The Power of Non-Reconciliation – Arendt’s Judgment of Adolf Eichmann By Roger Berkowitz

Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem has caused controversy for all the wrong reasons. Arendt's criticisms of the Judenräte for cooperating with the Nazis and protecting their friends and families while selecting Jews to be sent to the camps is well commented upon, if rarely thoughtfully considered. Her insight into the banality of evil is now common sense, which makes it an easy target for those who seek to discredit her criticisms of the trial in Jerusalem. But Arendt's rejection of the Israeli Court's legalistic response to Eichmann's great wrongs—and her framing of the question of war crimes outside the law and, instead, through the political question of reconciliation—has been poorly understood. As a result, her book has failed to provoke as it ought. The truly radical judgment in Eichmann in Jerusalem is Arendt's insistence that the question for the Israeli Court was one of reconciliation versus non-reconciliation rather than punishment, and thus her argument that the Israeli judges should have dared to judge politically rather than legally. The judgment that Eichmann must die, Arendt argues, should have been a singular, political, and non-legal judgment that no common world was possible. What was calle