R.F. Georgy
There was a time, during the 1920s, when a Jewish child could grow up in Germany believing that the country in which he was born was his country, that the language he spoke belonged to him as much as it belonged to his Christian neighbors, and that German civilization was as much his inheritance as anyone else’s. German Jews were physicians, mathematicians, philosophers, musicians, teachers, and writers; they were soldiers who had fought for Germany and citizens who had helped shape its intellectual and cultural life. In every field of human activity, European Jewry was thriving. The names alone: Albert Einstein, Emmy Noether, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and countless others are forever etched in our collective imagination as the epitome of academic excellence. Yet beneath the fragile democratic promise of the Weimar Republic, an older hatred was acquiring new political energy. German defeat in World War I, followed by economic dislocation, humiliation, and resentment became fertile ground for conspiracy theories that would systematically reduce the Jewish people to a kind of otherness that resulted in the cultural madness we remember today as the Holocaust. The immediate question, of course, is how did such a learned and civilizationally advanced German society become the gravitational center of unadulterated evil?
As an immediate, and convenient, target of collective punishment, the Jews were accused of betraying the German nation, corrupting its culture, and profiting from its misfortunes. The absurdity of these accusations mattered less than their usefulness to those who needed someone to blame. A people who had lived within German society for generations could now be represented as a people who did not truly belong. This was the first great theft: the theft of belonging, which prepared the way for all the others. The destruction that followed did not begin with the gas chambers. It began when a society learned to see its own citizens not as human beings with fundamental rights, but as a problem to be solved. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, this process acquired the machinery of the state. Jewish professionals and academics were excluded from public life, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jews of full citizenship, and Kristallnacht in November 1938 brought state-sanctioned violence into the streets. By the time mass murder reached its most horrific expression, the moral and political work of exclusion had been under way for years. The Holocaust was a historically specific crime, unprecedented in its systematic attempt to annihilate the Jews of Europe. Yet the process that made it possible exposed a recurring danger in human affairs: before people can be treated as though their lives count for less, a society must find ways of convincing itself that such people are less fully entitled to count as human beings.
Any comparison between the Jewish experience in Germany and the destruction of Gaza must begin with historical honesty. Nazi Germany and the present-day state of Israel are not interchangeable, the Holocaust cannot be reduced to a general metaphor for suffering, and Jewish people cannot be held collectively responsible for the decisions of an Israeli government or the conduct of its military. Historical circumstances, institutions, ideologies, intentions, and crimes must be examined on their own terms. But historical specificity does not require moral amnesia, and refusing to equate two situations does not oblige us to avert our eyes when recognizable systems of dehumanization appear elsewhere. The purpose of examining the Nazi past is to understand how fear weakens moral prohibitions, how political language turns human beings into threatening categories, and how institutions make cruelty appear palatable to those who administer it.
No people possess an inherited immunity to wrongdoing. The descendants of victims do not inherit guilt, but neither does the memory of victimization provide permanent moral absolution for a state. The humanity of the other must remain a moral constraint even when fear, grief, anger, and the desire for security offer powerful reasons to disregard it. We see this most clearly in the destruction of Gaza, which exposed not only the devastating consequences of modern warfare but also the systems of surveillance, intelligence, and military decision-making through which that destruction is carried out. The documentary NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, turns an uncomfortable spotlight on Israel and its military conduct in Gaza, examining the technological apparatus used to monitor Palestinians, identify targets, and facilitate a campaign of devastation that has prompted grave allegations of genocide. NAZA, whose title derives from the Hebrew phrase nezek agavi, meaning “collateral damage,” forces us to confront the anatomy of evil and its historical irony: those carrying out the violence belong to a people whose own history includes unimaginable persecution.
