Eichmann in Jerusalem is famous for giving us the phrase "the banality of evil". 50+ years on, in the face of a worldwide refugee crisis and official policies of exclusion, denial of services, and child separation that have not yet risen to extermination, this examination of the complicity of one man, a Nazi expert in "Jewish resettlement", remains an important and challenging book.

From the start, Arendt has little sympathy for the juridical theater of David Ben Gurion's statemaking exercise of a trial for Adolf Eichmann. As a refugee herself, a former Zionist, still Jewish, always a philosopher, she sees through the contradictions in the trial. Israel kidnapped Eichmann from Argentina and is trying him retroactively for the crime of genocide, rather than any individual murder. The purpose of the trial is not to decide if Eichmann is guilty, it never would have been held if he were not undoubtedly guilty, but to demonstrate Eichmann's guilt to the world, and Israel's new power to advocate for the Jews by proclaiming it. The more important question, for Arendt and for us, is what precisely is Eichmann guilty of?

This book is at it's best when Arendt confronts Eichmann, and tries to probe his essence. He is a small man, unremarkable, totally normal except for the bulletproof glass cage around him. His testimony, thousands of pages of conversation with an Israeli interrogator, reveal a mind incapable of thought, of seeing the world from any viewpoint other than his own. Eichmann misappropriates a German idiom 'winged words' literally meaning 'quotations from the classics' to mean any cliche, and when he utters a sentence in his own words, he repeats it until it is a cliche. A repeated failure in business, Eichmann joined the SS in the early 1930s, where he rose to a middle-rank equivalent to Lt. Colonel. His job was quite literally making sure that the trains ran on time, that the transit between the ghettos and death camps was efficient and organized. He was quite good at it, and his main complaint was that he was never promoted to general.

But Eichmann is only a small part of this book, because he was only a bystander at his own trial. For much of this book is a recapitulation of the epoch-defining crime of the Shoah. Jewish communities across Europe were transported and exterminated, but there were key differences in every province of the Reich in how Jews were rendered stateless and then lifeless, with varying degrees of assistance from local anti-Semites and Jewish leaders. Arendt relies heavily on some contemporary accounts of the Holocaust here. The machinery of death is hard to grasp, both because it is horrific, and because contrary to the common conception of totalitarian as efficient, it was a mess of at least a dozen different agencies working at cross-purposes on their own version of the Holocaust.

Arednt closes the book by gesturing at 'acts of state' as transcending common morality, the Shoah as a crime against the order of nations rather than Jews in particularly, and the vagaries of responsibility in Europeans who have to live with the fact that almost all of them knew at some point, and did all too little to help. But these points are buried under the six million dead.

Evil has no depth. Evil is banal. Evil is mediocre little men who can't think in straight lines. But evil can still kill you dead.