Comprehending Evil
The attack of October 7th unveiled the heinous society that Hamas created in Gaza. Don’t get me wrong. The Intifadas and the previous battles against the Palestinians offered us a peek into their dark alleyways. But October 7th allowed us a poster-sized view of the society Hamas has constructed.
The only phrase I can use to accurately describe Hamas is an “organization of evil”. When I use the word “evil”, I am not referring to it in its colloquial sense. We use the word “evil” to describe a lot of things: the refrigerator when it stops working, the man who steps on your toe, and the car that cuts you off in traffic. But these are colloquial usages. When I say that Hamas has created an evil society, I mean it in a technical sense. The Gazan society under Hamas rulership is the very definition of evil.
So, what is evil?
It is a question that philosophers have dealt with for centuries. Medieval philosophers defined evil as the absence of good. It is a definition that allowed them to make sense of evil in light of the existence of a benevolent, all-powerful God. In order to deal with the conundrum, they denied the existence of evil. Evil was simply the absence of something. It did not essentially exist.
While this answer appeases the religious quandary, it cannot do the same for people who have encountered evil, like Israelis did on October 7th. The rapes and rampages of that dark day don’t allow us to deny the existence of evil. We saw it. We lived it. We know it exists.
So, what is that thing that drove Palestinians to slaughter, rape and pillage? What is evil?
Modern philosophers take a different path from the medieval thinkers. In his Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Immanuel Kant wrote that “radical evil” (the highest form of evil) is something that is rooted in human nature. He defined it as the promotion of self-interest over moral law. While many thinkers disagreed with Kant, it cannot be denied that self-interest was one strong motive behind the ideology of Hamas leaders. I am referring to people like Ismail Haniya, who was worth billions of dollars and lived in the lap of luxury in Qatar, while his people starved as a result of his policies.
In her book “Origins of Totalitarianism”, Hanna Arendt defined evil differently. In her attempts to explain the Holocaust, she explained that she did not believe that evil is rooted in human nature. There is nothing human about evil. She explained that evil exists when human beings make other human beings “superfluous”; when they dehumanize them. This is the type of evil we find in totalitarian regimes. Arendt draws from her experience with the Holocaust to understand the process of dehumanization. Part of the process of dehumanization is the institution of an arbitrary society where the criminal and the righteous are treated the same, and the eradication of individual identity. These are both things she saw in the concentration camps. This type of evil is propagated by a bureaucracy that perpetuates an ideology and propaganda to convince people of the rationality of its claims.
In her analysis of Adolph Eichmann in her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, Arendt turns her attention away from the totalitarian regime towards the people who perpetrate the crimes of the regime. This is where she introduces the much-criticized term “banality of evil”. In watching Eichmann at his trial, she was struck by his ordinariness. He didn’t appear to be satanic. In fact, he appeared to be a thoughtless bureaucrat who managed to murder millions of Jews by his sheer thoughtlessness. In her book on Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt portrays this type of evil as being superficially committed to an ideology; It’s the willingness to do horrors without questioning the ideology you are being fed.
I believe that both of Arendt’s categories of evil apply to what we saw on October 7th, and what we know about extremist Islam and the way Iran used it to achieve its goals. It is not surprising that extremist Islam has these similarities to Naziism because its roots are planted in Naziism. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a friend of Hitler’s and promised to carry out Hitler’s work in the Middle East. Copies of Mein Kampf translated into Arabic were found in some of the houses in Gaza (https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-810940#google_vignette).
The process of October 7th began decades ago by dehumanizing Jews. Cartoons of Netanyahu drinking Arab blood, Jews puppeteering media, Jews with long noses controlling the UN, Jews with satanic faces, and Jews as crocodiles attacking Arabs appear in news sites all over the Middle East. (https://www.adl.org/resources/report/antisemitism-arab-cartoons-during-israel-hamas-war-chronology-dehumanization-jews
Jews were viewed as devilish colonizers who stole Arab lands. Just like in Nazi Germany, these tactics were perpetuated by an Iranian totalitarian regime via its proxy Hamas in order to make the murder of Jews easier, and even appetizing, to Moslems.
The murderers of October 7th were indoctrinated since childhood. They had been told that when they die, they will receive their ultimate rewards. They were told that the greatest thing you can do with your life is to sacrifice it. The people consumed this ideology without asking questions. They did not turn to their leaders to ask why the people were so poor, while their leaders were so wealthy. They did not wonder why, after 77 years, they were still in refugee camps. They did not question the violence and inequality in their societies. They were told to blame the Jews, and that is what they did. Like the thoughtlessness of Eichmann, their blindness caused the murder of thousands of Jews. The only difference between the Palestinian terrorists and Eichmann was the joy with which they committed their crimes. Unlike Eichmann, they did appear to be satanic on that dark day in October.
This, by no means, describes every Gazan. We have seen Arabs from Gaza successfully escape these death cults, who are now speaking out aggressively against the leaders of Hamas. But there are so many who partake in the poisonous propaganda of Hamas without thinking that it has become ingrained in their society to the degree that it characterizes it. It is fair to brand their type of evil, within that society, as “banal”.
I think all three of these technical definitions of evil – selfishness, dehumanization, and thoughtlessness – are what we saw on October 7th, and what we still see today in the West Bank and Gaza. Like the Nazis before them, Hamas has created a truly evil society.
Understanding evil is crucial. In order to construct a good society, a society that stands opposed to the evil one that seeks to destroy us, we must question what seems unfair. We must work hard to treat everyone with humanity, and we remain selfless in our service to our country and our fellow men. Comprehending evil is our first step towards creating a fair and humane society.