercy; beyond the fear and wounds and pitiful shortages; away from ear-splitting pleas for this hell to end, a toxic cloud of silence hovers over the sunny southeastern bend of the Mediterranean known as the Gaza Strip. Its people have ceased to exist.

They’ve been whisked down a ‘hole of oblivion,’ that frightening void of superfluity, and – out there in the living world – they have been erased and forgotten. It is the consummation of Hannah Arendt's 'Radical Evil'.

Listening to the silence, one can hear the totality of moral collapse and, with it, the subversion of thought. Absent both, a war machine can purr its way through a whole world, lulling its procurers and profiteers into a cosy sleep. Evil needs no supernatural force to seep into the foundations of our lives: demonise, isolate, concentrate, obliterate. Those who are unwanted and ill-placed can be disposed of without qualms. They aren’t part of the plan.

While Hannah Arendt is famously known for her thesis on the banality of evil, reached as she observed the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, it is her concept of 'Radical Evil', reached years earlier in her landmark 1951 study, The Origins of Totalitarianism, that helps explain the fate of Gaza’s two million Palestinians and the resounding silence with which it has been met from the ‘international community.’

For Hannah Arendt, totalitarian state systems were the source of the worst 20th century crimes, yet she understood that the tools of such regimes would be picked up and used by future governing systems in dangerous and novel ways, especially given our advancements in technology and surveillance, including by those regimes dressed in democratic attire to lull their citizens into complacency.

“In the presence of these solutions and their calculated attack on human nature, on humanity, and on history through the erection of a world of living dead, the holes of oblivion and the mass manufacture of corpses – to deprive men of their human condition and leave them alive, to expel the living from humanity and the dead from the memory of history seem to constitute the first crime in the long and sinful history of mankind that is a greater sin than murder itself.”

People who have been rendered useless to greater human society are mere abstractions in our understanding in a way that blunts the edges of conscience. 

Israel, as the natural offspring of the 19th-century Pan-ethnic movements and 20th-century fascism, has spent almost as long demonising Palestinian Arabs as Europe did identifying Jews as the source of modernity’s woes.

For Zionism, which sought ultimately to become a Pan-Jewish national movement, the “chosenness” of its people is a central feature not just through its biblical mythology but also in some ludicrous post-Hegelian historical framework where each great people must have its ‘day in the sun’ manifest as God’s Divine Will. His most beloved and cherished people, superior in every aspect to all other races, are destined for greatness. Note that this was equally true for Pan-Germanism, Pan-Slavism, Pan-Turkism and other fín de siècle Pan movements.

When taken to their mythical extremes, the fate of these nations was to be realised in a glorious future, an ideal community with which nothing and nobody should be allowed to interfere.

Like Zionism, these Pan-movements identified a specific territory, a common language, and a common — if highly romanticised — history as the essential elements of their organic ‘nationhood’ in which they would realise their intended potential. In such a system, no moral reckoning can ever be brought, or even contemplated, against those attempting to achieve their collective greatness by eliminating the peoples whose existence threatens to obstruct it. 

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In this light, Palestinians, dehumanised for a century, harassed, expelled, dispossessed, and murdered for the principal, if collective, sin of preventing a Jewish ethno-state, represent an unacceptable obstacle to the necessary national self-realisation of Israel. Displacement and marginalisation highlight their superfluousness — they fit nowhere into this system — casting them into the role of stateless persons, intruders, and outsiders.

As such, they lack a ‘real’ identity. What can their role possibly be in a nation-state in which they have no ‘organic’ purpose? The singular goal of a movement that sees itself as quasi-divine is its self-actualisation into an imagined Ideal, where all internal and external threats have been eliminated.

One could argue that by 2018, when Israel passed its Nation State Law, the groundwork for ‘Operation Swords of Iron’ had already been sufficiently laid to begin an all-out assault both in Gaza and the West Bank. Its genesis also signified the culmination of a national ethos long in the making. Jews alone can be equal citizens in such a state; they alone can, and must, ‘redeem’ — and settle — the land, fertilised by Jewish blood and sweat, and justified by a mythological and highly embellished ‘history’ in which the others, outside this process, are chaff for the wind.

Under this law, Jews within Israel have been encouraged to strengthen their ties with the diaspora since Israel is seen as “the state of the Jewish people” rather than a state of its citizens. Those not wishing to be part of this self-contained world have their own oblivion to fear. Self-determination belongs only to those with deep, organic roots in the land.

Palestinians are considered the remnants of an earlier age, connected to the greater Arab peoples and their original territory, primarily the Arabian Peninsula, but not to the historic land of Palestine. They are therefore to be encouraged to leave whenever possible and have now, with the passage of this law, been classified legally as strangers.

