I’ve been fascinated with the story of Pompeii and Herculaneum’s devastation by Mount Vesuvius for as long as I can remember, so when I saw Tom Hiddleston had made a three-part docudrama, Pompeii: Out of Time, I watched it almost as soon as it was out. It’s clearly a passion project, polished and well-made, and its central focus is on empathy. The people whose figures were frozen by ash for millennia were no different to us. They were caught mid-life, unprepared, and the volcano didn’t discriminate between the slaves and their owners, the rich and the poor. Within a few short hours everything they knew, routines, relationships, their physical world was gone.

When the CGI showed Vesuvius bombing Pompeii, my mind went straight to Gaza. The physical devastation, people’s reactions, their dusty, disheveled appearance, panic and confusion, don’t look too different. But we seem to sympathise with victims of natural disasters far more readily than with victims of deliberate human violence. When people are bombed, displaced, starved, or killed by other human beings, empathy becomes conditional — often it’s not there at all. Victims are scrutinised, blamed, made to justify their own suffering before anyone will extend them any compassion. The most visible example right now is Palestine, but I see the same pattern every week in my therapy room, working with survivors of childhood and domestic abuse.

But the more I thought about it, the less clean that distinction looked. The truth is we don’t reserve our suspicion only for victims of human violence. Often we’re not that generous even with victims of nature.

Hurricane Katrina’s survivors — disproportionately elderly, black, poor — were blamed for ‘not evacuating’ as if people without cars, without savings, had a choice. People in wildfires or flood zones get blamed for living where they shouldn’t. People who become ill get blamed for their lifestyle. Poor countries devastated by disasters caused by the impact of colonial extraction get lectured about corruption and poor preparedness. The pattern is often the same. Find something the victim could have done differently, no matter how fictitious and unfounded, and make that the focus.

What actually predicts whether victims get blamed isn’t the cause of harm. It is whether people can tell themselves the victim had a choice. We do this because the alternative is unbearable. If we accept that harm can be inflicted on anyone, at any time, for no reason, we have to accept that we too are vulnerable to harm, and that life isn’t as tidy or logical as we tell ourselves it is. We have to accept that reality is more dangerous and unpredictable than our nervous system can tolerate. It’s far more tolerable to believe that the victim did something, said something, was something — that they brought their suffering on themselves. That way the rest of us can live with the illusion that we are safe, because we wouldn’t make those same mistakes they did.

The people of Pompeii and Herculaneum are exempted from blame because no one in 79AD could have chosen not to live near a volcano they didn’t understand scientifically and didn’t know was active. But Gaza’s people get blamed because people can be sold a story that ‘they voted for Hamas’, that ‘they’re bad because don’t like Israel, so what do you expect?’, or that ‘they could have left’. These claims are as false as blaming a toddler or primary school child for their own sexual abuse. But these stories work, because they give others somewhere outside themselves to dump their discomfort.

Victim-blaming is also convenient. It keeps the focus on the victim’s character and choices rather than on the forces that caused their harm, which means society doesn’t have to change anything. It frees us from calling out perpetrators and reforming organisations that routinely damage people. So few cases of childhood abuse and domestic abuse ever make it to court and even when they do, perpetrators often walk free or get ridiculous punishments.

When empathy is offered, it can come with an expiry date. Ukrainian refugees were welcomed into British homes, but after a while we started to hear stories about hosts’ patience running out. In the therapy room, clients regularly tell me that friends grow impatient with them for still needing to talk about a bereavement or a trauma after what people decide is ‘long enough’. There is an unspoken ‘allowance’ — a window of time in which you’re entitled to sympathy, after which your suffering becomes a burden on others and you’re expected to stop complaining and go back to coping quietly. The message is that other people’s pain is welcome but only up to a point.

The hierarchy of who deserves empathy and support isn’t only psychological. It’s political. Some victims are actively kept out of the empathy circle not by individual squeamishness but by deliberate, well-resourced narrative management. The blame story isn’t just something observers generate to protect themselves. It’s manufactured and maintained by perpetrators and their allies.

I see this operating at every scale. In the therapy room it’s not uncommon for a client who was repeatedly beaten in early childhood to say at the start of therapy, ‘I was a difficult child and I cried a lot’, or ‘I was needy’, as if that explains or justifies the cruelty inflicted on them. Children don’t invent these stories on their own. Perpetrators openly blame their victims for their own abuse: ‘you made me do it’, ‘you were such a pretty little girl’. Children internalise these narratives because they have no choice — the perpetrator controls the story. Scale that up and you have Israel’s information operation around Gaza and the West Bank where the exact same mechanism is used. Israel controls the narrative and with the help of our own politicians and media also controls who gets to be seen as victim, and whether anyone will act to protect and support them.

Two days ago, a glacial collapse in Nepal triggered catastrophic flooding that has killed at least 579 people with almost 2000 still missing (at the time of writing). This week, the world’s sympathy will flow toward Nepal, and so it should. Ukraine gets sustained sympathy and weapons. But Gaza? Gaza gets narrative management. Its people are not grieved, they are debated. Their suffering is not met with empathy but with arguments about whether they deserve it, and how much compassion we’re allowed to show before we upset Israel too much.

The question isn’t whether we are capable of empathy across time and distance. Hiddleston’s Pompeii series proves that we are. We can grieve strangers who died two thousand years ago and recognise their full humanity across the centuries. Why do we refuse to do the same for people dying right now, and who benefits from that refusal?

Hiddleston made a beautiful empathy project about Pompeii, and I was left wondering: when does Gaza; when do the Palestinian people get the same?

A note on paid subscriptions

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I’ve been following with some interest the recent FIFA scandal, which is still unfolding. Trump’s chum Infantino, the head of FIFA, came up with a brilliant scheme to sell off stakes in the World Cup to private investors — a new commercial subsidiary dressed up as ‘FIFA Forward Enterprise’, fronted by Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital. This followed hot on the heels of Trump phoning Infantino directly to get a red card against Folarin Balogun, the US striker, overturned before the last-16 match against Belgium. Infantino didn’t even bother to deny the call. He confirmed it, then stood there with a straight face and called FIFA’s disciplinary process ‘independent’. This isn’t a person covering their tracks — he’s not even trying. These days more than ever before, Infantino and politicians like him do what they do in the open because they know they can get away with anything. Most evildoers do, so why hide? So clearly not all is well in the land of FIFA, and I suspect there is a great deal more, given that Infantino’s own senior adviser, Carlos Cordeiro, resigned in protest. Infantino’s days in power now seem numbered, although he should have been removed from his post a long time ago.

Neoliberalism is hard at work everywhere. The greedy characters that drive it leave no area of human activity untouched — not even football, where the last remnants of innocence are being destroyed, completing the sport’s transformation into yet another profit-driven human activity. But what I found interesting, as the scandal unfolded, was the reaction. UEFA’s 55 member associations voted unanimously to boycott every FIFA competition, including the World Cup, unless the sell-off plan is abandoned. Concacaf followed. So did the Asian Football Confederation. ‘Some things are simply too important to sell,’ UEFA said. ‘The FIFA World Cup belongs to football. It always will.’

