Genocide as Israel’s “Banality of Evil”: Six-decades after Adolf Eichmann’s Trial in Jerusalem

In his introduction to the Penguins’ edition of Hanah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem: Report on the Banality of Evil”, the Jerusalem-based essayist and critic Amos Elon, echoing Arendt, wrote, “The Palestinians bore no responsibility for the collapse of civilization in Europe but ended up being punished for it” (p.viii).

On Arendt’s penetrating capacity to observe and reflect critically on the dynamics within the European Jewry, Elon wrote, “(i)t would have been interesting to hear what she might have said later when, under the governments of Golda Meir and Menachem Begin, the Holocaust was mystified into the heart of a new civil religion and at the same time exploited to justify Israel’s refusal to withdraw from occupied territory” (p.xviii).

A word about the background of these two Israeli leaders, from the left and from the right of the Zionist Project, which built Israel as an un-welcome settler colony on the land populated by 95% Arabs, is in order.

Golda Meir (born Golda Mabovitch) was a Ukrainian-born staunch Zionist who settled in Mandate Palestine in the 1920’s from Milwaukee, Wisconsin where she grew up. Meir witnessed chilling mobs of Tsarist-era Eastern Orthodox Christians going after “Christ killers” (the Jewish community). Her 496-page autobiography (My Life, Golda Meir) recounts how she held her father in contempt because all that he could do was “board up the door” and cower inside their meagre home, with 3 young girls and wife. Raised as an immigrant child in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the turn of the 20^th century, she and her older sister settled in Mandate Palestine in the 1920’s while her youngest distanced herself from the older ones’ Zionist project. After the founding of Israel in 1948, David Ben-Gurion tasked Meir to travel to the USA and raise funds from the Jewish diaspora there for the purchase of weapons for the IDF. She was subsequently involved in the genocidal erasure of Palestine and its history: from calling herself, “I am a Palestinian”, during the British Mandate years to sending official instructions to pro-Israel politicians around the world including those in my own birth country of Burma (now Myanmar) NOT to call Palestinian Arabs Palestinians at the UN meetings.

Like Raphael Lemkin, Menachem Begin was born in Belarus. Unlike Lemkin, Begin embraced staunch Zionism, joined the Zionist movement in Eastern Europe and proceeded to lead “Fascist elements” among the Jewish settlers in Palestine. His group was responsible for the most infamous cold-blooded genocidal massacre at the Arab village named Dier Yassin. A group of 27 prominent American Jews including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt wrote an open letter to the New York Times as early as December 1948, to try to dissuade the United States Government from issuing Begin the entry visa. In their published words, “… they (Begin and his followers) openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.”

The prophetic nature of their letters cannot be overstated. The future these American Jewish leaders had forewarned is here. Gaza is only the beginning.

Since its founding in 1948, Israel and its leaders in their capacity as the new settler-colonizers have made the residential and native Arabs pay for Christian and latest Nazi Europe’s crime – genocide, no less – against “Europe’s unwanted Jews”, in Ilan Pepe’s words. In this settler colonial project of displacing the natives and taking over the land, using different justificatory narratives, the new Europe and the United States have been partners in crime. Over the decades, this joint venture of genocidal land theft in Palestine has been normalized throughout much of the West and a mundane policy amidst the mantra of “the two-state solution”.

The late Hanah Arendt gifted us students of totalitarianism and its devastating human consequences a memorable, if highly contested coinage, “the banality of evil”. During Eichmann’s trial, Arendt came up with the paradigmatic idea after having attended the trial of Adolf Eichman in Jerusalem in 1961: evil is not extraordinary.

She was there to do a commissioned reporting for the New Yorker.

As I understand it Arendt’s phraseology is meant to convey the fact that to the SS Colonel Eichmann, a shallow man with an inner void, the Holocaust was really a bureaucratic act, as mundane as shuffling papers from one desk to the next. Such acts are committed by morons without much capacity for thinking independent and critical thoughts.

