Laws Against Intermarriage (situational irony)
Israeli citizens, “religious and nonreligious,” agreed upon “the desirability of having a law” that prohibited intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews. Israeli officials “outside the courtroom” were willing to admit that they also agreed upon “the undesirability of a written constitution” in which such a law would “embarrassingly” have to be spelled out. The arguments against civil marriage would “split” the House of Israel, and would also “separate Jews of this country from Jews of the Diaspora.” The irony of that situation, according to Arendt, was that prohibition of intermarriage in Israel resembled “the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935.” The laws that were designed to protect the Jewish people against the threat of Nazism in fact resembled just the kind of laws that the Nazis enacted.
Eichmann's Statelessness (situational irony)
Dr. Servatius, Eichmann's lawyer, had asked the West German government “to demand extradition of the accused,” and, “falling this,” “to pay the expenses of the defense.” Bonn refused on the ground that Eichmann was not a German national. The irony is that Eichmann is now considered stateless—in just the condition that his actions, and Nazism more broadly, tried to place the Jews. Not even wanted or acknowledged by his own state, Eichmann has become the victim of exactly the kind of policy to which he tried to subject others.
The Jewish Councils (situational irony)
Arendt observes again and again the irony that the Jewish Councils that were supposed to administrate Jewish life became administrators of Jewish death: helping to sort out property holdings, finding Jews who were in hiding, even organizing the train transports themselves. She reflects on the bitter irony that the Nazis had succeeded in making Jews into their own murderers.
