None of this brought joy to Israel. In its unsmiling sobriety, the Eichmann trial represented the country’s only opportunity to bring a leading Nazi to justice. Over 100 witnesses testified to the horrors of the Final Solution, leaving the new Jewish State, then still home to hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors, mesmerized, shocked, traumatized. “Justice,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her famous account of the trial, “demands seclusion, it requires sorrow rather than anger.”

Eichmann’s was the second and last judicial execution ever carried out in Israel. And, as the atmosphere around his death implies, it was framed by robust moral reasons. In a country created as a safe haven for Jews after the Holocaust, the very notion of legally executing other human beings went against the grain for large parts of the population. Judaism generally frowns upon the judicial killing of others, albeit with a particular focus on other Jews, while the historical legacy of Jewish persecution meant a long-term insistence on the sanctity of human life.

Yet if the death penalty for murder was abolished back in 1954, it has now returned with a literal vengeance. Late last month, the Knesset passed a law permitting the execution of Palestinians in the West Bank. If that wasn’t stark enough — among other things, it explicitly excludes Israeli Jews — the law’s passage was also accompanied by celebration. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s security minister, popped champagne, proudly wearing a noose-shaped lapel pin as he went.

Ben-Gvir’s law is not entirely new. As the Eichmann execution implies, Israel already permits the death penalty in exceptional circumstances. These include involvement in genocide, but also a range of security offenses, from warmongering and undermining state sovereignty to treason.

In practice, though, these laws were almost never enforced. The only known case of legal execution besides Eichmann’s occurred in June 1948, when one Meir Tobianski was accused of passing military secrets to Jordan. But he was posthumously cleared of treason, while the death sentences of several Jewish murderers were commuted, largely thanks to the injunction that since man was created in the image of God, only God has the right to deprive him of life. The final abolition of the death sentence for murder came following a lengthy discussion in the Knesset, where Jewish tradition, universal humanitarianism, and the lack of deterrence were all invoked.

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As for Palestinians accused of murdering Jewish Israeli citizens, and sentenced to death by Israeli military courts, their punishments were repeatedly overturned by higher courts. This was in part because of the same legal and moral arguments applied to Jewish criminals. As Adi Carmi, a former senior Shin Bet official, said in March: “as an Israeli citizen living in a Jewish and democratic state, any encounter with terrorists should end with their neutralization or if needed taking them out. Once the terrorist has put up his hands and been arrested and cuffed, from my point of view the battle is over and he needs to be tried. As a Jew who sanctifies the sanctity of life, I do not want to see the death penalty.”

There have historically been more hard-nosed reasons to avoid executions too. As security-minded officials have warned, executing those who resist Israeli occupation, normally referred to in Israel as terrorists, would be counterproductive. Transforming them into martyrs, their deaths would merely fuel the cycle of violence. This reluctance also played a part in Israel’s claim to have joined the general trend in the West of viewing executions as inhumane — in contrast to its Arab neighbors, where the death penalty has been more common, or to Iran, whose theocratic regime has carried out public hangings and other gruesome acts.

In 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu himself opposed a proposal by members of his own coalition to adopt the death penalty. Only six MKs supported the law and 94, including most of the Right, opposed it. In this, they were only following tradition. Writing in 1969, Natan Yellin-Mor, a leader of the extreme-Right underground during the British Mandate in Palestine, warned that “if the death penalty is used at a time of a national struggle, it may elevate the person sentenced”. For their part, former security officials have also worried about the international repercussions of the death penalty, with Carmi noting that it could harm Israel’s relations with its Arab neighbors. Other experts have made a similar point about Israel’s wider reputation abroad, with former Shin Bet official Lior Akerman suggesting that executing Palestinians could “exacerbate attitudes toward us by states around the world.”

All this has now changed. Ben-Gvir’s party is called Otzma Yehudit — the Hebrew for “Jewish Power”. The far-Right, ultra-nationalist party traces its ideological roots to the outlawed Kach Party, itself banned in 1994 for its outright support for racism and Jewish terrorism. Kach’s most infamous supporter was Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born settler who murdered 29 Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Ben-Gvir has described Goldstein as a “hero”, and until 2020 hung a portrait of the killer at his home in an illegal West Bank settlement.

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The death penalty voted into law by the Knesset on 30 March is an extraordinary piece of legislation, even by recent Israeli standards. The law makes absolutely no pretense about being exclusively directed against Palestinians, stating that any resident of the West Bank found guilty of killing someone in a “terrorist act” must be sentenced to death by a military court, barring exceptional circumstances that would impose a mandatory life sentence instead.

