I wonder what Hannah Arendt would make of Israel today - her famous (at the time, controversial) essay on Eichmann outlined the famous idea that supreme evil did not depend on extraordinary people, but could flourish and spread in whole populations of people from very boringly everyday backgrounds. They did not have to be victims of abuse, or products of genetic abberations spawning psychopaths.
At the time, apparently, this was upsetting to the survivors of the Holocaust, because (at least from my reading) it implied that there could have been more succesful resistance to the Genocide. From today's perspective, this sounds a bit like victim blaming, and I don't believe that that is what Arendt meant. Her concern was more about how the perpetrator network grew, and did not for me have implications for particular target of the new evil, rather about how society could notice, and perhaps think about defending against the successful emergence of said evil. At least, reading a lot of her other work, it does seem Arendy was concerned with a wide variety of political organisations, and how and why they worked (or didn't). She was, of course, intensely invested in ethics as well.
Looking at Israel today, and their behaviour in Gaza, I have to say that it really is banal. And Evil.
And the response has to be from the rest of the world, since the victims (principally women, children, standers by in Gaza) are not to blame, neither for causing this behaviour, nor for failing to resist more effectively. If you blame Gaza and Palestinians, you are complicit in genocide. If you blame them, you are the new anti-semite. And if you do blame Israel, you are not anti-semitic. And if you do not blame Israel (the government, the IDF, not the individual people) you are anti-semitic.
[Just to note that the origin of the word semitic is consistent with this wider sense]
No comments:
Post a Comment