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

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 2 Jun 2025

Maung Zarni | FORSEA - TRANSCEND Media Service

Since its founding in May 1948, Israel and its leaders have envisaged, bureaucratized and normalized death, destruction, displacement and dispossession of the natives of Palestine.

31 May 2025 – 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).

Israel’s state-backed illegal settlements and industrial farms seen from the Tent of the Nations, outside Bethlehem. These illegal settlements dot the landscape throughout the Occupied Territories of Palestine where 700,000+ illegal settlers, mostly Americans, roam. About 200,000 have been issued combat machine guns and munition by the Israeli Ministry of Security headed by Ben Gvir, the settler from Hebron Hill, who holds and propagates genocidal Zionist views. (photos by Zarni, January 2025)

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.

February 1956 Map of UN Partition Plan for Palestine, adopted 29 Nov 1947, with boundary of previous UNSCOP partition plan added in green. Wikipedia Commons

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.

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