Richard Seymour, 14 October 2025
‘It is clear to everyone today that the right-wing was right regarding the political issue and regarding the Palestinian issue. Today it is simple, you go anywhere and they tell you to destroy them. In the kibbutz, they tell you to destroy them. My friends at the state attorney’s office, who’ve fought with me in political issues, in debates, said to me: “Moshe, it’s clear that we need to destroy all Gazans.”’
– MK Moshe Saada, Channel 14, 2 January 2024
I.
What can the captives of Sde Teiman have thought when, on 29 July 2024, protesters flooded the military base? Lying bound, blindfolded and face down on the floor, having suffered torture and rape at the hands of their jailers, they would have heard the assembled crowd riot not for prisoner freedom but for jailer impunity.
Earlier that month, Israeli soldiers from a unit known as Force 100 at the Sde Teiman military prison in the Negev had dragged a prisoner up from the floor, concealed him from CCTV behind a wall of shields, and gang-raped him. What they did left him unable to walk, with a ruptured intestine, severe injuries to his anus and lungs, and broken ribs.
The assault was hardly unique. Sde Teiman is one of the worst of what B’TSelem calls a ‘network of torture camps’ run by the Israeli military. Prisoners spend their days blindfolded, shackled, often in diapers. They are routinely beaten, sleep-deprived, burned with cigarettes, electrocuted, held in stress positions or sodomised with blunt objects. Palestinians call places like Sde Teiman ‘death camps’: as US journalist Alex Press points out, nine prisoners died in Guantanamo over twenty years, compared to sixty detainees killed in Israeli prisons over a period of ten months.
The prisoner was treated in a civilian hospital, where staff leaked details of his injuries to Physicians for Human Rights. The CCTV footage of the assault was broadcast by Israel’s Channel 12. On 29 July, evidently in an effort to contain the diplomatic fall-out, Israeli military police were sent to the base to arrest nine soldiers. As CNN’s Jeremy Diamond put it, this marked ‘an extraordinarily rare pursuit of accountability at the Sde Teiman facility’.
The soldiers barricaded themselves in the facility and pepper-sprayed those sent to arrest them. When news of the arrests broke, protesters – including soldiers from Force 100 and Knesset members like Heritage Secretary Amichai Eliyahu of Jewish Power and Likud’s Tally Gotliv – broke into the base and occupied in protest while police looked on impassively. Protesters accused the Military Advocate General of being a lover of ‘Nukhba’. (Technically, Nukhba references the naval unit of Hamas’s military wing. But, as B’TSelem documents, the prisoners are mostly civilians picked up on a variety of pretexts, sometimes simply for expressing sympathy for the plight of their fellow Palestinians. ‘Nukhba’ has become a term of racist contempt.)
When Israeli rightists speak about the torture of Palestinians, nothing, not even their relish, puts a dent in their sense of wounded rectitude. Gotliv, broadcast live from the protest, bitterly gurns in a manner sorely redolent of Unionist politicians during the ‘Troubles’. Those who ‘raped, slaughtered and abused our people have found a new method’, she rages. ‘They go and whine and snitch that some soldier touched them.’ In the television studios, Israel Yalom journalist Yehuda Schlesinger says the ‘only problem’ with the rape is that it is ‘not standard state policy’ because ‘in general they deserve it, and this is great revenge’. A mask-wearing soldier from Force 100 is invited to a panel discussion to berate the journalists for releasing ‘edited’ footage. In the Knesset, Likud politician Hanoch Milwidsky stertorously urges his colleagues to go on a legislative ‘strike’ until this ‘crazy’ situation is resolved. Asked by Palestinian legislator Ahmad Tibi if it is permissible to insert an explosive into a person’s rectum, Milwidsky shouts: ‘Yes! If he is a Nukhba, everything is legitimate to do! Everything!’ Among the general public, 65 per cent of Israeli Jews oppose prosecution of the soldiers, just as they had previously opposed the prosecution of Elor Azaria, caught murdering a Palestinian man in Hebron in 2016. In such a militarised society, impunity is a national value.
It is vanishingly unlikely that any soldier will be prosecuted. The main culprit, Meir Ben-Shitrit, was released early. His interrogators, he said, were ‘really nice … You see the support … With a hand on their heart, like, telling you “thank you”’.
‘A second later I accidentally ran over him with a Merkava Mark 4 tank weighing 65 tons, 1500 horse power :)’
– Israeli soldier, Daniel Lurie, posting footage of a dead Palestinian, 4 March 2024
II.
It is the world’s first live-streamed genocide. Its victims, says International Court of Justice prosecutor Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, are ‘broadcasting their own destruction in real time’. Might it also be the world’s first shameless genocide?
For while Palestinians document their daily terrors in the wan hope of eliciting aid from the outside world, Israeli soldiers gleefully post evidence of their own war crimes. They can be seen snickering as they blow up civilian buildings, pawing through the possessions of murdered or expelled Palestinians, giggling as they parade in stolen lingerie or dress up as a Palestinian school kid, and performing skits in the desolate, dust-caked ruins of playgrounds and classrooms as though to affirm the old hymn of the Israeli far-right: ‘there are no children left in Gaza’.
Their leaders, political and military, have declared their genocidal intent so audibly – remembrance of ‘Amalek’, fighting ‘human animals,’ making Gaza a ‘slaughterhouse’, erasing Gaza ‘from the face of the earth’, no ‘innocents’ in Gaza – that even the cautious ICJ felt compelled to grant South Africa’s application to prosecute the state of Israel on charges under the Genocide Convention. Their civilian supporters rave at the Karam Abu Salem crossing to block aid trucks trying to relieve a population on the brink of starvation and epidemic. They riot for impunity for torturers and rapists. They swagger and strut, like children imitating the fabled omnipotence of adults, soliciting, and seemingly revelling in, global disgust.
