Riviera of Blood, the Banality of Evil
Just recently the appalling death count in Gaza was revised upwards. The Gazan journalist/writer Hamza Yusuf wrote: “The revised death toll in Gaza is now at more than 60,000. This is precisely why the mainstream media uses terms like “Hamas-run health ministry…” It’s to cast doubt on the reality, which is apocalyptic.”
This is the backdrop for the appalling scenes last night as Donald Trump sat by the fireside with the international fugitive Benjamin Netanyahu. To a shocked domestic and global audience Trump vowed that the US would “take over” war-ravaged Gaza and “own it”. In an announcement that created shock-waves around the world, Trump claimed that Gaza could become the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
“The US should take over Gaza, level it, and create economic development” Trump said during the bizarre press conference with Netanyahu. He also expressed his view that the United States should assume a “long-term ownership position” over Gaza, ethnically cleansing its inhabitants and transferring them to a “good, fresh, beautiful piece of land” in another nation.
As Abubaker Abed has written from Gaza City: “Trump’s comments came despite hundreds of thousands of Palestinians returning to northern Gaza over the past week after Israeli troops withdrew from the Netzarim corridor as part of the ceasefire agreement. The return to the north was a resounding display of Palestinians reclaiming parts of Gaza they were forced out of by Israel’s genocidal assault. Yet the destruction in the north is near total, with hardly any buildings left standing and people erecting tents on the rubble of their homes.”
Trump’s macabre ad-libbing and grand-standing risks the very precarious and fragile peacefire, such as it is.
This dystopian proposal was, as many predicted, the long-term goal of Israel since October 2023: to use the Hamas attack as a pretext to make the conditions of Gaza so unliveable that ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians comes dressed up as a humanitarian effort, even if that means, as Trump’s off-the-cuff proposal does, mass ethnic cleansing.
As Husam Zomlot, Ambassador of the State of Palestine to the UK, and former Ambassador to the United States said “It just tells you all you need to know for the last one hundred years. This is about the erasure of Palestine, and at the centre of that erasure is ethnic cleansing.”
Palestinian Ambassador to the UN, Riyad Mansour, responded to Trump by reminding him that in two days over 400,000 Palestinians had walked home to northern Gaza : “Our homeland is our homeland” he said.
While shocking, this should not come as a surprise from a sociopathic president who just treated a tragic air crash resulting in multiple loss of life as an excuse for political point-scoring. Nor should mass ethnic cleansing come as a surprise to anyone who recognises Israeli actions as that of a colonial settler project which enforces an apartheid regime. Nor does this come as a shock at all considering he is currently conducting his mass deportation plans at ‘lightning speed’ – the first flights sending migrant detainees to Guantanamo Bay took off yesterday.
When asked about how many people he thought should be displaced Trump had the audacity to talk, blithely about: “All of them. There’s 1.7 or 1.8 million people. They can settle, all of them to areas where they can live a beautiful life and not be worried about dying every day.”
Needless to say, the Geneva Convention (which the US has ratified) forbids the permanent and forcible removal of citizens from their homes. But there’s something else going on here beyond the callous crashing through international laws and protocol. The reduction of everything to a question of real estate is capitalism reduced to its brutal essence.
Trump’s language and demeanor are childlike, he comes across often like a simpleton, and his ‘solutions’ are masked by his seemingly moronic use of words. This is, as Arendt had in 1963, the “banality of evil.”
Much of his press conference was utterly incoherent. As Yara Hawari, co-director of Al Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network said:
“What followed was a stream of contradictions: he claimed that there would be no rebuilding in Gaza and also claimed that the US would lead the efforts in rebuilding; he claimed that Palestinians would have to leave and then said that the US would create jobs there for all people, not “just a specific group of people” and that Palestinians would continue to live there. The cognitive dissonance was palpable, and there were moments when even Netanyahu seemed confused. Trump also put forward the idea of US “ownership” over Gaza – whether or not that would mean the deployment of US troops was not confirmed.”