The idea of nationhood enshrined by this ‘law’ goes back to the extreme ethno-nationalisms of fascist and totalitarian regimes. ‘Nationhood’ in this light is the ultimate source of a person’s identity.

It is militant, exclusive, superior, and intolerant of any kind of ethnic or racial pluralism. The underlying anti-democratic tendencies inherent in this type of nationhood are being cultivated by right-wing nations and organisations across the world today — India, Hungary, Poland, Myanmar, Russia, North Korea, the United States, etc.

Indeed, MAGA nativism in the United States, as well as white supremacy, where ‘outsiders’ such as immigrants and migrant workers — almost exclusively people of colour — are increasingly unwelcome, vilified, and dehumanised, must be seen as a curious offshoot of this late 20th and 21st-century form of ethnonationalism.

Both Nazi Germany and Manifest Destiny America would have approved. Within this rightward shift, we can sense the dark undercurrents of our fading liberal-enlightenment order washing over the parochial and increasingly brittle façade of respectability that governs them — everything that might have been good and decent in a right-side-up universe.

Those who are demonised and persecuted long enough become untouchable. From there, they become the anonymous, wished-away detritus of a nation-building machine. In other words, they become expendable. By the time they start to disappear through death or displacement, they have already ceased to exist because they’d long been rendered irrelevant; a waste product to be wiped away like dust.

For Arendt, a system in which human beings have become superfluous is one in which their humanity itself has been subverted or nullified. Thus, to carry out their annihilation or disappearance is to commit a Radical Evil. “Radical” originates from the Latin word “radix” or “root”; this evil goes to the root of the problem — to people, humans, whose collective expression exemplifies humanity. To do away with them by following the dictates of an organic nation state becomes, in modern Zionist ideology, the duty of a good citizen; a just and merciful righting of history as God, expressed by the collective nation, intended. Radical Evil is the force that destroys humanity in the service of its goals.

Though Arendt is known more for her theory of the “banality of evil,” there is nothing banal about firing missiles into children queuing up for water or families seeking rations of food.

There is nothing banal in setting tent shelters ablaze with a fire that incinerates entire families, and there is nothing banal about torturing people to death through starvation, dehydration, and disease. To obliterate every manifestation of a culture and society built painstakingly across time requires more than banal obedience to a commander. It is evil at its most radical because it seeks ‘Vernichtung’ or the rendering into nothingness of a great mass of humanity.

Of course, there was nothing banal in the literal extermination of millions of Jews, gypsies, political prisoners, homosexuals, disabled people, and common criminals either.

Rather, Arendt claimed, it was the simple, yet interconnected actions of thousands of petty bureaucratic functionaries – paper stamping, filing, certifying, organising – that were banal and yet led to the unspeakable evil of genocide. I contend, however, that the actions themselves were not the source of evil; rather, that can be found in the machine itself; in the system created for the uninterrupted execution of the state’s aims.

The machinery enabling unquestioned destruction, however, is practically invisible. It connects a world of disparate businesses with manufacturing plants, corporate headquarters with multinational banks, transportation hubs with shipping containers and the steadily working, non-complaining participants of this great abstract beast on whom our lives depend; whose seamless operation is guaranteed by the necessity of overseeing this functioning world.

This machinery, perhaps the quintessence of banality itself, allows the colossal cover-up of what is, in real terms, a multinational criminal enterprise. Its authority is unquestioningly accepted by nobody and everybody. Its complex inner workings are dependent upon the absence of thought, morality, and individuality. The only escape from this system is the refusal to participate in it, an act which comes at an exceptionally high cost.

The machinery operating this world requires obedience and, above all, silence. If your humanity is sacrificed to keep this system going — and it must be — that is the ultimate expression of patriotism. You have abandoned the self for the greater good of the whole. Your human qualities have been rendered obsolete.

You, too, have become the superfluous human whose only praiseworthy quality is in the subversion of your humanity to a system that serves Radical Evil. As such, you yourself may one day be targeted. Your dehumanisation, untouchability and expendability shall be a matter of chance in the great game of the 21st century. Only the re-imposition of humanity can stop it – plurality, creativity, morality, cosmopolitanism and defiance.

To be free today is to be subversive. Only through a conscious rejection of the system that seeks an imagined perfection through death and destruction can the will of an imperfect humanity be reimposed upon the living. Otherwise, Gaza’s end may be our own.

Jennifer Loewenstein is a human rights activist and freelance journalist. She was formerly (now retired) Associate Director of Middle Eastern Studies and Senior Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Follow her on X: @JenniferLoewe10

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