On October 7, Hamas fighters breached the Gaza jail fence, launching a coordinated attack on at the least seven Israeli navy installations and greater than 20 surrounding residential communities. Over 1000 Israeli residents, each civilian and navy, in addition to dozens of international nationals, had been killed within the assault. Some 240 others had been taken captive. Caught off guard and in disarray, the Israeli navy responded to the assault in a frenzy, firing indiscriminately on breached localities, slaying Israeli captives alongside Hamas fighters within the course of. It took the Israeli forces practically a day to recapture all misplaced territory and safe the Gaza perimeter.
Following Hamas’s unprecedented incursion, Israel’s public relations equipment launched a misinformation marketing campaign geared toward inciting concern and fury and commenced to unfold unverified atrocity propaganda. The marketing campaign, involving tales of infants being “beheaded en masse”, “burned” and “held on a clothesline”, helped rework the Israeli public’s shock into genocidal tribalism and diverted consideration from Israel’s political, intelligence and navy blunders that paved the best way for the assault within the first place. The marketing campaign additionally helped the federal government garner essential public assist for mass mobilisation of reserve models which made the ensuing full-scale floor invasion of the Gaza Strip attainable.
After securing unconditional navy, political and diplomatic backing of its imperial sponsors within the West, most notably in Washington, and below the pretext of countering Hamas and rescuing captives, Israel then initiated what has since been precisely described as an AI-guided “mass assassination marketing campaign” in Gaza.
Ten weeks on, most of Gaza is now destroyed, practically 20,000 Palestinians are lifeless with many extra nonetheless below the rubble, and the world continues to look at a genocide unfold in actual time. Inspecting these occasions via a behavioural-neuroscientific lens may supply insights into the Zionist settler colonialist dynamic typically and the actual motivations behind Israel’s present genocidal acts in Gaza, in addition to potential paths ahead.
The pillars of Zionist propaganda
In response to historic trauma, Jewish individuals have a deep concern of anti-Semitism. Within the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this concern, together with disdain for oppressors, led to the formation of autonomous Jewish self-defence teams in numerous geographies.
Zionism, a European colonial motion, recognised the potential of this dynamic. It syncretised Jewish eager for security and self-defence with white supremacist, messianic and fascistic ideologies. This synthesis birthed a brand new, nationalist Jewish identification that equates Jewish security with the development of an exclusivist homeland in Palestine via the displacement of the area’s Indigenous populations.
Settler colonial endeavours sometimes rely on depicting the focused territory as “uninhabited”, and its present inhabitants as inhuman barbarians unworthy of any land.
This portrayal allowed Zionists to displace the Indigenous inhabitants of Palestine with out ethical qualms, portraying the institution of Israel not because the destruction of a individuals however as the development of a “villa within the jungle”.
Throughout the Israeli society grounded in land and useful resource theft, offensive aggression below the guise of “self-defence” (as in “Israel Defence Power”) has been rewarded and bolstered from the very starting and consequently turned a routine a part of life. By reinstating concern and hijacking trauma related to previous and current destructive experiences of Jewish individuals, Zionist leaders ensured the settler inhabitants’s continued assist for aggressive, expansionist, hegemonic, genocidal policies and shielded their corruption and different prison endeavours from public scrutiny.
To keep up Israel’s violently oppressive established order and increase the territory of the settler colony, Zionists opportunistically conflated their colonial ideology with Judaism.
Citing divine dispensation, radical, far-right settlers have been inspired to grab hilltops on Palestinian land, expel these residing there, and kind unlawful outposts. These outposts are later fortified by the Israeli navy and finally “legalised” by the Zionist state.
Past justifying violent land theft, the conflation of Zionism and Judaism serves to delegitimise Indigenous resistance by equating any criticism of Zionism or Israel’s insurance policies in the direction of the Palestinians as an assault on Jews. Additional, it hinders anticolonial resistance by portraying a political wrestle over land and sources between occupying settlers backed by imperial forces and an Indigenous-occupied individuals as a supposed historical spiritual “battle” between equals.