Trump’s inability to comprehend what a home or a homeland is, is because he doesn’t have one. His disassociation from any form of reason or empathy is, in its own way the logical conclusion of a capitalist psychopathy. He seems unable to comprehend that the reason for the Palestinian’s plight is sitting next to him, an international pariah indicted by the ICC for war crimes. “Dying every day” seems to be a random occurrence, unrelated to the USA’s massive contribution of weapons of war and terror and unrelated to the action of the IDF.
That the norms of international relations, and what’s laughably referred to as “the rules-based order” have long ago collapsed have led us to this debacle, but we should also take note that Trump didn’t reach this moment of barbaric absurdity on his own. This man, this conduct, this plan was enthusiastically supported by vast swathes of the American people. He is not an aberration, he is a manifestation. He is not a sideshow at the Freak Show of Late Capitalism, he is the Ringmaster.
“We’re going to develop it, we’re going to create thousands of jobs and it’ll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of,” Trump insisted. The idea that anyone could be proud of such an obscene proposal is so staggering it defies belief. But believe it. This is the dystopia we are living in.
As the Middle East writer David Pratt pointed out Steve Witkoff, the billionaire real-estate tycoon and Trump’s buddy, was made Middle East envoy even before the presidential inauguration. Pratt writes: “In this mad, mercenary and predatory world that Trump and his cohorts inhabit, America’s perverse spending of billions of dollars to support Israel’s decimation of Gaza making it virtually uninhabitable could well in turn see it recoup its financial losses lining the pockets of countless tycoons in the process.”
“That they might consider doing so in Trump’s eyes by building a “luxury resort” with a “phenomenal location” on the sea where there is the “best weather”, at the expense of millions of Palestinian lives and in breach of the Geneva Convention which the US – to date – has ratified is perverse beyond imagining.”
But this perverse dissociation is strange and morbid, as Karline Levitt, the White House Press Secretary inadvertently blurted: “He (Trump) expects partners to accept Palestinian refugees temporarily so that we can rebuild their home…[images of Gaza] that is an apocalyptic scene, this is an uninhabitable place for human beings.”
This is a new form of Disaster Capitalism, Disaster Genocide.
Israel’s banning of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) for Palestine Refugees in the Near East ensures that Palestinians in Gaza will never have access to basic humanitarian supplies, adequate food and services.
‘Salvation’ comes in the form of power, but at a cost.
As Chris Hedges writes: “Israel, supplied with billions of dollars of weapons from the U.S. Germany, Italy and the U.K., created this hell. It intends to maintain it.”
The sick calculation being done between Trump and Netanyahu is to maintain the crisis and the most appalling conditions – with only a controlled pretense at restoration. Amid the rubble and torment the groundwork is being laid for the inevitability of a perverse humanitarian removal of people. The ethnic cleansing, the further colonisation now has a macabre cloak of a ‘solution’ that has been conceived by Jared Kushner and co.
The response must be huge, international and unprecedented.
The Council on American Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group, said in a statement: “Gaza belongs to the Palestinian people, not the United States, and President Trump’s call to expel Palestinians from their land is an absolute non-starter.
“If the Palestinian people were ever somehow forcibly expelled from Gaza, this crime against humanity would spark widespread conflict, put the final nail in the coffin of international law, and destroy what remains of our nation’s international image and standing.”
Paul O’Brien, the executive director of Amnesty International USA, added: “Removing all Palestinians from Gaza is tantamount to destroying them as a people. Gaza is their home. Gaza’s death and destruction is a result of the government of Israel killing civilians by the thousands, often with US bombs.”
Yes, spot on. Excellent analysis and well written too. Disturbingly accurate.
The similarity to the early days of Donald Trump’s inauguration and consequent uttering to what brought Adolf Hitler to power in 1933 is startlingly horrifying. From blaming minorities to lebensraum, the consequent genocides are happening – now in Palestine, then the overrunning of Greenland, Panama and Canada. Trump’s ringmasters are the Goebbels and Himmlers of just 80 odd years ago.
