The Hyde side of Israeli culture

hideous, hidden

AI-generated Jekyll and Hyde. Image source: Nightcafe. Creator: nafri.

When I first got the inkling way back in October 2023 that Israel may indeed be embarking on a genocide, what immediately concerned me, beyond the safety and security of the people being killed, was the effect of that undertaking on Israeli society itself.

I’d come across lectures by Ervin Staub, a sociologist who studies peace and conflict, where he spoke about the metamorphosis societies undergo when they take such action.

“Now, [genocide] evolves progressively, partly because individuals and groups change as a result of their own actions. If I harm somebody, if I do some bad thing to a person for some reason that I have—I wouldn’t do a bad thing with no reason, right? I’m doing it with some reason—and then there are not negative consequences to me, I am likely to justify my action. I may have devalued this person before that made my action possible; now I devalue this person more; I justify my actions; I find further reasons. And this makes new violence more likely. So there is this evolution.

“The tragic thing is that, for reasons that I will describe, witnesses within a society (bystanders, people who are not … actual perpetrators), they are members of the group, perhaps, that perpetrates violence, but they themselves are not perpetrators. And they are not victims. They are witnesses—they are bystanders. They usually remain passive. And this passivity encourages perpetrators.

“The passivity of a population tells people that at the very least—the pass tells perpetrators that, at the very least, the population accepts what they’re arguing, and they often interpret it as approval.”¹

My own lens being sociological in nature, I was quite apprehensive as to how this military campaign would affect Israeli culture itself. At the same time, I wanted to be cautious as to how I approached this, because people are susceptible to ethnocentrism, the effect of viewing other societies and judging them as though they were one’s own. While I’m aware of this bias, I’m not immune. So part of this year’s journey of learning more about the history of the conflict has been to learn more about Israeli culture in general, to get a better perspective.

I’ve barely gotten a foothold. Still, it’s clear to anyone who’s looking at the situation even remotely objectively that Israeli society is rapidly undergoing a change. 

Recently, I’ve come across materials — some from Israelis themselves — that have shed a light as to the nature of this transformation. What happens when a society turns genocidal?

One resource I encountered was this webinar by Dr. Mark Ettensohn, who has created a library of references regarding narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). His work is very straightforward and based both in psychological theory and clinical practice. His video on malignant narcissism was quite eye-opening.

Malignant narcissism

Malignant narcissism as a term was coined by Erich Fromm, renowned psychologist and theorist from the middle of the 20th century. He was keen to understand how such horrors as were visited upon the world during World War II could have come to be — what was it in the human psyche that supported such destruction?²

That’s a political question, ultimately, one which does not have clinical ramifications, so Ettensohn declines to explore Fromm’s outline but instead turns to Otto Kernberg, one of the most influential psychologists of our time.

Kernberg said that malignant narcissism — as distinguished from regular NPD — contains four facets:

➢ Narcissistic Personality core

➢ Antisocial Personality traits

➢ Ego-syntonic sadism

➢ Paranoia

Narcissistic Personality core. Ettensohn remarks, “Because of the narcissistic personality core, malignant narcissists are typically arrogant, grandiose, envious, and preoccupied with fantasies of power, brilliance, beauty and perfection.” But he stresses that malignant narcissism “differs in kind, not merely in degree” from regular NPD.

Antisocial Personality traits. Malignant narcissists “also have classical antisocial traits, like lack of remorse, contempt or disregard of social conventions, and amorality. They have no problem lying, stealing, cheating, or taking advantage of other people in pursuit of their goals.”

Ego-syntonic sadism. “The term ‘ego-syntonic sadism’ means that there’s sort of a perverse pleasure in causing harm, pain or discomfort to other people.”³

“Some authors call this a conscious ideology of aggressive self-affirmation,” Ettensohn explains,  “in which the individual feels justified — or even in some ways elated — to dehumanize others, because they perceive them through a lens of envy or disdain.

“These individuals will typically project their unconscious feelings of weakness or frailty onto other people and then sort of punish those people for those projected qualities. They boost their own sense of well-being — of being strong or powerful — at the expense of other people.”

