Abstract

The October 7th massacre and the ensuing war show how easily evil can pierce civilization’s thin veneer of comity. How should we define, identify, and defeat evil? In this article, I argue that to be evil means consciously and constantly treating people like things to be (ab)used. Like pure righteousness, pure evil— the uppercase “Evil”—is a metaphysical construct. Actual human beings are not Evil, and thus, unlike mortal people, Evil can never be killed or defeated. But lowercase “evil” can be. Defeating evil is practically and morally daunting. We should be willing to give up on humans who have given up on the good in their own humanity, while not relinquishing our own. Hamas’s ideology and practice of genocide through politicide is evil, and defeating it will require both a vision of the good and, like it or not, the lesser evil.

Introduction

Leviathan in the Sands

On October 7, 2023, the Saturday morning of the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, Israelis woke up to a nightmare. Fifty years earlier, to the day, on the second day of the Yom Kippur War, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan proclaimed, “It’s the destruction of the Third Temple.” The expression is lost in translation: the Hebrew for “temple” reads “home.” Dayan was wrong, but fifty years later, on that bleakest Saturday as the gravest catastrophe in the country’s history was unfolding, his proclamation of doom seemed prophetic. Many Israelis felt they lost their Home—and must now fight to rebuild it.

The collective shock was larger than that of 1973. Fifty years ago, the vast Egyptian and Syrian armies inflicted heavy losses on the IDF forces due to a fateful intelligence error; Israel itself was not invaded. On Oct 7, 2023, at daybreak, Israelis witnessed their southern military posts, townships, and Kibbutzim overrun, not by state armies, but. by a militia and a mob who crossed the supposedly unbreachable barrier, killing the soldiers left to guard it, and butchering over 1200 civilians, men and women, old and young, including children, even babies, torturing and kidnapping hundreds. Families with small children, young people celebrating a music festival, foreign students and workers—terrorized, brutalized, raped, burnt alive, decapitated, humiliated, and paraded. Hamas spared no one.

Citizens of other societies should take a momentary leap of imagination. Picture, if you will, the 9/11 attacks going far beyond the destruction of the World Trade Center. Adjusted to population size, imagine seventy thousand Al-Qaeda gunmen invading the US, spreading carnage throughout NYC, massacring forty thousand at close range, then kidnapping five thousand survivors to the Taliban’s Afghanistan.

While Hamas attacked, the victims’ desperate cries for help were largely unmet for hours on end by the IDF and other state institutions. The state—that modern promise of omnipotent Leviathan—whose main task, indeed its raison d’être, is to shield its citizenry, vanished, or rather defected, leaving a harrowing collective sense of betrayal and abandonment.

With the state canopy removed, the very veneer of civilization—mutual help, respect, and trust between human beings—seemed withdrawn. We felt exposed, vulnerable, and alone. It was as if the 75-year-old Israel—this “high-tech nation”—had joined the ranks of failed states, its core institutions in charge of protecting its own people collapsing before our very eyes. We watched Leviathan dying in the sands.

Whence Evil?

The bruised and battered Leviathan left a sign in the sands—a question mark: How should we deal with evil? How can we fight and defeat it?

First, by defining it and identifying it. We should determine what “evil” means and then detect its agents and their enablers. My working definition of evil is simple enough: evil treats humans as expendable objects. Evil means viewing people as obstacles to be removed or assets to be (ab)used for one’s benefits or pleasure (Kant’s self-conceit); either way, evil treats humans as things to be discarded.

The implication is clear and troubling enough: we all harbor evil. This “banality of evil” drives some to resigned nihilism: We’re all bad, and nothing matters. But it should motivate us in the opposite direction–to be involved, to think things through, to devise our own conscience, individual and public, and to act accordingly.

When we treat evil, we should tread with caution, recalling Nietzsche’s abyss: the more we think in dichotomous go(o)d-(d)evil, the more we become prone to become evil ourselves. To state the obvious, if fighting monsters means becoming one, if defeating evil means becoming evil, we fought for naught.