We cannot be touched, they seem to say, by the shaming gaze of the world. An example of this sort of gaze is given by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness: the person caught peeping through the keyhole, once caught up in the act, is suddenly touched in the core of his being. The inefficacy of this gaze, Sheldon George argues in Trauma and Race, is terribly dangerous: the person without shame is capable of limitless savagery. And that is exactly what is implied by the apparent impotence, both in Israel and its patron states, of the once regnant discourses of law, democracy and human rights.
And yet, there is also a curious game of revelation and concealment in Israeli public discourse, of flaunting it and burying it. There has been, amid all the macho braggadocio and public sadism, an extraordinary degree of official censorship. Most foreign press have been prohibited from entering Gaza. An unprecedented 116 journalists, mostly Palestinian, were assassinated in just ten months. Israel shut down Al Jazeera’s office, blocked its websites and outlawed the use of its footage by domestic channels. Within Israel, journalist Anat Saragusti writes, the IDF line rules: ‘Hebrew-speaking Israelis watching television news are not exposed at all to what’s going on in Gaza’. Domestically, the state has cracked down on what meagre, generally apolitical dissent there is – since Operation Cast Lead, Israeli wars have been supported by at least 90 per cent of Jewish Israelis. Nor has Israel spared any effort to get social industry bosses to extirpate pro-Palestinian sentiment on their platforms: Meta has a pattern of assenting to 81 per cent of requests received from Israel to remove content, and Human Rights Watch has documented pervasive censorship of Palestine content on both Facebook and Instagram.
Even those cackling memes posted by Israeli soldiers generally don’t document their most serious crimes, from the sniping of children and grandmothers, to flour massacres, to the mass graves discovered at hospitals destroyed by the IDF. And they appear to be designed more for a domestic Israeli audience than for a world that ‘wouldn’t understand’, a way of soliciting complicity through enjoyment: ‘blutkitt’ as Nuremberg prosecutor Leo Frank called it. For international audiences, there is denial: ‘there is no limit to how much we do to protect innocent civilians’, a Kahanist soldier tweets in English. In Hebrew, responding to an Israeli drawing attention to the sniping of civilians, he brags: ‘I am proud to serve in the most valuable army in the world.’ These videos are, moreover, tacitly licensed from above. The IDF, rather than treating such production as embarrassing exuberances to be controlled, busied itself with producing its own gore porn through an unofficial and initially disavowed Telegram channel known as ’72 Virgins’. This was, if anything, more explicit than the material produced by the soldiers. ‘Burning their own mother … You won’t believe the video we got! You can hear the crunch of their bones.’ ‘Exterminating the cockroaches … exterminating the Hamas rats’. ‘Garbage juice!!!! Another dead terrorist!! You have to watch it with the sound, you’ll die laughing.’ Only after several months of indifference, and only following the ICJ’s provisional ruling against Israel, did the IDF leadership finally urge soldiers ‘not to film revenge videos’.
The soldiers, the military leaders, the journalists and politicians behind this genocide yearn to shout it from the rooftops, but dare not tell the whole truth. They want to brag, while also protesting their innocence. This is a vital clue not to take at face value the Israeli performance of invulnerability: the shamelessness of Israel’s genocide is far more contradictory than it appears.
‘To wipe off the memory of Amalek! To take revenge on the gentiles!’
– Israeli soldier, upon blowing up a Palestinian house, 4 July 2024
III.
Genocide is habit-forming. Erwin Staub, in his work on the psychology of perpetrators, points to a ‘continuum of destruction’ wherein annihilation is prepared by ‘a history of aggression’. As perpetrators hurt their victims, they form the dispositions giving rise to motives for further killing. Having killed makes it easier to kill, just as being victimised makes one easier to victimise. A participant in My Lai quoted by Robert Jay Lifton in Home From the War says: if we shoot and bomb them every night, ‘how can they be worth so much?’
A population must be prepared for the psychological rigours of an extermination campaign through a long process of brutalisation. It must also be willing to bear the costs. For, whatever their formal rationales, genocides are expensive outbursts of ensanguined exuberance. As Staub points out, comparing the Cambodian, Armenian and Nazi genocides, they impair the fabric of society, destroy essential functions and waste desperately needed resources. Raul Hilberg draws attention to the financial strain of the Holocaust and its burden on a ‘bureaucratic machine that was already straining to fulfil the requirements of the battlefronts’. A study of the macroeconomic toll of genocides by Dimitrios Soudis et al shows that the destruction of total factor productivity leads to plunging activity in the first years and no recovery thereafter as long as destruction goes on. As one would expect, Israel’s economy has been severely damaged by its genocidal war, its credit-rating downgraded, and tens of thousands of businesses made bankrupt. The total costs of the war may exceed $55 billion according to the Bank of Israel. Were it not for $17.9 billion in aid from the United States through the first year of war, the situation would be worse. Tellingly, none of this was sufficient to diminish support for the genocide.
The process by which a population is so conditioned is sometimes called ‘genocidal priming’. According to Alexander Laban Hinton’s study of the Cambodian genocide, Why Did They Kill?, this is enabled by cultural models of ‘disproportionate revenge’ which can be activated in the moment of mass killing. Hinton describes the popular Cambodian story of Tum Teav, in which King Reamea exacts revenge on a disobedient governor by obliterating seven generations of his family line. In the Gaza genocide, the Biblical story of Amalek plays an analogous role. For while it hardly created Israel’s militarism, pervasive racism and intensely violent relations with Palestinians and the wider Middle East, in this genocide it has functioned as a symbolic node: gathering, channelling and justifying the society’s killing energy.
