What is our personal responsibility under genocide when it is enabled and legitimated by institutions that we consent to — including governments and universities — to the degree that we do not disobey them actively, asks Ayça Çubukçu [photo credit: Getty]
In an essay crafted in 1964, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” Hannah Arendt reflects on a set of moral issues concerning our capacity to judge.
The difficult questions she raises in this essay remain pertinent in our own genocidal times unfolding in Gaza and beyond, including the very question: “Who am I to judge?” Arendt opens this essay by commenting on the furious controversy occasioned by her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil.
She subsequently considers two questions about our faculty of judgement that inform her philosophical approach to the problem of personal responsibility: “How can we tell right from wrong, independent of knowledge of the law? And how can we judge without having been in the same situation?”
Not unlike the Western academy today, the context of her reflections in 1964 is one where “the fear of passing judgement, of naming names, and of fixing blame — especially, alas, upon people in power and high position, dead or alive,” is deep-seated. Nevertheless, Arendt is fearless in echoing accusations against Pope Pius XII for “his singular silence” during the Holocaust.
She questions those who attempt to justify such silence by “desperate intellectual manoeuvres” and asks bitingly: “And what shall one say of those who would rather throw all mankind out of the window, as it were, in order to save one man in high position, and to save him from the accusation not even of having committed a crime, but merely of an admittedly grave sin of omission?”. After all, she asserts not once but twice in this essay, “where all are guilty, no one is”.
Reading Arendt’s reflections on our capacity to judge with sixty years of hindsight, what shall one say today of our own silence in the Western academy — with notable exceptions — about the genocide in Gaza?
What shall one say of our own “sin of omission,” even as we pride ourselves on our expertise in politics and ethics, the Middle East and international affairs, racism and colonialism? What is our personal responsibility under genocide? What is our personal responsibility under genocide when it is enabled and legitimated by institutions that we consent to — including governments and universities — to the degree that we do not disobey them actively?
Lest we get fixated on the legal term “genocide” and cite lack of expertise to justify our silence, we could turn to well-publicised reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, who have all determined that “genocide” is in fact what is unfolding in Gaza.
But that is not the primary point I would like to register. Regarding the Holocaust — mostly valid, I would submit, for the annihilation campaign Israel has been conducting in Gaza — Arendt argues:
[T]he moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonisation. It is reached only when we realise this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shall kill,’ not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian calculations. … And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.”
Allow me to reflect on this paragraph to risk a few thoughts on our personal responsibility under genocide.
In the state of Israel and the so-called West or the Global North today — in presidential offices, national parliaments, military command centres, Security Council meeting rooms, corporate headquarters, and university boardrooms where investment and firing decisions are made — the extermination of the Palestinian people and the legitimation of this extermination are neither committed nor enabled “by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.” And the academy and its members, no doubt, remain part and parcel of this “respectable society.”
Materially, if it is true that universities where we make a living are invested in corporations that profit from apartheid and genocide; if it is true that the academy provides the knowledge and the expertise that legitimates Israel as a genocidal legal entity, what personal responsibility do we bear as cogs in this transnational machine we call “the academy”?
As Arendt grants, “It is obviously not everyone’s business to be a saint or a hero. But personal or moral responsibility is everyone’s business”.
Accordingly, we can find with her that the question to ask Eichmann and other respectable members of respectable society participating, directly or indirectly, in mass murder is: “And why, if you please, did you become a cog or continue to be a cog under such circumstances”?. This is not an easy question to answer.
Going to the heart of the moral matter, Arendt searchingly turns to the exceptions, to those members of society — “respectable” or not — who decided not to serve as cogs in a murderous machine. These moral exceptions faced “the predicament of judging without being able to fall back upon the application of generally accepted rules” that spelt death — Thou shall kill — for certain demographic groups.
Those who refused to be cogs in the legal killing apparatus, in Arendt’s paradoxical formulation, “acted under conditions in which every moral act was illegal and every legal act was a crime”. As I have argued elsewhere, Arendt’s formulation of this situation is predicated on the very possibility of a “lawfulness,” denoting a sense of what is right and just, that contradicts “the law” and does so against the platitudes of legal positivism.
With respect to the exceptions who refused to act as cogs, often by withdrawing from participation in public life altogether, Arendt asks, “in what way were those few different who in all walks of life did not collaborate” with the Nazi regime?
The answer, she claims, is relatively simple: the non-collaborators were “the only ones who dared to judge by themselves, and they were capable of doing so not because they disposed of a better system of values or because the old standards of right and wrong were still firmly planted in their mind and conscience.
On the contrary, all our experiences tell us that it was precisely members of respectable society, who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They [members of respectable society] simply exchanged one system of values against another”.
By contrast, those who refused to collaborate with the Nazi regime, Arendt finds, “were those whose consciences did not function in this automatic way”. In daring to judge by themselves, non-collaborators used a different criterion than an exchangeable set of learned rules and values.
According to Arendt, “they asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds”. “To put it crudely,” she writes, “they refused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to the command ‘Thou shall not kill,’ but because they were unwilling to live together with a murderer — themselves”.
Arendt asserts that it is thinking, that is, “to be engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself,” which is the precondition for this kind of judging, while “the dividing line between those who want to think and therefore judge by themselves, and those who do not, strikes across all social and cultural or educational strata”.
In this respect, “the total moral collapse of respectable society during the Hitler regime” — arguably comparable to the moral collapse we are witnessing in the West as a live-streamed genocide unfolds in Palestine — may warn us, as she argues, that “those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards are not reliable: we now know that moral norms and standards can be changed overnight and that all that then will be left is the mere habit of holding fast to something”.
Instead, under such circumstances, Arendt finds, “much more reliable will be the doubters and the sceptics … because they are used to examine things and make up their own minds.
Best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain,” she writes, “that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall live together with ourselves”.
Even if, as I suspect, Arendt’s judgement on our faculty of judgement presents too generous a view of “thinking” and its moral consequences — to the extent that she underestimates our capacity for self-deception — it nevertheless offers some hope for genocidal times.
What is the significance then, if any, of Arendt’s reflections on “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship” for us, scholars making a living in “the zone of interest” that is the Western academy, members of respectable society neither living under open dictatorships, nor being asked to murder anybody directly?
Considering Gaza, the fact remains that today, many of our universities and governments are financially and politically invested in the mass murder of Palestinians.
Our students who build encampments for Palestine, who tirelessly organise divestment campaigns, who withdraw their consent from business-as-usual at universities and actively challenge their governments — they know this fact well. Precisely because they disobey, they cannot be accused of what Arendt named the “grave sin of omission.” Are we willing to think or learn, and learn from them?
Since October 2023, Israel has destroyed every single university in Gaza. It has also targeted and killed scholars from across the social sciences, humanities, and beyond.
I conclude then with the words of the Palestinian historian Sherene Seikaly, urging the American Historical Association in January 2025 to pass a resolution on scholasticide in Gaza: “This genocide targets the Palestinian people, our peoplehood, our capacity to narrate the past, and to imagine the future. History is screaming to the present. The [American Historical Association] has been deafeningly silent. Silence is complicity. The task of the historian is to ask the hard questions, and to take the difficult positions—not when the dust settles, but as the fire reigns.” Historians and more, it is our task as scholars to assume and assert our personal responsibility under genocide as the fire continues to reign.
This is the text of a talk delivered at King’s College London on January 24, 2025
Ayça Çubukçu is Associate Professor in Human Rights and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Follow her on X: @ayca_cu
Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com
Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.