I don't think either thing there is what's going on, and I think ultimately it is possible to make sense of things. Israel's main motivation is neither "evil for evil's sake" nor Lebensraum; it's fear and hatred. Actually I think Germany also wasn't really evil for its own sake; they were also more motivated by hatred.

Maybe the difference sounds academic but it's not - people who want to be evil for its own sake can't be denazified/whatever the name that will be given to removing the hate from the Israeli regime. Some hateful people, however, can still be brought back to humanity by promoting empathy.

Israeli Jews generally (obviously not all) hate the Palestinians for October the 7th and previous attacks going back decades. It doesn't matter to them what Israel has done to Palestinians before or since - they have been attacked, they suffered, they want a) to prevent it happening again and b) revenge. So questions of "how will we use the land if we bomb it to smithereens" are not even secondary, not even tertiary, they come way down the list of priorities.

There are two smart Israeli takes on this:

1. You don't win security by enacting ever greater atrocities against your enemy - that just ensures their children hate you forever
2. Actually, you do win security by enacting the greatest atrocity imaginable, because if there are no Palestinians, there can be no threat from Palestinian attacks.

Clearly some evil people in the Israeli government subscribe to option 2. Very few people subscribe to option 1. Sadly, option 2 does actually make sense if they can pull it off before the world gets off its ass.

So the evil is not for its own sake - it stems from the fear and from the hatred. Fear of attack creates an incentive to commit the ultimate evil of genocide. Hatred of those who attacked them creates an incentive for cruelty - what you see from Ben Gvir going around and performatively abusing prisoners and so on. These are evil acts, but they do make sense.