The irony is almost unbearable. Historical memory can deepen moral understanding, but it cannot guarantee it. On October 9, 2023, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, announced a “complete siege” of Gaza and declared, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” His immediate reference was to the enemy Israel was fighting, Hamas, but language of this kind becomes especially dangerous when applied within a military campaign conducted against a densely populated territory whose civilians have nowhere safe to escape. President Isaac Herzog went further in a statement asserting that an entire nation was responsible and rejecting the distinction between civilians who were involved in the attacks and those who were not. Such rhetoric does not by itself establish the intent behind every military decision, but it erodes a distinction upon which the protection of civilians depends. When responsibility is extended from perpetrators to a population, the innocent begin to inherit the guilt of the guilty, and punishment can be represented as justice.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s invocation of Amalek, the biblical enemy whose destruction is recalled in Jewish scripture, likewise acquired a disturbing resonance in the context of the war. A religious reference does not, by itself, settle the meaning of a military campaign or prove an intention to destroy a people. Its significance lies in the moral atmosphere it can help create when a conflict is described in absolute terms, when an enemy becomes the embodiment of evil, and when restraint is presented as weakness. History teaches us that dehumanization need not begin with a carefully articulated doctrine of racial superiority. It can emerge through a succession of statements, each of which makes the next act of severity easier to justify. The danger is not that Israeli society is identical to Nazi Germany, but that no society, whatever its history or political identity, is exempt from the temptation to suspend the humanity of those it fears.
This is where NAZA becomes particularly disturbing. Based on testimony from Israeli intelligence personnel, most of them anonymous, the film examines how surveillance and data systems can transform the identification of a human target into an administrative procedure. One source describes the chilling vocabulary used to calculate anticipated civilian deaths: “We don’t say 15 women and children are going to die in this strike. We say 15 NAZA.” The change is more than linguistic convenience. Women and children become a number attached to an operation, while the word “collateral” implies that their deaths belong to the margins of the event rather than to its moral substance. The film also describes a system known as “Where’s Daddy?” associated with tracking targets to their homes. Its testimony raises questions about the extent to which civilian presence, including the presence of families, was incorporated into targeting decisions rather than treated as a reason to reconsider them.
The film includes a particularly grave allegation that a strike was approved despite an expectation of approximately 500 civilian deaths. Imagine this for a moment – in order to kill one target, Israel determined that 500 civilian lives is an acceptable number. The Israeli military has denied that it ever planned, approved, or carried out a strike on that basis, and the allegation should not be presented as an independently established fact. But the dispute does not remove the broader question the film raises: how are civilian deaths estimated, who authorizes the anticipated loss of life, and what limits constrain the calculation? When a system can assign a numerical value to the deaths expected from an attack, the existence of a calculation may create an illusion of moral control. Yet no algorithm can answer the prior ethical question of whether a particular attack should occur at all. A number can inform a decision, but it cannot absolve the person who makes it.
The scale of destruction also demands attention to the weapons and conditions under which military decisions were made. In December 2023, The Washington Post, citing a United States intelligence assessment, reported that a substantial proportion of Israel’s air-to-ground munitions used in Gaza were unguided. Among the weapons supplied by the United States were 500-pound Mark 82 bombs. Unguided munitions are not inherently unlawful, and their use does not by itself establish that a particular strike violated international humanitarian law. But their use in a densely populated urban environment raises obvious questions about proportionality, precautions, and the foreseeable danger to civilians. International humanitarian law requires parties to distinguish between combatants and civilians, to avoid indiscriminate attacks, and to refrain from attacks expected to cause civilian harm excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage. These are not optional restraints to be discarded when the enemy commits atrocities. They are the moral and legal boundaries that distinguish military force from vengeance.
Reports from medical personnel have raised an even more immediate concern. British surgeon Nick Maynard, who treated wounded Palestinians, described accounts of Israeli soldiers shooting civilians near aid distribution sites in circumstances he likened to “target practice.” These are grave allegations, not proof that every such incident occurred as described; the Israeli military has rejected claims that its forces intentionally harmed civilians in this manner. Nevertheless, the testimony of medical personnel and the accounts of people seeking food demand serious investigation. A civilian who approaches a place where food is distributed does not become a legitimate target because the surrounding territory is a battlefield. If soldiers deliberately shoot unarmed people seeking aid, the issue is not a technological failure or a regrettable consequence of combat. It is a direct assault on the moral distinction between a human being and an enemy category.
Hannah Arendt’s account of the banality of evil offers a way to understand how such acts can become possible without assuming that every participant is a sadist or that evil always announces itself through monstrous personalities. Writing about Adolf Eichmann, Arendt examined the ordinary administrative habits, obedience, and failures of judgment through which mass persecution and murder could be organized. Her argument was not that the crimes were banal, nor that their perpetrators were innocent because they followed procedures. It was that immense evil can be facilitated by people who stop examining what they are doing and allow institutional language to substitute for independent moral judgment. In NAZA, the disturbing feature is precisely the contrast between the magnitude of the human consequences and the technical vocabulary through which some intelligence personnel describe the process. A civilian becomes a data point, a family becomes a predicted cost, and a decision to strike becomes one more item in a chain of approvals. Responsibility does not disappear; it becomes harder to see because it is distributed across a system.
