Opinion | The Banality of Evil

This picture, taken from a position at Israel's border with the Gaza Strip, shows smoke above destroyed buildings in the besieged Palestinian territory on September 16, 2025, amid the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas militant group. Credit: AFP/MENAHEM KAHANA

There is no morality here, only institutionalized oppression. The poet Denise Levertov writes about the repeated killing of children, whose names are forgotten and sex undetectable in the ashes, rising in flames yet not disappearing.

 ... “the sad truth is that most evil is committed by people

who never decide to be good or evil; it arises from a failure to think... the banality of evil."

Hannah Arendt

It is the silence of the majority when people become accustomed to evil and cease to think, oppose, or refuse to participate.

The Israeli public is witnessing the expulsion of women, children, and elderly people, and it is maintaining silence. It is witnessing the ethnic cleansing and says nothing. It is seeing the total destruction of the Gaza Strip and doesn't speak up. It knows that 18,000 children have been killed in Gaza and remains quiet. It knows that journalists, physicians, emergency workers, educators, and thousands of civilians are buried under the rubble, and says nothing. And when houses and high-rise buildings are bombed, it says nothing, often demanding more, sometimes even smiling sadistically.

The atrocities in Israel's Gaza border communities, in which 30 children and hundreds of civilians were murdered, shocked Israel's public, and justifiably so. But what the government is perpetrating in Gaza, with the support of most of the public, is not "self-defense." It is not a temporary reaction but the implementation of an old plan that had been waiting in some drawer: a plan of transfer and annihilation arising from the depths of Israel's political-defense discourse. Israel's government has become an openly Kahanist one.

The day is not far off when Likud ministers will place a wreath at the grave of Meir Kahane. What was once considered abominable and outlawed extremism has become the core of the ruling consensus.

All those who repeated the statement that "there are no uninvolved people in Gaza" afforded justification for the killing of children and innocent people. These words were not a slip of the tongue but a Nazi statement. As soon as you remove the distinction between a combatant and a civilian, the minute you say that all Palestinians are legitimate targets, you endorse the killing of millions of people.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the most influential cabinet member, a minister with no public behind him, with all opinion polls showing that he remains under the electoral threshold, does not conceal his doctrine of annihilation. Smotrich has said, written and repeatedly explained that an entire people have to disappear.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the son of a historian, is not stopping him. On the contrary, he is giving him free rein. It's hard to decide what's worse: Has Netanyahu forgotten Jewish history, or has he decided that this time he would be on the side of the exterminators?

Anyone seeing the ongoing atrocities the Israeli army is committing day and night in the Gaza Strip – with starving children, women with missing limbs, entire neighborhoods pulverized – yet still repeats the hackneyed and ridiculous mantra about the "most moral army in the world," is a full accomplice to these war crimes.

The camera of a Reuters photographer killed in the bombing of Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis in August.Credit: AFP

There is no morality here, only institutionalized oppression. The poet Denise Levertov writes about the repeated killing of children, whose names are forgotten and sex undetectable in the ashes, rising in flames yet not disappearing.

Denial is also a form of being an accomplice, as is repressing the truth, ignoring it or remaining silent. The person who saw the picture of a starving Palestinian child and rushed to deny it, arguing that he was sick before that, or that this was part of some campaign, is also fully complicit in the crime.

The instinctive and human response of denial and fleeing the taking of responsibility or blame for this terrible deed attests to a society that's shed all its moral boundaries. Anyone who can't see this, anyone who is not prepared to confront reality is not a partner in the efforts to stop this horror.

No less grave is the double standards being used. Anyone who called the killing of hundreds of civilians in Israel a "holocaust," hence viewing all Palestinians as Nazis, must explain why he or she is shocked at the use of these terms in describing what has been happening in Gaza for the last two years: the large-scale killing and murder, starvation and expulsion, ethnic cleansing, uprooting and extermination.

If using these terms is allowed when talking of the other but forbidden when describing Israel's actions, this amounts to moral hypocrisy and emotional manipulation aimed at legitimizing the horror.

A woman sits with her child in Gaza City, in July.Credit: Abdel Kareem Hana/AP

International law is clear: You cannot harm civilians or punish an entire population; you cannot deliberately destroy civilian infrastructure or expel people by force. Starvation cannot be used as a means of war. All of these are being done daily in full view of the world, at the instruction of Israel's government and with the support of the Jewish-Israeli public, whether by silence or with excessive enthusiasm.

Moreover, former IDF chief of staff Herzl Halevi has admitted that the army has hit around 200,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians. Such a declaration is not a testimony of "morality." It is clear proof of a policy aimed at deliberately and seriously harming a civilian population.

There is a courageous minority in Israel, consisting of activists, citizens, journalists, artists, people in the health and academic worlds who oppose this, refusing to be swept up in the stream. They sign petitions and demonstrate in the streets, sometimes paying a heavy personal price. But they are only a few, and they're being muzzled. The vast majority is cooperating and supporting what is taking place in Gaza. History will remember this minority and the silence of the majority.

History will not forgive. It will remember that Jewish Israeli society, despite its historical traumas, perhaps because of them, mobilized in masses and turned a blind eye when an entire people were being exterminated. History will remember the destruction, the ruin, the ethnic cleansing and the killing of children. One day it will place a mirror in front of the people who yelled "the most moral army in the world" while destroying Gaza.

As Hannah Arendt wrote, "the sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil; evil comes from a failure to think… the banality of evil." That's the core of the matter. It's the silence of the majority, the moment at which people get used to the evil and stop thinking, opposing or refusing to be part of it.