Hannah Arendt Warned Us — How Israel Normalises Sadism in the Service of Its Settler Colonial Machine
A state or a group fighting a genuine war of survival — however brutal — has the logic of survival on its side. The brutality of resistance is directly proportionate to the brutality and injustice inflicted by perpetrators. A woman who survives decades of domestic violence and control may one day take up a weapon against her abuser. Whilst domestic abuse and control are disturbingly common, violent resistance by victims is rare. When a victim resorts to extreme and possibly lethal action against her abuser, it is because of the cumulative and escalating abuse and harm, and because the perpetrator brutally quashed and punished every previous attempt to resist — no matter how modest.
Bottom of Form
In any system where the stronger party exploits their power to abuse the weaker, it is the perpetrator who is responsible for the extreme actions the victim is driven to take just to survive, or attempt to liberate themselves. And yet throughout human history we have routinely blamed, maligned and abandoned victims. The evidence is overwhelming, historically and clinically, and it’s one of our greatest deficiencies as a species: humanity is perversely biased in favour of abusers psychologically and structurally. It’s a pattern I’ve spent my professional and personal life witnessing, observing, and working against.
Israel is committing the worst crimes and depravities imaginable against a captive people with complete impunity. When Israel’s victims resist — and they have no other choice — they are maligned, dehumanised and punished. Those who try to support them are maligned, dehumanised and often punished too.
A central part of Israel’s fraudulent framing is the pretence of victimhood. Jews as a group were victims historically. But Israel was never a victim. From its birth as a settler-colonial project, Israel was always the perpetrator. Israel has no right to cloak itself in Jewish victimhood. Positioning itself as a victim is a calculated lie. Perpetrators always lie and conceal their crimes. As a powerful settler-coloniser, Israel is perpetrating a colossal crime against humanity. Supported and armed by key Western governments, chiefly the US, Israel holds all the power in this abusive system. In a world already biased in favour of abusers, this works. Israel is protected and enabled. Its victims are abandoned to suffering and erasure.
Sadism in the Service of Genocide
When I watch footage of Israeli soldiers filming themselves in the ruins of Palestinian homes, posing with children’s toys, trying on women’s underwear, celebrating over bodies, smiling as they lounge on living room furniture outside a home that was just bombed to rubble — when I see videos of soldiers attacking Palestinian men, women and children in the colonised West Bank — I see something that reaches beyond political analysis. As a psychotherapist, what I see on display is psychopathology — diseased human psychology.
There is a distinction between a predator and a sadist. A lion killing an antelope isn’t a moral issue. No matter how sorry we feel for the antelope — we know the lion is not evil. The lion is a lethal predator, but there is no malice in its actions.
What we are watching in Israel is something different. There isn’t even an attempt to hide the pleasure the politicians and the soldiers take in their abuse of Palestinians. The filming. The social media posts. The statements from politicians and ordinary citizens go beyond any security rationale into explicit, ostentatious enjoyment of human suffering.
While bombs were still being dropped, Israeli Defence Minister Katz announced that Shia residents south of the Litani River in Lebanon would not be allowed to return until unspecified Israeli conditions were met — and then ordered the accelerated demolition of their homes, explicitly invoking Gaza’s Beit Hanoun and Rafah as the model. This is not the language of a state defending itself. It is the language of a state that has given itself permission to enjoy the destruction.
Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, provides the clearest possible illustration of what this enjoyment looks like at the highest level of government. In May 2026 he posted a video of himself walking among foreign activists from the Gaza aid flotilla — bound, kneeling, faces to the floor — waving an Israeli flag over them and smiling as a bound woman was shoved to the ground by masked officers. He told the guards around him not to be bothered by their screams. Ben Gvir is seen waving a large Israeli flag and shouting in Hebrew, “Welcome to Israel! We are in charge here!” Israel’s national anthem is blasted over a loudspeaker, and he shouts “Am Yisrael Chai”1 at a bound detainee trying to argue with him. This was not leaked footage. He posted it himself as if it were something to be proud of. Ben-Gvir reportedly physically forced his way onto the naval ship to film this, pushing aside a lieutenant colonel who tried to block him and asked him to wait for approval. That detail underscores that this wasn’t incidental access — he went out of his way to create this footage.
Days earlier, Ben-Gvir filmed himself entering the solitary confinement cell of Marwan Barghouti — the Palestinian leader many regard as the closest equivalent to Mandela, held since 2004 and now barely recognisable, wasted and gaunt. Ben-Gvir told him: “Whoever messes with the people of Israel... we will obliterate them.” He posted that too. And in prisons across Israel, he has had oversized photographs of Gaza’s ruins hung in the corridors Palestinian prisoners must walk through to reach the yard — pointing to one, in footage he released himself, and noting with apparent satisfaction that a prisoner had recognised his own destroyed home. “This is how it’s supposed to look,” he said.
