When the images of dead Palestinian children become a punchline on a television show, where the host, guest, and the audience engage in nervous laughter, then what we are witnessing is not only the normalization of genocide, but the banality of evil in our collective consciousness. On a recent episode of Bill Maher’s Real Time on HBO, CNN’s Van Jones made the following emphatic observation: “Iran and Qatar have come up with a disinformation campaign that they are running through TikTok and Instagram that is massive. If you are a young person, you are opening up your phone, all you see is – dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaze baby, Diddy, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby.” This one comment, singular in its capacity to reaffirm our cynical consumption of news, perfectly illustrates just how desensitized many of us have become to the routinization of evil itself. Although Jones apologized for his overt insensitivity, his comments should give us all pause to reflect upon two overarching themes – representation and the banality of evil itself. 

We cannot fully understand why Van Jones, and millions of other people, can casually dismiss the concentrated density of suffering of the Palestinian people without understanding how representation works in our cultural imagination. For centuries, the West has systematically reduced the Arab world to what the late Palestinian scholar, Edward Said, called an essentialist reality. That is to say, the Arab world, which is a subset of the Islamic world, has long been, and continues to be, looked upon as a backward and barbaric culture unworthy of our respect and sympathy. Our perception of the Arab world today is a construct, shaped and informed by intersecting and overlapping images of visceral violence, hatred, and the punchline of jokes. Consider that when the October 7th terror attack happened two years ago, the media represented this tragedy in human terms. Israelis were looked upon as fully formed human beings, with lives and narratives. The media coverage in this context was accurate and appropriate. Israelis are, and should always be, represented as fully formed human beings. Here we are now two years removed from the heinous and cowardly attack by Hamas, with some 67,000 Palestinians killed, the representation is demonstrably different. Palestinian victims are looked upon as an amorphous mass of undifferentiated misery. The Palestinian people are not worthy of a coherent narrative, and their lives are hidden behind the threshold of our compassion. How do we condemn something that does not trespass upon our moral compass?

Coterminal with how the world is represented for us is the banality of genocide. What is more disturbing than the mass murder of human beings is our desensitized attitude. It was the Jewish political philosophy, Hannah Arendt, who first introduced the concept of the banality of evil. For Arendt, it was the normalization and routinization of evil that proved to be more disturbing than the actual murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust. For Arendt, the banality of evil “comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examines the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there.” As much as it is tempting to agree with Arendt, the idea that human generated evil is somehow divorced from thinking is tenuous at best. I would postulate that evil does, indeed, come from the act of thinking. It is not the case that evil defies thought, rather evil is intertwined with thought, dialectically moving through time and space. Under this paradigm, there are punctuated moments where evil finds expression by manifesting itself in the interstitial space of the human psyche. The Holocaust, and other genocides throughout history, have served as constant reminders that evil is always lurking and ready to descend upon us. 

What is happening in Gaza today perfectly captures how a rational and “civilized” society, such as Israel, engages in genocide. The Israeli government’s narrative has systematically represented the Palestinian people as zoomorphically inferior. Former Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, declared that Israel is fighting a war “against animals.” When Israel attacked Gaza following Hamas’ brutal and barbaric killing of 1200 innocent Israelis, it dropped unguided “dumb bombs” that indiscriminately killed thousands of Palestinians. As the bombs dropped and the death toll rose, the Palestinians became a statistical abstraction. Evil in this context did not only reveal the expansive scale of death and destruction; it also revealed how such death is represented. In both life and death, the Palestinian people have been, and continue to be, represented as an amorphous mass of undifferentiated misery. Evil is indeed predicated upon thoughts, as well as the projection of our basest human emotions. 

Given the complex cultural dynamics of how we relate to the Arab world, it should not come as a surprise that Van Jones, who is someone that has an internalized self-image of being open-minded and intellectually aware, can easily succumb to the demeaning representations of the Palestinian people as a subaltern people unworthy of our compassion. Hannah Arendt was correct about the banality of evil in the sense that evil can be carried out with a detached sense of machine-like brutality. This brings to mind the disturbing image of Israeli soldiers indiscriminately shooting at Palestinians scrambling like animals to obtain food, as if it was target practice. When evil is carried out in such a manner, it becomes a kinetic force that blinds the executioners from realizing the horrors of their action. Let me end this piece by quoting Mandy Patinkin, who wrote in a July 2025 New York Times Op-Ed piece, “How could it be done to you and your ancestors, and you turn around and you do it to someone else?” 

---