The Fever

A crowd attacks a Palestinian journalist on Jerusalem Flag Day, June 5, 2024.

Last month, CNN featured an exposé on the Sde Teiman black site in Israel where Palestinian prisoners are being tortured, abused, and subjected to humiliating and debilitating conditions. The New York Times, following up last week on the same site, noted that upwards of 35 detainees have died there while in custody.¹

In an essay I wrote regarding the site, I noted that both prisoner and guard are conditioned by torture: the former is atomised through isolation, and the latter partially loses identity as he (or she) becomes brother-bonded to the group.

In a related way, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is on the one hand torturing Palestinians, but on the other he’s conditioning his own populace toward totalitarianism. It’s a parallel, coeval process.

Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer and lecturer living in Israel, has written recently about what she calls “genocide fever”:

Israel’s violence has become so commonplace that Israeli soldiers openly brag about killing, wounding, maiming, and torturing Palestinians on social media. ✂️

But it’s not just Israeli politicians and soldiers. Some of the top-charting songs in Israel (a few even with over 20 million views on YouTube) call for Gaza to be erased and for Palestine’s celebrity supporters, such as Bella Hadid and Dua Lipa, to be killed. Israeli comedian Hen Mizrahi made a comedy routine about Palestinians being killed by food airdrops in Gaza. These airdrops are only necessary because Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians in the besieged enclave. Mizrahi later doubled down on his comments on national TV, repeating the same line uttered by some Israeli politicians and officials: “There are no innocents in Gaza.”²

She talks about the phrases that saturate society, almost to the level of pure incitement.

At every turn, a sign can be found promoting Israel’s attacks. Signs in English quoting Nikki Haley’s call for Netanyahu to “finish them” are plastered on storefronts and displayed in apartment windows. Images morphing Adolf Hitler with Hamas leaders can be found on highway overhangs.

But the most popular slogan these days, “Together We Will Win,” is everywhere – on billboards, commercial websites, and business cards. It was even stamped on eggs – yes, eggs – alongside the expiration date, of course.³

partnersintorah

A post shared by @partnersintorah

The stamping of genocidal statements on eggs is an extreme form of penetration, of messaging that seeps down to the bedrock of workaday society.

She also talks about the atmosphere of informing, where one’s closest associates, neighbors, study group partners are now reading up on one’s online or other types of writing and communication, then contacting the government if they see something that doesn’t jell with the tenor of society.

My Israeli neighbor has a “Together We Will Win” bumper sticker on her car.

“What does ‘win’ mean?” I recently asked her. 

“You don’t know what win means?” She replied.

“Not really. I am asking what ‘win’ looks like. So far, more than 35,000 Palestinians killed, including 15,000 kids....”

She shrugged and unabashedly answered, “This is the price.” ✂️

A friend warned me not to say anything to my neighbor. “Don’t express dissent,” she told me. “Your neighbor will just report you to the police.” My friend is right to worry.⁴

dianabuttu

A post shared by @dianabuttu

Leafing through “Pavlovian Strategy as a Weapon of Menticide,” written in 1954 by Joost Meerloo, a renowned psychologist of the post-WWII era, I came across this passage:

“[I]n the totalitarian society Pavlovian strategy has acquired grotesque proportions. The reflex machine is designed; the subjective, self-thinking man has to disappear. There is rejection of any attempt at persuasion or discussion. Individual self-expression is taboo. Private affection is taboo.

“Children are taught to become haters and informants of their parents. The continual education in betrayal, in snooping and peeping, breaks through every barrier of personal reserve. Personal loyalty does not exist any more — only loyalty to the system which may better be called servile submission.

“Peaceful exchange of thoughts in free conversation disturbs the conditioned reflexes and is therefore taboo. No longer are there any brains, but only conditioned patterns and educated muscles. In such a compulsive training system neurotic compulsion is looked at as a positive asset instead of something pathological. The mental automaton becomes the ideal of education.”⁵

Notably, Meerloo states,

“There is only one form of systematic immunization against the totalitarian attack on human convictions. That is a deeply founded conviction of democratic freedom, a deep faith in the steadily growing system of checks and balances, of laws and rights made to canalize the outburst of human hunger for power.”⁶

Yet we see in Netanyahu’s Israel increasing repression of nonconformity, even to the point of jailing teachers who post incontrovertible facts. (The facts themselves are the fly in the ointment, and so the source of the irritant must be disappeared so as to smooth out the social veneer.)

This repression, especially that compelled by rendering certain expressions illegal, is the diametric opposite of “checks and balances, of laws and rights” — it allows Netanyahu’s thirst for power to grow unchecked.

This is another way in which we can tell that Israel is not a real democracy — it seems not to be a democracy at all. The jettisoning of checks, balances, laws and rights is the clearest sign that Israelis are living under a form of authoritarianism.

Part of the complicating factor in recognizing that fact is that the populace is eagerly participating in these depredations, in a form of folie à deux. Thus the authoritarianism is cloaked, due to the extreme group dynamics.

What is folie à deux? In short, it’s a shared delusion. According to P. N. Suresh Kumar and colleagues,

The term folie à deux includes several syndromes in which mental symptoms, particularly paranoid delusions, are transmitted from one person to one or more others with whom the apparent instigator is in some way intimately associated so that he or she and they come to share the same delusional ideas. ✂️

Many synonyms have been used for describing this condition, which mainly reflect the idea of the condition's transmissibility, viz. ‘communicated insanity’, ‘contagious insanity’, ‘infectious insanity’, ‘psychosis of association’ and ‘double insanity’. Although this condition involves two people, it can extend from the original subject to three, four, five persons, viz. folie a trois, folie a quatre, folie a cinq, or even a whole family, folie a famille.⁷

Erich Fromm in the 1960s suggested that entire societies could be affected by such a condition, in what he called folie a millions.⁸

Something that esteemed psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg said in “Psychotic Personality Structure” (2019) relates to such a situation:

“There are extreme psychological and social conditions under which reality testing may be lost, including severely pathological sadomasochistic relations of intimate couples who present mutual reinforcement of primitive defense operations, such as in cases of folie à deux (shared psychotic disorder).