We should not behold our moral universe through bicameral black-and-white glasses but through a prism. While the idea of evil invites a binary go(o)d-(d)evil morality, it is better to think of morality as a light spectrum of colors and shades, each with a different wavelength that a sharp prism might help discern. In human affairs, there is no absolute White, combining all the colors of the spectrum, nor absolute Black—their complete absence (even the super-black Vantablack absorbs 99.965 percent of light, not all of it). Still, some acts, and the people committing them, come close to the darker end of the spectrum. Importantly, evil acts need not indicate an evil person; one becomes evil by constantly and consciously committing such acts, refusing to change course and make amends.

Realizing morality through a non-binary prism reveals a paradox: a main impediment to defeating evil is believing it exists and can be defeated. President Biden proclaimed that Hamas is “pure evil.” He is wrong. Like pure righteousness, or omnibenevolence, “pure evil”—the uppercase Evil— is a metaphysical construct. Actual human beings are not Evil, and thus, unlike mortal people, Evil can never be killed or defeated.

But lowercase evil can be. It has been done, and it can be done. I wish karma would take care of it, that perpetrators and their enablers will know no rest and be haunted for the rest of their lives by the ghosts of their victims. Still, I know this is wishful thinking. In the world as it is, there is no metaphysical shortcut. Defeating evil is up to us: for if we tolerate this, our children will be next.

Hurt people hurt. Some Israelis who see the Holocaust within the 10/7 carnage seek to inflict the same hurt upon the Palestinians. The latter who see the Nakba in Israel’s response may wish the same upon their mortal enemy. Both communities often see themselves as righteous victims.

Granted, the best way to stop this vicious cycle is to stop hurting and start caring. Whether motivated by a religious turn-the-other-cheek mentality, or a secular liberal creed, or plain fantasy, there is a great appeal to appeasing evil. But when it comes to people, however hurt, who harm innocent others deliberately, who refuse to own up to their choice and actions, who refuse to learn, who refuse to reform—such evil cannot be placated, let alone pacified. It will only become worse. We should be willing to give up on humans who have given up on the good in their own humanity.

At the same time, we must not relinquish our own humanity. However hard, we should always actively choose to treat people—however evil—as humans, and thus, if they are harmed and can do no harm, to help them. The best way to avoid falling into the abyss is to never abandon the horizon.

Slaughterhouse-Twenty-Three

On Oct 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists gave up on the good in their own humanity. They did not seek a mere military victory, taking over IDF posts, killing and kidnapping soldiers. They sought the debasement of as many Israeli civilians as possible, treating them as playthings for torture and humiliation, and the ultimate gratification of power: killing them at will. They raped women, burned babies, decapitated men, brutalized the elderly, and basked themselves in a bloodbath, then paraded their Israeli “things” as trophies, for the hunger for power can rarely be satiated in private; it needs recognition, admiration, and fear by others. And of course, they took no responsibility for their atrocities, lying (for example, arguing it was ordinary Gazans instead of Hamas militants, who killed and kidnapped civilians), and shifting blame to Israel.

Lowercase evil is not a demon; it’s often driven by ideas, and in this case by ideology. Hamas’s Covenant (1988) is an instructive document. 1967 is hardly mentioned; neither is 1948. The battle is eternal, cosmic-like, and is squarely directed against “Israel, Judaism and Jews [that] challenge Islam and the Muslim people” (Article 28). The Covenant is not merely deeply antisemitic, targeting “the warmongering Jews” (Article 32), clarifying that “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious” (introduction). It is also genocidal, pledging a Jihad upon Jews, since Judgment Day “will not come until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them” (Article 7). Practically, it’s genocide through politicide, the elimination of the Jewish State, for “Israel will arise and continue to exist until Islam abolishes it” (Introduction). This doctrine has underlined a 35-year indoctrination.