And this is far from the first time Infantino has shown exactly where his priorities sit. Ahead of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, he stood in front of the world’s press for nearly an hour and, rather than address the deaths of migrant workers who built the stadiums, announced:

He accused Western journalists of hypocrisy for even raising it. The Guardian had reported 6,500 South Asian migrant workers dead in Qatar since the World Cup was awarded in 2010. When pressed months later on whether FIFA’s profits might go to the families of the dead, Infantino called it a ‘tragedy’ and talked instead about dignity and pride in hard work. This year, ahead of the 2026 tournament across the US, Mexico and Canada, dozens of players signed an open letter demanding FIFA strengthen its heat protocols after research found nearly 90 per cent of host stadiums could exceed dangerous thresholds. FIFA’s response was mandatory hydration breaks, which broadcasters then used for extra advertising.

They Do Know How to Act, When It Matters to Them

The reaction to Infantino and his scheme wasn’t grassroots. It came from above — from the ruling bodies of the sport and from its politicians. It appears that when something is so blatantly wrong, and when it threatens something people in power value, including their own positions and profits, they know exactly how to stand up and act, not only to correct a wrong, but prevent it from ever happening.

This reaction to Infantino’s scheme stood out like a sore thumb against the world’s silence over Israel’s settler-colonial project to empty historic Palestine of Palestinians by any means possible. Millions of Palestinian lives are at stake. Countless people live under daily threats and incomprehensible harassment from the Israeli authorities, their military and police, and the so-called settlers they arm, train, goad and protect. Countless Palestinians languish in Israel’s Inquisition-style torture dungeons — innocent people like Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, held without charge or reason, their only crime is being Palestinian and living on land the settler-colony wants for itself.

Women and men held captive for the ‘crime’ of being Palestinian are sexually tortured, raped, some by dogs. Israel gets away with the worst violations imaginable — violations its own soldiers have been posting on social media to gloat and boast. No one can escape the images out of Gaza and the West Bank, or avoid the instinctive recognition of what it must feel like, as a human being, to suffer as Palestinians suffer. Any parent would have no trouble feeling for Palestinian parents whose children have long been used as target practice for Israeli snipers. 351 Palestinian children were held in Israeli adult prisons at the end of 2025 — over half without charge or trial — suffering abuse in addition to the trauma of incarceration. There has been a total absence of any meaningful action from international bodies meant to protect children. There has been no attempts to lead to actual release or accountability. (Those who look away from the news do it because they can’t bear the emotional resonance with another human beings’ pain, not because they don’t care). But what I feel, what many of us feel, is the utter powerlessness and despair at the world’s lack of meaningful response to Israel’s crimes, and their devastating impact on the Palestinian people. What will it take for our politicians and leaders to do for Palestine and Palestinians what UEFA just did over Infantino’s attempted daylight robbery?

In FIFA’s scandal, the casualty would have been the sport, its integrity, its meaning to millions of fans. No one would have died. No one would have been tortured. No one would have been turfed out of their home or have their olive trees bulldozed. In the settler-colonial scandal — a clear and colossal crime against humanity — we can’t find one decent politician willing to use the words ‘settler-colonialism’, let alone do what is necessary to stop a murderous state, and clip the wings of an annihilationist regime and its society. This should have already been done in 1949, but from 1948 Israel has been enabled and supported to complete its Zionist project — a product of a colonial world.

If politicians — those who head international sports organisations are politicians — can stand up and stop a wrong before it’s even carried out, how is it possible that politicians do nothing about Palestine and Israel? Those same sports politicians have never boycotted Israel. They’ve let its teams compete in every international event, despite everything.

Apparently, humans in power know perfectly well how to act fast and decisively — when they see an injustice that threatens something they value. But faced with genocide and a home invasion on a grand scale they choose performative tactics not real action: pointless, toothless ‘condemnations’, and even those only when something considered excessive comes to light — and usually, not even that. Never mind the horrific and unbearable everyday reality Israel deliberately and systematically inflicts on Palestinians. UEFA didn’t ‘condemn’. They threatened, unequivocally, to boycott the World Cup. Why can we not get our own countries to boycott a state that hasn’t just been destroying Palestinian sport, but is determined to erase the Palestinian people?

Why is there no politician anywhere who says openly, unapologetically, that we need world peace? Why is there no politician calling on their international colleagues to sit down together and work out a plan for peace, safety and dignity for all human beings on our planet? The UK media and politicians routinely beat the war drums. They keep talking about the inevitability of war, of ‘deterrence’, of more nuclear weapons. Why do we keep arming Ukraine to fight a pointless and indefinite proxy war against Russia? Where are the leaders calling for everyone to sit down and talk about our global problems, with a spirit of true cooperation for the goal of solving our problems for everyone’s benefit?

Until I saw the reaction to Infantino’s scheme, I thought politicians simply weren’t capable of standing up to wrongs — that change could only come from the grassroots. Now I know better. When something is at stake that they care about, politicians are perfectly capable of decisive, even preventive, action. The conclusion is obvious. Politicians act on what they care about. Since our politicians enable perpetual war, genocide and suffering, greed and inequality, that tells us what they care about. They want this. If they wanted world peace, they would choose actions that lead to it.

The inevitable conclusion is not that they’re powerless, or disillusioned, or that they don’t know how to use their own power. The people at the top of our world choose the actions that maintain the status quo: genocide, war, and the human and environmental destruction that comes with them; senseless competition over resources that no one owns and that belong to everyone; privatisation; preferential treatment for those who believe themselves entitled to it. These are the people we put in power, and that we go on enabling. I don’t even blame them in the end. I blame all of us.

Once we see the actions politicians actually choose, we know everything we need to know about their real motivations and interests. It is therefore up to us — the people disproportionately paying for their choices — to stop mistaking their inaction for impotence, or to shrug at their corruption as an inevitable part of politics. Politics isn’t a force of nature. Like everything in our human world, we create it and shape it in our own image. The way our politicians operate actually reflects humanity. If we want world peace, we should enable politicians who will lead us to it.

The idea of ‘changing the conversation’ isn’t just philosophical. In my profession it is an actual intervention that leads to profound change. Clients often raise a real problem but dance around it, wrapping what I can clearly see as dangerous or serious circumstances with euphemisms and softening language. Heavy drinking becomes ‘a bit of an issue’, or ‘a bit sensitive’. Control, threats, violence, fear become ‘he/she has a bit of a temper’. The softening language allows people to keep circling serious problems and dangerous circumstances and dynamics without ever naming them. As a therapist I’m often invited to go along with the fiction that the topics are delicate or ‘sensitive’ and collude with the myth.

