Why there’s nothing normal about Israel normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia
As Hans Morgenthau and Hannah Arendt would remind us, choosing the lesser of two evils still means choosing evil
A plaque marks the seat of the delegation from Israel during a UNESCO meeting in September 2023. Photo by Getty Images
By Robert Zaretsky October 2, 2023
Last week The New York Times reported on two diplomatic events that unfolded simultaneously in the Middle East. At the very moment that Israel’s tourism minister traveled to Saudi Arabia to attend a regional conference, a Saudi diplomat passed through an Israeli border checkpoint to visit the West Bank. The diplomatic choreography was nuanced, but noteworthy. The two events, declared the Times headline, “reflected how the two countries are moving toward normalizing their relationship.”
Those who follow the news probably did not pause over the headline or accompanying report. Why would we bother to give it a second glance? It has been hard, after all, to ignore the clatter made by the Biden Administration’s effort to normalize ties with a lasting diplomatic deal between Riyadh and Jerusalem.
But let’s pause all the same to take a second glance. What do we talk about when we talk about normalization? And how might two of the 20th century’s most influential political thinkers, Hannah Arendt and Hans Morgenthau, talk about this distinction?
What we talk about when we talk about normalizing
When we talk about normalizing, we usually mean one of two activities. In the context of international relations, normalization is the series of steps taken by two parties to establish a predictable and peaceful relationship. This, it seems, is what the Times editor had in mind. But normalization also means the banalization, honed by their repetition and reverberation, of actions or words that, not long before, would have sparked indignation, not indifference. This, it seems, is not what the Times reporter, Patrick Kingsley, had in mind.
In his account, Kingsley described the current Israeli government as “the most stridently nationalist in Israeli history.” This is true as far as it goes, but as Kingsley must know, it does not go very far. Had Kingsley gone a bit farther, the reader would have learned (or relearned) that the government’s most prominent and powerful members, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, are more than strident nationalists. They are unabashed racists.
Ben-Gvir’s worldview was forged in Meir Kahane’s Kach Party, his credentials include an extensive police rap sheet, and until recently his home décor included a photo of Baruch Goldstein, the extremist who massacred twenty-nine Muslim worshippers in 1994. As for Smotrich, he made headlines a few years ago when he called for “wiping out” a West Bank town that had been the scene of violent actions against local settlers.
Finally, this government is led by Benjamin Netanyahu, a man whose best chance of avoiding prison for bribery and fraud charges is by clinging to political power. Hence his decision to form a coalition between the Likud and the Knesset’s radical right. No less important, Netanyahu has long exploited Israeli society’s existential fear for survival to guarantee his own political survival. (The historian Derek Penslar, in his recent book on the history of Zionism, notes that Netanyahu’s politics exemplify what he calls “catastrophic Zionism.”)
Of course, history has provided countless reasons for the existential fear that runs through Israeli society. So great is this fear that it seems normal to normalize ties with Saudi Arabia, a country which worries about Iran nearly as much as does Israel. This is the same Saudi Arabia ruled by its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salam — aka MBS — who has been credibly accused of war crimes in his invasion of Yemen; of the torture and execution of Saudi citizens for the crime of free expression; and of the murder of the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed, and his body dismembered, in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul.
The crown prince’s rap sheet gives an ironic twist to Netanyahu’s enthusiastic response to the normalization of ties: “You are seeing things that could not even be imagined several years ago.” Indeed. Obviously, the passage of time and the preoccupations of life have, in part, banalized or normalized MBS’s crimes against humanity and individual human beings. No less obviously, Saudi Arabia’s possession of vast oil reserves has driven the other kind of normalization. Shouldn’t we just be realists, then, and swallow the sordid aspects of the Saudi and Israeli governments to preserve our mutual security? To reconcile ourselves, in short, to what is rather than what ought to be?
A ‘tragic sense’ of politics
Hans Morgenthau and Hannah Arendt had much in common. They were both German Jews who, having fled their country in the mid-1930s, settled in the United States. Prominent public intellectuals in postwar America, they were also close friends — close enough for Morgenthau to propose marriage to Arendt, which she gently turned down — who were as critical of liberal pieties as conservative moralizing.
Most important, perhaps, Arendt and Morgenthau shared a “tragic sense” of politics. For the latter, the human desire for good was overmatched by the human drive for power. Man is suspended, he wrote, “between his spiritual destiny which he cannot fulfill and his animal nature in which he cannot remain.” In principle, man knows what is right, Morgenthau held, yet in practice, he most often does, knowingly or not, what is wrong. Those who refuse to see that politics boils down to a choice between two evils, and that we are condemned to choose the lesser evil, are being, quite simply, unrealistic.
“Whatever choices we make, we must do evil, while we try to do good,” Morgenthau concluded, “for we must abandon one moral end in favor of another.”
Arendt shared her friend’s political realism, but not his moral pessimism. She rejected his belief that politics is a grimy affair that leaves our hands dirtied and our ideals denied. This brand of hard-nosed realism — “Whether you like it or not, this is how the world is” — was, in fact, a cowardly kind of resignation: “Whether you like it or not, this is how I need to believe the world is.”
Arendt spoke to this distinction during the firestorm of criticism — sometimes valid, almost always virulent — sparked by the publication in 1963 of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In a talk she gave at a several American campuses, titled “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” Arendt elaborated on the elements that make for the banality of evil. One of these elements, she observed, was the argument for the lesser evil. Should you be confronted with two evils, and one is less ghastly than the other, you must choose the latter. To do otherwise, the argument insists, would express a “germ-proof moralism, which is alien to political circumstances.”
But a serious problem resides in the heart of this argument. Those who choose the lesser evil, Arendt notes, “forget very quickly that they chose evil.” How could it be otherwise? Telling myself that I chose as best as I could, I eagerly forget the enormity of this first and fateful step. Few of us, I suspect, have not found ourselves, at one point or another in our lives, in this very spot.
Moreover, as Arendt adds, the “acceptance of lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such.” This logic not only explains, in part, the burgeoning entente cordiale between Jerusalem, Riyadh and Washington, but also explains the accommodation made by most members of the GOP to the person and politics of Donald Trump.
As Arendt knew, there is not and can never be a simple answer to our deeply rooted reflex to dismiss idealism — the ought of our lives — and embrace realism by accepting the is of our world. But she also knew this was a cop-out. Rather than ignore the never-ending tension between the demands of our ideals and the demands of reality, we have no choice but to embrace this tension, and, though we will always fall short, nevertheless always demand better of ourselves but also others, especially those that talk the talk, but do not walk the walk on human rights.
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