‘You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible’, Benjamin Netanyahu reminded the Israeli public in his speech announcing the invasion of Gaza on 28 October. ‘And we do remember.’ In a letter sent to soldiers and officers five days later, he repeated the reference. Netanyahu, a sophisticated operator, would have understood how the Israeli Right and, more importantly, the soldiers would take this. According to the Bible, the Amalekites were a nomadic tribe inhabiting the Negev and Sinai, who had ambushed the Israelites on their exodus from Egypt. Ignoring all customary laws of war, they attacked without cause and targeted the weakest first. In the passage from Exodus (17:14-16) referenced by Netanyahu, the Israelites are commanded to ‘blot out’ all memory of Amalek. Not once, but repeatedly: ‘the Lord will fight Amalek generation after generation’. The command is repeated in Deuteronomy (24:17–19) with the injunction: ‘Don’t forget!’ One is to remember to blot out the memory. In 1 Samuel 15:3, King Saul is ordered to destroy Amalek, and to ‘slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass’. When Saul disobeys by allowing the Amalek king to survive, he forfeits his kingdom and the prophet Samuel hacks the king to pieces in a public square.
Biblical sources yield to interpretive commentary, and it is not incumbent on any believer to construe this as a divine command to commit genocide. It may be interpreted, Israeli philosopher Avi Saga points out, as ‘the embodiment of a metaphysical struggle taking place in the divine world’. Or, as Joshua Cohen notes, Amalek may be construed as the ‘spirit of military aggression’, so that believers are enjoined to ‘forsake the ways of war’. The Israeli and Jewish Right is more literalist: the Palestinians are the descendants of Amalek. ‘The Arabs engage in typical Amalek behavior’, Likud’s Moshe Feiglin told former IDF soldier Jeffrey Goldberg. ‘I can’t prove this genetically, but this is the behavior of Amalek.’ Benzi Lieberman, chairman of the council of settlers, was no less blunt. ‘The Palestinians are Amalek! We will destroy them. We won’t kill them all. But we will destroy their ability to think as a nation. We will destroy Palestinian nationalism.’ ‘Amalek is simply reality’, writes the American Orthodox rabbi Daniel Lappin, scoffing at the ‘doctrine of “proportional response”’. ‘There are nations whose ideas are so evil that we cannot live with them – either they survive, or we do.’ Shortly before Netanyahu’s speech, Likud MK and former Israel Yalomeditor Boaz Bismuth had raged against ‘the cruel and monstrous “innocent citizens” from Gaza’. It was, he said, ‘forbidden to show mercy to cruel people, there is no place for any humanitarian gesture – the memory of Amalek must be protested.’
After Netanyahu’s speech, the destruction of Amalek immediately had a practical relevance. This was understood by the Israeli soldiers singing and chanting ‘we know our motto: there are no uninvolved civilians’ and calling ‘to wipe off the seed of Amalek’. It was grasped by Colonel Yogev Bar-Sheshet, deputy head of COGAT, who told soldiers: ‘Whoever returns here, if they return here after, will find scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future’. Colonel Erez Eshel likewise exhorted: ‘Vengeance is a great value. There is vengeance over what they did to us … This place will be a fallow land. They will not be able to live here’. Yair Ben David, Commander in the 2908th Battalion, referenced another Biblical story of revenge when he said that the IDF had ‘entered Beit Hanoun and did there as Shimon and Levi did in Nablus.’ As South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice points out, the relevant passage from Genesis (34:25) explains: ’Simeon and Levi … took each his sword, came upon the city unmolested, and slew all the males.’ All of Gaza, David said, ‘should resemble Beit Hanoun’.
Soldiers were urged on from all sides. Finance minister Belazel Smotrich urged them to ‘blot out the remembrance of Amalek’. The deputy speaker of the Knesset wrote of ‘erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth’. On the Israeli television channel, Kan, children sang a ‘Friendship Song’ about the ‘annihilation’ of Gaza. On the eve of invasion, soldiers were addressed by a 95 year old veteran of the Nakba, who said: ‘wipe out their memory, their families, mothers and children’. Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, gave him a certificate of honour. Right-wing rabbis urged soldiers to take pleasure in the destruction. ‘War’, said rabbi Yigal Levinstein ‘is a great thing.’ Early in the assault, IDF rabbi Amichai Freedman said that, apart from the Israeli dead and captured, the war had given him ‘the happiest month of [his] life’. Soldiers must loot, said rabbi Yitzchak Sheilat, from the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, because ‘all the spoils must go to the king’. An Israeli soldier stationed in the north told Ha’aretz that a settler rabbi had said ‘we need to destroy and shoot everyone’, and that the rules of engagement were ‘a distorted Western morality’. Orthodox rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu exhorted soldiers to ignore ‘the rules of war’, since ‘Arabs in Gaza do not observe international conventions.’ Here was a veritable, collective foghorn of genocidal priming, blasted from every quarter of church and state.
‘If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza tomorrow, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow, I would press it in a second. I think most Israelis probably would.’
– Israeli podcaster Eytan Weinstein, 3 September 2024.
IV.
Such priming would be unnecessary if soldiers could be trusted to spontaneously avail themselves of the pleasures of transgression. Even in war, as military historian Richard Holmes documents in Acts of War, soldiers are often reluctant to kill the enemy. In Israel, while outright refusal to serve is a rare and valuable commodity, there are historical patterns of ‘grey refusal’ where soldiers persuade their commanders to let them off an operation for which they are not psychically prepared.
Even those who are politically ready to murder may still need permission to ignore their conscience, and assurance that they will not be personally culpable. It is vital for Israel’s war on Gaza that there are no written rules of engagement. Field commanders and soldiers enjoy tremendous latitude in interpreting and implementing what are nonetheless military orders. What is mandatory, as Raul Hilberg suggests in his analysis of Nazi perpetrators, is ‘also a mandate’, containing ‘broad authorisations’. The bureaucratic killer, for instance, ‘clung to his orders’ less out of fear of superiors than because ‘he feared his own conscience’: hence the ‘many requests for “authorisation”’. This enables the murderers to say they had ‘no choice’, that their actions had nothing to do with personal malice, and that they were conscientious professionals coping with a difficult situation.