This conflation encourages Zionist appropriation and exceptionalisation of Jewish victimhood. Israeli hasbara presents the Holocaust as an unparalleled genocide, granting Jews particular sufferer standing. This narrative justifies privileges, reductions and allowances for Israel because the “Jewish state” constructed to make sure the protection of Jews, on the expense of Indigenous Palestinians. Notably, Zionist revisionism usually neglects and downplays Nazi crimes in opposition to different oppressed teams, together with communists, socialists, Roma, disabled people, LGBTQI and African Germans.
The liberal wing of Zionism serves to whitewash the reactionary core of the motion and conceal its true goals – expansionism and apartheid. Misleadingly, Liberal Zionists painting Zionism as an ideology aligned with democratic, progressive values and human rights, falsely projecting a real dedication to peace, justice and full integration into the Center East.
Worry and genocidal fervour
Till October 7, Israel upheld its founding aspiration, imposing a doctrine of endless occupation whereas oscillating between implicit and specific types of genocide, the latter usually described as “mowing the garden” in reference to Israel’s periodical assaults on Gaza since its 2005 “withdrawal” from the besieged Palestinian enclave. Throughout this time, Israeli Zionists reaped the advantages of Palestinian land and its sources in a contemporary, prosperous, supposedly democratic client paradise, fostering sturdy connections and identification with white US and Europe and oil/cash-rich Gulf monarchies, moderately than its quick neighbours.
On October 7, intense concern and shock gripped Israeli society, presenting Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right authorities with a golden alternative to quash rising dissent in opposition to corruption, and please his coalition membe rs with a genocidal land seize.
Worry in Israel is sustained via militarisation, anti-Palestinian narratives, reframing resistance as “terrorism,” remembering previous atrocities, specializing in perceived threats and selling segregation, ie, apartheid. Persistent concern induces signs akin to Publish-Traumatic Stress Dysfunction (PTSD), making the Israeli inhabitants vulnerable to aggression masked as “self-defence”.
The poisonous mixture of concern, dehumanising propaganda, rewards for aggression and intense apartheid has bred an absence of empathy in Israelis towards Palestinians. Regardless of claiming the Gaza battle as “self-defence”, Israeli leaders overtly blame Palestinian society as a complete, basically sanctioning collective punishment of civilians. Day by day, Israeli institutional leaders mock Palestinian tradition and cheerlead the torture, displacement and annihilation of Palestinians, revealing a disturbing genocidal mindset.
The trail ahead
On October 7, the rigorously constructed Zionist facade of incremental genocide inside a liberal/democratic framework collapsed, exposing Israel’s genocidal and fascistic core. Zionists in Israel and past didn’t mourn the tip of this charade, and as a substitute celebrated their newfound freedom to kill and destroy Palestinians with none restraint or pretence. This growth not solely poses a menace of elimination to the Palestinian individuals however for the reason that Occupied Territories are used as a laboratory for the event and testing of latest navy know-how and methods, it may additionally set the stage for comparable violent escalations in opposition to oppressed communities within the World South in addition to in opposition to BIPOC and immigrant communities inside the World North.
Israel’s genocidal behaviour in Gaza and elsewhere in historic Palestine resonates with patterns seen within the Stanford jail experiment and the Milgram obedience examine. Within the latter, people, swayed by authority, had administered probably deadly shocks to different contributors.
For Israelis to interrupt their habit to aggression, they would want to undergo a technique of deprogramming and decolonisation. This could require them to embrace the reality in regards to the historical past and nature of their nation, decide to honest accountability, recognise the humanity of Palestinians, and empathise with their struggling and plight. As soon as the oppressive construction, Zionism, is disassembled, it may be successfully dismantled, paving the best way for a technique of rehumanisation and reconciliation via using empathy. Liberation, reconciliation and an finish to Israel’s genocidal violence can solely be achieved inside a steadfast and unwavering anti-Zionist framework that aligns with wider leftist, antiracist, anticolonial values.
Devoted to the late Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.