Donald Trump, the Israeli Defence Forces and the banality of evil.
I don’t normally write in this blog about international affairs: about Donald Trump or Israel/Palestine or Ukraine. There are thousands of commentators far more qualified and knowledgeable than me to do that.
But I am a simple person in many ways (maybe that’s the Ulster Presbyterian in me!), and I believe in the presence of good and evil in the world. With last week’s election result in Israel deadlocked, meaning the warmonger Benjamin Netanyahu stays in power, and with the possibility of Donald Trump’s Republican sycophants in the US Congress facing a defeat in the midterm elections tomorrow, I feel I have to speak out in a tiny way against the forces of evil.
Because I believe Donald Trump (along with Vladimir Putin) is currently the most powerful evil force in the world, a champion of ‘might is right’ in international relations and an enemy of social justice, European democracy and international humanitarian organisations . His rise to power has seen ‘copycat’ far right leaders in Latin American countries like Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Ecuador (it was a wonderful surprise to see Brazil’s ‘Lula’ – Luis Inacio Lula da Silva – bucking this trend). Similarly he and his supporters have promoted the rise of extreme right-wing parties in most of the major European countries, notably Germany and France – with the likelihood of the neo-fascist Marine Le Pen becoming French president next spring greatly increased by the street violence in that country in recent weeks.
David Remnick, the distinguished journalist who edits the New Yorker, wrote last month1: ” the President of the United States has the impulse control of a toddler, though most toddlers have neither the authority nor the inclination to spark an insurrection, destabilize the Western alliance, live-stream an execution, or threaten to end ‘a whole civilization.’ We are subjected daily to the caprices of a mind both unregulated and amoral. As Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, the Commander-in-Chief is “fascist to the core…”
“In the passage from lame duck to pensioner, Trump still has plenty of time to inflict further damage on the Republic while milking it for profit. He is the sum of his whims and his rages, and, a change in Congress or not, he will likely go on flouting the law, tightening the screws on universities, cultural institutions, and the press. What he seems to value most of late is the humiliation of his enemies and, even more, the accumulation of vast wealth. Since the second Inauguration, the Trumps and their satraps have operated with all the commercial cunning of the Corleone family; the White House is their front, their Genco Pura Olive Oil Company. The Attorney General, Todd Blanche, is an obedient Tom Hagen. Recently, Kristen Welker, of NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’, asked Blanche, “If the President asks you to do something that you feel crosses an ethical or legal line, would you do it?” Blanche replied, “The President will never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never will.” Not a wartime consigliere, perhaps, but Blanche understands the expectations of his Don.
“What more and more voters are coming to understand is how profoundly they have been betrayed. And this is not just about the price of gas and groceries, though ‘affordability’ is scarcely the joke the President thinks it is. Vladimir Putin long ago set out to mock the United States for its hypocrisies. You are no better than us – that was his message and his cover to crush dissent at home and the liberties of an independent Ukraine. When Trump threatens Greenland and Canada or greases a media merger in his interest, he is proving Putin’s point. When the titans of tech obediently line up at Trump’s Inauguration and fund his ballroom, Putin smiles. Who are we to lecture him about oligarchy? This is the ethos of the era defined by Putin and Trump: morality in politics is for dupes; all that matters is interests. Because Trump is simultaneously an autocrat and a performance artist, because Americans tend to cling reflexively to the fraying notion of national exceptionalism, it is difficult to reckon with the idea that a President might be not merely shambolic and incompetent but something far darker, even evil…
“But if we are uncomfortable using a word like “evil,” how else are we to describe the spectacle of the President unleashing Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the history of humankind, to slash the budget of the US Agency for International Development? According to an article in The Lancet and the intensive research of Atul Gawande, a surgeon, a former assistant administrator for USAID, and a writer for this magazine, the agency’s support – focussed on fighting malaria, polio, malnutrition, tuberculosis, and HIV – saved at least ninety million lives in the previous two decades. Researchers estimate that the cruelty-by-budget-cut has been responsible for the loss of as many as seven hundred thousand lives.”
Trump’s ringing pre-election endorsement of Benjamin Netanyahu was no accident. They are birds of a feather: Trump waging war on Iran abroad and inflicting terror on immigrants at home; Netanyahu waging war on Iran and genocide on Palestinians at home.
Another type of evil was displayed recently in NAZA (‘collateral damage’ in Hebrew), the deeply shocking documentary by two extraordinarily courageous Israeli film-makers, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, about the integration of AI and surveillance in military targeting by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in Gaza. It features interviews with 24 anonymous IDF soldiers and intelligence personnel (seen only in silhouette) discussing how many civilian casualties are permitted in every AI-targeted strike on that benighted territory.
Each potential target, a Hamas member, was assigned a NAZA ‘value’ representing the expected number of civilian deaths from an airstrike aimed at him. “We say 15 NAZA. We don’t say 15 people killed, and certainly not that 15 children and women will be killed,” said one soldier. According to another interviewee, targets with NAZA ‘values’ below 20 required no special authorisation, while approval could be granted for high ‘values’ – up to 500 in one case.