The turning point usually comes from naming the thing bluntly, exposing it for what it is. It isn’t ‘temper’ or ‘a bit of an issue’, it is abuse. I can’t remember how many times I have said to clients in twenty-seven years that ‘alcohol isn’t a sensitive issue. It’s a huge problem’. My bluntness is usually uncomfortable to those sitting in front of me, but it’s also a relief. I am not polite or ‘nice’, and I don’t play the social game, because people’s wellbeing depends on naming what is actually happening, not on what might be offensive to someone who is doing something wrong. To do my job ethically and morally, not to mention effectively, I refuse to collude with what I know is harmful. Nothing ever changes when we pussyfoot around issues, placate perpetrators, or minimise crimes.

It’s time to change the conversation on a global scale like we do on a smaller scale in the therapy room. The phrase settler-colonialism in relation to Israel and its crimes in Palestine must be on everyone’s lips, not ‘conflict’ or ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’. The phrase world peace must take centre stage everywhere, not ‘war’, ‘nuclear deterrence’, or ‘more funding for armed forces’.

The conversation — our public discourse — must change. A crime is a crime. Harm is harm. They’re not anything other than precisely what they are. What we refuse to avoid, what we insist on naming clearly, openly and unapologetically, becomes the catalyst for healing and change in my profession. We need the same on a global scale. Those whose salaries our taxes pay for must name and then dismantle the Israeli settler-colonial machine. They must dedicate their careers and use their positions to work towards world peace. Nothing is more important or more urgent.

A note on paid subscriptions

Substack encourages writers to activate paid subscriptions. When people pay for subscription or make a one-off donation Substack take a small cut. I am grateful to the readers who have pledged money for monthly or yearly subscriptions, but I have no intention of monetising my work and this is not enabled on my page.

I don’t want to turn my writing into an obligation, but even more importantly, I don’t believe in a tiered system where those who can pay get preferential treatment over those who can’t, such as the right to comment, or privileged content. This hierarchy of ‘worthiness’, especially based on such an arbitrary principle like how much money people have, couldn’t be further away from my values.

If you do feel moved to support my writing, please use the ‘buy me a coffee’ button below. If you haven’t seen it before, it is a way of offering a donation to freelance writers. Payments are processed securely by Stripe on the ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ site. Donations can be made anonymously.

My writings will always remain free to all.

Thank you for reading my work!

Last Sunday, I gave an online talk at the invitation of Prof. Haim Bresheeth and the Jewish Network for Palestine. The topic was the social psychology of Israeli society. I spoke about the Israeli enclave society, its cult mentality and civil religion and the heavy indoctrination that makes such a society possible. The Israeli indoctrination machine doesn’t just manufacture consent. It stamps out empathy. It breeds a blood-curdling, widespread enthusiasm not only for genocide in Gaza, but for the removal of every Palestinian from historic Palestine.

In the Q&A, someone with a background in therapy asked a question about the individualistic nature of psychotherapy. I couldn’t engage with it in any depth because it would have pulled the discussion away from the focus of the talk. But the question stayed with me.

Two and a half weeks earlier, I attended a conference organised by Psychologists for Palestine — a group I want to acknowledge and thank properly, because what they put together, on what I imagine was a modest budget and largely volunteer labour, was extraordinary. The venue was humble. The chairs a bit uncomfortable. Presentation slides were hard to read — there was too much light and no way to darken the space. But it was by far the best conference in my field that I have ever attended.

The first speaker offered a striking image early in the day that I still haven’t been able to shake. He asked us to imagine a man trapped inside a burning house. A psychologist rushes in and offers a breathing exercise. In for four, hold for four, out for four. If the man can’t calm down, if his hands shake and his thoughts scatter, if he panics, this is taken as a problem with him. His dysregulation. His pathology. Never mind that the house around him is in flames.

That’s an incredibly accurate image to describe the malaise of individualism in mainstream mental health. Mainstream Western psychology for the most part focuses on symptoms and avoids context. Human beings are reduced to their problems, rather than seen as whole beings with a history and a rich life context. Despite everything we know, despite excellent science that confirms that we are largely a product of our environment, that our brain is wired in response to our environment, and that most people don’t ‘malfunction’ — despite all of that, people are heavily pathologised. The ‘therapies’ on offer are irrelevant or pointless at best, harmful at worst. They offer so little to people. Individualistic, reductionist psychology tells people that all they can hope for — all they should hope for — is to cope, to survive and function, regardless of their history, their pain, their losses, how awful the world is, or anything else that might be going wrong in their lives.

The speaker who gave us that striking burning house image, Dr Ron Roberts, had left the British Psychological Society in protest over exactly this failure — not only regarding Gaza, but going back to Bosnia. He said that our profession has still, to this day, not properly reckoned with its own silence on Bosnia, despite three separate international courts confirming that a genocide took place there. Gaza isn’t the first failure. It’s a continuation of a pattern our associations have never once been made to answer for.

He was specific about how that silence gets built. Articles on Gaza rejected without being sent for peer review. Contributors who raise the subject facing professional backlash. Letters that go unanswered or quietly redacted. He described writing to the BPS himself, only to be told that as a charity, it doesn’t comment on ‘political’ matters — while the same organisation apparently found room to publish commentary from people connected to the arms industry.

He described how the American Psychological Association spoke out quickly and clearly on Ukraine, while simultaneously discouraging its own members from calling for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. “We’re still living in the Empire”, he said. Sitting there, my own translation of that was even blunter: our professional associations are in the service of Empire, not of the people or societies we’re supposed to serve.

Every single one of our major professional bodies either actively prohibits members from speaking about Palestine, or simply looks away and calls it neutrality. They don’t just avoid Palestine — they avoid talking about the social, political and economic issues that directly affect people’s mental health. These professional bodies do not see themselves as agents of societal change. They actively maintain the status quo. And there is a very uncomfortable truth hiding in plain sight. The profession profits from misery. If the world were fixed, none of us would have any clients. Our associations are more interested in whether we are making a living than in making the world better.

This isn’t a minor institutional failing. It produces generations of therapists trained to believe that context stops at the therapy room door — that naming what’s happening in the world to the person sitting in front of you, engaging with their political or social concerns, is somehow unprofessional, rather than the most basic and compassionate act of seeing them. It ignores the simple reality that we, therapists, live in the same world as our clients, and are affected by it too. Yet our professions seem to expect us to keep ourselves separate, and pretend to be oblivious to what is going on around us. I have encountered this directly with colleagues telling me that therapists are ‘quiet’ people or that therapy isn’t political. The general atmosphere in the professions actively discourages therapists from being activists. It’s as if you can’t be a therapist and an activist.

That’s what was so different about this conference. Everyone there understood that psychology and psychotherapy are political, and that if we do our job properly, we are by definition activists. Everyone understood that we have a double role: to help our clients, and to be agents of change in the world and no one apologised for it.

What we name, and what we ignore or stay silent about, are political statements — whether we see that or not. Neutrality is not only an illusion; it is itself a political statement. Pretending otherwise is a betrayal of everyone who reaches out to us for help.

