Why are Israel’s leaders invoking Hitler?
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” — Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt, a Jewish political philosopher who fled Nazi Germany, coined the phrase “the banality of evil” after observing Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. Her insight was profound: the greatest atrocities aren’t always committed by obvious monsters, but often by ordinary people following orders, adhering to systems, and detaching themselves from the moral implications of their actions. The bureaucratization of evil — making it routine, procedural, and sanctioned by authority — is what allows it to flourish on a massive scale.
Today, we find ourselves witnessing this concept unfold in real-time as Israeli officials make statements about Palestinians in Gaza that shock the conscience — yet somehow have failed to provoke an adequate international response, or to shift President Trump away from his inexplicable support for genocide and committing US taxpayer dollars, in the many $billions, to paying for ongoing genocide and famine.
We read these leaders’ words on the page or the screen in a way that is utterly banal, with the same actions as we read about today’s weather. And yet these words are expressing utterly evil intentions and actions.
Just as disturbing is that these indefensible actions are being carried out by Israel’s leaders in the name of global Jewry, by the very people whose historical suffering gave rise to Arendt’s insights about the nature of evil.
The Words They Speak
Former head of Israeli military intelligence, Major General Aharon Haliva, was recently caught on tape making statements that epitomize this concept. In audio recordings broadcast by Israel’s Channel 12, Haliva declared: “The fact that there are already 50,000 dead in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations.” He continued, saying that for every Israeli killed on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die, adding: “It doesn’t matter now if they are children.”
Perhaps most chillingly, Haliva referenced the Nakba — the catastrophic displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during Israel’s creation in 1948 — saying: “There is no choice — every now and then, they need a Nakba in order to feel the price.” This explicit call for the periodic ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians represents a horrific moral inversion: the victims of historical persecution now advocating for the mass killing of others.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have been similarly explicit in their statements. Smotrich has previously called for “total annihilation” in Gaza and said that a Palestinian town in the West Bank should be “wiped out.” Both ministers have advocated blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza as long as Hamas holds hostages, effectively weaponizing starvation against an entire civilian population.
Ben-Gvir stated in May 2025 that “the only aid that should enter Gaza is for the purpose of voluntary migration,” clearly expressing support for the forced displacement of Palestinians. Both ministers have pushed for Jewish settlement in Gaza after the war, with Ben-Gvir declaring: “We cannot withdraw from any territory we are in in the Gaza Strip. Not only do I not rule out Jewish settlement there, I believe it is also an important thing.”
Former Israeli parliament minister Moshe Feiglin went so far as to explicitly quote Hitler while discussing the Gaza war recently, saying: “‘As Hitler said,’ I can’t live if one Jew is left,’ we can’t live here if one ‘Islamo-Nazi’ remains in Gaza.” Feiglin continued, declaring that Jews “are not guests in our own land, it is entirely ours,” while advocating to “turn Gaza Hebrew.”
These statements reveal an explicit intent to not just defeat Hamas, but to permanently remove the Palestinian population from Gaza and replace them with Jewish settlers. Feiglin’s Zehut party platform had previously claimed that there is no Palestinian nation and proposed helping Palestinians leave the territory, offering to help them “immigrate to the destination of their choice.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while less explicit in his public statements, has not decisively rejected these views. When Smotrich and Ben-Gvir proposed destroying Gaza City — where over a million displaced Palestinians are sheltering — Netanyahu reportedly did not rule out the plan. That invasion is underway as we speak, with Israeli troops invading that city of a million Palestinians. Netanyahu has also referenced biblical passages about Amalek, which many interpreted as a call to kill indiscriminately, including women, children, and infants.
Funded and Protected by the United States
What makes this situation even more morally unconscionable is the role of the United States in facilitating these atrocities. While several European countries have imposed sanctions on Smotrich and Ben-Gvir for their explicit calls for ethnic cleansing, the United States continues to provide billions in military aid to Israel and diplomatic cover at the United Nations.
American taxpayer dollars directly fund the weapons used to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza. American-made bombs, missiles, and artillery shells have destroyed homes, schools, hospitals, and refugee shelters. American diplomatic power has repeatedly blocked UN resolutions calling for a ceasefire. This makes American citizens unwitting accomplices to the very evils that Arendt warned about — bureaucratized, systematized destruction carried out in our names, with our resources.
The Biden administration occasionally expressed “concern” about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, but consistently undermined these statements by increasing military aid and expediting weapons shipments to Israel. Trump has expressed almost nothing but support for Israel’s actions and even proposed his “Trump riviera” plan for Gaza that would turn this Palestinian homeland into a glitzy tourist destination with not a Palestinian in sight. This immoral hypocrisy reveals the hollow nature of American claims to support human rights globally.
