Two Preambles
The immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023 was one of shock and deep humiliation for Jews worldwide. The sovereignty of the Zionist project should have made October 7 impossible. But it didn’t. Reactions to the war exhibited a rawness that was as understandable in its intensity as it was troubling in its presentation. And the military reaction to that massacre has been horrifying to watch. I begin with two preambles.
First, in February 2025, a liberal Zionist rabbi gave a moving sermon about the fears, anxieties, and the insecurity of this moment. He talked about the need for Jews to retain a commitment to a moral standard even, or precisely, in these moments. Hamas, the rabbi said, was “an enemy whose depravity and evil knows no bounds.” A few minutes later he described the plan, recently approved by the Israeli Knesset, to transfer two million Palestinians out of Gaza as “an abomination” and a deep moral error. He described Israelis as good people who sometimes do bad things.
There is nothing unusual about these comments and, in fact, calling transfer “an abomination” was to my mind quite a courageous thing to say from the pulpit these days. But the juxtaposition of “evil people” and “good people who do bad things” is worth considering, not because I necessarily think it was misplaced, but because it raises a series of issues that need further examination.
Second, in a recent interview on Peter Beinart’s Substack, “Beinart’s Notebook,” Palestinian Israeli law professor and cultural critic Raeif Zreik responded to using the language of “evil” regarding what the IDF has done in Gaza or what Hamas did on October 7 (depending on which side of the conflict you stand). He said that “evil” was not a useful analytical category to describe either group. Evil, he suggested, is acting with no context, no justification, no reason other than the act itself. In both instances, the actions may be evil, but the perpetrators were not acting without reason. Each had a reason, legitimate or not, to perform those inexcusable evil actions. This is not to justify the actions, but quite the opposite, it is to try to understand their causes.
Purim and Violence in the Jewish Tradition
It is no coincidence that both of these comments took place as the Jews entered the month of Adar and began to think about Purim. The prelude to Purim is the public reading of Torah verses describing Amalek and the Jewish obligation to obliterate Amalek (that is, to commit what today we would call genocide). Who exactly Amalek was, scripture never quite tells us. In the Jewish tradition, Amalek represents the quintessence of evil, “with no bounds.” In fact, Amalek is viewed as the exemplar of evil worse than other nations who attacked Israel, i.e., the Moabites, Ammonites, or the seven nations indigenous to the land of Canaan. Those biblical peoples were legitimate enemies who acted in some cases as a response to the Israelite claim that God gave them the land that would come to constitute the biblical Kingdom of Israel. In fact the first comment by Rashi on Genesis 1:1 asks the question: Why did the Torah have to begin with the story of creation? He then cites a midrash that states, “because the nations will claim you are thieves when you come into the land and thus Genesis begins with creation to show them that I, God, created everything and I can give it to whomever I want.” Setting aside the problems that comment creates when it is used as a political tool, there was never a biblical mandate to destroy those peoples (although there were mandates to expel them, what today we would call “ethnic cleansing”). This was because, I surmise, those peoples had a reason to attack the Israelites as nations attack other nations: they felt threatened, they were defending their land. Therefore, they may have committed evil actions, war crimes of the time etc., but they were not deemed “evil” in themselves. Only Amalek was deemed “evil” in essence, and thus meriting the mandate of genocide. As Zreik noted when talking about evil, there was no context, no justification, no reason other than the act itself that made Amalek evil.
The rabbinic sages seemed acutely aware of this genocidal mandate and muted it by claiming that the genealogy of Amalek had been lost. For this reason, obligatory genocide was interpreted out of the Jewish tradition. But was it? As Elliot Horowitz shows in his book Reckless Rites, which explores the history of Purim violence in the Jewish tradition, Amalek has continued to be used, to this day, to describe Israel’s enemies. Horowitz cites a 2004 essay by Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker: “The Palestinians are Amalek,” Goldberg was told by Benzi Lieberman, chairman of the Council of Settlements. “We will destroy them,” Lieberman continued. “We won’t kill them all. But we will destroy their ability to think as a nation. We will destroy Palestinian nationalism.” And Moshe Feiglin, a leading Likud activist, told Goldberg: “The Arabs engage in typical Amalek behavior. I can’t prove this genetically, but this is the behavior of Amalek.”
The only Palestinian city settled from within by the Jewish colonizers, Hebron sits as a hotbed of occupation, violence from the settlers, and oppression of the Palestinian residents. Via Flickr User flo razowsky. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
The rabbis suggest that the villain in the Book of Esther, Haman, was descended from Amalek. Horowitz shows how even today Palestinians who live under the auspices of a Jewish state are called by some Amalekites.