Eichmann was one of the 14 or so senior Nazi bureaucrats who attended the Wannsee meeting the outskirt of Berlin. It was in this meeting that the SS policy planners divided up their bureaucratic tasks to implement Hitler-approved plan of exterminating the European Jewry under the cover of the expanding World War II across Europe. The division of labour was spelled out in the minutes that came to be known as The Final Solution.

One of Colonel Eichmann’s key assignments was to make necessary logistical arrangements to transport via trains over half-a-million Hungarian Jews, of all ages, to the death and forced labour camp complex – known as Auschwitz-Birkenau – almost 500 kilometres away in an obscure Polish town called Oswiecin, chosen for its strategic web of railroads across the Nazi-occupied Europe.

In the Jerusalem trial, Eichman’s guilt was established on the basis that he was the one whose signature was affixed on all the passengers’ lists for the trains which carried 600,000 Jews to gas chambers and forced labour camps 500 kilometres away.

Fast-forward to 2025.

Israel’s so-called war against the Hamas in Gaza has unmistakably come to assume all the hallmarks of a textbook Lemkinian genocide, Israelis’ version of the Final Solution.

It is so much so that even its European and Western backers such as Canada, UK and France have been alarmed by the very real possibility that they and their countries too will be recorded in the annals of genocide as collaborating states in the latest phase of Israel’s settler colonialist genocide.

On the 77th anniversary of the original Nakba or Palestinians’ Holocaust a week ago, millions took to the streets of European and western capitals to call for the immediate end to Israel’s ethnic cleansing mission in Gaza and to condemn the western governments for their varying degrees of active support and/or complicity in the genocide in Gaza.

In my brief visit with the Rabbis for Ceasefire and Christians for Ceasefire delegations from USA to Kerem Shalom Crossing I drew a parallel between the Nazis’ Auschwitz-Birkenau and Gaza as Israel’s own Auschwitz – except Gazans outnumber by 1 million Auschwitz’s 1.4 million inmate population. As a student of genocide, I did not make the Auschwitz comparison lightly for its shock value.

​            Watch FORSEA’s Maung Zarni speaking at the Kerem Shalom Crossing in the southern most tip of Gaza, 29 Aug 2024.

Rightly all eyes have remained fixed on Gaza where, like the Nazi regime which produced the Final Solution, the Netanyahu’s openly genocidal regime has been perpetrating a full-scale genocide under the banner of its ever-expansive war against Hamas.

There are crucial differences though.

First, the Nazis sought to conceal their heinous crimes against the Jews and other victims in the Nazi-occupied Europe in the 1940s whereas in fact in 2025, the Israelis livestream or spread openly photos of their genocidal acts in various social media platforms. Even the Nazis seemed to have an ounce of humanity, which made them realize what they were doing – mass extermination – was wrong. In sharp contrast, the Israelis, that is, both the political and military leaders and the executioners and settlers on the ground in Gaza, as well as the rest of the Occupied Palestine, have been going about their business of destroying, dislocating, dispossessing Palestinian lives mundanely and bureaucratically as I write.

With the benefit of the hindsight, the Fascist Israeli regime has been using Hamas’ attack against Israeli on October 7 as a convenient excuse to speed up and scale up its genocidal onslaught against Gaza’s population of 2.3 million Palestinians already under a vice-like siege since 2007.

In his videotaped endorsement of the Global March to Gaza on 15 June, Dr Mustafa Barghouti, a highly respected Palestinian politician and head of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Medical Relief Society which manage medics and clinics on the ground inside Gaza, has called attention to Israel’s use of starvation as a method of genocide and the resultant situation where various epidemics of treatable diseases are on the horizon.

But the world needs to be reminded that just as the Nazis did not confine their atrocities to only a web of SS-run death camps and slave labour camps, Israel is committing numerous crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes with unconcealed ultimately genocidal intent across ALL territories under its illegal occupation since 1967.