Such, indeed, is the familiar rationalisation. At South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the apartheid state’s torturers and hired assassins saw themselves as committed professionals waging war against an evil, godless, ‘revolutionary onslaught’. Yet, reviewing the testimonies in Violent Accounts, Robert Kraft points to the latitude afforded those waging war on the anti-apartheid movement. Captain Jeffrey Benzien, for example, referred in his testimony to the ‘unwritten word’, the implicit, privately given instructions that allowed ‘any method’: including his own preferred method of water torture. Hilberg, likewise, describes how many of the instructions given in the preparation of the Final Solution were delivered privately, verbally, and not in official headquarters. The logic is that of the dirty secret, binding superiors and subordinates in a programme of atrocity, both legalised and illicit. In Gaza, there is ‘no direct order to take revenge’, a refusenik observes. But day to day decision-making is not determined by overt orders, but by what those orders are tacitly understood to mean. ‘You fill in the blanks’, another refusenik observed. If shooting was ‘forbidden’ on certain humanitarian routes but not expressly forbidden elsewhere, then it was ‘permitted’. Israel insists that all its operations are signed off by attorneys from the IDF’s Dabla unit, the international law department. This assiduous legalisation only subverts the law’s usual role in sublimating the drives, turning them into the empty rituals of the death-drive.
Take, for example, the routine destruction of Palestinian homes in Gaza. One of the main justifications for this is that once a house has been used by the IDF, they must leave behind no ‘intelligence markings’. Therefore, since soldiers are ordered not to leave the house as it was found, they burn them down. This, apparently acting on a narrow military rationale, also facilitates the informally stated goal of reducing Gaza to ‘scorched earth’, ‘fallow land’. Or consider the forced starvation in Gaza, whose ‘rigour, scale and speed … surpasses any other case of man-made famine in the last seventy-five years’ according to Alex de Waal. The siege on Gaza began following Israeli ‘disengagement’ in 2005. After which, in the words of Ariel Sharon advisor Doc Weisglass, Israel put ‘the Palestinians on a diet’. The resulting de-development, plunging 80 per cent of Gaza’s population into poverty, destroying the sewage infrastructure and leaving 4 per cent of the fresh water drinkable, was expedited by the use of a literal ‘calorie counter’ to precisely calibrate how much aid would get in. The stranglehold was further tightened by rules prohibiting ‘dual use’ items, a category interpreted extremely broadly by soldiers inspecting aid trucks.
Since defence minister Yoav Gallant announced a total siege on Gaza’s ‘human animals’ in October 2023, the policy of starvation has been organised through these same bureaucratic rules. Israel claims to be using the same list of banned items that it has since 2008. But when aid workers ask for clarity on what is and is not allowed, Israeli authorities reportedly say it is ‘an individual determination’. Soldiers, thus instructed, are equipped with ‘broad authorisations’ to create the state of biological emergency in which, as they know, the starving body takes forty days to die, eating its fat reserves, muscle mass, and heart to keep the brain alive. The brain finally eats itself. The body sickens and dies of what the World Organisation Against Torture calls ‘torture in slow motion’. The moral hardness of each decision to deny a truckload of aid for containing a ‘dual use’ item like scissors, abetted by orders from above, flows into a strategy demanded by Netanyahu of senior advisor Rod Dermer: to ‘thin’ Gaza’s population ‘to a minimum’.
‘I am unable to sleep if I do not see houses being destroyed in Gaza. What do I say? More houses, more buildings. I want to see more of them destroyed. I want there to be nothing for them to return to.’
– Israeli journalist Shimon Rifkin, Channel 14, 13 December 2023
V.
Not all perpetrators are equal, or equally engaged, and the psychological challenges that come with killing in the field can be avoided by gamifying the slaughter. In the first weeks of war before the ground invasion, Israel relied almost entirely on aerial bombardment guided by the AI targeting system ‘Habsora’ (‘Gospel’).
With inputs from intelligence sources, satellite imagery and mobile phone signals, the system routinely generated hundreds of fresh targets. The ‘power targets’ were those that did the most civilian damage: a high-rise building where a junior government official is said to live, a university, a bank, or a government building. During the first five days, Israel trooped a total of 6,000 bombs weighing 4,000 tons on Gaza, half of them aimed at ‘power targets’.
The automation of death has been a goal of the US military since 2004. The aim has been to progress from ‘man-in-the-loop’ technology, where a human decides what the technology does, to ‘man-on-the-loop’ system where a human can intervene but does not regularly make decisions, to full automation. In full automation, AI would have to distinguish between civilians and combatants. Even the Geneva Conventions cannot specify such a distinction, requiring that belligerents use common sense – which, of course, AI cannot even simulate. Habsora is man-in-the-loop automation: commanders decide which of the machine’s targets are to be obliterated. The feted precision of AI targeting has been shown to be a myth: a target recognition programme that was claimed to have 90 per cent accuracy turned out, with a small tweak, to be closer to 25 per cent accuracy. This does not even take into account the ‘reference class’ problem, where everything depends on what data is deemed relevant enough to feed to the machine, and how its elements are classified. The subjective inputs are inevitably contaminated by ideology and guesswork.
The chief tactical virtue of automation is not accuracy, but the inhuman speed with which it establishes probabilistic connections between datasets, enabling the aggressor to, as Maj. Matthew Volk of the US Air Force puts it, ‘create multiple dilemmas across multiple domains at an overwhelming speed’. Its virtue is damage, not accuracy: the targeting system provides a pseudo-rational occasion for attacking, but the precise target matters little when the weapon is a heavy munition causing destruction over a wide radius. As IDF spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari put it: ‘right now we’re focused on what causes maximum damage’. The overt rationale is, per the ‘Dahiya doctrine’ – named after a Beirut neighbourhood that the IDF destroyed in 2006 – to ‘create a shock’ in Palestinian civil society by destroying infrastructure and causing mass death, leading them to ‘put pressure on Hamas’.
