CrossFireArabia
By Ismail Al Sharif
‘…As though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit this world – we find that no one, that is no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, for which you deserve to be hanged,” – Hannah Arendt, German-Jewish philosopher.
When you read the sentence: “We had to create conditions more painful than death,” you might think it’s taken from a horror novel or a dystopian narrative that depicts future or imaginary societies in which values collapse, injustice prevails, and environmental and social devastation rages. It’s the “corrupt city,” the exact opposite of utopia, the ideal city.
You might think the sentence appeared in one of Ahmed Khaled Tawfik’s “Utopia,” George Orwell’s “1984,” or Albert Camus’s “The Plague.” You might think it was a line in the testimony of a serial killer who plagued the police for a full decade before dozens of bodies were discovered buried in his garden.
But would you believe that this statement was uttered by Minister of “Zionist Heritage,” Amichai Eliyahu? He wasn’t angry, he wasn’t agitated, and no spittle was flying from his mouth. He said it with calm, measured calm, wearing a smart suit and tie, his face sporting a trimmed beard that, at first glance, you might mistake for a dignified sheikh or a holy man.
His statement was devoid of any emotion, like a routine uttering from a government employee, explaining to people that the power outage was due to a heat wave, or that the road closures were due to temporary maintenance work.
Have you ever wondered how decisions to commit genocide are made? And how countries became complicit in these?
My direct answer: Decisions to commit genocide are made when they are put on the agenda, when they are announced from golf courses or discussed at dinner tables. When children and women are killed by bombs, and hospitals and shelters are destroyed, a dapper bureaucrat takes the stage.
He starts his day with a jog around his house, has breakfast with his children, kisses his wife goodbye, asks her what she needs from the market, and instructs his children to behave.
This same bureaucrat takes center-stage to defend genocide, beautifying it, whilst sanitizing it linguistically, using flowery terms such as: “Precision strikes,” “human shields,” “collateral damage.”
He like other bureaucrats are creative in manipulating the vocabulary: Torture is transformed into “interrogation,” starvation into “economic pressure,” and ethnic cleansing into “security buffer zones” or “humanitarian cities.” Even death traps are remarketed under glamorous names, such as the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.”
Let’s return to the Minister of “Zionist Heritage,” who concludes his statement by saying: “Death is no longer enough. It must be painful, prolonged, and free from any international accountability.”
Even the most brutal of tyrants in history were careful to conceal their intentions when committing crimes. When the Qarmatians slaughtered pilgrims in Mecca in 317 AH, they claimed they were doing so to destroy idols. When the pilgrims committed the Euphrates Massacre against the people of Iraq, the pretext was “sedition.” Even when the United States committed the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, it described it as “military engagement.”
But this time, and for the first time in history, this man comes out publicly and admits to committing genocide, while dressed in his finest suit and tie. It is the most brutal and horrific genocide in our modern history and under our eyes.
Perhaps, one day, criminals like him will be brought to justice and charged with war crimes. They will defend themselves coldly: “We were following orders,” or “it was just a business procedure,” without pain, without remorse, and without the slightest sense of guilt or responsibility.
This is exactly what Hannah Arendt described as the “banality of evil.”
This article by Ismail Al Sharif was originally written in Arabic for the Addustour daily.