Importantly, evil is also driven by politics and psychology. Hamas has shown itself capable of making pragmatic realpolitik calculations, adjusting to shifting balances of power and interests. For example, while it still adheres to its 1988 Covenant, Hamas issued in 2017 “a general document on principles and policies,” devoid of explicit antisemitism, focusing on Palestine, and suggesting a willingness for a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders as in interim phase until the armed resistance to Zionists, which are “a danger… to humanity,” will liberate whole of Palestine, which belongs exclusively to Arabs.

Unlike the PLO, which actively and formally changed its Charter, Hamas’s 2017 document did not amend the Covenant, as Hamas leaders clarified and demonstrated. It seems more of a rebranding effort, mainly geared toward the Arab World. While foregrounding politicide at the expense of genocide, the latter is clearly implied.

Psychology is pivotal too, as it can help us understand the emotional allure of radicalism. The modern condition is to escape the human condition—in vain. Whether we chase godlike power or retreat into doglike predicament, it’s our humanity—with its burden of freedom and frailty—that we try to run away from, yet never can. A popular panacea to this inevitable failure and the ensuing anxiety is imagining ourselves as heroes, which often demands sacrificial devotion.

Radicalism lurks, and obviously not just for Palestinians. It could manifest, as for some academics, through the exaltation of an intellectual construct (“shifting the balance of power against the oppressor”). Or it could also be, as for Tzvika Mor, the binding of his son, Eitan, now held hostage by Hamas. In a TV interview, Mor proclaimed: “If I have to choose between the love for my son and the love for the nation, I choose the love of the nation. I did my part. I raised a family, eight children. And I’m ready to replace my son, I’ve been preparing for this all my life... if the sacrifice has to be made, we will make the sacrifice... we need to raise children here who are ready for what this land demands of them.”

As hard and horrid as this may sound, we must recall that this is how monotheistic civilizations started. Sacrificing your son to God, and His promised land might be the closest one can get to God.

Returning to Hamas, I believe that the orgiastic slaughterhouse uncovered the terrorists’ deeper urge for a momentary bliss of omnipotence by all but devouring your oppressor, experiencing complete control over those who supposedly control you. It goes beyond genocide and politicide to a savage decide.

While driven by genocidal ideas and ideology, shifting politics and a troubled psyche, and possibly boosted by drugs (Captagon), Hamas’s evil, like others, is the work of people. Who then are its agents? There are over two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. About three thousand Hamas terrorists infiltrated into Israel on 10/7. That’s a tenth of one percent. They should be located, isolated, and eliminated, as should Hamas leaders who spread its genocidal ideas, those who ordered the attack, and members of Hamas (and, later, the mob of people) who partook in the atrocities.

But what about the rest? What about a Hamas terrorist who realized his comrade just murdered a young girl, and mumbled, “may God forgive you, what we’re doing is wrong”? What about Palestinian workers in Israel who informed Hamas on how best to kill their Jewish employers in the Kibbutzim? What about a Hamas police officer who did not partake in the slaughter, but rejoiced when he learned about it? What about the elderly women crying “God is great” at the sight of the mutilated bodies? What about everyone else—hundreds of thousands of Gazans who depend on Hamas for their livelihood, and the other two million Palestinians—civilians, men and women, old and young, including children, even babies?

And what about others? What about a political leader who treats his own people as things to gain and sustain his power? What about the people who support him and their own state’s policies that effectively foster violence?

Fighting evil requires a painstaking discernment along the moral spectrum and a painful realization that no side has a monopoly on evil, or good. It also requires that we acknowledge the other danger of moral purism: demanding that the coalition against evil be righteous. It cannot be. Ultimately, defeating evil requires both a vision of the good, and—like it or not—the lesser evil, whether it is the war itself (Hamas will likely not dismantle peacefully) or through a coalition with evildoers who can, and want to, repent and reform.

 The opinions and findings expressed in this Brief belong to the author exclusively and do not reflect those of the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies.