Hannah Arendt’s immortal phrase, “the banality of evil”, is widely employed to describe the now-axiomatic belief that evil is neither operatic nor grand—it is quotidian, everyman and blasé. “A central logic of the democratic peace theory claims that public opinion acts as a powerful restraint against war,” wrote Steve Chan and William Chafran in a paper, ‘Public opinion as a constraint against war’.
But the ongoing Gaza genocide seems to have put paid to both these observations. Public opinion no longer matters, to the degree that it no longer recognises evil as particularly banal—just commonplace.
Kofi Annan once said, “Information is liberating”. The quote is an indicator of the sheer power of information—information as the plinth of freedomism, the realpolitik of suppressing information, the cleverness of using information as a ligament for the manipulation of public opinion.
The Gaza genocide says to hell with this, too. Information means nothing when faced with belief in the catharsis of mass bloodletting: Gazans must be wiped. So, what has changed in the world’s cognisance? “The history of battle”, wrote Paul Virilio in War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, “is primarily the history of radically changing fields of perception.” While the terabytes of information leaving Gaza every day in the most publicly played-out of all anthropophagic brutalities in recent memory have provoked some huge rallies around the globe, it is telling that not a single one has swayed political support against Israel’s hyper-aggression. It is changing nothing on the ground, or in the political war-rooms of the largely Western Israelist coalition, or in the designer studios of the news media.
“Conflict is the adrenalin of the media”, observed Ajay K Rai in the article, ‘Media at war: issues and limitations’. “The term ‘shooting war’ is aptly suggestive of both soldiers’ and photojournalists’ professions, as the camera owes its sighting mechanisms to those developed for artillery. Likewise, many means of transmission by which news from war zones reaches those at home evolved from the technologies originally pioneered to allow soldiers to communicate with one other (telegraphy and radio broadcasting).”
This is significant analysis—that the media and the military at war are and have always been intertwined. It is information—or data—exchange and dissemination that is the core competence of both. Without one, there could be no other.
Or seemingly so. The Israel-Palestine war has put paid to this formal axiom, too. For the media to report from a warzone, it has to be in the warzone, either as independent reporters or those embedded in one or both armies. In this war, the formal media is almost entirely missing. It has no presence in the resistance in Gaza or the West Bank or in the Israeli army.
The only media organisation with a presence in Gaza is Al-Jazeera—a presence it is paying for by the killings of its correspondents and their families. The only Western media organisation that has made a single, brief incursion into Gaza with Egypt’s help is the American CNN. Nearly all the 90-odd journalists killed in Gaza—all of them reporting using cellphones and a few cameras—were affiliated to small news organisations that were essentially feeders for the major channels until they were exiled off the airwaves and had to turn to instant messaging and apps such as Telegram.
The Vietnam war slid into decline, and then closure, when reports from war correspondents entered the public domain. The visual testimonies from notable photojournalists of sweeping death and destruction in Vietnam became knowledge, and knowledge turned into public power. The massacre of noncombatants at My Lai became a turning point.
Compare this to what is transpiring in Gaza. Social media is awash with images and videos of children dying and dead, of death rattles. There are apocalyptic scenes of entire blocks cratered into grey, dusty collapse by bombs, photographs of the use of white phosphorus shells and thermobaric bombs illegal under international law, of overcrowded hospitals with bloody floors where the grievously wounded have been dragged into alcoves. Never in human history has a warzone been more intensively documented. The Nazi concentration camps were photographed largely ex post facto, with a handful of images of deaths while they were actually occurring, leaving us to fill in the gaps with our imaginations and our personal views of hell. But Gaza leaves nothing to the imagination.
The IDF is looting jewellery and carpets, burning marts and homes, torching food and medicine, blowing up libraries and the seat of government, destroying hospitals, executing children and women in schools My Lai-style. All these are codified war crimes, and not banal by any yardstick.
The Israeli government shut down the internet in the early days of its Gaza genocide. It has since reconsidered, and news of a continuing bloodbath is central to its ethnocidal strategy—the more advertising the better. The Gazans disseminate news of butchery in order to end it, and the Israelis to further it and clear the way for more. A stranglehold on information is no longer considered essential for power.
Nor, today, is an anti-genocidal show of support for Gaza considered essentialist in liberal aesthetics. In August 1971, photographs of Pakistani soldiers executing Bangladeshis led to the sold-out Concert for Bangladesh in New York. The following years witnessed a liberal upsurge: a concert for Ethiopia in 1985; for Kurdish refugees in 1991; for Tibetan freedom in 1996; for Iraqi refugees in Iran in 2003; for Syrian refugees in 2016 and 2018; for Ukraine in March and August 2022.
More than 40 percent of the dead in Gaza are children. No one is singing a dirge for them or holding charity concerts. This, then, is the banality of evil.
Kajal Basu,
Veteran journalist
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)