Memories are forgotten by brainwashed citizenry. And you think he doesn’t have Scotland in his plans. What a stupid idea!
USAmerican President Trump’s statements may be much as you say, but they are also likely to be lucrative in and of themselves, since (regardless of what happens) speculators and lobbyists will invest and bribe today on such a basis. Which is another set of crimes on top. We could be in for a Genocide Bubble (to supplement the Ecocide Bubble we’re living and dying through).
The best and most effective way for UK and other countries to show their opposition to Trump’s plan and support for Palestine’s right to exist is to follow Spain and Ireland and immediately recognise Palestine as a nation state with all the rights that entails.
Agreed John, though tremendous pressure will / would have to be put on the Uk given that ‘we’ have been supplying weapons to Israel throughout this period
The government’s answer to formally recognising Palestine is ‘now is not the right time’ which reminds me of my response to my kids when I didn’t want to do something they requested but didn’t want to say so outright.
Yes, a strong piece. Never been sure about this banality of evil concept though – evil acts are never banal (however routine as in the death camps) and those doing them neither. What it is, is that they were banal people doing banal things but stopped being so when they did the evil. Plenty with much greater credentials have made the same point about Arendt’s idea. It is important becasue it is the corruption that occurs that turns a banal, everyday person into someone who can do such un-banal evil that matters.
As for Trump, has he ever been a banal ordinary person?
@Niemand, I think you are missing the general point about ‘banality of evil’, although I have to be careful since I haven’t read Eichmann in Jerusalem and got bogged down with the text of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. If I recall correctly, Arendt was talking about how a totalitarian society suppresses the kind of (independent) thought that makes people question the goals of their organisation. And the human ‘cogs in the machine’ spread throughout society (apparently there’s a game of railway workers which players only later on find out where the final destination is…).
If a different example helps, think of Big Tobacco, and all those people involved in pushing and providing cigarettes, despite many knowing the product killing half of its long-term users and many more through secondhand smoke.
“Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States.”
https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/health_effects/tobacco_related_mortality/index.htm
The USA is not a totalitarian state in the sense of Nazi Germany, but it is even more heavily propagandised. And its human inhabitants are regularly complicit in great evils across the planet, but in the banal everyday sense that I think Arendt intended. Indeed, one could say that to be woke is simply to recognise this. Capitalism has its holocausts.
Hmm, yes I see the point, and is actually quite close to what I was clumsily saying. But is this quite subtle understanding how people generally use the banality of evil phrase?
@Niemand, I think that is more a case of people being conditioned to see evil in a particular way, typically done by other (sorts of) people. The point of, for example, abolitionist Elizabeth Heyrick’s call for a sugar boycott was to awake people to the evils of slavery they (as consumers) were helping to perpetuate, and counter that conditioning.
If we take into consideration the ‘effective altruism’ approach, we should see that weighing up, say arms-industry jobs against genocide would be an immoral approach. We should also be aware of the abuses of this critique, as when one group (consumers) are held entirely to blame for exploitative and polluting consumption while groups (the military, corporations etc) are expediently ignored.
I imagine most of us live in empires or states which do a lot of evil, which we are to some extent complicit in, and to some extent ignore. These collective acts may seem banal because not enough people object to them (“and I said nothing”).
Note that this is also an argument against democracies, which are as capable of normalising evil as any political system, and in some senses more so, since if people are able to object and don’t, this adds powerful peer pressure to conform to silences and groupthink.
Some of these actions might seem trivial indeed, like the naming of warships (including submarines).
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/27/hms-agincourt-no-10-accused-of-trying-not-to-upset-french-by-renaming-submarine
But why do the English celebrate The Battle of Agincourt? It’s pretty much a war crime, even in Shakespeare’s Henry V. But these cultural totems form part of banal nationalism, the sort of thing you might find commemorated on a postage stamp.