As a clinician I have no doubt at all that Ben-Gvir is a diagnosable psychopath. He is having the time of his life right now, enjoying what every psychopath craves — complete control over helpless, captive people. He isn’t doing what he does out of patriotism. He is fulfilling his depraved fantasies, they just happen to also serve the aims of the state of Israel. We know psychopaths film themselves in the act of abusing others so that they can watch the recordings over and over again at their leisure. This is common practice among pedophiles. I can’t help but wonder what else Ben Gvir is doing when he is not in front of cameras.
This is not an aberration or a rogue soldier acting outside the chain of command. This is a government minister. It is the policy-making level of the Israeli state, on camera, enjoying itself. An Al Jazeera analysis of the episode captured precisely what distinguishes Ben-Gvir from the rest of Israel’s political establishment. For Netanyahu, the sin was not the torture or humiliation of the activists; the sin was broadcasting it to the world. Ben-Gvir, by contrast, performs these abuses for his domestic audience, confident he will face no real consequences. One wants the cruelty hidden. The other wants it seen. But no one thinks there is anything wrong with the cruelty itself.
Manufacturing the Capacity for Cruelty
Recently, a reader alerted me to a phenomenon I hadn’t heard of before, that is confirmed in Israel’s media and on the Israeli government’s website. In the past ten years there have been widespread cases of the burning alive of animals, especially stray cats and dogs, in bonfires on the festival of Lag Ba’omer (ל״ג בעומר). When I was a child, we all loved Lag Ba’omer. You got to stay out later than usual, outdoors with your friends, eating potatoes you cooked in the fire, just having fun. I do remember that we burned effigies of whoever happened to be Israel’s enemy leader at the time, and sang songs about killing all Arabs. It was ‘fun’.
But I never remember anyone doing what people have been doing in Israel for the past ten years — throwing live animals into bonfires. It’s such a problem, that the government and animal rights organisations have had to step in and tell people to keep their pets indoors. There are some attempts at prevention, but I’m not hearing about anyone being prosecuted or sent to prison for this. The fact that it has been going on for ten years points to a practice that is taught and passed on generationally.
The reports suggest it is teenagers who do this — young people on the cusp of starting their military service. The fourteen-year-olds of ten years ago are twenty-four-year-olds post compulsory service, and serving in the Israeli military right now perpetrating the atrocities we see in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. This correlates perfectly with the kind of mentality you need to foster if you want soldiers ready and willing to commit harm, and be desensitised to the suffering of other human beings. Psychopathic systems require people to ‘pass tests’ — to demonstrate they would be prepared to do anything to defend their group. It’s the same as when a new gang member is ordered to beat up, or rape someone to prove they are worthy of becoming a member and be trusted by the group. Whilst not an official state policy, this ten-year-old horrific phenomenon is a natural sociological development that reflects a society that requires psychopathic traits as a necessity for completing its settler-colonial project. Practising on helpless animals, or witnessing their abuse without taking any action, desensitises people to the abuse of children and people in general. People with empathy would not be able to carry out Israel’s plan to complete the erasure of the Palestinians and their removal from all of historic Palestine.
A UN commission of inquiry found that Israel’s use of sexual violence was systemic, serving to “dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part.” Multiple detainees independently described dogs being used to rape them at Sde Teiman — Israel’s concentration and torture camp — one Palestinian lawyer told Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor he witnessed it directly: a captain sprayed something on a stripped, restrained man, then “unleashed the dog on him. The dog raped the young man, literally speaking.”
A 35-year-old detainee named Amir gave a similar account to Euro-Med Monitor: stripped naked with others, a dog urinated on him, then “raped me, penetrated my anus in a trained manner while I was being beaten. This continued for several minutes.”
The choice of weapon here is not incidental. In Jewish religious tradition, dogs are considered the most despised of all animals — seen as the dirtiest, the most inferior, and possessing the vilest characteristics imaginable. To use a dog to rape a Palestinian man is not simply torture. For those capable of conceiving it, it is the deliberate construction of the ultimate possible humiliation, drawing on a symbolic vocabulary embedded in the perpetrators’ own religious culture. There is also a psychosexual dimension to this. Men do not arrive at the idea of training an animal to rape another man without some relationship — however repressed, however disavowed — to the act itself. In a society where religious orthodoxy demands the suppression of homoerotic desire, its eruption in this form, as an instrument of domination and humiliation rather than desire, is not a contradiction. It is exactly how suppressed impulses find their way into psychopathic expression: redirected, weaponised, and aimed at those the perpetrator has already been taught hold no human worth. There is no other way to say this — it is disgusting beyond belief.
This sadism is not only individual pathology. It is also a cultural product — the predictable outcome of decades of systematic dehumanisation embedded in education, military culture, political discourse, and media. Israeli children are taught from infancy that Palestinians are not human beings like them. The result is not only a society containing and enabling psychopaths — though it clearly does — but something in some ways more alarming: a collective suspension of normal moral functioning toward a specific group, maintained and reproduced by the state itself.
Whilst there are clear cases of individual psychopathy among politicians, prison guards, soldiers and others in Israel’s genocidal apparatus, not every member of a genocidal society is a psychopath. But you don’t need a majority of psychopaths for atrocity to become normalised and sustained. All you need is psychopathic leadership at the top, and a population that is willing to collude, turn a blind eye, distract itself, or that has been rendered unable, or is too stupefied to express empathy and resist.