Goldberg then turned to a young acquaintance seated next to him, Ayelet, a pregnant (married) teenager who wore a long skirt and carried a semiautomatic M-16 and asked her whether she thought Amalek was alive today. ‘Of course,’ she replied, and pointed toward one of the Arab villages in the distance. (Horowitz, Reckless Rites, 3–4)
Of course, after the massacre on October 7, Hamas were likened to Amalekites by Israeli government officials, rabbinical leaders, even the Prime Minister. As Amalekites they were “pure evil” and the mandate of genocide would apply to them. And here, those who make that claim get caught in their own trap. If you deem Hamas to be Amalek, there is a biblical mandate to commit a genocide against them. At the same time, however those same people invoking Amalek are claiming that Israel is not committing genocide against Gazans. Of course, extending Hamas to Gazans more generally requires an additional step, albeit one that is becoming increasingly common, for example in President Herzog’s early claim that “there are no innocents in Gaza.”
Essentializing Hamas as Evil
Before bringing Kant and his notion of “radical evil” into the conversation, I want to parse one more distinction that could be used to justify genocide in this circumstance. I mentioned previously the trope that “Hamas are evil, and Israelis are good people who sometimes do bad things (in this case “ethnic cleansing” is an “abomination” committed by Israel). There seems to be a categorical distinction here between how the two peoples are being defined. One group’s ethics is defined by what they do, while another’s is defined by who they are deep down. Israeli Jews are essentially good, who can do evil, that is, they can fall into moral error. Hamas, however, form an “evil that knows no bounds” and thus what they do is not a willed choice, not a moral error, but an expression of their essence. More generally, this describes how many (though certainly not all) Israelis view themselves and Hamas: as two different species of humanity. One who can choose good or evil, and one who can’t. Can this be distinction be reasonably sustained?
In terms of people being capable of evil, we needn’t look further than Genesis 8 where we learn that, in response to the flood, the LORD smelled the pleasing aroma, the LORD said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of human beings, for the intention of the human heart is evil from their youth (Gen 8:21). The Jewish tradition has done much with this verse, mostly to say that humans are not evil by nature but are capable of evil. That is, given free will they can, and often will, choose evil, but that is not part of their essence. Saying Hamas is evil—certainly their eliminationist ideology can be evil but that is saying something different—is making a different and, in my view, more problematic, claim. By saying Hamas is evil, one is saying that their evil actions (and their actions certainly were evil on October 7) are not a choice, say, between good and evil, they are not “evil thoughts” that became a reality through choice, they are not a product of reason, however skewered, but rather part of their essence: it is who they are. This can easily bring one to compare Hamas to Amalek. But I think this is a serious error.
By saying Hamas is evil, one is saying that their evil actions (and their actions certainly were evil on October 7) are not a choice, say, between good and evil . . . but rather part of their essence: it is who they are.
We must recall that which separates Amalek from, say, the Canaanites. This is that, as the Bible tells it, the Amalekites had no reason to attack Israel in the desert. They had no claim to land that was being challenged nor that they were being threatened. In short, they had no justification for choosing to attack the Israelites. The Canaanites, however, had a reason to go to war with the Israelites. In fact, God tells the Israelites the indigenous population will go to war with them. The Israelites enter their land and claim that God granted them this land even though the Canaanites were indigenous to it. In that sense, if we want to anachronistically compare any ancient people to Hamas, it would be to the Canaanites and not Amalek. But I have never heard that comparison.
Kant, Radical Evil, and Moral Choice
And here we come to Immanuel Kant and his notion of evil and radical evil. Kant’s religion is a religion of reason, which for him requires human freedom. He rejects the Lutheran and Calvinist understanding of “original sin” as an erasure of human freedom, suggesting that we are trapped in an irredeemable state of sin/immorality only redeemable by Christ. Recounting Kant’s rejection of original sin, Emil Fackenheim in his essay “Kant and Radical Evil” describes it this way: “original sin is a state in which I am obligated to a law which I am nonetheless unable to obey…[Kant] categorically denies the possibility of a situation in which there is a moral obligation without a corresponding moral freedom” (69). For Kant, if original sin defined as such, is true, then humans are not free, and thus not human. Human freedom, or moral freedom, is at the center of his understanding of the human and of evil.