Paranoia. “Malignant narcissists also tend to have a paranoid mistrust of others, and that’s because they view them through a lens, a categorical lens, as either enemies or fools or idols,” Ettersohn says.

“In individuals with this type of pathology, the self is extremely damaged at a very early stage of development. The ability to recognize others as human beings with feelings of their own is actively obliterated within the personality at an unconscious level, and instead the individual’s own needs, feelings and impulses are projected onto everyone around them. 

“They essentially live in a world that’s populated only by their own projections, because they’re unable to see anyone else as a separate center of subjective experience.”⁴

More about malignant narcissism

The prototypical malignant narcissist, Ettensohn says, is aloof, cold and arrogant. “They’re obsessed with power and vanity. They attempt to humiliate, psychologically destroy, or even kill those around them in pursuit of their own self-aggrandizement. And they experience no remorse in the process. They inhabit a psychological landscape that’s split into that which is theirs, and therefore perfect, and that which threatens their status and must, therefore, be destroyed.”

“Sadistic or cruel treatment of others in malignant narcissism provides a feeling of freedom from pain, fear, or distress.”

One can see how, rather than being limited to an individual diagnosis, those facets might be mapped onto an entire society.⁵

Sadism made manifest

Those traits matched up with a description of Israeli society discussed in a conversation between Hadar Cohen, an Arab Jewish multimedia artist and activist, and Yuval Manns, a soldier in the IDF. Both were raised in Israel, so they have a birds-eye view of this cultural deformation.

The fact that Manns brings up a sexualized component to the depravity evokes something that Hannah Arendt said in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), tucked in a little footnote, where she said:

“This new mechanized system eased the feeling of responsibility as much as was humanly possible. When, for instance, the order came to kill every day several hundred Russian soldiers, the slaughter was performed by shooting through a hole without seeing the victim. [...] On the other hand, perversion was artificially produced in otherwise normal men. Rousset reports the following from a SS guard: ‘Usually I keep on hitting until I ejaculate. I have a wife and three children in Breslau. I used to be perfectly normal. That’s what they’ve made of me. Now when they give me a pass out of here, I don’t go home. I don’t dare look my wife in the face.’”⁶

Arendt, it seems to me, was speaking more about the nature of compartmentalizing, the fact that these agents of the Nazi state stayed sane, or at least kept up a functional façade, by keeping their two main roles in life — torturer and husband of home and hearth — separate. But of course there’s a carnality to her description as well.

Cohen and Manns, in their discussion, trace this throughline by calling attention to the eros drive in humankind⁷ and suggest that what we’re seeing is the inversion of that inner power:

Manns (31:11): The pleasure part, it’s so, so, so engrained. This is not just about the extreme right wingers who derive pleasure in this psychopathy. This is about all of Israeli society. There is a sense of pent-up aggression — it’s almost erotic. It’s a pleasure. It’s a pleasure that exists in the psyche, in the collective psyche, in the personal psyche, with ideas around the annihilation of the Palestinian people.

And I think it’s also connected to domination, which connects to this masochism — sadism, sadistic-masochistic kind of relationship. And I’m saying ‘sadistic- masochistic’ because the masochistic is like, ‘Yes,’ the way in which the Israeli society received October 7th, with a lot of grief, but also in some way as if some fantasy is being fulfilled. The way that they all jumped into making this rape-crazed, beheaded babes — like, all kinds of fantasies. It’s fantasies! It’s erotic fantasies that they have in the psyche of being, of experiencing these atrocities and dying for this idea of Zionism. But also then, of course, enacting atrocities.

Cohen (34:56): I see that really strongly, and I think so often — I mean, sexuality is just so embedded into politics in general all the time, but specifically in this context… The conversation, either it gets sexual real fast, or, like, sexual abuse and, as you were talking about, rape stories — a lot of that just becomes so central. […]

Ultimately, money, power, all of these are deeply connected to the eros, right? And the sexual impulse is just so strong, and when it gets twisted … we get into what we see today.

Erich Fromm, who I mentioned before, did his best to uncover what it was that enticed people in Nazi Germany and elsewhere into surrendering essential liberties. In Escape from Freedom (1941), wherein he describes relationships between people and their leadership, Fromm specifically names sadism as intrinsic to totalitarianism.