Here, at last, is the automated apotheosis of the doctrines of Italian Fascist General Giulio Douhet. For Douhet, since war in an era of mass democracy was between peoples, the most expedient way to win was to destroy the civilian infrastructure and terrorise the population of the enemy. As Thomas Hippler points out, in Bombing the People, this wasn’t simply a nasty emanation of fascist will-to-power: it could be traced directly to the ideas of the nineteenth-century pro-colonial Left. Tested in the colonial frontiers, by the French in Syria and the British in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt and Palestine, the use of terror bombing from the air recommended itself because it cost substantially less than ground forces. It formed the basis of the area bombing of Dresden and Hamburg in World War II, as well as similar practices by the US in Korea and Vietnam, and is the original source of the Dahiya doctrine. And the defence, from Italy in Ethiopia, to the US in Vietnam and Israel in Gaza, is always that the enemy has illegally ensconced its operations in the civilian population.
As a factor in perpetrator psychology, two things about digital Douhetism are instantly arresting. First, it does not work on its own terms. The historical record, documented in gruelling detail by Marilyn B Young in Bombing Civilians and Robert Pape in Bombing to Win, is clear on this point. The idea that punishing civilians to the point of social and economic collapse will lead to a civilian revolt against the leadership and suit for peace is illogical – civilians tend to despise the bombers, not their leaders, and practise stoical resilience, not collapse – and empirically unsubstantiated. Why, then, continue to do it? The question only makes sense if we assume that the goals are rationally coercive. The orectic conditions of warfare for any national ruling class, especially genocidal warfare, include surplus cruelty as an end. All enemies, as phobic objects, elicit both desire and disgust, and the Palestinians are a particularly extimate enemy for Israeli society: its constitutive other. In any apartheid society, the felt plenitude of racial superiority depends on the existence of those who are most hated. Without their phobogenic objects, those racially marked bodies who are supposedly poor-in-world, the rulers would face a terrifying impoverishment of their own being. There would be nothing to sustain their superiority. They need those whom they most want to destroy. The flame of Zionist messianism may well have flickered out decades ago were it not for the recalcitrant and evidently unbearable existence of the Palestinian people. The advantage of digital Douhetism is that it delegates this libidinal economy to a series of objectified statistical operations, giving it the appearance of a militarily rational determination.
Second, just as the other violent abstractions of capital relieve agents of responsibility for denying someone insurance or a mortgage, AI bombing abstracts the bombers away from the killing situation. The ‘self-traumatised perpetrator’, made famous by Lifton’s studies, is averted when perpetrators operate a game-like interface, manipulating fungible digital objects. The computer scientist Noel Sharkey describes the moral effect of the resultant ‘“Playstation” mentality’, quoting a young drone ‘pilot’ based in Nevada. ‘I thought killing somebody would be this life changing experience’, he said. ‘And then I did it, and I was like “All right, whatever.”’ It was ‘like squashing an ant’: ‘you kill somebody and it’s like “All right, let’s go get some pizza.”’ The operator, spared the laborious task of reckoning with his victims, exempted from weighing ideological justifications that have been rendered as a series of technical, algorithmic functions, can kill without emotional involvement – and then get some pizza.
‘They had a ball! Obviously they can’t say that today! Nobody failed to turn up … I want to repeat that people today give a false impression when they say that the actions against the Jews were carried out unwillingly.’
– Krakow police officer, quoted in Ernst Klee et al, The Good Old Days.
VI.
And yet, manifestly, Israeli society and its military do not fully want to disown their libidinal involvement in the genocide.
Consider the wild, wild joys available to the well-built young men who occupy most of the combat positions in Gaza. The shots of adrenaline, intoxicating sensations of omnipotence, the comradeship, the singing, the incondite wisecracks, the explosions, the occasional brush with death, the technological priapism, the freedom to decide who gets to pass, cowering and desolate, with a mere insult or roughing up, and who gets to die, and all of it officially sanctioned as justified revenge: these lads will never again experience anything like it, whether on patrol or scratching for a living, a purpose, or a scintilla of political hope in an increasingly unequal, pessimistic and precarious society.
The Israeli Defence Force is still a draft army, and to that extent still the ‘people’s army’ of David Ben Gurion’s design. It is, arguably, the last recognised social contract in Israel, the surety of its herrenvolk democracy. It structures the education of young Israelis who, explains Haim Bresheeth-Zabner in An Army Like No Other, are inducted into the collective memory and myths of the Zionist state from the age of eight. Their military training begins at the age of fourteen ‘when high school kids join the Gadna (acronym for Youth Battalions)’, until they are ready for the draft at the age of eighteen. As a draft army, it guarantees employment to young Israelis, the median age of the grunts being just twenty. It doesn’t offer much remuneration for draftees: even on the frontline the monthly wage is 2,400 NIS, which is just over five hundred pounds. What it does offer is a matchless opportunity for hell-raising adventure.
In the ordinary routine of patrols, arrests and manning checkpoints, boredom and moral numbness are combined. The rituals of oppression identify the Palestinians as a threat to be managed and punished, but there is only sporadic opportunity for recreational harassment or killings. A junior commander, explains Erella Grassiani in Soldiering Under the Occupation, may order soldiers to hold Palestinians at a checkpoint for a few hours, for no better reason than to break the monotony. In recent years, soldiers in the West Bank have been able to enliven their day by forming irregular militias with settlers and assaulting a Palestinian community whose land and resources are wanted by the colonists.
