Victimization and the perpetuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict

The Arab-Israeli conflict has manifested as one of the most prominent and poignant of conflicts in our era, with transgressions by both sides resulting in the perpetuation of a conflict which has claimed nearly 100,000 lives over the 70 years of its continuity and the livelihoods of innumerably more. In order to better comprehend the motivations of the belligerents and thus more empathetically perceive the nuances of the complex situation, an understanding of the legacy predicating the actions of both sides is required.

Photograph of Hannah Arendt–Credit: Ryohei Noda. Photograph of Adolf Eichmann–Credit: The Huntington

To these ends the film Hannah Arendt appropriately analyzes the legacy of distanced apathy and the dehumanization that occurs as a result of the bureaucratization of conflict and malevolence. It explains that the most egregious of transgressions against humanity are not perpetrated in aggressive antipathy but rather win passive apathy, as exemplified by Adolf Eichmann and his seemingly bureaucratic job of accounting and signing off on the numbers of victims to be deported and exterminated. This "banality of evil" maintains its pertinence in relation to the Arab-Israeli conflict in which both sides suffer from a demagogical de-individualization of constituents on the other side of the conflict. As a result of this distancing apathy which prevents the empathetic comprehension of either side, the conflict is perpetuated through a divisive ignorance which trivializes the humanity existent on the other side as well as their grievances. The perennial pertinence of these social phenomena can be seen throughout the dialectic of malevolence in which previous conflicts influence and directly stimulate their inevitable and invariable successors. In the film Waltz with Bashir, an animated documentary about the legacy of various experiences of Israeli soldiers during the 1982 Lebanese War which culminate in the massacre of Palestinian refugees by the Lebanese Christian Phalange militia, this perpetuation of the bureaucratic apathy towards human lives is apparent throughout Israeli occupation and especially during the massacre–an apathy which allowed the massacre to take place and with its self-realization and subsequent negation thusly ended the massacre.

The perpetuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict is one predicated on the bureaucratization and consequent trivialization of human lives. It is through this distanced apathy and dehumanization that a dialectical malevolence, in which violence is invariably reciprocated to the suffering of all parties involved, is allowed to continue across innumerable human lives incessantly and actualize potentially endless suffering. It is only through a cessation of these bureaucratic, distanced, de-individualizing, and dehumanizing phenomena that we can hope to achieve the cessation of this dialectical malevolence in subsequence.

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