Mental health professions have a long, disgraceful history of being conscripted into, and colluding with the machinery of oppressive states. In the Soviet Union, psychiatry invented a fictitious diagnosis, ‘sluggish schizophrenia’, whose defining symptom was political dissent itself. An ‘obsessive’ pursuit of truth, disagreement with the regime — these were treated as a slowly progressing psychosis, which led these regimes to confine dissidents to psychiatric institutions for years where they were forcefully medicated and tortured. East Germany’s Stasi ran a parallel programme of psychological destabilisation against dissidents, designed with real clinical understanding of how to induce breakdown and isolation. Documented reporting on Israeli detention today describes a related pattern: government-paid healthcare professionals identifying psychological vulnerabilities in detainees, sharing them with interrogators, and systematically failing to document the abuse they witness. This is what happens when a profession betrays its own ethics and serves whoever is in power.

My own training and practice was in the humanistic and existential tradition, which insists context matters, and that suffering isn’t a pathology to be corrected in isolation. Existential work in particular emphasises our human need for meaning and purpose, not as a luxury but as a basic necessity alongside our need to survive. I’ve never practised the individualist, medicalised, symptom management model in mental health. It is not only against my professional ethics, it offends my own humanity.

It was at this conference that I realised, for the first time, that even humanistic and existential psychology, for all that they get right, were built inside a fragmented, individualistic, Western liberal, capitalist culture. They were created for people whose difficulty is a hard childhood, a strained marriage, an existential crisis of purpose — not an active, live-streamed military assault with no end in sight. Not mass destruction of everything that sustains people’s lives and gives it meaning, torture, wholesale loss and displacement. Gaza doesn’t just break the individualist model. It shows the limits of even the more humane end of Western psychology.

Livestream from Palestine — Dr Reem Abu Hweij

Early in the afternoon the psychologist Dr Reem Abu Hweij joined us by live video link from Palestine to talk about her group therapy practice. The title of her talk was ‘Between Actionality and Meaning: Group Therapy as a site of Liberation Madness’.

I trained as a group therapist myself, in Irvin Yalom’s tradition. Yalom’s model is built around the idea of the group as a kind of laboratory, a safe-enough space where people learn about themselves through each other, then carry it back out into ordinary life. The group inevitably becomes a microcosm of the participants’ families of origin, with members’ interactions and feelings about each other beginning to mirror their earlier family experiences. The therapy process makes use of this, and the assumption is that through skilled facilitation, people can finish some of their ‘unfinished business’ as they relate to the other group members.

Listening to Dr Abu Hweij, I understood immediately how much Yalom’s model quietly assumes the room is safe and the world outside stable enough for the laboratory to function. But what Dr Abu Hweij described was something else entirely. Group therapy in Palestine is not a room set apart from danger. It operates within the danger, while the bombs — real and metaphorical — are still falling, while a deliberate and systematic programme of erasure and elimination is progressing in full speed. It serves as collective preparation for an ongoing reality that is far from resolved and whose end is not clear. If Israel had its way, Dr Abu Hweij, her colleagues, her clients, and everyone they know would be dead or expelled from their homes and reduced to the most basic survival imaginable. It was remarkable to encounter a clinician working right in the middle of it all, with her eyes completely open. Yalom is one of the world’s foremost experts on existential psychotherapy — but what Dr Abu Hweij is working with is existential therapy as I have never encountered it before, and it made complete sense.

Dr Abu Hweij calls the shift she works toward ‘liberation madness’. She sees it as the moment a person stops accepting the logic of their own domination by their oppressor, and turns instead toward the possibility of freedom. It’s worth pausing on the word ‘madness’, because our profession has spent a century pointing it in exactly the wrong direction. When someone resists domination, breaks down under conditions no human being should have to endure, or simply refuses to accept the story their oppressor tells about them, psychology shamefully calls this madness. It locates the pathology in the person who was harmed, rather than in the system or the people doing the harming.

Dr Abu Hweij’s use of the word does the opposite, and deliberately so. The madness, in her framing, isn’t the Palestinian who refuses to accept their own erasure. It’s the system built to erase them in the first place, and everyone participating in it. Real madness belongs with the perpetrator who commits genocide and calls it self-defence, not with the person who resists it. Reclaiming the word this way isn’t just clever reframing. It’s a correction our whole profession badly needs, applied here to Palestine, but true everywhere power tries to pathologise the people it’s harming rather than the harm itself.

Dr Abu Hweij drew on Viktor Frankl, who built a psychology of meaning and a therapy modality — logotherapy — out of surviving the camps. Existential therapy has told me for years that meaning isn’t optional. People can’t live without purpose and meaning and Frankl believed that to be well we need to be able to find meaning even in the middle of hell. It doesn’t mean ignoring hell, quite the contrary. But you work towards maintaining your humanity all the way through so that you can continue to live fully when you are finally liberated. This kind of psychology is revolutionary, because in its essence it is the strongest form of resistance we can have. Here is a group therapy model that doesn’t ignore reality, or teach people merely to cope, but that supports people’s humanity in the middle of a dehumanising, sadistic system created by a powerful and determined annihilator. Dr Abu Hweij is living inside that world herself, she isn’t detached from it.

She isn’t taking a Western model and adapting it for Palestinian clients. She isn’t nudging people toward the more individuated, more ‘differentiated’ relationships to family and culture that Western therapy aims for, even at its best. She’s doing close to the opposite — working with the culture, with the relationships, with sumud and faith and family exactly as they already exist, and finding the liberation and meaning already inside them. Nothing needs correcting. Nothing needs Westernising. Watching it live from a hall in Luton, it struck me as nothing short of a masterpiece.

The image she left us with comes from the words of one of her clients, and it’s stayed with me: “I just want to bake bread and sit with my children. I feel like the thing that angers them the most is that we know how to live despite their hideous attempts to stop us.” Damn right. Here is therapy as resistance, and as preparation for liberation. It puts Western therapy to shame.

I’ve spent most of my career as something of an outlier — out of step with NHS mental health services, with how GPs approach psychological distress, with how my own professional bodies have often behaved. In Luton, for the first time I can remember at a professional conference, I wasn’t out of step. It was also, without question, the most ethnically diverse room of professionals I’ve ever been part of, and somehow everyone in it spoke my language. We all understood suffering as something happening to people inside real life situations, not a private ‘malfunction’ to be corrected in isolation from the world that produces it.

At the end of the day, over an extraordinarily generous spread from Al Quds, a brilliant Palestinian restaurant in Luton, ideas turned into something more lasting. I found myself at the same table with a psychologist from Poland, another from Bangladesh, one from Pakistan, one of the speakers originally from Greece, and me, from Israel by way of Australia and now Scotland. Six countries, one table, entirely at ease with each other, enjoying an incredible meal.