‘Annihilation zones’ were designated from Tel Aviv, and Palestinians learned their boundaries by being shot when they entered them. “Whoever you decided to kill was considered a terrorist,” one man explained. Another interviewee recalled Israeli snipers firing on starving people at a food distribution point and illustrated the incident with a stick-figure drawing. A female soldier recounted how when injured people were left lying on the ground, she would drop another bomb on them to kill them.
Most interviewees described killing from a distance as routine office work and themselves as merely ‘cogs’ in a machine. They said: “If I hadn’t been there, someone else would have done it.” Or: “I trust the system, and I do my job as part of the system.” Or: “My role is technical. I’m not supposed to express any moral or principled position.”
They said the most reliable targets were often not Hamas fighters themselves but their homes, where their families lived. Every building in Gaza is numbered and the storeys of each building are recorded. The relevant buildings were identified by AI surveillance of communications systems in Gaza, through a system known as ‘Lavender’. This analyses vast amounts of data from the Israeli-controlled phone network to extrapolate the likelihood that any given individual is a ‘Hamas operative’ – thus creating potential targets for elimination, each with a NAZA number of victims. An interviewee said the system has an accuracy rate of 85%. One interviewee called this system a “factory of targets”.However, the Lavender system also made mistakes; among the 70,000 phones it had earmarked, “it once marked an 80-year-old woman. They bombed her house with her entire family in it.”
An interviewee explained that intelligence personnel were able to access the cameras and microphones of any phone in Gaza, including those of children. The phrase “Where’s Daddy?” refers to hacking into a child’s phone to determine when their father will be home, enabling an airstrike to kill the entire family. The name came about because checking children’s calls for words like “Daddy” and “return” had proved a particularly effective strategy. An interviewee described the practice bluntly: “You hack her [i.e. the child’s] phone and then kill her.”
One soldier said that while Hamas sometimes does use human shields, it is absurd to speak of human shields when airstrikes are used to kill them at home alongside their families. “We bomb them in houses because that’s how we find them,” he said. “They just come home to sleep. That’s where we catch them.” In one case, a father had gone out, inadvertently leaving his mobile phone at home; as a result, the missile aimed at his flat killed his daughters, aged 3 to 6, while he himself was spared. The officer recalled listening in on the phone as one of the daughters burned alive and her mother called for help. An interviewee said the ability to hear everything happening inside people’s homes made him “feel like God”. Andy Pollak
Several interviewees said the mass killing of civilians was not only accepted but viewed as a duty, reflecting the widespread belief in Israel that there were ‘no innocents in Gaza’ in the aftermath of the October 7th 2023 attack. The IDF has made its own rebuttal film (NAZA: The Real Story).
Is this horror not the latest appalling example of ‘ the banality of evil’, the phrase the philosopher Hannah Arendt used to describe the actions of Nazi apparatchik Adolf Eichmann at his 1960 trial in Jerusalem for organising and overseeing the murder of millions of Jews? What she meant by that was how horrific atrocities can be committed by ordinary people, not through malicious intent, but through thoughtlessness, careerism and blind obedience to bureaucratic rules and orders (and failing to question the moral consequences of those orders). And isn’t it the most terrible irony that it should be the Jewish state, founded out of that Holocaust, that is committing this latest high-tech ‘banality of evil’?
Evil is also approaching in that most civilised of nations, France. I have been reading my former Irish Times colleague Enda O’Doherty’s superb book about the far right in that country, The Dark Side of France. He recounts how Marine Le Pen has been working for many years to ‘de-demonise’ her party, the Rassemblement National (formerly the Front National), to make it more morally acceptable to the French electorate. The main ‘demon’ in this instance was her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a Holocaust denier who was eventually expelled from the party.
In a chapter entitled ‘Renouncing the Devil,’ O’Doherty recounts – quoting Louis Aliot, a senior RN official who is also Le Pen’s partner – how this has not involved softening its racist, xenophobic or Islamophobic image, but only its anti-semitism. It remains entirely legitimate for the party and its members to target people from an African background, Muslim and Christian, and to open them up to threat and insult, particularly through online abuse.
We have our own evils in Ireland. A fine recent film, The Lost Babies of Tuam, recounts the determined campaign of Catherine Corless – a County Galway housewife – to uncover the grim story of the secret burial of the bodies of nearly 800 ‘illegitimate’ babies by a Catholic religious order, the Bon Secours nuns, in a sceptic tank and other underground structures in that town. Corless’s husband calls what the order has done ‘evil’. In their eventual apology the nuns resorted to that politicians’ euphemistic term ‘unacceptable.’ No it wasn’t – it was evil.
Most people instinctively recognise evil when they see it. And there is a lot more of it around in the world of Trump and Putin and Netanyahu. Please God there will be a little less in the US after tomorrow’s congressional elections.