Now, at last, they are in a war where almost anything goes, where there is no shaming gaze. There is a tremendous surge of omnipotence. ‘Imagine how powerful I felt all the time’, an Israeli perpetrator of atrocities during the First Intifada once explained. ‘I could kick anyone in the head and nobody would talk. I could do anything … The moment you pass from Israel to Gaza you are the law, you’re God.’ ‘The bottom line, when I think about it’, another says, ‘it’s like I was a Nazi.’ This sense of power is revealing because, relative to today, the soldiers crushing the Intifada were limited in what they could do. The Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had exhorted soldiers to break the Palestinians’ bones, and in the first three months of the uprising Israeli soldiers fired more than a million bullets to quell it. Yet, in other ways, as in the use of non-lethal plastic or rubber-coated bullets, their kinetic range would be regarded as miserly by today’s soldiers. Neve Gordon’s conceptualisation of the occupation partly explains the shift. Prior to Oslo, Israel was more directly engaged in the daily running of Palestinians’ lives, attempting to drain the energies of Palestinian nationalism through control of welfare, health and economy as much as through direct violence: in Foucauldian terms, its dominant mode of power was disciplinary. Especially since the ‘disengagement’ from Gaza, Israel has reverted to a form of sovereign power in which the West Bank and Gaza have been ghettoised and policed with more lethal, long-range violence.
Today’s soldiers thus go to war much more empowered with death-dealing capacities. In Gaza, there is no need for rubber coating on the bullets. In the West Bank, meanwhile, soldiers and settlers have been given the opportunity to escalate their pogromist offensive: B’TSelem has documented hundreds of attacks on West Bank Palestinian communities since 7 October 2023. Among those fighting today is a much higher share of those classified by Yoel Elizur and Nuphar Yishay-Krien, in their analysis of the Intifada’s suppression, as ‘ideologically violent’. Jewish Israelis of age to join the military are overwhelmingly right-wing, overwhelmingly opposed to any Palestinian state, and over-represented among both the dati leumi (religious right) and the secular far-right. What Lifton calls the ‘atrocity-producing situation’ does not so much cause, as liberate, their appetite for destruction.
‘Within a year we will annihilate everyone’
– Childrens’ choir organised by Israeli propaganda group, The Civil Front, 19 November 2023
VII.
In sanctioned interviews, soldiers are strenuously well-mannered, calm and reflective. They express their humane concern for the Palestinians, before briskly mentioning the usual flaccid rationalisations. An Israeli ‘leftist’ soldier tells CNN that it is a ‘complex situation’ and he favours a two-state settlement. Nonetheless, he is ‘100 per cent sure’ that he is ‘on the right side of history’ and ‘trying to defend people’ in fighting this war. ‘Nobody wants to kill an innocent civilian, an innocent woman, an innocent child’, another soldier wearily explains, ‘but if we have to fight a war, there are casualties.’ Strikingly, interviewees never appear to have witnessed or participated in any war crimes. None of them, for example, had stripped, tied and shot or beheaded any of the hundreds of bodies discovered at mass graves at the Nasser and Al-Shifa hospitals, or any of 140 mass graves counted by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. None of them had run over zip-tied Palestinians with their tanks, or sniped any of the children seen by Dr Mark Perlmutter with ‘dead-centre’ shots to the head. A non-commissioned officer tells the Guardian’s Jason Burke, ‘I didn’t see dead children or women and that helped a lot’. Whatever the literal accuracy of this claim, which there is reason to doubt, the vast majority of those killed by Israeli soldiers are women and children.
Perpetrator testimony is notorious for scotomising distressing details. Kraft describes the role of benign self-concept, among the apartheid state’s perpetrators, in shaping and deleting memory. An example of this in Gaza would be the soldiers’ astonishment, during the November 2023 ceasefire, when civilians emerged from their ‘basements’: ‘We didn’t even know they were there.’ That they did not ‘know’, even though they had every reason to know, is significant. And, in a case of broken kettle logic, another soldier explained that anyone who remained behind after evacuation orders was a legitimate target anyway: ‘What am I going to think? That they’re not supporters of Hamas? What are they doing there then?’
Israeli refuseniks, and those who have broken from the ‘displaced responsibility’ and ‘empty justifications’ that Gillian Slovo discerned in South Africa’s perpetrators, tell a different story. There is ‘total freedom of action’, explains a soldier to +972 magazine. If there is ‘even a feeling of threat’, there is ‘no need to explain – you just shoot.’ If someone is looking out of a window, you shoot. Even if you’re ‘bored’, you shoot. ‘Shoot a lot, even for no reason’, another explains, ‘anyone who wants to shoot, no matter what the reason, shoots’. Commanders encourage it. The shooting is ‘unrestricted’, ‘crazy’: shooting with ‘machine guns, tanks, and mortars’, everything goes. They shoot ‘as they please with all their might’. ‘It’s permissible to shoot everyone, a young girl, an old woman.’ Even they, however, occasionally offer familiar rationalisations, involving the iniquity of the enemy: Hamas members ‘walk around without their weapons’ making it impossible to distinguish between civilian and combatant. This is redolent of the ‘unfairness’ experienced by US troops in Vietnam: ‘We give the medical supplies and they come and kick our ass’. As though their enemies were supposed to make it easy for them.
In his analysis of US atrocities in Vietnam, Lifton draws attention to the ‘all-encompassing absurdity and moral inversion’ experienced by troops responding to an ‘informal message … to kill just about everyone’. This ‘all-encompassing absurdity’ may, though, be deferred for as long as the killers believe in the ideological justifications for what they do. The troops in Vietnam suffered in part because they scarcely believed the official story that they were there to defend a people’s freedom against communist aggression, and had barely any sense of the war’s strategic goals. Israeli soldiers, likewise, can hardly believe they are in Gaza to liberate the hostages and ‘destroy Hamas’. They have killed more hostages than they have liberated, and after ten months of carnage a CNN analysis showed that only three of Hamas’s twenty-four battalions had been ‘destroyed’. But since the real justification for the war is limitless revenge, annihilation and conquest, this hardly matters. The absurdity has already been scripted, and folded back into an officially sanctioned moral inversion.