Listening to Dr Abu Hweij, I felt not just admiration but something closer to release. Her psychology elegantly dismantled a bias I hadn’t even recognised I had — my faith that humanistic and existential therapy, the traditions I love and practise, were somehow complete. They aren’t. They were formed inside a particular culture, and they carry its blind spots. But it wasn’t a loss. It felt liberating.

Here is what I didn’t have time to say in response to that question. Western psychology, even at its most humane, still largely assumes the room is safe and the ‘fire’ is somebody else’s department. Palestinian psychologists don’t have that luxury. They’re working under conditions most of us will never face. They are building something the Western world badly needs — a psychology that doesn’t flinch from naming reality, doesn’t turn a broken world into a personal diagnosis, and doesn’t pretend neutrality is professionalism.

Palestinian psychology is far ahead of us. It should lead the way, not only for Palestinians but for all of us.

A note on paid subscriptions

Substack encourages writers to activate paid subscriptions. When people pay for subscription or make a one-off donation Substack take a small cut. I am grateful to the readers who have pledged money for monthly or yearly subscriptions, but I have no intention of monetising my work and this is not enabled on my page.

I don’t want to turn my writing into an obligation, but even more importantly, I don’t believe in a tiered system where those who can pay get preferential treatment over those who can’t, such as the right to comment, or privileged content. This hierarchy of ‘worthiness’, especially based on such an arbitrary principle like how much money people have, couldn’t be further away from my values.

If you do feel moved to support my writing, please use the ‘buy me a coffee’ button below. If you haven’t seen it before, it is a way of offering a donation to freelance writers. Payments are processed securely by Stripe on the ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ site. Donations can be made anonymously.

My writings will always remain free to all.

Thank you for reading my work!

A reader wrote to me recently, saying: ‘I had never believed it possible that there’d be another genocide, and that the world’s politicians would allow it to happen without doing everything they could to stop it.’ This reader is understandably shocked — not only by Israel’s livestreamed genocide, but by the silence of world leadership in the face of it. I completely empathise with her feelings. But the grim reality is that the world’s deafening silence in the face of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon is not the exception. It’s the rule.

This non-exhaustive list of mass atrocities and genocides since the Second World War is sobering.

Bangladesh, 1971 — mass killings by Pakistani forces during the independence war. Death estimates range widely: 300,000–3 million. Some governments have contested the idea that this event can be formally classified a ‘genocide’. But the word genocide has been widely used by scholars.

Cambodia, 1975–1979 — Khmer Rouge killings, roughly 1.5–2 million dead. Legally recognised as genocide by a UN-backed tribunal (ECCC).

East Timor, 1975–1999 — Indonesian occupation. A UN-sponsored truth commission found mass killings amounting to at least 100,000+ deaths, with some scholars applying the genocide label to specific periods (esp. 1975–1980).

Guatemala, 1981–1983 — Maya genocide, part of the broader 1960–1996 civil war. A UN-backed truth commission found acts of genocide against Maya communities.

Iraq, 1986–1989 — Anfal campaign against Kurds, including the Halabja chemical attack (1988). Recognised as genocide by several national parliaments and courts.

Bosnia, 1992–1995, particularly Srebrenica, July 1995 — legally established as genocide by both the ICTY and the ICJ.

Rwanda, April–July 1994 — approximately 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu murdered in around 100 days, internationally recognised as genocide.

Darfur, Sudan, 2003–2005 onward — declared genocide by the US government in 2004. The ICC issued genocide charges against Omar al-Bashir — President of Sudan 1993 to 2019.

Yazidi genocide, Iraq/Syria, 2014 — by ISIS. Recognised as genocide by the UN, EU, US, UK, and others.

Rohingya, Myanmar, since 2016 — recognised as genocide by the US government (2022) and is the subject of an ongoing ICJ case (Gambia v. Myanmar).

Uyghurs, China, 2017–present — the US, Canadian, UK, and other parliaments have made genocide determinations. China disputes this.

The Nakba, 1948 — Around 700,000–750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled during the 1947–1949 period. UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III), adopted in December 1948, affirmed in Article 11 that refugees wishing to return to their homes ‘should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date’, with compensation for those who chose not to return or for loss of property.

The UN specifically instructed its Conciliation Commission to facilitate that repatriation. As you would expect from a settler-colonial project that has always intended to remove the non-Jewish indigenous people of the land and replace them — Israel completely ignored this.

Either by ignorance or deliberate deceit, the UN General Assembly treated the expulsion of the Palestinians as a consequence of war, after which the victors would presumably allow the refugees to return and live alongside them. But the UN Resolution never left the matter entirely to Israel’s ‘good will’. It provided for quite specific international intervention, even naming the bodies that would facilitate the return of the refugees.

What happened to that provision? Why wasn’t it enforced?

In the same year the international community pretended to care about Nazi Germany’s crimes, it established the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. That same year, the fledgling, self-declared Israeli settler-colony systematically and deliberately ethnically cleansed more than half of the Palestinian population. It committed massacres and gang rapes1, destroyed 500 Palestinian villages and towns, countless homes, and public buildings, looted, stole Palestinian land, and condemned the people and their descendants to statelessness in refugee camps or displacement around the world. Their descendants remain stateless or in refugee status across the region, including in Gaza, to this day.

How does the world allow this to happen, over and over again? One mechanism, above all others, secures the world’s collusion and silence: the dehumanisation of victims.

Israel is not content merely to remove every last Palestinian from historic Palestine and erase them as a people. Like the Nazis before it — not content merely to kill those they deemed undesirable in their ‘racially pure’ state — Israel wants to erase its victims’ very humanity, in the eyes of the world.

Without bystanders and collaborators, perpetrators would find it extremely difficult to commit the crimes they do. If they can weaken support for their victims and secure the silence and collusion of others, they can act with impunity, unchallenged and unopposed. One of the main tools for securing silence, indifference, and support for atrocities is the dehumanisation of victims. All colonial and settler-colonial regimes have used it. We see it closer to home in the UK’s anti-immigrant — or rather anti-human — right-wing community delusional yearning for Britain’s imperial past. These people, who don’t see colonialism as an atrocity and who feel nothing for its victims, routinely dehumanise asylum seekers and immigrants. But nowhere is dehumanisation more lethal today than in Israel’s annihilationist assault on the Palestinians.

A March 2025 survey found most Jewish Israelis support the mass expulsion of Gaza’s population, and nearly half endorsed killing every inhabitant of a conquered city, as in the biblical conquest of Jericho. This is not a public reluctantly enduring what its government does in its name. Dehumanisation is what makes the callousness toward Palestinian life possible, what enables widespread torture, and what secures impunity for the perpetrators.

We have always dehumanised victims to justify to ourselves why we harm people, or why we do so little when we learn of the harm done to them. As a reactive, primitive species, we have always treated victims appallingly. Looking at deeds rather than words, our track record throughout history is dire. For a species with such potential, we keep placing the worst among us in charge. They do what you would expect, which build and sustain the destructive, cruel systems that taint and destroy everything good about life and humanity.