My point is evil acts are never banal and the people doing them never act in a banal way. In that sense the phrase banality of evil is misleading.
We all live in societies and those societies can be bad in some ways but understanding that but not being able to do anything effective about those bad things is not necessarily banal. Even accepting things are as they are is not necessarily banal either as quite possibly not to do could be suicidal. In Nazi Germany where this phrase was applied, and Stalin’s Russia say, not being ‘banal’ would very likely lead to your torture and death. Those societies were not banal in my view as they ruled people with utter murderous ruthlessness.
In some ways it does seem more applicalble to ordinary Western democracies where that is not true and the change of banal, everyday iniquities is much more possible. The issue there though is using the word ‘evil’ because Arendt was talking about the Holocaust, not routine demonsiation of asylum seekers, for example. What is happening in Gaza is certainly on the evil spectrum however.
To me it is the normalisation of injustice and cruelty that we are talking about here.
@Niemand, are you sure that these evil acts aren’t closer to home? The British Empire was doing its own genocides and committing atrocities for far longer and on a greater scale than Nazi Germany. USAmerican racism was even more vitriolic and unjust. Do you really think you have been able to recognise evil at face value through your own lifetime?
Few things can be as banal here as food-shopping in a supermarket (for those who can afford to, anyway), but what evils lie behind?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensive_animal_farming
Child-beating, domestic violence and racism were normalised everyday acts in Britain (and may be again). Pretty much every transformative social justice campaign I can think of started from the point of rejecting a banal evil.
I think we run into a serious issue if we refer to everything that is cruel and/or unjust as evil and use the same word for the Holocaust. Slavery I would certainly include however. Food shopping and the backdrop to some of that (you refer specifically to factory farming – I do not eat meat because of that btw) no, and especially not the people doing their shopping. I find that comparison / equivalence does not do justice to what Arendt was referring to. She was talking about men and women who palnned / oversaw / undertook deliberate and systematic mass murder of fellow humans on a massive scale and on a daily basis. It is true that some regard the slaughter (‘murder’) of animals for food as equal to that but I do not agree.It is seriously skewed thinking.
In summary I think if we are to use the banality of evil phrase then if we start using it for anything we find bad and unjust, it loses all meaning.
The banality of evil becomes easier when people are regarded as numbers rather than as individual human beings.
Note the reporting of freed hostages with pictures and back story helping you empathise more with them. Israeli government has banned reporters from Gaza to prevent individuals stories of suffering being reported to reduce empathy with those suffering in Gaza.
What Aren’t was going on about was the ordinariness of the perpetrators. Their evil did not have them with cloven hooves and horns on their heads, but ordinary, everyday people carried out such evil. And they would then return home to their families, play with their own children and celebrate Christmas. That is what the banality of evil is about. Look at Trump’s team and they are ordinary looking folk like you and me and they are involved in evil. The richest man in the world wants to end aid to the poorest in the world. He is a geeky guy like other geeky guys we all know who is prepared to cause such harm. That is banal.
And nobody seems to be talking about another goal for the conquering nation – the Gaza oil and gas reserves. Of course, Donny just forgot about them….
Excellent article Mike, thanks.
The phrase “the banality of evil” comes directly from Hannah Arendt’s excellent piece of reportage, “Eichmann In Jerusalem” which she wrote in situ as she attended the very long trial of the Nazi Eichmann for The New Yorker magazine, or maybe the New York Review of Books back in the early 60s. Eichmann had been kidnapped in Argentina by the Israeli secret service, Mosad, and taken to Jerusalem, to be tried for crimes against humanity following his prominent role as a Nazi responsible for coordinating the massive deportations of European Jews by train to the death camps .