“There are certain regressive large group consolidations under extreme social deprivation or isolation — such as religious cults, where similar phenomena of collective loss of reality testing may take place.

“But there are also experiences in which momentary loss of differentiation between self and others occurs, such as under some conditions of intense orgastic experiences of a couple intimately related, or of an extremely hateful momentary merger between torturer and his victim. These latter conditions have a momentary quality that does not reflect a psychotic personality organization.”⁹

⇾ But I would say that, in the case of state violence — and particularly in the case of genocide, where the culture committing the genocide has an active hand in abject dehumanization in Otherizing the victim group — the tortures may be under both types of psychotic influences, that which is momentary and immediate (that of the scene or interpersonal situation) and that which is communal and atmospheric (that of a chronic, suffusing nature).

The reason why this latter, communal form of psychosis occurs, I posit, is to serve as a bulwark against what otherwise would manifest as moral injury (that is, severe and inescapable psychological distress).¹⁰ This is the same flight from reality that Ernst Simmel noted in “Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology”:

“Flight into a mass psychosis is therefore an escape not only from reality, but also from individual insanity.”¹¹

So mass psychosis becomes a defense mechanism for genocidal cultures.

Indeed, I would even go so far as to say that the emergence of dehumanization, as a culture-wide phenomenon, is one of the earliest indications of this collective loss of reality testing.¹² As I estimate it, the people stop taking such imagistic descriptions metaphorically but ascribe those dehumanizing features or facets onto the scapegoated population. When the leader calls the outgroup vermin or cockroaches, in the mind of the people, that’s what their victims become. It’s a full-blown transformation, a mirror of the internal transformation that the people themselves are undergoing.

1. I have included a gift link to the article, so that those ordinarily restricted by the paywall may view it. Find it here.

2. Diana Butto, “A Diary of a Palestinian Living in Israel.” Zeteo, May 7, 2024.

3. Butto, ibid.

4. Butto, ibid.

5. Joost Meerloo, “Pavlovian Strategy as a Weapon of Menticide,” American Journal of Psychiatry (1954), Vol. 110, No. 11, p. 811. Paragraph spacing added for clarity in reading.

6. Meerloo, ibid., p. 813.

But note also what Erich Fromm, psychologist and theorist similarly renowned from the same time period, in The Heart of Man (1964) said about freedom (p. 136): “Freedom is not a constant attribute which we either ‘have’ or ‘have not.’ In fact, there is no such thing as ‘freedom’ except as a word and an abstract concept. There is only one reality: the act of freeing ourselves in the process of making choices.”

7. P. N. Suresh Kumar et al., “Folie à deux,” Indian Journal of Psychiatry (2005), Vol. 47, No. 3, p. 164.

8. Fromm relayed these insights in The Heart of Man, especially with regards to Nazi Germany:

“A more important solution consists in getting the consensus of one other person, and, if possible, in obtaining the consensus of millions. The former case is that of a folie à deux (some marriages and friendships rest on this basis), while the latter is that of public figures who prevent the open outbreak of their potential psychosis by gaining the acclaim and consensus of millions of people.” (p. 76)

“From Caligula and Nero to Stalin and Hitler we see that their need to find believers, to transform reality so that it fits their narcissism, and to destroy all critics, is so intense and so desperate precisely because it is an attempt to prevent the outbreak of insanity.” (p. 76)

“In one form or another both in primitive religions and in individual psychology, we find the same severe pathology: regression to animal existence, to the state of pre-individuation, the attempt to do away with that which is specifically human. This statement, however, must be qualified in one sense. If regressive archaic trends are shared by many, we have the picture of folie à millions; the very fact of the consensus makes the folly appear as wisdom, the fiction as real. The individual who participates in this common folly lacks the sense of complete isolation and separation, and hence escapes the intense anxiety he would experience in a progressive society. It must be remembered that for most people reason and reality are nothing but public consensus. One never ‘loses one’s mind’ when nobody else’s mind differs from one’s own.” (p. 118)

Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (1964). Harper & Row: New York. Emphasis added.

9. Otto Kernberg, “Psychotic Personality Disorder,” Psychodynamic Psychiatry (2019), Vol. 47, No. 4, p. 360.

10. Kjell Anderson, in “‘Who Was I to Stop the Killing?’: Moral Neutralization among Rwandan Genocide Perpetrators” (Journal of Perpetrator Research (2017), Vol. 1, No.1, p. 44) states:

“Neutralization techniques can only be effective if they invoke and amplify pre-existing beliefs among the population. They are a means for perpetrators to maintain consonance and coherence with the society in which they live. . . . . In mass crimes, the motives of individual perpetrators are culturally situated and impossible to separate from social structures. If perpetrators commit deviant acts without neutralization, then they may develop a persistent ‘deviant identity’ with concomitant feelings of self-rejection; neutralization is therefore essential.”

11. Ernst Simmel, “Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology.” In Anti-Semitism, A Social Disease (1946), Ernst Simmel, ed., p. 49. International Universities Press: New York.

12. Dehumanization occurs early on in the sequence observed in genocide. Of ten recognized stages, dehumanization is #4.