A Congress of Eichmans

Hannah Arendt made the phrase “banality of evil” famous- and infamous.  When she reported on Eichman’s trial in Israel in 1961 with serialized installments to the New Yorker, not everyone was happy with her reporting.

Zionists especially were incensed that a German Jew would marginalize the evil of the Holocaust. And describing Eichman as the banality of evil seemed to do exactly that. But Arendt was describing what she saw: a mediocre and insipid yes-man protesting relentlessly that he was but a cog in the wheel of fascist state policy.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s prime minister, wanted a show trial that indicted Eichman as the architect of history’s most monstrous evil; the climax of thousands of years of anti-Semitism, and the best justification for Zionism. It was necessary that the embodiment of evil stand trial and thereby sanction what had been done and would be done to create the state of Israel: the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The controversy over her reporting was volcanic, and endures to this day.

There is no doubt that the Third Reich represents the acme of tragic nationalism. But also that it gave rise to an Israeli exceptionalism eerily similar to the self described identity of the US, American exceptionalism. Both the US and Israel are settler-colonial states in which the native population was/ is deemed inimical and sacrificial to God’s command. The Old Testament God blessed the birth of both nations in genocidal blood.

There is a widespread historical assumption in America that the US represents the Christian fulfillment of ancient Israel’s covenant with God. For example, slavery was considered by many in the colonies for over two hundred years to represent a divine prerogative descending from religious history. Today, America considers itself  “the indispensable nation”, i.e. that only America can fulfill the role of promoting civil and human rights across the Earth. And obviously Israel is a senior partner in this mandate. And for this reason Israel receives more military aid from the US- almost 4 billion dollars annually, than any other nation; it is a rite of political passage for every American politician to acknowledge fidelity to the sacred bond that unites the two countries.

The recent American political melodrama of King Baby Trump was the high- or low point, depending on your point of view, of US/ Israeli relations. Trump and the Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu, were fabulous collaborators in promoting American empire in the ME and Zionist apartheid in Israel. And so far Biden has continued to endorse virtually all of their joint agenda.

But the interesting thing is that the Democrats view Trump and the Republicans as incipient fascists, but are loathe to call Israel the same, even if they think it. Israel and the US War Machine is practically the only thing Dims and Repugs now agree upon. There is nothing they won’t do to support either Israel- or endless war in the ME, or somewhere else. Such is the power of enduring politicized and radicalized Judeo-Christian values.

King Baby Trump bears a passing comparison to Nazi leaders such as Eichman in that he came to be seen as the embodiment of evil by Democrats. He was regarded as the end of all that was politically and socially acceptable by liberals. Russiagate, however, unlike Eichman’s trial, was a complete bust. Eichman was hung for war crimes, but King Baby walked free. And for good reason of course, even if they were both justly considered evil: war crimes are much more awful than the unproved assertion of treason.

But as far as war crimes and the banality of evil are concerned, why not reference every past president beginning with George W. Bush, and all the Eichmans in Congress who have promoted twenty years of misery and war crimes in the Middle East? They are all, like Eichman, just cogs in the wheel of state fascism, doing their job, paying their bills, raising their children, mowing their lawns, supporting the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and killing men, women and children with an abandon that would make Eichman laugh.

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