What is the essence of the sadistic drives? Again, the wish to inflict pain is not the essence. All the different forms of sadism which we can observe go back to one essential impulse, namely, to have complete mastery over another person, to make of him a helpless object of our will, to become the absolute ruler over him, to become his God, to do with him as one pleases. To humiliate him, to enslave him, are means to this end and the most radical aim is to make him suffer, since there is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on him, to force him to undergo suffering without his being able to defend himself. The pleasure in the complete domination over another person (or other animate objects) is the very essence of the sadistic drive.⁸

So many moments of clear disregard by the IDF for human life have been shown to us over the past year, but this embrace of sadism was encapsulated in the revelation of IDF treatment of Palestinian detainees at Sde Teiman prison — a dungeon, really, where some of the most horrendous stories have emerged, including the use of a heated stick to sodomize a male detainee, an act that led to the laceration of his intestines and to his death. Another detainee’s sodomization was detected on a security camera at the camp, masked by a phalanx of IDF shields to hide the act.

Accounts detail mindboggling atrocities, such as detainees “being suspended from chains that are connected to the ceiling of the warehouse.” Milena Ansari of Human Rights Watch told Democracy Now! of the testimony of Walid Khalili, a paramedic and ambulance driver taken into Israeli custody in November 2023:

“Israeli soldiers removed the blindfold from his eyes … He said immediately, when the blindfold was removed, he saw … dozens of Palestinian detainees being suspended from chains that are connected to the ceiling of the warehouse. He saw the men wearing diapers and not being fully clothed or properly clothed, suspended by chains, and then he understood where these screams and sounds of torture are coming from.”

The spillover of this corruption into the wider society was evidenced by the fact that a mob of Israeli citizens and some high-ranking officials stormed the army base where nine IDF offenders had been detained in the wake of these revelations. They battered the fence and demanded the soldiers’ release. Popular press unveiled the primary suspect, revealing his face and name, after which they feted him with interviews and proclaimed him a hero. A rabbi blessed him.

The condition of Israeli society now

So we must ask ourselves: what has become of Israeli society since October 7th? We need more people closer to the ground who can shed light on the differences that have emerged and settled over the landscape. Gideon Levy, columnist for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, is a lone voice in the wilderness on this topic. Just in the past week, Levy wrote of what has befallen his country:

The loss of humanity in public discourse is a contagious and sometimes fatal disease. Recovery is very difficult. Israel has lost all interest in what it is doing to the Palestinian people, arguing that they “deserve it” — everyone, including women, children, the elderly, the sick, the hungry and the dead. 

The Israeli media, which has been more disgraceful over the past year than ever before, voluntarily carries the flag of incitement, inflaming passions and the loss of humanity, just to gratify its consumers.

The domestic media has shown Israelis almost nothing of the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, while whitewashing manifestations of hatred, racism, ultra-nationalism, and sometimes barbarism, directed at the enclave and its population.

Very few other Israelis speak about this transformation (at least, they avoid doing so in English-language press).

One activist, breaking the taboo, says people in Israel don’t even bring up the assault on Gaza. As a topic, it is settled. Mairav Zonszein, senior Israel analyst of the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera’s The Take:

“It’s hard to speak about Israelis as a monolith. It’s quite a divided society, and there’s a lot of different types of Israelis, of course. So I don’t want to be too sweeping, but … I think some people, like me, are resigned to believe that there may never be a ceasefire hostage deal, that it’s just going to go on and on and on. …

“[Palestinian suffering is] just not something that people talk about. It’s not something that comes up. Certainly it doesn’t come up in the media here, but it doesn’t come up in conversations. There was a lot of civil society organizing to help people who were affected by October 7th to help soldiers get to different places … because there wasn’t public transportation. All this kind of organizing, and never once has there been any organizing that has to do with the Palestinians. That’s not just in Gaza, that’s also in the West Bank, it’s also in Jerusalem, it’s also inside Israel. 

“I mean, this gets talked about almost not at all, but Palestinian citizens of Israel make up twenty percent of the population. They’ve been going through their own war here. I mean, they’ve been silenced. They’ve been fired for Facebook posts. They’ve been arrested for protesting. Their freedom to protest has been completely suppressed. And, of course, these were patterns that were happening before, but they’re on steroids now after October 7. Nobody is talking about that.