So the world failing to intervene to save the Palestinians from annihilation, and the sadistic cruelty that underlies it, is in fact the norm, not the exception. This is what we do. This is our real legacy. Humanity dehumanises repeatedly and consistently, which allows it to continue committing atrocities with impunity, in full view of everyone. Our history is soaked in our own blood, and our record proves we don’t care.

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1

See for example:

Manufacturing Dissent

Tantura Documentary | A Massacre Buried, Denied, and Still Unanswered

Tantura was a coastal Palestinian village south of Haifa, a place built around fishing, farming, and family networks that stretched back generations. By May 1948, it became one of the many communities caught in the sweep of military operations that emptied more than 400 Palestinian towns and villages. What happened in Tantura on the nights of May 22-23 …

Listen now

3 months ago · 88 likes · 13 comments · Nouri™️

For readers who might be interested, I am giving a webinar next Sunday, 26th July, 7pm [UK] at the invitation of Prof. Haim Bresheeth of the anti-Zionist, pro-BDS, UK-based Jewish Network for Palestine.

If the link at the bottom of the poster doesn’t work, please use this link to register for the Webinar. (If the form includes someone else’s name and email address, please just replace them with your own).

I’m not involved in organising or in the technical side. Please contact JNP directly if you need any information or support to register.

To remove any doubt about the aims and spirit of my talk, here are my first two slides:

A note on paid subscriptions

Substack encourages writers to activate paid subscriptions. When people pay for subscription or make a one-off donation Substack take a small cut. I am grateful to the readers who have pledged money for monthly or yearly subscriptions, but I have no intention of monetising my work and this is not enabled on my page.

I don’t want to turn my writing into an obligation, but even more importantly, I don’t believe in a tiered system where those who can pay get preferential treatment over those who can’t, such as the right to comment, or privileged content. This hierarchy of ‘worthiness’, especially based on such an arbitrary principle like how much money people have, couldn’t be further away from my values.

If you do feel moved to support my writing, please use the ‘buy me a coffee’ button below. If you haven’t seen it before, it is a way of offering a donation to freelance writers. Payments are processed securely by Stripe on the ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ site. Donations can be made anonymously. My writings will remain free to all.

Thank you for reading!

In a previous essay I argued that Israel is simultaneously expanding outward with maximum violence and contracting inward as the society it claims to serve votes with its feet. The Zionist project is collapsing because it is structurally unsustainable and what is happening now is its acceleration not just in relation to the Palestinians but internally.

Israel’s government has just declared itself above its own laws.

Ynet, Israel’s most popular newspaper — essentially a tabloid read by the vast majority of Israelis — is reporting what it calls a ‘shock’ decision by the Israeli cabinet to openly defy a ruling by Bagatz, Israel’s Supreme Court, the highest court in the country (my translation from Hebrew is below). The Hebrew word tad’héma, in the article’s title indicates a really big shock.

It is important to read Israel’s media in the original rather than rely on English-language reporting in the Western press, which despite everything Israel is doing still tries to soften the edges to protect Israel’s image. In a society where there are few secrets, the Hebrew-language media reveal more of the truth than their English-language counterparts.

Netanyahu has been doing in Israel what Trump has been doing in the United States: systematically hollowing out democracy and its institutions. Both are doing this to protect themselves from legal accountability for their crimes. Both know that the only thing standing between them and indefinite power is functioning democratic institutions — so they are dismantling them one by one. They know democracy is their real enemy, and they are massacring it.

Never mind that Israeli ‘democracy’ was always only for Jews. Palestinians inside and outside Israel’s borders have never lived under anything other than a brutal, arbitrary and dehumanising military dictatorship. But Israeli Jews lived under the illusion that democratic institutions protected them. That illusion is now being stripped away in public, and the stripping is accelerating.

The specific details of this particular ruling — the Second Broadcasting Authority Council, the machinations around its composition — will probably not mean much to readers outside Israel. The detail that matters is that the Israeli government has announced it will not comply with its own Supreme Court’s ruling, and basically do as it pleases.

In reality Netanyahu has been making all the decisions and running the country as a de-facto dictator anyway for a while now. The Knesset — Israel’s parliament — already functions as a performance of democracy, just as Congress does in the United States. But now it is official and out in the open.

The word ‘shock’, tad’héma, in the Ynet article is laughable. I do not believe that Israeli judges — some of whom have routinely enabled and excused horrendous, sadistic crimes against Palestinians — are suddenly waking up to a new reality. Pretending to be shocked is rich. I have little sympathy for Israeli judges and other ‘liberals’ who have spent decades providing legal and moral cover for crimes against Palestinians. What is coming for them is not misfortune, it’s poetic justice — a direct consequence of what they have enabled and sanctioned for decades. A settler-colonial, apartheid society could never be a democracy.

The legal consequences for Israel are worth pointing out. The Ynet report acknowledges that this move could damage Israel’s standing internationally and expose it to proceedings in international tribunals. The principle of complementarity is the key to understanding this. Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute — it signed in 2000 but never ratified — and the ICC’s jurisdiction over Israeli nationals derives from Palestine’s territorial jurisdiction, which the court upheld over Israel’s objections. But the principle of complementarity holds that the ICC defers to functioning national legal systems. If a state is genuinely investigating its own conduct, the ICC is obliged to step back. This is the shield Israel has tried to hold up — pointing to its own legal institutions as evidence that it is capable of self-regulation.

When the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, the prosecutor made clear that the door to complementarity remained open. If Israel conducted genuine domestic proceedings, the court would defer. A government that has now publicly announced it will not comply with its own highest court has just slammed that door on itself. It has destroyed, in a single cabinet decision, whatever residual argument it had for being treated as a self-regulating, democratic legal system.

I expect a fresh wave of emigration by those Israelis who do not wish to live under dictatorship. But what I am really watching for is how the world responds — especially Britain, whose government has been abusing its own laws to suppress Palestine advocacy, allowing Israeli interference in its elections and judicial processes, and offering cover to Israel in full view of a televised genocide.

Those precious Israeli ‘liberals’ who are so ‘shocked’ need to understand that any regime capable of doing what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians was always going to turn those same capacities on its own population. Annihilationist settler-colonialism is not limited only to the target population. It is a way of organising a society — its institutions, its psychology, its relationship to law, to truth, to the humanity of others.

Once we start ‘othering’ it is the dehumanisation and othering themselves that become the organising principles. They cannot be curbed by laws because it is those very laws that they will seek to destroy first. Israeli ‘liberals’ should have paid attention to Niemöller.1He learned the hard way that once regimes target people, any people, no one is safe. The devil doesn’t play fair and doesn’t honour deals.

Israel’s government declaration to disregard the Bagatz decision is a milestone that foreshadows the imminent collapse of the Jewish settler-colony. How long this collapse will take depends on the action of the rest of the world, and its willingness to continue to collude with, and cover for Israel’s war crimes. But while we await our own countries to finally do the obvious, millions of Palestinian lives are hanging in the balance.