For Kant, evil actions are the result of a “weak will” (choosing to ignore moral obligation) or “no will” (choosing to act solely on desire). Relevant to our concerns, there is another category Kant introduces. It is what he calls “radical evil.” Radical evil for Kant is acting by already perverting the principles in one’s character such that one chooses to curtail the freedom to choose the good. One example might be taken by an ideology to the extent that violence in the name of that ideology is viewed as “good.” Ideology can demand, at times, the curtailing of a moral will. Yet, as humans, we must retain that freedom, albeit it is now muted (by perverted desires, ideologies, etc.). Does radical evil erase one’s ability to choose good? Kant would say “no,” that is impossible, but the shift from choosing evil to choosing good cannot come about incrementally but only through a “revolution.” Kant writes, “A man [can] reverse…by a single unchangeable decision that highest ground of maxims whereby he was an evil man.” ( 43). How this can occur, Kant does not tell us, but he maintains that it can occur, in fact it must be possible for it to occur in order for the human to be human. To be chained to desires or instincts would be to lack the capacity for reason that is essential to human nature for Kant. And if specific humans are not human, but “animals,” then they are not capable of evil, radical or otherwise. This is because animals do not have the capacity of reason which makes a moral choice possible. Thus, they are not able to be “evil” or “good.” On Kant’s reading, animals act according to their nature. This may be one interpretation of the legal claim of insanity, but here insanity would be a perversion or malfunction of one’s humanity. Amalek becomes the biblical exception that proves that rule. Amalekites were not insane. And yet on Kant’s terms they were not “radically evil” either. They were something else, some kind of amalgam of human and not-human. To my knowledge Kant never discusses them.
In the end, Kant leaves us with three categories: those who can choose evil but choose good (a strong moral will), those who have the ability to choose evil and choose evil (a weak moral will), and those whose perversion of principles reaches a point that it minimizes freedom (radical evil). Each remain free agents, each can choose otherwise—even if one may require a “revolution,”—and thus each remains human.
How can all this speak to our moment? Likening Hamas to Amalek is self-serving. It is as if saying, “we are good people who can act badly, but they are simply evil.” Perhaps we can say, rather, that Palestinian resistance is as Revisionist Zionist Zeev Jabotinsky claims in his essay “The Iron Wall”, “natural” and even justifiable. Kant would say that it is a willed choice that comes from a place of moral freedom (self-determination) even as, in this case, it manifests as evil (the murder of civilians). It may be for Kant an example of a “weak will,” that is choosing against morality (the sanctity of life) that results in evil (the death of innocent people).
Likening Hamas to Amalek is self-serving. It is as if saying, ‘we are good people who can act badly, but they are simply evil.’
One can even say, I think, that while Palestinian resistance more generally is a willed act between good and evil (as Jabotinsky acknowledged), Hamas has morphed that state into one of “radical evil” whereby, as Fackenheim again surmises, “any empirical evil act already presupposes a perversion of principles in man’s intelligible character” (67). This coheres with Kant’s notion that man has freedom to choose evil. But one does that as a human being and that freedom can also be a tool to reverse that choice. It may, as Kant suggests, take a “revolution” and not merely “reform.” But it is precisely because that decision is possible that the comparison to Amalek and the biblical mandate to commit genocide against them, does not—cannot—apply. Amalek, as Kant might interpret it, has for whatever reason (we are not told) erased its freedom and thus is irredeemable. But it also may be the imagined enemy that has not, and cannot, truly exist. The closest we may have come is Nazism which, in its baseless, almost insane, hatred of Jews comes nearest in resembling the biblical story. But any comparison between Hamas and Nazism is, to my mind, unsustainable.
As a brief coda to this brief exploration, one can understand psychologically why some might deploy Amalek as a description of Hamas. By setting up the enemy as “pure evil” one also sets up the self as innocent (as the Israelites were in the desert when Amalek attacked). But of course, as Jabotinsky makes quite clear in “The Iron Wall,” Zionism as colonialism (a term he uses) is not wholly innocent (separating whether in this case it is justified). And once you erase innocence, the Amalek claim falls apart.
Ideologies, in this case Hamas, are one justificatory way that choosing evil as a moral error can become “radical evil.” But ideologies are human constructions and human choices, and can be transformed, or lose support among the masses. One can see Hamas as performing evil actions, even reaching the bar of “radical evil” on October 7, yet withhold essentializing them as Amalek. When we do this we can better see a way beyond this morass, in part by recognizing that while Israelis may be “good people who sometimes choose bad things” Israelis are not innocent here like the Jews in Shushan or the Israelites in the desert when Amalek attacked them. That is, in some way, one of the consequences of sovereignty. Sovereignty includes responsibility and agency that can sometimes result in moral error. Amalek may be the counter example, and not the embodiment, of where we find ourselves today.
