As the intellectual historian Richard Wolin has explained, several recent works have firmly discredited Hannah Arendt’s famous (and notorious) Eichmann in Jerusalem and its depiction of one of the major organizers of the Holocaust as a “banal” and mindless bureaucrat, motivated more by the desire to follow orders than by actual anti-Semitism. But Arendt still has her defenders, to whom Wolin responds here:

If Eichmann was “banal,” then the Holocaust itself was banal. There is no avoiding the fact that these two claims are inextricably intertwined. . . . Arendt’s defenders would have us believe, counter-intuitively, that it was the mentalité of dutiful “functionaries,” rather than impassioned anti-Semites, that produced the horrors of Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, and Auschwitz. But the vast preponderance of available historical evidence tells a very different story.

If there is to be peace, Palestinians will have to unlearn the hatred of Israel they have imbibed during nearly two decades of Hamas rule. This will be a difficult task, but Cole Aronson argues, drawing on the experiences of World War II, that Israel has already gotten off to a strong start:

The population’s compliance can . . . be won by a new regime that satisfies its immediate material needs, even if that new regime is sponsored by a government until recently at war with the population’s former regime. Axis civilians were made needy through bombing. Peaceful compliance with the Allies became a good alternative to supporting violent resistance to the Allies.

Israel’s current campaign makes a moderate Gaza more likely, not less. Destroying Hamas not only deprives Islamists of the ability to rule—it proves the futility of armed resistance to Israel, a condition for peace. The destruction of buildings not only deprives Hamas of its hideouts. It also gives ordinary Palestinians strong reasons to shun groups planning to replicate Hamas’s behavior.