“Naked Sadism.”

A settler, a dog, a beating, a video, and learned sociopathy.

Lucy and the sociopath. Atara, Ramallah Governorate, 15 May.

“Most Israelis view Palestinians like they’re dogs.”—Anonymous

25 May—A text arrived on Friday, 15 May, from the village of Kisan. It was Adnan. He had sent a video then circulating throughout the West Bank. It showed a young Jewish settler mercilessly beating a Palestinian family’s dog while it was tied up and unable to escape. The video has since circulated widely on social and mainstream media in the Arab and Western worlds. It was reported throughout the Israeli press. But you didn’t read or hear of it in the major dailies or broadcasts in America.

I watched the short clip, unguarded and entirely unprepared for the brutality it showed. I recoil even now just thinking about it.

Perhaps you’ve seen the video. If not, here it is:

The dog’s name is Lucy and she survived the beating, as reported by The Cradle in a post on X. A cab driver who runs a “pet taxi service” and who transported Lucy to a veterinary hospital told Haaretz, “I constantly receive reports about animals being beaten by settlers.”

I reported previously in West Bank Alerts on the sadism directed toward Palestinian livestock. In all of these attacks you see exactly what you see in the above video—a pathological compulsion to eradicate all things Palestinian—to wipe the people and their animals from the land.

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Think about your reaction to the video. I’ve thought rather a lot about mine: It was visceral revulsion. Why, I ask myself, do images of settlers brutalizing animals seem especially horrific? Have I become numb to the relentless torture and murder of Palestinian people?

I care deeply about animal welfare, as most of us do. How we treat animals is an indication of how we treat and care for each other. But unlike Israeli animal rights activists who “rescue” donkeys from Gaza—depriving Gazans of their last remaining mode of transportation—while the I.D.F. daily slaughters more Palestinian children than there are donkeys I don’t prioritize the life of animals above people.

The video is shocking to those of us with an intact moral compass because we understand that animals are inherently innocent. Brutalizing an animal is not unlike brutalizing a child. It’s a complete betrayal of trust. An animal is dependent and vulnerable and entirely unable to defend itself against violent attack. This is what I saw in the video.

Think for a moment about the settler who beat Lucy. Study the video: He wields two sizable sticks beating her repeatedly on the head in what appears to be uncontrolled rage even as she crumples to the ground and rolls over helplessly. Think about the frenzy of his attack, and then the intimacy. What you see is a complete absence of empathy. Here is a person without a conscience, lacking a capacity for rational thought, unable or unwilling to control himself. I saw this in the video, too.

The settler’s behavior—learned, condoned, encouraged in Zionist Israeli society—is sociopathic.

Sociopathic behavior is learned in the sense that it arises from trauma and abuse. This young man—once a child, once innocent like the dog he beat—was turned into a sociopath by the society in which he was raised and educated—that is to say, by his parents, teachers, and rabbis.

Jewish Israeli society is sociopathic by design, by virtue of Zionist education and indoctrination practices that are ahistorical, racist, and Jewish–supremacist. The Jewish state instrumentalizes sociopathy as a political, geopolitical, and national-security strategy for territorial expansion and regional dominance and to ensure a collective state—psychological and social—of constant terror, constant violence, constant warfare.

At its root, what I’m talking about is systemic, generational child abuse in Jewish Israeli society at all levels within the family and educational and religious environments. And this explains the behavior of Jewish soldiers and settlers whose psyches have been profoundly damaged.

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Israeli peace activist Nurit Peled–Elhanan has written extensively on the dehumanization of Palestinians in Jewish Israeli schools, a process of indoctrination that prepares them for military service. Her two books are Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education (I.B. Tauris, 2012) and Holocaust Education and the Semiotics of Othering in Israeli Schoolbooks (Common Ground Research Networks, 2023). She was a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until October 2023, when she was suspended for expressing empathy for Palestinians in Gaza and accused of supporting Hamas.

I recently watched an interview of Peled–Elhanan on the Palestinian–Israeli podcast Women Ending War. The episode, “Narratives of Fear and Hatred: Holocaust Education’s Impact on Society,” explains how Jewish children are repeatedly and intentionally traumatized by stories and images from the Holocaust. Zionist Holocaust education begins when a child is three years old and continues year after year until he or she graduates and enters military service.

Jewish children learn nothing about the actual history of World War II or how Jews lived in Eastern Europe prior to the war. Instead, the focus is on every horrific detail of the violence perpetrated against European Jews during the Holocaust. Events are purposefully decontextualized. The victims themselves remain nameless and are portrayed with contempt so that there’s no actual identification with their humanity.

Children are told that the Holocaust happened because Jews didn’t have their own state. The only things protecting them from being murdered today—by all the Palestinians that surround them—are the Jewish state and the I.D.F. If the enemy isn’t controlled and eliminated today, another Holocaust will happen tomorrow and you, Jewish children are told, will all end up like them. Them: The thoroughly dehumanized Holocaust victims and survivors, deserving of scorn in the minds of Israeli Jews.

In this way a state of psychological terror is intentionally cultivated in children to instill unthinking loyalty to the Zionist project and the Jewish state. In the Holocaust curriculum, the crimes of Nazi Germany are projected onto the Arab populations that surround Israel, and onto Palestinians in particular. Early Zionists cynically conflated Nazism and Arabs well before Israel was even established to justify their crimes and the ethnic-cleansing of Palestine. Jewish children today grow up equating Palestinians with the Holocaust and with Nazism.

The consequences of what Jewish children are taught to believe cannot be overstated. If you truly think the Jewish state and the I.D.F. are all that stands between you and catastrophe, then any amount of violence against Arabs is reasonable and defensible. By the time young Israelis begin serving in the military—as all Israelis other than ultra–Orthodox are obliged to do—any form of brutality against Palestinians, without limits as is now horribly evident, is acceptable because it saves Jews from another Holocaust.

Peled–Elhanan describes this years-long process of indoctrination as “child abuse.” It turns Jewish Israelis into “traumatized heterophobic human beings.” Israelis are fearful of and have no tolerance for people who are not also Jewish. “Everyone hates a Jew,” they have been taught to believe.

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No one, according to Peled–Elhanan, has undertaken a careful study of what this perverse process of Holocaust indoctrination does to Jewish children. And perhaps a clinical study would indeed be useful. But the impact of this social and psychological conditioning is unambiguously clear. You have merely to look at Israeli society—each generation more racist and violent than the previous.

Jewish Israeli children are broken. Their humanity is broken. Their capacity for clear, rational thinking, for a developed conscience, for empathy is broken. Intentionally.

You see this in the behavior of Israeli soldiers as they carry out war crimes, as they laugh and dance and photograph themselves committing every atrocity imaginable, as they brutalize and rape and slaughter Palestinians, and Lebanese, and Syrians, and Iranians by the tens of thousands. What you see is naked sadism. And in the sadism you see the purposeful cultivation of sociopathy over many generations.

You see this in the unhinged barbarism of settlers in the West Bank. You see it in the video I posted above.

By destroying the psyches of Jewish children, Israelis destroyed their most precious, and one would have thought most beloved, resource. They have destroyed the future for their own children. They destroy the future of Israel itself. Because no nation can survive a state of permanent warfare.

This is Zionism. This is what Zionism has done to the Jews of Israel. The “so-called Jews,” to borrow Chas Freeman’s recognition of the chasm separating Judaism from the perversions of Jewish Israelis.

And this is the question I can’t get out of my mind: How is peace possible with a people who don’t want peace, who intentionally destroyed any chance of peace, and who celebrate their naked sadism?

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Published simultaneously in West Bank Alerts and Winter Wheat.

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