In Israel this happens on multiple levels simultaneously. Formal coercion — the harassment and arrests of dissenters — has increased in recent years. But the most effective and successful method to enforce conformity has always been the informal kind. Social and professional ostracism, the labels of ‘traitor’ and ‘antisemite’ used against anyone who steps out of line, mob attacks — oppression by consensus — has been the norm in Israeli society from the start. In Israel, simply expressing empathy for Palestinians can get you into trouble, officially or unofficially.
Hannah Arendt Warned Us
When I was at school, and later during my university years my Zionist teachers taught that the Nazis were not content merely to kill Jews. Humiliation and the deliberate destruction of human dignity were a big part of the project itself — shaving heads, tattooing numbers, rape, medical experiments, degradation in every conceivable form, and all manner of deprivation before death. The cruelty was not incidental to the killing. It was the point. This is what we were taught marked Nazism as the deepest possible evil.
Israel is now doing precisely this to the Palestinians and the audacity of it is staggering. Somehow, in the mind of Israeli society, what they are doing is different, even as it follows the same logic their own education identifies as the marker of absolute evil. This is exactly what Hannah Arendt’s warning was about. It was never only about Germany. The capacity for moral failure is a general human capacity, not a German one. Ideological certainty, dehumanisation of an out-group, bureaucratic distribution and abdication of responsibility create the conditions, and then ordinary humans’ collusion does the rest.
Hannah Arendt offers a warning from history that the depraved behaviour we see towards the Palestinians and activists can happen anywhere, done or enabled by anyone, including — especially — those who consider themselves immune because of what was done to Jewish people in the past. It’s hardly surprising that Israel vehemently rejected Arendt and her message. Israel should have listened to her warnings, but it had to reject them because by the time she offered them, the settler-colonial project was in full force.
And there is no doubt that psychopathy has always played a central role in settler colonial and colonial projects. Only psychopaths, devoid of all capacity for empathy and normal human emotions, could possibly conceive of projects whose explicit aim is conquest, theft, ethnic cleansing, subjugation and domination. Only psychopaths can take pleasure in causing suffering, and normalising it. When psychologically healthy human beings — even those with trauma — witness, collude with, or participate in acts that humiliate and harm others, they inevitably suffer from something that in the clinical literature is called ‘moral injury’. Moral injury is a recognised form of trauma that comes from acting immorally, or witnessing an action that violates one’s own moral code.
The danger in racism, or any campaign that promotes the dehumanisation, subjugation and humiliation of a group of people is that they enable and encourage psychopaths and psychopathic behaviours. Once the normal rules of society break down or are suspended, the psychopaths come out to play. It is not possible to orchestrate a settler-colonial project — a genocide — that is ‘humane’, ‘gentle’ or ‘benevolent’. Once the evil system is established, psychopaths come out of the shadows to find that their ‘skill set’ is suddenly desirable. They then assume formal and informal roles in a system that is welcoming and grateful to them. Israel will not stop its own psychopaths, because it needs them. They are the only ones capable of bringing Israel’s aims to completion. There is a reason the likes of Ben Gvir and Netanyahu are in power. It’s not a temporary ‘deviation to the right’. Without psychopaths there is no settler colonialism.
For everyone else, distance becomes the mechanism of survival. A pilot far above a city can avoid thinking about the human beings he is slaughtering as he releases his payload. During my own military service, between 1982 and 1984, a friend who was a naval officer told me he was glad to be stationed below deck when his ship fired on apartment blocks in Beirut — because then he didn’t have to see the damage he was inflicting. That is moral injury finding its only available exit: not to refuse, but not to look.
And yet the Israelis I grew up among, and the Israelis who populate today’s social media with their celebrations of Palestinian suffering, do not think of themselves as evil. They think of themselves as good, loyal people, defending their families, reclaiming their ancestral homeland, doing what ‘must be done’. They preposterously suggest that I, or indeed anyone who speaks against what they’re doing and who supports their victims, is bad. They dare to claim that supporting the Palestinians and opposing Israel is ‘radical’, extremist and unfair to ‘poor little Israel’.
The British Empire never thought of itself as evil either. It thought of itself as superior, divinely mandated, and entitled to the resources it took and to the removal of anyone who stood in its way. It is not a coincidence. Britain gave birth to Zionism and to the state of Israel. It offered a blueprint for its political system, its bureaucracy and its military and it inspired everything Israel is doing. The moral architecture is identical, and it’s hardly surprising that Britain’s leaders on either side of the political divide are still enabling Israel and doing absolutely nothing to stop it.
1 Am Yisrael Chai (עם ישראל חי) — ‘the people of Israel lives’ — is an old Hebrew phrase regularly proclaimed by Zionists who pretend that their project is about the survival of the Jewish people.
Photo: Palestinian prisoners lying on the floor bound and blindfolded in Sde Teiman Prison, Source: Middle East Eye.