The inversion of morality is not, however, the same thing as amorality. In his work with violent offenders, psychoanalyst James Gilligan finds that they are obsessed with moral questions, particularly of when and under what circumstances violence is justified. They have simply flipped conventional morality on its head, with their own antisocial ‘value system’ that venerates Nazis and Satan-worshippers, and takes pride in being ‘the baddest motherfucker you ever saw’. David Keen, analysing the atrocities in Sierra Leone, finds the same pattern among the RUF rebels: they ‘turned law and morality on their heads’. In their ‘perverse’, ‘upside-down world’, they rewarded rape and mutilation and punished those who refused: hence ‘the strange shamelessness of the rebels’ enclosed world’. A similar shamelessness was expressed by apartheid police officer Paul van Vuuren when he explained to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission why he enjoyed torturing and killing ANC activists: ‘It was the enemy we were killing. I felt I was busy with big and important things.’ Alongside the sanctioned enjoyment in doing ‘big and important things’, there is the illicit enjoyment in the chaos for its own sake. A veteran who served as a medic in Vietnam expresses anguish over the fact that he was ‘pleased at the ugliness of what I saw … I liked it. I enjoyed death.’ And then there is what Edward Weisband calls the ‘macabresque’, where the cruelty has a deliberate and gratuitous theatricality belying its strategic rationales.
Shamelessness is powered by shame. Not moral shame, but the shame of weakness which Elizabeth Young-Bruehl finds to be at the heart of prejudice. It is the feeling of being ‘disrespected’ which Gilligan says lurks behind almost every violent outburst among the offenders he works with. This sensation is said to be experienced as a ‘death of the self’ which can only be remedied by an immediate and overwhelming self-assertion. Kieran Mitton, describing the atrocities of soldiers in Sierra Leone in Rebels in a Rotten State, notes that the forced child recruits who had suffered abuses as part of their induction were more cruel than the adults. And yet, the more ‘extreme acts of violence from young fighters’ also seemed to emanate from ‘an inner moral conflict’: the atrocity that momentarily obtunded shame also deepened the sense of shamefulness that was to be metabolised through further transgression. Atrocity, then, becomes the motive for further atrocity. In Lifton’s account, even the effort of justifying one’s atrocities demands further atrocities. A My Lai participant recalls firing into the crowd ‘in the excitement’, feeling briefly horrified as ‘a few people go down’, and then to justify it or even make it seem logical, doing it ‘more … maybe do it repetitively just to make that appear to be … some part of your make-up.’ The ‘shame-free zones’ described by Keen are actually zones where shame is the overriding emotion and motive.
The role of shame in Zionist ideology is well-documented. At times, the founders of Zionism sounded like antisemites as they scorned the Jewish diaspora. Theodor Herzl was repelled by the ‘revolutionary proletariat’ and the ‘terrible power of the purse’. Revisionist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotkinsky reviled the ‘ugly, sickly’ ‘Yid’, just as Labour Zionist Nachman Syrkin derided the ‘puny, ugly, enslaved, degraded and egoistic Jew’. Diaspora Jews were ‘disgraced and ridiculed’ for being ‘weak’ and ‘ugly, and as a result immoral as well’, according to novelist Yosef Hayim Brenner. The answer to shame was the ‘masculine beauty’ (Jabotinsky) of the ‘great, beautiful, moral and social’ Jew (Syrkin) of the nationalist future. Big, beautiful, strong Jews who would never again be mistaken for victims. Ben Gurion, as the Second World War began, was ‘choking with shame’ at what was happening to the Jews in Germany. ‘We do not belong to that Jewish people … We do not want to be such Jews.’ Hence, according to Jacqueline Rose, the cruel shame and silencing with which Holocaust survivors were treated in Israel after the Nakba. This was to be a nation for the strong, not the weak.
Israeli soldiers in Gaza hanker for revenge over a burning shame felt, not for anything Israel has done, but for the cracks in the defences exposed by Operation Al Aqsa Flood. ‘Everyone in my unit knew someone who was a victim on 7 October’, a reservist explains to the Guardian. They thus take pride in their exaggerated cruelty. As Gaza descends into mass starvation, an infantryman films himself setting fire to food and water supplies in Shujaiya. Another soldier stands next to dead Palestinian bodies with a sign advertising his barber shop back in Israel: the accompanying song calls Palestinians ‘animals’ and ‘Amalek’. Another, in footage of a dead Palestinian seen through a tank window, boasts of running over the corpse with his tank. Through such productions they construct a dangerous illusion, in which ordinary morality is for people weaker and more servile than they are.
There is something in these performances that recalls an established tradition since 1948, described by anthropologist Sophia Goodfriend, of Israeli soldiers taking photographs as trophies and evidence of conquest. Yet all of this is staged with an air of conscious defiance and resentment, and contradictory self-justification, suggesting that the perpetrators are not only aware of but are abidingly preoccupied with how wretched they have become. Even the weak, jock humour on display in these memes and taunts reeks of an effort to overpower conscience, similar to the uneasy jokes after the My Lai massacre recounted by Lifton: ‘ha ha, they were all women and children’.
‘Shame is already a revolution of a kind’.
– Marx, in a letter to Arnold Ruge, 1843.
VIII.