The events of October 7, 2023, must be confronted without reservation or qualification. Hamas-led attackers killed approximately 1,200 people in Israel and took 251 hostages, committing atrocities that included the deliberate killing and abduction of civilians. These crimes were indefensible, and the suffering of Israeli families cannot be diminished by reference to Palestinian dispossession or the history of the conflict. Yet condemnation must retain its moral coherence. Nothing about October 7 justifies collective punishment of Palestinians, just as the history of Palestinian suffering cannot justify the deliberate murder of Israeli civilians. The moral test is whether we can recognize the humanity of people whose actions we condemn, and whether we can refuse to make children answer for the deeds of armed groups or governments. If our principles survive only when they favor our own side, they are not principles at all.
I have tried to hold on to that distinction in my own life and work. In a conversation on NPR with the Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi, I spoke about the possibility of finding a shared vocabulary across a divide shaped by history, religion, fear, and national identity. I said, “I acknowledge your humanity, you acknowledge my humanity. And as long as we acknowledge our collective humanity, hate will start to diminish.” This is not a claim that acknowledging another person’s humanity resolves political disputes or erases the injuries that have shaped them. It is a recognition that peace becomes impossible when each side regards the other’s suffering as irrelevant or deserved. The first step toward a common future is not agreement on every historical claim; it is the refusal to make the other person’s humanity conditional on agreement.
That conviction informed my novel, Absolution: A Palestinian Israeli Love Story, which I wrote as an overture to the possibility of peace. Fiction cannot negotiate a treaty, dismantle a military occupation, return hostages, or resurrect the dead. It can, however, imagine people who encounter one another before the machinery of collective identity has decided what they must represent. It can restore particularity to those reduced to symbols and allow love, doubt, vulnerability, and moral courage to exist across boundaries that politics treats as permanent. Today, that possibility can feel generationally distant. The scale of death, displacement, grief, and mutual suspicion has made reconciliation seem almost naïve, but abandoning the imagination of peace would mean allowing the logic of permanent enmity to dictate the limits of human possibility.
The anatomy of evil is not a mysterious substance possessed by one people and absent from another. It is a process through which fear becomes collective blame, collective blame becomes dehumanization, and dehumanization permits institutions to inflict suffering while dispersing responsibility among those who plan, authorize, execute, and defend their actions. Nazi Germany demonstrates the catastrophic consequences of this process in its most extreme historical form; the destruction of Gaza demands scrutiny of its own causes, circumstances, decisions, and legal consequences. The two histories must not be collapsed into one, but neither should the differences between them become an excuse for moral silence. The historical irony is profound: a state founded in the aftermath of Jewish catastrophe, and a people whose collective memory contains the Holocaust, are not thereby guaranteed immunity from committing or tolerating grave injustice against another population. That observation assigns no inherited guilt to Jews, Israelis, or the descendants of Holocaust survivors. It places responsibility where it belongs: on particular leaders, institutions, soldiers, and citizens according to their actions and choices.
The final question is not whether a society remembers its own suffering, but whether that memory enlarges its capacity to recognize the suffering of others. Evil becomes most dangerous when people cease to see the human beings inside the categories they have created, when the language of security renders every restraint suspect, and when procedures permit each participant to imagine that responsibility belongs to someone else. The lesson of history is not that every atrocity is the same, or that every victim will become a perpetrator. It is that no historical wound confers a license to wound another, and no instrument of war, however sophisticated, can relieve human beings of the obligation to judge what they are doing. A society preserves its humanity not by declaring itself incapable of evil, but by refusing to make any other human being less deserving of life, dignity, and protection.
*R.F. Georgy is an Egyptian American writer. After studying philosophy at UC Berkeley, Georgy went on to write such books as Notes from the Cafe, which is an updated version of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Absolution: A Palestinian Israeli Love Story. Absolution will soon be adapted to film by one of Israel’s leading directors, Eran Riklis. Notes from the Cafe is also being adapted for an animated short film. Georgy is currently writing The Digital Wasteland, a non-fiction critique of the digital revolution.
Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/10/14/the-anatomy-of-evil/
