A middle-aged man sits in a glass booth, or perhaps a cage. He seems bewildered, surprised to be there. His nervousness is visibly manifest to all onlookers—the trembling mouth, the shocked near-sighted eyes, the hands nervously clutching each other for comfort.
The trial is in progress. The fate of the man in the glass booth will be decided shortly. The booth is for the protection of this prisoner, who ends up a spectacle, a strange species of caged animal. He is ordinary-looking in every way, a man lacking all distinction. Medium height, middle-aged, on the street you would pass him without giving him another thought. And yet, here he is, on trial in Jerusalem, a city he never expected to visit. He has been brought here through a kidnapping by Israeli agents who tracked him down to Argentina, where he fled and lived under an assumed name after the war. The charge? Genocide.
Such is the story of Adolf Eichmann, whose trial in Jerusalem in 1961-1962 provoked much thought from the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who covered it for the New Yorker. How could someone accused of orchestrating the Holocaust—not single-handedly, to be sure, but in significant part—be so ordinary, nondescript, average. Is this what the face of evil looks like? And if so, what are the implications of this for how the rest of us should see the world? Arendt published her expanded reflections in a 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
For many at the trial, including Arendt herself, there was an obvious shock when beholding Eichmann. We expect the face of evil to be readily identifiable, recognizable. But what if we cannot recognize evil for what it is when we meet it up close? Or, at least, what if we cannot recognize evil in the face of man—much less in his heart? But there is more to consider about Arendt’s argument, and so many have missed it, contends Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz:
“The judgment that Eichmann must die, Arendt argues, should have been a singular, political, and non-legal judgment that no common world was possible. What was called for in the Eichmann trial was, she argued, was an extraordinary judgment—one not grounded in law—that such things as Eichmann did ought not to have happened. Eichmann must die in order to state unequivocally that we reject a world in which he and the deeds he helped enact could happen. Eichmann must die, in other words, because something happened in Germany to which we, as human beings, cannot be reconciled.”
Berkowitz’s thoughts—and Arendt’s original argument—readily come to mind now, as we mark the second anniversary of the horrifying Hamas attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023. It should never have happened; such acts are simply beyond judgment or any earthly justice. The atrocities of that day are sickening to imagine, including as they did a massacre of civilians at a desert music festival; executions, rape and other sexual violence, and torture of civilians in two kibbutz communities and another nearby settlement; and the kidnapping of hundreds of civilians into Gaza, where some of them remain still (but are any of those remaining alive?). Many of those who were taken to Gaza as hostages died there, some quite brutally—Shiri Bibas and her two toddler sons were killed by their attackers’ bare hands.
And yet, we are witnessing the banality of evil anew now in the world’s reactions. To be clear, it is not Hamas that plays the role of Eichmann in the current drama. There is nothing banal or surprising about the evil of a terrorist organization, whose genocidal acts were simply what they had threatened to do all along. To look at what Hamas did on October 7, 2023, is to look upon evil, plain and simple.
The banality of evil, rather, involves the too many ordinary, average, normal-looking people the world around who have, over the past two years, taken the side of Hamas with such facile slogans as “Free Palestine” and other, more overtly anti-Semitic gestures. Just this fall, Jewish students at Dartmouth College have found swastikas painted outside their dorm rooms. We are in an era of new antisemitism, a “hatred immune to education.”
The antisemitism of old was, many educators and justice advocates believed, the product of insufficient education. If only high-school and university students and members of the general public learned more about the Holocaust, surely this education would show them that antisemitism and the hatred of the Jews is wrong. It is possible that this worked for a time, although it is hard to tell—some undercurrent of antisemitism has always been present in America as well as in Europe. But now, it is the most educated of all—the college students on some campuses—who have been the most vocal in their opposition to Jews. After all, who on Dartmouth campus might have painted those swastikas outside Jewish students’ dorm rooms? Obviously, other Dartmouth students. How far will such harassment of Jewish students go? Will it culminate in violence? I hope not, and yet, history doesn’t give me confidence in the matter. Neither does the news—just days ago, an attacker targeted a synagogue in Manchester, UK, killing two people and injuring four others “on the holiest day of the Jewish year.”
This is evil, but it is not easily recognizable as such in some circles now. This evil is, rather, respectable, educated, thoughtful, masquerading as a quest for justice for the oppressed Palestinians. Israel, in such stories, is not the victim of a massacre by Hamas, but a Western colonizer, who perhaps is getting some deserved come-uppance.
But perhaps there is a better way. I am a dual citizen of Israel and the United States. I am also an adult convert to Christianity. I care deeply about the people of Israel. And I care deeply about ordinary Palestinian civilians, who have found themselves in tragic circumstances because of the actions of Hamas, which have also brought about Israeli military attacks on Gaza. God sees these injustices against both Israeli and Palestinian civilians. God cares about both, because He cares about every injustice here and now.
In other words, the banality of evil in our midst does not harm God. How could it? But it does harm us—and the harm is of an additional nature than Arendt, a self-described agnostic, could recognize.
Some of the banality of evil today involves a refusal to see evil, recognize it for what it is, regardless of who the perpetrator is. The costs cannot be anything but spiritual. What does it do to our souls to see evil and call it good? But there is a more convicting question yet: What does it do to our souls to see evil and call it ordinary?
It is, I contend, a profound act of unbelief, a refusal to see God’s mission to redeem this world. It is difficult to see injustice in the meanwhile, but that difficulty is not a call to make ourselves into our own gods bent on justice in our own image. It can, rather, be a sign that our conscience has not been seared yet. It calls us to confess: God’s will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
He is making all things new, of this we can be sure.
