From Hamas to Lakemba, this was evil at its root

A family grieves during the funeral at the Hod Ha'sharon cemetery in Israel.

They weren’t hunting for Israelis, much less for soldiers; they were hunting for Jews. Their instructions were simple: kill as many as you can. Nor were the civilian casualties collateral damage: they were the objective. And maiming babies, butchering children, raping women and defiling corpses wasn’t the work of a handful of sadists; they were a pervasive feature of the operation.

At least the Einsatzgruppen – the Nazi brigades who murdered nearly half a million Jews in a matter of months, forcing their victims to stand naked at the edge of mass graves before shooting them through the head – tried to hide their crimes, showing they had some inkling of breaching morality’s fundamental principles. Hamas’s killers did the opposite: they videoed their atrocities and posted them – to howls of joys that echoed from Gaza to Lakemba – on the internet.

Only one word can describe these people: evil. To use the term may seem as anachronistic as speaking of abomination, uncleanness or iniquity. Even the Oxford English Dictionary tells us “evil” has been “commonly superseded, in familiar speech, by “bad”. But exactly as we know good from bad, so we can differentiate evil from ordinary wickedness – and this was it.

“Radical evil”, thought Immanuel Kant, is ultimately incomprehensible: to explain human action, he argued, is to appeal to good reasons; and there can never be good reasons for murdering babies, mutilating toddlers and disfiguring the dead. However, even if we can’t make that evil intelligible, we can capture its essence: the denial of the victims’ humanity.

Thus, just as the Nazis believed Jews were less than human, so the Islamists, gripped in their death cult, refuse to acknowledge that Jews have the moral standing that would protect them from humiliation, degradation or extermination. And just as it was absolutely impossible for the Allies to make peace with Hitler, so it is absolutely impossible to make peace with Hamas.

As a result, the only practical option is to demolish, as thoroughly as possible, Hamas’s capacity to wage terror. If evil was the first step, it was therefore always certain the next step would be tragedy – a tragedy that follows with all the grim inevitability that, in the masterpieces of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides, sets the tragic apart from the merely catastrophic.

Hamas knew that: it knew that Israel, as it grieved its dead, would be faced with a choiceless choice. And Hamas also knew it could maximise the scale of the tragedy by placing rocket launchers in schools, hiding its command centres in hospitals and preventing Palestinians from fleeing to safety. Its goal, since it was founded in 1987, has never been to protect civilians; it has always used them as shields, compounding its crimes against humanity. Now, as Gaza yet again groans in seas of blood, the Palestinians losing their lives are Hamas’s victims every bit as surely as their Israeli counterparts.

Jews are murdered at the ravine in Babi Yar in 1941.

To say that is not to ignore the conflict’s complexities. But in the charnel house of history, the great horrors always come in media res – in the midst of longstanding and ongoing grievances and disputes. Those grievances and disputes can no more wash away Hamas’s slaughter of the innocent than Germany’s resentment about the Treaty of Versailles can justify the Holocaust. And even less can they erase the fact that Hamas, having made the conflict into a total, existential, war, must bear the consequences.

As those consequences unfold, there will, no doubt, be ever louder calls from Hamas’s supporters for an immediate ceasefire. “Every aggressor,” wrote the great military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, “is a lover of peace: he wants his aggression to go unopposed; but to prevent aggression, we must fight.” And fight Israel will, by whatever means suit it best, until it has achieved its objectives – no matter how many of the Islamists’ useful idiots burn Israeli flags and chant anti-Semitic slogans.

Those Jew-haters were out in force, disgracing Sydney’s streets, even as Hamas was still butchering its way through southern Israel. If they weren’t as vocal in subsequent marches, it was because the organisers specifically asked for the Jew-baiting cries to be silenced. In doing so, they simply confirmed what everyone knows: that had the crowd been left to its own devices, the filth would have spewed like excrement from a burst sewer.

Grotesque celebrations of terrorism, those demonstrations exemplify what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil”. She certainly didn’t mean, by calling this form of evil “banal”, to cast it as trivial, any more than did her mentor, German philosopher Karl Jaspers, who originated the concept; on the contrary, both considered it especially dangerous.

Hannah Arendt

Rather, it is “banal” because it is the evil that grows from suspending, suppressing or entirely abandoning the capacity to tell right from wrong. There is the evil of the morally deranged, the fanatics who allow their death cults to override the faculty of judgment; but there is also the evil of the morally deprived, who, washing their hands of moral responsibility, take refuge in a moral equivalence that conflates victims and executioners, the terrorists and the terrorised.

It is precisely the horrifying “everyday thoughtlessness” of those Pontius Pilates that Arendt tried to capture in her famous phrase; and it is precisely because not thinking is so easy and so comfortable that it threatens, “like a fungus, to devastate reality by laying waste to its surface”.

We have seen plenty of that in recent days, from the NSW Police Minister to state and federal parliaments; there will be even more of it in the days ahead.

Woefully ignorant both of international law and of the realities of war, drenched in the moral earnestness that is nothing but moral luxury, those voices are the price we pay for having bred the moral sense out of large sections of an entire generation, much as the wings have been bred off chickens to produce more white meat.

Little wonder then that the religion-hating Greens, who epitomise the wingless generation’s moral confusion, have linked arms with Islamic fundamentalists who would, if only they could, crucify gays, behead transsexuals and force women into the perpetual darkness of illiteracy, childhood marriages and burqas.

NSW Police Minister Yasmin Catley

Israel will survive these idiots, as it has survived so much else. Judaism’s fundamental principle is that of obligation: its ethic is based on the duty to give, never on the right to take. It holds to no sweeping claim that good will triumph, that its countless martyrs will enjoy eternal bliss or that the righteous will conquer the Earth.

But just as the secular, democratic state of Israel is founded on the overriding imperative of “mamlakhiyut”, or civic responsibility, so the Jewish tradition vests in each person the absolute obligation to protect this world of ours from evil. With evil, chemically pure, once again unleashing the furies of death and destruction, that is our duty too.