At the same time, a death sentence no longer requires, as it previously did, a unanimous decision by a panel of military judges, nor that they be at least at the rank of lieutenant colonel. Indeed, according to this new law, the death penalty must be imposed even if the prosecution asks for a lesser sentence. As for the state of Israel proper, the new law vaguely mandates that any killing intended to undermine the existence of the state must similarly be punished with death or a life sentence, and that the execution must be carried out within 90 days, barring intervention by the prime minister. In short, the new law clearly imposes the death penalty only on occupied Palestinians — and potentially on Palestinian citizens too — but not on Jews.

Before the law can go into effect, it will be reviewed, and possibly overturned, by the Supreme Court. This could happen for humanitarian reasons — in reference to Jewish law and to the “Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty” of 1992 — or, given the law’s prejudicial nature, on judicial grounds. In recent years, however, the court has increasingly veered to the Right, as well as becoming ever-more timid, and it may well either hedge in some manner or allow the law to be enforced.

Whatever the judges decide, it is impossible to define this new law as anything but blatantly racist, making a clear distinction between two groups, Jews and Palestinians, on the basis of their nationality and ethnicity. It is another substantial step in the ongoing establishment of an apartheid regime in the West Bank, as well as its creeping extension into the state of Israel itself. The same state that, just over six decades ago, executed a Nazi perpetrator for implementing a racist genocidal policy against European Jews — in a trial that in many ways served to establish the Jewish state’s legitimacy as a safe haven for Jews after the Holocaust — is now in danger of abandoning its last claim to a just legal system.

The consequences of this new legalized racism, deeply rooted in the far-Right’s ideology, are unfathomably destructive. Beyond his antics in the Knesset, Ben-Gvir made that clear, promising the law would ensure “a day of justice for the murdered” — and “a day of deterrence” for Israel’s enemies. And if legal experts from the Israel Democracy Institute see things differently, defining the law as “unconstitutional, immoral, and contrary to Israel’s commitments according to international law”, it is hard not to see a more basic moral collapse from Arendt’s sombre reflections.

I grew up in Israel before the occupation of 1967, and recall listening to recordings from the Eichmann trial on the radio with my family every evening. For someone like me, the transformation of Israel from a country that perceived itself as the clearest answer to persecution and genocide — to one that is engaged in systematic oppression against Palestinians, and is now seeking to legalize their judicial killing, is devastating. These are not only the actions of extremists such as Ben-Gvir and finance minister Itamar Smotrich; more than half of Knesset members voted for the law. That Zionism, which set out to emancipate the Jews, has now become an ideology geared towards dehumanizing Palestinians, is not only tragic. It is, I think, sufficient cause to reject the ideology altogether, and call instead for the remaking of the state into a just and equal society for all its inhabitants. For now, it remains to underline that the law is a breathtaking plunge. One is hard put to think of a more stunning turn of events.

Yes, we expect those things. We desire them. They comfort us. They tell us we have nothing to do with these people. They are an anomaly, a curio, a fascinating oddity that will not come again. A biography of Josef Mengele is being written as I type. It will likely be a best-seller for these reasons, though I do not want to read it.

Martha Gellhorn, who covered the Eichmann trial for the Atlantic magazine, wrote this in 1962 of her subject: “We fear him because we know that he is sane. It would be a great comfort to us if he were insane; we could then dismiss him, with horror, no doubt, but reassuring ourselves that he is not like us.” 

It feels morally necessary to distance oneself from the perpetrators of the Shoah because in that is expiation, the removal of complicity, and, therefore, sanity. But it is not useful, and it teaches us nothing.  Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil” does not work either. It may be an intellectual’s gravest insult — Arendt the grumpy don judging Eichmann the functional idiot — but ennui is hardly a useful response to a shocking eruption of mass murder.

It is comforting, of course, to see Nazism as the rise of the stupid — Hitler’s credulous army of chicken farmers — but that is not true either. Many of the leading Nazis were highly cultured, or from highly cultured families. The father of Reinhard Heydrich — Hitler’s “man with the iron heart” and Eichmann’s overlord — founded a conservatoire. Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer was Heinrich Tessenow’s assistant at 22. Members of the Einsatzgruppen, the  elite paramilitary death squad, had a disproportionate number of PhDs. And of the fifteen people who sat around the table at the Wannsee House to plan the Final Solution to the invented problem of Europe’s Jews, seven had doctorates in law and another a doctorate in political science.

For every chicken farmer in the Nazi high command there were two lawyers.  There were ideologues and functionaries; fellow travellers and the ambitious; greedy souls who wanted the Jews’ homes, businesses and the shoes of their children. Some were very odd, of course. Himmler went looking for the Holy Grail (too much Wagner?).