To speak of moral inversion implies that the readiness to commit atrocities is necessarily achieved à rebours, as a deviation from the norm. It suggests that the perpetrators have been socialised in a world where such things are not permissible, making them vulnerable to what David Wood calls ‘moral injury’. That is generally the case. ‘Ordinary men’, as Christopher Browning calls them, can only be turned into genocidal killers through trained obedience, group conformity, and intense ideological drilling. Indeed, there is some evidence of trauma among the perpetrators of the Gaza genocide. Among the thousand new wounded soldiers removed from the frontline every month, according to the IDF, 35 per cent complain about their mental state, with 27 per cent developing ‘a mental reaction or post-traumatic stress disorder’. In an interview with CNN, Israeli soldier Guy Zaken described how he could no longer eat meat, having ‘run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds’ with his tank. ‘Everything squirts out’, he added. Another soldier, Eliran Mizrahi, took his own life before he was due to be redeployed to Gaza. Horrified by what he had seen and done, he said he felt ‘invisible blood’ coming out of him: out, out, damned spot.
But it isn’t always so. Among those fighting in Gaza are soldiers from Israel’s Netzah Yehuda battalion, an all-male ultra-Orthodox unit of volunteers recruited from the arrogant, racist, power-drunk far-right settlers and Hilltop Youth – notorious for the murder of unarmed civilians, the killing of suspects in custody and the rape and torture of Palestinians. They have been raised on eliminative racism from the nursery, their native moral capacities broken and deformed long before they learned how to hold a weapon. And while they are not representative of the whole, they are the extreme end of an army, indeed a whole society, that is thoroughly enraptured in its genocidal mania. The regime of moral inversion, while it temporarily overrides the difficulties that most people would have with killing – helping to make it enjoyable and an achievement – also empowers those who were already hankering for the adventure of mass murder. The ‘ideologically violent’ perpetrators are in command, they enjoy what they’re doing and they have the limitless support of the Knesset, the media and the wider public. There is no reason for the perpetrators ever to experience the gift of a shameful self-revelation and start fragging superior officers. After all, there are Nakba perpetrators alive today who still have no regrets.
There is a great difference between an army of this type, and one composed of ‘socialised warriors’, as Lifton calls them, whose spirit of slavishness recalls Karl Liebknecht’s ‘obedience of the corpse’. For there is no hint of slavishness in the Israeli rank and file, who want to go further, faster than the senior chain of command. Ha’aretzreported in March 2024 that junior commanders and soldiers routinely disobey orders. It cited General David Bar Kalifa’s handwritten order to take revenge on Palestinian civilians and Brigadier General Barak Hiram’s destruction of a university in Gaza as examples. Yedioth Ahronoth reported that the IDF leadership was infuriated by some of the destructive behaviour, like the blowing up of a Hamas legislative council building, because it vaporised vital military intelligence. The rank and file clearly have the initiative. In their video dispatches from the front, they still agitate against what they call excessive ‘restraint’. They demand the full recolonisation of Gaza. They call for annihilation. In one case, a masked soldier demanded Gallant’s resignation and threatened a putsch: ‘We the reserve soldiers do not intend to hand over the keys to any Palestinian Authority’, he said. ‘You cannot win a war. Resign. … We will listen to one leader, and it is not the minister of defence, and it is not the chief of staff, it is the prime minister. … Here I tell you, did you want a military coup?’ The video was shared by Netanyahu’s son. The attempted arrest of Force 100 soldiers, and their violent resistance, showed that they will not suffer restraint. Nor will civil society, in which the IDF is so firmly embedded, tolerate it.
After fifteen months of genocide, the Israeli government finally acceded to a ceasefire, coerced by an incoming Trump administration. Netanyahu had bedded in for a long war of attrition, but had increasingly exhausted every last military and strategic rationale for prolonging the war. The Israeli security establishment dissented, critical of the government’s lack of planning, and angry that the government’s unwillingness to investigate war crimes leaves the leadership vulnerable to ICC arrest warrants. Yoav Gallant, who had promised war on ‘human animals’, was fired in November 2024 after months of opposition to Netanyahu’s plans for ‘total victory’, and preference for a tactical truce to return the hostages. The Israeli public, though largely unmoved by the plight of Palestinians, no longer thought the war was winnable. Yet their dissent came from the right. If an election were held tomorrow, polling suggests, Naftali Bennett – who claimed that too much aid was allowed into Gaza – would be Prime Minister.
Until he agreed to a ceasefire, Netanyahu, who had waged a demagogic battle against the military leadership and aligned himself firmly with the far-right, retained the support of the soldiers. For him, the genocide was a superstructural response to an intensely superstructural crisis, consolidating his leadership while temporarily abating the centrifugal political forces rending Israeli state and civil society. Satellite evidence compiled by Forensic Architecture showed that the IDF was building infrastructures for a prolonged occupation, suggesting that any ceasefire would be partial, provisional and temporary, a prelude to colonisation. Crucially, for as long as Netanyahu wished to prolong the war, with whatever scant rationale, the outgoing Biden administration continued to arm it and pay for it unconditionally and to support Israel with military deployments in the Mediterranean and the bombing of Yemen. It is deeply ironic that Trump, whom the Israeli far-right wanted to win, finally imposed the ceasefire that saw them quit the government: a ceasefire that, however precariously, represents a political defeat for the state of Israel, a danger for Netanyahu, and a demoralising blow to those who looked forward to building their neighbourhoods on Gaza’s ruins.
Yet, even if the occupying army is exhausted by war, many of the perpetrators are still excited, still on the spiral of shameful shamelessness, their thirst for revenge still not slaked. On the streets, their civilian counterparts are furious, raging against the ceasefire and the traitors. Far-right politicians who remain in the government assure them it’s in hand: the war will continue and lead to the ‘gradual takeover of the entire Gaza Strip’, Smotrich says. This is among the reasons why the peace is precarious: Israeli society is weary but has not yet been divested of its cruel fantasies. Like all perpetrators, they need to be released from their illusions. Their experience of moral injury would be, not a spiritual misfortune as Wood would have it, but the beginning of sanity. They need the crisis of confidence concomitant upon ideological collapse. They need the liberation of defeat.
Richard Seymour is a writer and a founding editor of Salvage. He is the author, most recently, of Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization.
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