"Feelings have a significant ideological charge and, in politics, they are used to maintain the status quo or to end it," as Cynthia Franklin, professor and researcher at the University of Hawaii (USA), expressed during her visit to the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra. Professor Franklin gave a seminar organized by the Emotional Culture and Identity project, which is funded by Zurich Insurance.

At the seminar, entitled "Affect, Ideology and the Eichmann Trial," Cynthia Franklin explained the relationship between ideological feelings and their use for political ends, connecting it with the controversy surrounding the philosopher Hannah Arendt and the repression of any anti-Zionist discourse, which, for some, is anti-Semitic.

Hanna Arendt and the Adolf Eichmann trial

According to Cynthia Franklin, Israeli politicians used the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a lieutenant colonel in the Nazi SS, to strengthen the legitimacy and existence of the State of Israel both internally and externally.

"The trial of a person who had committed great atrocities," as she highlighted, "was also used as a political theater. Hannah Arendt, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil, harshly criticized Israel for using a political trial as a State construction project."

For the University of Hawaii professor and researcher, the most controversial part of Hannah Arendt's book was her ironic tone. "Personally," she pointed out, "I think they misunderstood what she meant; it was rather a call to all citizens to think about how they participate in maintaining structures of violence and human rights abuses."