What struck Arendt about proceedings was just how comically normal Eichmann was on the witness stand, his obsession with the chain of command and following orders, and the, in general, completely unexceptional nature of events as he saw it, which boiled down mainly in his case to the nightmarish logistics of train timetables (Godard said that any film seriously attempting to depict the death camps would have to be a film about logistcis: so many Jews arriving at such an such hour requiring X number of gas cannisters etc ect) …
It’s worth pointing out that the explosion of counter-culture in Europe in the sixties in countries like Germany and France was in many ways a direct reaction to the unfolding revelations and dissemination of what the Nazis had done, and how they had done it, namely, a blind and ‘banal’ or everyday adherence to obeying orders by millions and millions of people, following the dictates of Authority and the chain of command.
This was still in the air in the seventies when I was growing up, when any figure of authority had to be challenged to some extent or other, teachers, policemen, judges, and of course parents. The conclusions drawn by the youth of Europe in the sixties, by no means wrong-heaed albeit perhaps slightly exaggerated, was that blind obedience to authority and the rules had led to the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka. The trial of Eichmann, a worldwide mass media event, no doubt played a big part in that perception.
As for Hannah Arendt, she was ostracized by many Jews for pointing out that thousands of Jews collaborated with the Nazis too. See the fairly recent film by Margueritte von Trotta HANNAH ARENDT. As a matter of fact, Von Trotta and her husband, the director, Volker Schlondorff are two good examples of people who back in the wild and revolutionary sixties and seventies condemned the German State as being a continuation of fascism (again, not entirely wrong-headedly) and showed certain sympathies to the Baader Meinhoff terrorist group (at least, militated for their humane treatment in prison, where they were eventually killed, almost certainly by the German State).
Since then, both have become New Labour kind of social democrats, obviously…
There is a film, DUESTCHLAND IM HERBST, which is a collective film or an anthology film shot be several German directors, including Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge and Volker Schlondorff, back in 1978, which starts out with footage of the funeral of the industrialist Hanz Martin Schleyer, boss of Daimler-Benz, who was kidnapped and murdered by the Baader Meinhoff and includes quite a long scene of Fassbinder, naked and chain smoking, talking to his (slightly fascist) mother on the telephone about fascism and the continuation of fascism from the Nazis into the then contemporary German State of the time (full of ex-Nazis in the State apparatus), while his mother retorts that she is favour of a “strong leader” to “sort things out”…
That so many leading European intellectuals supported violent left-wing groups like the Baader Meinhoff and in Italy the Red Brigade – and to a certain extent the IRA and ETA were in the same mix, albeit their aims were not identitcal – was to a great extent down to this percpetion, which comes at least in part from Arendt and the Eichmann trial, that there was something gravely wrong with the most basic fabric of society, that authority had to be challenged (and ultimately overthrown) at all costs, that education had to be completely rethought (and teachers and university professors ousted) that the leading capitalist companies had deep roots in Nazism (which many did) etc etc, that everything was tainted by capitalism and a dehumanized view of work, that everywhere was repression, social, psychic, political, military…
There is another excellent and recent series I saw not long ago by former Communist Marco Bellocchio, ESTERNO NOTTE (EXTERIOR NIGHT) which is fictionalized version of the kidnapping (and subsequent murder) of the then Italian PM Aldo Morro who was excuted by the Red Brigade in 1978…
It’s maybe worth remebering how recent these things were, as we think about how bad things have become recently. There have also been very grave and disatrous excesses by the Left in the name of progressive politics, and a whole generation of European intellectuals were active cheerleaders of such madness…
In terms of that whole moment, the latter 60s and early 70s, I am curious about waht it was like in Scotland then…
@Douglas, psychologists like Stanley Milgram responded quickly to these questions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
“who intended to measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience.”
Although there is nothing inherently evil in bureaucracy or business, a great deal of evil appears to be carried out in offices during office hours. This has been a topic of writers like Franz Kafka. One modern example from games I can think of is Papers Please! (2013) Although the greater acts of evil tend to have been imperial, state and corporate, the obedient ‘cogs in the machine’ keep a lot of it going.