Israel has gotten not only sadistic but also very creative in the ways it seeks to annihilate the Palestinian population, in whole or in part, all throughout the Occupied Territories, and Gaza is only the most blatant, the more savage and the most heinous in Israel’s conduct and policy.

Israel’s planners and executioners of genocide have taken the Nazi’s Final Solution to an entirely new level: instead of arranging to transfer their captive populations of Palestinians outside of their ancestral villages, cities and farmlands to third countries – because this option doesn’t exist for Israeli’ genocide planners this time around as opposed to 1948 – Israeli architects of genocide have built a wall (whose total length of 520 kilometres) is only slightly longer than Eichman’s Budapest-Auschwitz route.

It is in these walled spaces where over 3 million Palestinians are subjected to myriad ways of bureaucratic repression and “a war in different forms”, as Budor Hassan said in her recorded talk (see below) on the situation in the West Bank whereby Israel’s various security agencies and troops collaborate with the country’s judicial system, the parliament, the IDF-linked technology companies, and their openly genocidal Jewish settlers – numbering 700,000 of whom about 200,000 are armed with the state-issued automatic machine guns to make Palestinian lives impossible.

See below my eye-witness account of how Israel has created an ecosystem of genocidal methods.

The wall serves inter alia as a genocidal physical structure in Israel’s attempt to make the lives of 5 million Palestinians (3 million in the West Bank and 2.3 million in Gaza) as economically and existentially deprived as possible, so much so that they would abandon their ancestral land and “voluntarily” leave the Occupied Palestine. On the policy-induced depravation of sustenance of which starvation is the ultimate point, see my tribute to the late Johan Galtung.

Outside the wall of separation – nah, I would call it “the genocidal wall” – another category of the populations of the natives of Palestine, Bedouins are subjected to what Galtung called “structural violence” designed to deprive communities of life’s essentials. Israel’s +972 magazine reports, “they (150,000 Bedouins) are prevented from connecting to state infrastructure including water and electricity, and their residents are denied municipal services.”

In my two visits to the Bedouins villages in South Hebron Hills, I saw small shantytown like villages sandwiched between industrial chicken farms and the illegal settlements made up of gated stone-houses. It bears pointing out that chickens in Israeli company farms are provided with electricity and heat, water and ample supply of food than 150,000 Bedouins of Palestine.

Besides the structural deprivation of life’s essentials, our Bedouin hosts told us foreign solidarity visitors that they live with a very real threat of not simply settler violence including arson attacks but also Israeli state’s official acts of house and village demolition.

Like the Nazis of Nazi Germany of the bygone days, Israel and its leaders are waging a multi-front genocidal war with a view towards acquiring and expanding the land for Lebensraum or living space for the state’s chosen race of Jews. Israel wants the land, but not the people.

In this 3rd instalment of FORSEA Palestine Solidarity Dialogue Series, we are posting the two recorded talks by the two prominent Palestinians in the West Bank, namely Budor Hassan of Amnesty International and Daoud Nassar of the Tent of the Nations. They offer their grounded, first-person understandings of how Israel has been executing the variously genocidal policies through both its state bureaucracies and the outsourced agents of state terror, namely the 700,000 settlers.

I did the recordings during my second visit to the Occupied Palestinian Territories with a small delegation of scholars from 6 different countries in January this year.

Listening to these Palestinian voices one fact will become abundantly clear: that genocide of Palestinians has been a mundane and banal act and thought within Israel’s state and society at large.

Both Hannah Arendt and Adolf Eichmann would be turning in their graves.

Watch Ms Hassan’s videorecording (36 minutes in total) below.

The second recording (31 minutes in total) is the talk given to our visiting small delegation by Daoud Nassar, who runs, with his brother and sister, the Tent of the Nations, a family farm used for ecological and educational purposes whereby “people from many countries come to learn, to share and build bridges of understanding and hope.”

Importantly, Daoud also explained how Israeli authorities and institutions have been trying to dispossess and displace them off their land or silence them through select assassination.

Maung Zarni