Un douteux rapport

Abstract

A Dubious ReportIn 1966, The French version of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil was published by Gallimard. Immediately upon its release, the book provoked very serious controversies around it which aroused the curiosity of Avner Lahav – then a young Israeli soldier – about how an author of the magnitude of Arendt, whose analyses of totalitarianism were authoritative, could be so widely criticized. Was it possible that her book contained to a great degree what could be defined as a counter-analysis ? Was there not some kind of dispute among scholars, personalities or about prestige ?It was from these issues that Lahav undertook a systematic reading of Arendt’s works. While doing so he became aware of the fact that what he held in his hands was a “report” that was more than dubious especially in terms of the methodology applied, and also on many points regarding the contents. He undertook the task of writing a critical, reasoned analysis of Arendt’s book along four well defined axis : the personality of Adolph Eichmann, the society (comprising Nazis versus Jews), the problematic jurisdiction over the issue of crime against humanity, and finally the work and personality of Arendt. In these four chapters it emerged that this book was not only one of the most highly criticized of Arend’ts works, but also one of the most criticisable.Over the years that followed Lahav progressively updated his text by means of in-depth reading, and viewing of documentary films broadcast on French and Israeli television. Each re-examination of Arendt’s book in light of the new information only confirmed to which extent she ultimately had been misled, too often mixing genres and not less often bending the historical facts (to the point of simply ignoring them) to suit the purposes of her case. No, it was decidedly not a simple “report”, but indeed a “thesis”, highly personal and definitely questionable.