Many survivors of the Nazi concentration camps and the Holocaust wrote memoirs to permanently record what had happened, with a belief that such atrocity should never happen again.
Many authors credited their survival to the desire to make sure they lived to tell the story. If it was so important to them that the world know what happened, then reading seemed the least I could do.
The banality of evil was a term coined by Hannah Arendt to capture the ordinary and mundane daily lives people lead while atrocities were being committed. For example, one reads about the stench of death and the impossibility of ignoring the smell; how could the people of Auschwitz pretend they did not know what was going on?
It does not take a case like South Africa has now brought to the International Court of Justice to beg many of these questions. South Africa is accusing Israel of genocidal acts, according to the charges. As Al Jazeera reported, during the “three-month war in Gaza, more than 23,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed, lawyers told the top United Nations court. Most of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million has been displaced, and an Israeli blockade severely limiting food, fuel and medicine has caused a humanitarian ‘catastrophe.’”
Genocide is a serious charge, and crimes against humanity have a burden of proof like all others. I am troubled by even more latent questions; if it is not ruled genocide, does that make it somehow OK?
Israel dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza within the first six days of war—for comparison, that is about what the U.S. dropped in Afghanistan in 2019—how many of those bombs do we want to assume responsibility or pay for?
In the first six weeks of the war, Israel deployed more than 22,000 U.S.-produced bombs on Gaza, according to intelligence figures provided to Congress. Individually and collectively, we need to stop supporting it with our tax dollars and silent complicity, or, preferably, just stop it. Forget ceasefires; let us finally put an end to war before war puts an end to us.
Wim Laven, Ph.D. teaches courses in political science and conflict resolution.