The Toll of This Policy
The human cost of these policies has been catastrophic. According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, most of them women and children. Infrastructure has been decimated, with hospitals, schools, and residential areas destroyed. A humanitarian crisis of unprecedented proportions has unfolded, with severe shortages of food, water, medicine, and fuel.
Human rights organizations including Amnesty International and B’Tselem have accused Israel of committing war crimes and genocide. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem stated that Haliva’s remarks are “part of a long line of official statements that expose a deliberate policy of genocide.” South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which found in January 2024 that Palestinians in Gaza have “the right to be protected from acts of genocide.”
In a particularly grim assessment, one genocide scholar who grew up in Israel and served in the IDF concluded: “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.” This scholar noted that having “spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could.”
The Banality of Our Collective Response
What makes this situation so disturbing is not just the violence itself, but the normalization of it. We scroll past images of devastation on our phones. We hear political leaders make statements justifying mass civilian casualties. We watch as humanitarian aid is blocked as a political tactic. And most of us continue with our daily lives, perhaps feeling momentary outrage before moving on to the next headline.
This is precisely the phenomenon Arendt warned about — the way evil becomes procedural, bureaucratic, and ultimately accepted. We become numb to atrocities when they’re framed as necessary security measures, when they’re justified by political rhetoric, and when they’re perpetrated by states rather than individuals.
The use of American tax dollars to fund this catastrophe makes Americans particularly complicit. U.S. weapons manufacturers profit from the war while U.S. diplomats shield Israel from accountability at the United Nations. Yet most Americans remain disengaged from this reality, either through ignorance, distraction, or a sense of helplessness.
How can it be that in 2025, we watch genocide unfold on our television screens and social media feeds, hear officials openly call for mass killing and displacement, and yet feel powerless to stop it? How have we reached a point where the evil is so banal, so normalized, that it barely registers in our collective consciousness?
Breaking the Spell
The first step toward challenging this banality of evil is to refuse to accept the normalization of atrocity. We must name what we are seeing for what it is. When officials speak openly about inflicting mass death and displacement, we cannot pretend these are merely tough security measures.
We must recognize that our silence and inaction make us complicit. The evil that Hannah Arendt described thrives precisely when ordinary people fail to stand up against it, when we allow bureaucratic language to mask moral horror, and when we accept the dehumanization of others.
The question we must ask ourselves is not just what Israeli officials are doing in Gaza, but what we are doing — or failing to do — in response. The banality of evil requires the complicity of the many, not just the actions of the few. And breaking that spell requires the courage to see, to speak, and to act.
History will judge not just those who issued the orders and dropped the bombs, but those who watched in silence as the atrocities unfolded on their screens, day after day, and chose to do nothing. It will judge those who continued to fund the weapons, who provided diplomatic cover for war crimes, and who turned away from the suffering of others.
The supreme irony is that the state founded in response to one of history’s greatest atrocities is now committing atrocities of its own, using the language of security and survival to justify actions that shock the conscience. And they do so claiming to speak for all Jews worldwide, even as many Jewish individuals and organizations explicitly reject such representation and condemn these actions.
The World Responds
Despite U.S. diplomatic cover for Israel, the international community is increasingly recognizing the reality of the situation. As of August 2025, approximately 146 countries now recognize Palestine as a sovereign state, representing 75 percent of United Nations member states. The ranks of these nations have grown substantially since the Gaza war began, with several traditional Israeli allies joining the list.
In a significant diplomatic shift, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada have all announced plans to formally recognize a Palestinian state by September 2025. This marks a dramatic change in policy for these key Western powers and NATO members. They join other European nations like Norway, Ireland, Spain, and Slovenia that recognized Palestinian statehood earlier in 2025. This growing diplomatic isolation reflects the international community’s increasing condemnation of Israel’s conduct and policies in Gaza.
These developments leave the United States increasingly isolated on the global stage as one of the few major powers still refusing to recognize Palestinian statehood while continuing to provide Israel with military aid and diplomatic protection at the United Nations.
Arendt understood that evil often wears the mask of normalcy and necessity. She saw how bureaucrats like Eichmann could participate in unspeakable crimes while seeing themselves as merely doing their jobs. Today, we are witnessing that same banality of evil play out before our eyes. The question is whether we will recognize it for what it is and find the moral courage to stand against it, or whether we too will become complicit through our silence and inaction.
The time for action is now. The banality of evil can only thrive when good people do nothing.
[Claude 4.0 assisted in writing this essay]