“And so, when you have Jewish Israelis protesting for a hostage deal and they’re also starting to get roughed up by the police, they’re starting to realize maybe that, you know, what your opinion is — not just what your ethnicity is — is going to affect how you’re treated by the state.

“But they’re still not making the connection to the fact that if you have a society and a government that treats people a certain way, what is going to stop them from treating you that way?

“… For me, I just feel that the excessive use of military force and the total lack of restraint, and also the lack of the appearance of restraint … they don’t even want to look like they’re abiding by laws anymore. I mean, that’s how blatant it is. And so that has ramifications for every single person in the world. What’s being done here is going to have consequences for everyone. It’s clearly breaking the notion that there are still some basic ... rules of engagement or basic moral order.”

In response, some of the comments on YouTube said this about Zonszein’s revelations:

No one could say that Israelis simply did not know. They are aware. They simply don’t want the outside world to know that they know.

Israelis have been saturated in this acrid bath for more than a year; and, rather than seeing the conflict draw to a close, hostilities astonishingly have become even more open-ended. Israel has pushed into another nation’s sovereign territory and is actively bombing the heart of cities. What is going to satisfy them? What will sate their lust?

“Malignant narcissism, thus, is not self-limiting[.]”
— Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man

This collective madness will not stop on its own accord. Some external force must block the path.

Once that happens, how long will it take for Israelis to recognize their own journey — that of their transmogrification? Will they, as a society, be able to recapture a sense of humanism, of humanity?

Some may read this essay and feel that I am disparaging the Israelis. Such a view could not be more mistaken. I want them to come out whole, because they too are human beings. But they are being severely damaged, in ways they themselves may not detect for months or even years. How, then, does healing take place? How long, blinded by pain, will they stagger, a danger to others and themselves?

1. College of the Holy Cross. “Ervin Staub lectures on ‘Passivity of Bystanders in Genocide’,” YouTube, July 22, 2015.

2. Fromm tells us, “A society which lacks the means to provide adequately for the majority of its members, or a large proportion of them, must provide these members with a narcissistic satisfaction of the malignant type if it wants to prevent dissatisfaction among them. For those who are economically and culturally poor, narcissistic pride in belonging to the group is the only — and often a very effective — source of satisfaction. Precisely because life is not ‘interesting’ to them, and does not offer them possibilities for developing interests, they may develop an extreme form of narcissism. Good examples of this phenomenon in recent years are the racial narcissism which existed in Hitler’s Germany, and which is found in the American South today. In both instances the core of the racial superiority feeling was, and still is, the lower middle class; this backward class, which in Germany as well as in the American South has been economically and culturally deprived, without any realistic hope of changing its situation (because they are the remnants of an older and dying form of society) has only one satisfaction: the inflated image of itself as the most admirable group in the world, and of being superior to another racial group that is singled out as inferior. The member of such a backward group feels: ‘Even though I am poor and uncultured I am somebody important because I belong to the most admirable group in the world — I am white’; or, ‘I am an Aryan.’” The Heart of Man (1964), p. 79.

3. As opposed to dissonant, which means that the thought or action would go against one’s conscience, moral core, or understanding of the world, syntonic means that it aligns with one’s beliefs or understanding and does not cause a person to feel unsettled or ill at ease.

4. To go into more detail is beyond the scope of this essay, but I encourage those who are curious to learn more about each of these aspects. Mayo Clinic provides a good synopsis of NPD. Additionally, Cleveland Clinic describes anti-social personality disorder, and VeryWell Health provides an excellent clinical definition of paranoia.

5. “[T]he group narcissism of the ‘whites’ or the ‘Aryans’ is as malignant as the extreme narcissism of a single person can be.” Fromm, The Heart of Man, p. 80.

6. Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), p. 454 (footnote 159).

7. This idea of eros suffusing and enervating this movement recalls an insight by Fromm: “Narcissism is a passion the intensity of which in many individuals can only be compared with sexual desire and the desire to stay alive.” The Heart of Man, p. 72.

8. Erich Fromm. Escape from Freedom (1941), pp. 178-179.