The Banality of Evil

In the film, ‘Zone of Interest’ by Jonathan Glazer, we witnessed how a German family lived its cultured middle-class life in seeming ignorance/denial of the Nazi concentration camp right next door. Where the father of the family was its Camp Director, but also a loving family man, husband to his elegant wife, and father to his own children. Some inmates even came into the family compound to help with housework and the mother’s great project, creating a beautiful garden that abutted the wall that separated the family compound from the prison. But on the other side of this wall the ‘business’ of death in its gas chambers proceeded with bureaucratic efficiency. Where all the German officers were only ‘following orders’.

Looking the Other Way

As Aluf Benn, editor-in-chief of Haaretz reminds us, we now see this scenario playing out in Israel. Under Prime Minister Netanyahu, and his cabinet of Zionist hardliners determined to extinguish any possibility of a Palestinian State to stand alongside Israel, Israel has become a mirror image of the Nazi regime, which determined to wipe out the Jewish people as a pestilence and threat to Aryan purity.

The Ironies of History

While the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) proceeds under orders of the democratically elected Netanyahu government, while under the guise of its war on Hamas in the name of rescuing Israeli hostages abducted on 7 October 2024, we see that the real political intent is to wipe out the Palestinian people as a sovereign group of citizens with their own homeland—the promise given to them in the creation of the Jewish state of Israel as a home for the Jews of Europe displaced by the holocaust and centuries of antisemetic pogroms.

• Through collateral damage in the failure to distinguish between Hamas fighters and Gazan civilians
• From carpet bombing and drone strikes that have physically obliterated Gaza
• Withholding of humanitarian aid to effect mass starvation and denial of medical assistance
• The deliberate targeting and killing of Gaza based journalists to prevent any eye-witness reporting that counters Israel state propaganda.

Israelis continue to expand their illegal settlement of the Palestinian West Bank, supported by the apartheid practices of the Israeli Government on Palestinians who live there, especially those who work in Israel. Meanwhile, in the cities of Israel, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem the cafes are brimming with patrons, the economy is booming on its drip feed of US money, Israeli citizens are flocking to the beaches to escape the heat, or lining up at Ben Gurion airport to fly off to Greece and elsewhere for their holidays.

Aluf Benn suggests: “after almost two years of fighting, life in Tel Aviv recalls the antebellum days of endless partying. The beaches and restaurants are packed and Ben Gurion airport is busy again with summer vacationers flying to Greece. Israel’s economic data is outperforming expectations. Antiwar sentiment is limited to fear for the plight of Israeli hostages in Hamas tunnels, decreasing motivation to re-enlist in reservist units, and growing PTSD and suicide cases in the military. Nevertheless, most Israelis, even diehard critics of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would give him carte blanche to continue with the ongoing punishment of Gaza.”

Yes, most care about getting their hostages back. But most are entirely immune to the suffering of the Palestinian people of either Gaza or the West Bank, who like the Jewish inmates of Nazi Concentration Camps, live beyond the wall. Out of sight, and largely out of mind. Not one of us. A perfect mirror of the Nazi view of the Jews they marched to their death in the gas chambers of their Concentration Camps.

And just as the Western world denied fleeing Jews entry to their nation states to escape this looming holocaust, on the pretence of ignorance and not wanting to get involved, so today they have largely looked way, frightened of what punishment Trump’s America might exact on their economies should they not line up with the US in its support of Israel against the troublesome Arabs.

Memories of ISIS are still strong. What is one country’s Resistance is another’s Terrorism, where warfare no longer separates the civilian and the professional soldier. The Arab world itself is divided, still struggling with the legacies of European colonialism and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Yemen and Syria. The Shia, dominant in Iran, against the Sunnis, dominant in Saudi and various other subsects and alignments. Religion and deeper economic interests underneath caught up in complex geo-politics between Russia, China and the US and their separate imperial ambitions.

The Turn Around

But FINALLY, Australia, along with a group of aligned Western powers who previously regarded themselves as friends and defenders of Israel, have decided to declare their intention to recognise the State of Palestine as a member of the UN. They are hoping their collective gathering will provide cover against any reactive punishment on their economies from Donald Trump through his tariff calibrations.

But so far the Western allies of a Palestinian State have stopped short of directly punishing the Israeli Government and its wilfully ‘blind’ citizens who continue to want to live the ‘good life’. There are no trade sanctions, no denial of tourist visas and work permits to Israeli citizens.

However, we are slowing seeing a behind the scenes hardening of the West’s political arteries against any future claim that Israel can ever again become ‘one of us’, a member of the ‘liberal democracies club’ of the West—a club from which the US is also progressively extricating itself in its visible transformation into a Techno-Fascist-Petro Christian State. The new ‘weird’ alliance between the techno-libertarianism of Silicon Valley, Christian nationalism, and the Fossil Fuel oligarchs and their mantra of ‘drill, baby, drill’. Not to mention the new cabal of the anti-woke Trad Wives of the MAGA movement.

One question remains. Can Trump and his cohort create a white ethno-state on the back of his ICE assault on immigration? Will the Jews of America, the solid political backers of Israel, finally become ‘white’ in the eyes of the neo-nazi backers of the ethno-state? Or will they find themselves once again marooned, excluded from MAGA’s Christian world? The unwanted diaspora of Israel as a global pariah state?

OR – Will the demographics of Latino and Afro-American US citizen birthrates defeat the MAGA dream—and the great seething fear of Replacement Theory become a growing reality?

Larger Questions

Into this scenario of a rapidly changing world order, we face into the headwinds of two further transformative forces of global panic—the ongoing effects of global warming and climate change that is re-arranging the world’s environmental balance, and the rapidly advancing arrival of a level of artificial intelligence that is threatening to match or supersede human intelligence. The potential evolution of a new digital species on Planet Earth.

Wither humanity?

And to this question, we must turn to Barad’s theory of agential realism, a new world order, not in the geo-political sense, but in the fundamental way in which we understand and parse the grammar of Reality.

Agential Realism – The New Paradigm

Agential Realism, rests on the insights of quantum physics that takes us beyond our habitual reliance on the dualism of the Newtonian/Cartesian worldview of mainstream economics and its love affair with the illusion of that great market hero, homo economicus. It is the missing bridge in our ability to respond to the clarion calls of the post colonial scholars of Australia, who have been introducing us to the truths (tjukurpa) of our Foundational Culture – that of Aboriginal and Torres Strait island cultures. Spelt out for us in ‘Law: The Way of the Ancestors’ (2023) by Marcia Langton and Aaron Corn in the National Museum of Australia’s First Knowledge Series

These, the voices of our Indigenous Ancestors, are urging us to understand the relational nature of the world of which we are part. Not its overlords as the human exceptionalism of the Western Enlightenment would have us believe. This is the other side of the challenge that the AI revolution poses.

More on this next post.