1

The German Lutheran pastor who initially supported the Nazis and later became a fierce opponent and concentration camp survivor.

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A note on paid subscriptions

Substack encourages writers to activate paid subscriptions. When people pay for subscription or make a one-off donation Substack take a small cut. I am grateful to the readers who have pledged money for monthly or yearly subscriptions, but I have no intention of monetising my work and this is not enabled on my page.

I don’t want to turn my writing into an obligation, but even more importantly, I don’t believe in a tiered system where those who can pay get preferential treatment over those who can’t, such as the right to comment, or privileged content. This hierarchy of ‘worthiness’, especially based on such an arbitrary principle like how much money people have, couldn’t be further away from my values.

If you do feel moved to support my writing, please use the ‘buy me a coffee’ button below. If you haven’t seen it before, it is a way of offering a donation to freelance writers. Payments are processed securely by Stripe on the ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ site. Donations can be made anonymously. My writings will remain free to all.

Thank you for reading!

Twenty years ago, when I still lived in Australia, I was invited to a professional development workshop in Sydney presented by an Israeli therapist who was also a rabbi. The topic was ‘narrative therapy’, an approach I had already rejected. I was especially suspicious of a presenter from Israel teaching narrative therapy, and I had no interest in attending.

Narrative therapy deserves its rightful place in the ‘discarded, forgotten and good-riddance basket’. It is clinically useless, even harmful. But it was favoured by Israeli therapists for its post-modernist basis. For those unfamiliar with it, post-modernism is a philosophical movement that holds that we each have our own subjective perception of reality. According to narrative therapy, this subjective perception informs our ‘narrative’ — the story we tell ourselves and others about our experience. It is true that we each have a subjective experience of reality and our own perspective on it — I see this regularly in my relationship therapy work in particular. But some extreme post-modernists have gone further, arguing that the fact that we have our subjective perception of reality means that objective reality doesn’t exist at all.

A few years earlier, I attended a residential weekend at the University of New England in NSW as part of a Masters degree in counselling. One of the lectures was on post-modernism. The lecturer explained with a straight face that because we each have our own subjective perspective, objective reality doesn’t exist. I raised my hand and said: ‘Suppose I approach you right now at the lectern and slap you. When you complain about it, I say it’s just your narrative and the slap never actually happened. I insist that all we have are our respective narratives, and mine says I didn’t do anything to you.’ He looked at me stunned, and admitted that ‘perhaps post-modernists have taken things too far’.

The lecturer, as it happened, was an Aboriginal Australian. I have thought about this many times since. His people had suffered catastrophic genocide at the hands of white settler colonisers who wanted their land and its resources — and to take it, murdered millions and set about erasing everything else: Aboriginal culture, identity, existence itself. And yet here he was, arguing that objective reality doesn’t exist. It is a striking example of how colonialist ideology can sometimes succeed in poisoning the minds of even some of those who have suffered its most devastating consequences, leading them into collusion and self-doubt. But that is a subject for another essay.

Israeli therapists have embraced narrative therapy enthusiastically, and it’s easy to see why. Therapists tend toward liberal or left-leaning politics — it goes with the territory. But Israeli therapists face a particular problem. They cannot easily identify with the right, yet confronting what their society is and what it’s doing is equally intolerable. To do so would mean acknowledging their own complicity, and accepting that being a moral person and a loyal Israeli are mutually exclusive. Narrative therapy resolves this nicely. The idea that objective reality doesn’t exist and that all we have is our subjective experience and the stories we tell about it allows Israeli therapists to feel progressive and humane while maintaining the convenient and wilful blindness that has always characterised the Israeli Zionist left. That blindness is driven by tribal loyalty, and tribal loyalty is driven by basic, self-serving existential fear and the belief that Israel is the only thing standing between Jews and another holocaust. When existential fear trumps everything else, values and principles that should be universal, become selective. You apply your values where it costs you nothing, and look away where it does.

If objective reality doesn’t exist, then what Palestinians say is being done to them isn’t in fact real — it’s ‘only’ their perception, their ‘narrative’. One wonders what would happen if we applied the same logic to Jewish victimhood and suggested it was just a ‘narrative based on subjective experience’, and that nothing really happened because postmodernism suggests that there is no such thing as objective reality. Israeli sophistry and double standards are legendary.

The organiser knew I was an activist for Palestinian human rights and that I had renounced my Israeli citizenship. He was insistent — he thought I should hear this particular speaker, and gave me the ticket for free. At the time this puzzled me and against my better judgement, I went.

The rabbi opened by listing his credentials — the educational and therapeutic work he was doing in the Jerusalem area, the joint Israeli-Palestinian educational projects he was involved with, which among other things facilitated ‘dialogue’ between Israelis and Palestinians. This was his way of telling us he was a decent man who didn’t hate Palestinians and was using his profession for good. What he never did was take any ownership of why a problem existed in the first place — the kind of problem no amount of ‘dialogue’ was ever going to resolve, because dialogue assumes two equal parties with a disagreement, not a coloniser society and the people it is replacing and erasing. I was not going to sit there and tolerate it. I waited for the first break and walked out.

Eventually I understood why the organiser had wanted me there. He thought he was bringing in a ‘nice’ Israeli — someone who worked with Palestinians, who clearly meant well — and he wanted the encounter to soften my ‘one-sided’ position. Twenty years ago activists like me were under considerable pressure to be ‘fair to both sides’, to acknowledge the good Israelis, and to moderate what Israel supporters labelled as one-sidedness. I now completely ignore this whitewashing nonsense.

Just before that year’s Yom Kippur — the Jewish day of atonement — I received an unexpected email from the rabbi. He had noticed me walk out of his workshop. He didn’t know what he had done to ‘offend’ me, he said, but he was asking for my forgiveness.

It might seem strange to some, but I knew exactly why he asked me to forgive him. Yom Kippur is the holiest day in Judaism, and the law behind it is specific in a way most people outside the religion do not know. On Yom Kippur, God can forgive sins committed against God. But God does not forgive sins committed against another person. That kind of sin can only be forgiven by the person who was wronged, and only if they choose to grant it. When this religious man asked me for forgiveness before Yom Kippur, he was not being sentimental or considerate of my feelings. He was trying to close an account that his own God could not close for him. I knew exactly what it would mean to him if I withheld my forgiveness. For an observant Jew, that is a very serious matter.

I wrote back and told him that he had not committed an offence against me as an individual and did not need my forgiveness. The issue was moral, not personal. He had used narrative therapy as a way of avoiding ever naming what his own society had done and was still doing, actively promoting the idea that Palestinian dispossession is a matter of perspective rather than a matter of fact. I told him he had ignored and whitewashed a crime against humanity, and that I was not going to sit there and tolerate it — which is why I walked out. I also told him who he actually needed to ask forgiveness from. He never replied. He had been released from needing my forgiveness and had no further need to engage with me. ‘Liberal Zionists’ like him believe you can make settler colonialism more humane, more ‘civilised’, effectively buying time for Israel to complete its monstrous, annihilationist project.