No strategy of emotional distancing works and, anyway, history proves you wrong. Anti-racist education has failed, and anti-Semitism thrives again. It seems its brief absence post-war — a copious pause, an exhaustion, a burning out — was the anomaly. This willingness — this desire — for distance is at least part of the cause.

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We cling to the singular monster narrative, but the opposite is true. Nazism would not have thrived without its millions of collaborators and bystanders; as Gellhorn said” “eager thousands obeyed him [Eichmann]…. there was endless work for willing hands”. Without them it would have begun and ended in Munich in the early 1920s, a small, repulsive stain on a city rather than a twelve-year Reich that was supposed to last for a thousand years. One can spend too long imagining parallel futures for the Weimar Republic. But that is comforting too.

They enabled it, and that, in its totality, is its lesson and its terror. That is why it is necessary to put devil’s horns on Eichmann and Heydrich; on Streicher and Mengele. That is why Auschwitz, which appeared most recently in an X-Men film as a creation myth for a superhero, is debased into myth. More than 37% of the vote went to Nazis in July 1932 and this was a full seven years after Adolf Hitler exposed what he wanted in Mein Kampf. They only had to read it. Did they?

The Austrians greeted the Anschluss with garlands of flowers and why not? They requested the union in 1918 and when Hitler entered Vienna 90% of the population greeted him as Jews committed suicide or were forced to scrub the streets with toothbrushes. Later, the Jews of Paris were not rounded up by the Gestapo. They were rounded up by the French police. In Lithuania and Ukraine natives did not wait for the Germans to massacre the Jewish population. They started themselves, knowing their retrospective defence was on its way.

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There were rescuers, of course, many thousands of them — remember Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who waged his own war on Eichmann and lost everything, dying in a Russian prison after the war, and Princess Alice of Greece, mother to the Duke to Edinburgh, hiding the Cohens — but they were not representative. It was your neighbours who would send you to your deaths.

Why such complicity? It is disorientating to compile a tidy list of the causes of the Shoah (studying Nazism will give you a horror of lists by itself) but it must be done. And the most important element is not economic collapse, or thwarted nationalism, or the Versailles Treaty, or the implicit weakness of the Weimar Republic or the useful idiocies of Communism.

It is Christianity, and that is as uncomfortable a truth as the realisation that Adolf Eichmann and the rest of his gang of mass murderers were ordinary human beings. (The wife of the commandant of Auschwitz complained that her husband did not sleep with her enough, distracted as he was by the murder of Jews and Roma.) Nazism was its own religion, it is true, but the Shoah flowered amid two thousand years of anti-Jewish hatred, warped by Nazism from contempt into a death sentence. Christianity did not order the death of Jews. It merely wanted them to live in shame. They were more useful that way.

This is the complicity we dare not name. It is easier to pass the devils’s horns from the Jews to the architects of the Final Solution than to understand what enabled the one to kill the other: the deicide myth, the founding story of Jewish power and Jewish malice. This, from the gospel of Luke: “To the cross, to the cross with him!” This, from the gospel of Matthew: “His blood be on us and on our children”. This, from the gospel of John: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do what your father desires”. To Saint Gregory they were “slayers of the Lord.” To Saint John they “surpassed the ferocity of wild beasts”.

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“What then shall we Christians do” asked Martin Luther, “with this damned, rejected race of Jews? First their synagogues and churches should be set on fire…” There isn’t a positive image of Jew in European culture before the Enlightenment. Gotthold Lessing’s play The Jews (1749) failed on the Berlin stage because the hero was a Jew. The audience could not believe it.

In his book The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) the historian Raul Hilberg noted that the canonical law and Nazi law proposed many of the same measures. In 1965 the Second Lateran Council retrospectively removed the charge of deicide from almost all Jews — it was passed by 2221 to 88 of the assembled bishops — and that is surely an admission that millions in history have believed these libels.

But millions do not make good villains, either morally, or narratively. They do not make particularly good victims either. That is why Stephen Spielberg ruined his potential masterpiece Schindler’s List by emphasising a pretty girl in a red coat, the only colour in the film. That, to paraphrase Mel Brooks’s The Producers, is your victim.

Instead, we prefer to emphasise the gaudy monsters, which only serves to make the Shoah more mysterious and, in the end, meaningless. For if so few are responsible, who can take responsibility? Nowadays, if you are not committing mass murder, you can consider yourself benign. “The private conscience is not only the last protection of the civilised world, it is the one guarantee of the dignity of man,” Martha Gellhorn concluded after watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Or, to put it another way, demonise the few and we cease to be afraid of what we should fear most: ourselves.