The Jewish religious law that made this man ask my forgiveness is: ‘Transgressions between a person and God — Yom Kippur atones. Transgressions between a person and their fellow — Yom Kippur does not atone until the wronged person has been appeased’. (Aveirot she’bein adam la’makom — yom hakippurim mechaper. Aveirot she’bein adam le’chavero ein yom hakippurim mechaper ád she’yeratzé ét chavero).

The law is clear. God does not forgive transgressions between people. The account stays open and does not close when the day is over. In other words, if forgiveness is not granted by a person who was wronged to the person who has wronged them, the purpose of Yom Kippur has not been achieved.

But the word that really matters here is chavero — fellow, neighbour, the other person. Jewish religion is legalistic by nature, specific and nitpicky about the meaning of every word. So who is chavero? Does it include ethnically cleansed and tortured Palestinians, those kidnapped and incarcerated without charge, raped and tortured in Israel’s dungeons of horror, the bereaved families of murdered Palestinian babies and newborns left to decompose in incubators in Gaza’s bombed hospitals, Gaza’s survivors who are suffering from malnutrition, who were left with nothing, who are surviving, somehow, in the ruins of their homes, maimed and traumatised children, displaced and traumatised Lebanese, the bereaved families of dead Lebanese people murdered by Israel, the bereaved families of two hundred Iranian schoolgirls?

If the answer is yes, then no ritual on the holiest day of the Jewish year absolves a settler, a soldier, a politician, or the rabbi who blesses them, of what they have done to a Palestinian or anyone else. Only the person harmed can grant forgiveness, and they are not being asked.

If the answer is no — if chavero means only other Jews — then this has to be stated out loud, for the world to hear. It means Israeli Jews and the Jews who support them admitting that the people of Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon and Iran are not considered fellow human beings.

There is no third option. Either chavero and the law apply to everyone, or someone has to stand up and explain why it does not. A society that dehumanises anyone who is not one of its own should have been called out long ago.

Judaism has no hell, no purgatory, no afterlife where unfinished business gets sorted out later. What it has instead is the ‘Book of Life’ — the belief that on Yom Kippur a person’s fate for the coming year is sealed, and that to be inscribed in that book is to be granted another year of life. Death, in this tradition, is not simply nature taking its course. It is what happens when atonement fails.

Atonement is not just about a private conversation with God. The law is explicit. The rabbi who condones rape, the settler who harasses children on their way to school, who burns olive groves, the soldiers who randomly break into people’s homes, searching, violating, humiliating; the soldiers who rape Palestinians, the judges who dropped the charges against them, the soldiers who train dogs to rape male Palestinian detainees, who shot a family in their car killing their seven-month-old baby and an entire family on another day, and lied about it, the politicians who send fighter jets and drones to finish off the survivors of a genocide in an enclave of Nakba refugees they have controlled and besieged for decades, the religious minister who poses for photographs with Palestinian detainees — none of them get to settle their account through ritual alone, no matter how fanatically they observe the day. In a religion with no later place to settle it, an open and unresolved account is a big deal.

I am not Jewish in any meaningful way. I was born in Israel and was given the label Jewish by that country, and that is the extent of it. But this legal point matters to every Jew who observes Yom Kippur. In Israel itself it matters more now than ever before. Israel is no longer the largely secular country it was when I was growing up, with religious Jews a minority. It is rapidly becoming a theocracy. It is run by a supremacist religious nationalist movement that justifies colonisation, settlement, dispossession, rape, torture and indiscriminate slaughter explicitly in the name of Jewish law and Jewish destiny. The rabbis who sanction rape as a weapon of war, the ministers who invoke the Torah to authorise the destruction of Gaza, the settlers who believe their title to the land is God-given and therefore unchallengeable — these are not fringe figures operating at the margins of Israeli society. They are at its centre, in its cabinet, in its courts, and in its military.

Jewish religious law is not a distraction from the political argument but the centre of it. When a state acts in the name of a religion, the obligations of that religion apply. You cannot invoke God’s covenant as the justification for what you are doing and then claim God’s law is irrelevant when it requires you to take responsibility for your actions. The chavero question is being posed to exactly those people who have placed religious law at the heart of their politics, their violence, and their impunity.

A strategy for protest & resistance

I want to suggest something concrete to those who are directly harmed by Israel: Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, and anyone affected by Israel’s surveillance technology and arms trading. Before Yom Kippur each year, send a message to Jewish Israelis and those who support them that you do not forgive them. Say it plainly — through social media, by email, on camera. Tell them you know about their Yom Kippur law; that their account is not settled and cannot ever be settled, because the only person in a position to settle it was never asked.

I do not believe these perpetrators deserve forgiveness. Their crimes are so heinous and so intentional that they are beyond redemption. But this is about them knowing that you know that their God does not forgive, on your behalf, a sin committed against you, no matter how devoutly they fast or pray or perform the rituals of Yom Kippur. If they want to insist this does not matter to them, they will have to say why. And there is only one honest answer available to them — that they do not consider you chavero — a fellow human being. Let them expose, in their own words, exactly how little they think of non-Jews. Because if chavero is not a fellow human being but only a fellow Jew, then it means they can do anything to anyone who is not Jewish with impunity and they are not required to atone for it. When people wonder why most Israeli Jews support genocide and show such absence of conscience and empathy, the answer is simple: even non-religious Jews are raised on the same value system that the religion is built on. They are taught to believe that only Jews matter.

Let the rest of the world explain why it supports, funds and provides political cover for a society that thinks and behaves as if only Jews are human — Jewish supremacy, laid bare.

At the next Palestine advocacy vigil or rally, carry a sign that says: ‘Yom Kippur does not atone for this — your victims do not forgive you. We do not forgive you.’ It will be very hard for the UK, German, Australian, French or US governments to legislate against this.

Jewish faith condemns its own adherents, and no intellectual gymnastics can change this. And ‘Thou shalt not kill’ doesn’t even include the chavero qualification. It is universal and has no exceptions.

A note on paid subscriptions

Substack encourages writers to activate paid subscriptions. When people pay for subscription or make a one-off donation Substack take a small cut. I am grateful to the readers who have pledged money for monthly or yearly subscriptions, but I have no intention of monetising my work and this is not enabled on my page.

I don’t want to turn my writing into an obligation, but even more importantly, I don’t believe in a tiered system where those who can pay get preferential treatment over those who can’t, such as the right to comment, or privileged content. This hierarchy of ‘worthiness’, especially based on such an arbitrary principle like how much money people have, couldn’t be further away from my values.

If you do feel moved to support my writing, please use the ‘buy me a coffee’ button below. If you haven’t seen it before, it is a way of offering a donation to freelance writers. Payments are processed securely by Stripe on the ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ site. Donations can be made anonymously.

My writings will always remain free to all.

Thank you for reading my work!

In 2025, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics — which makes this data available only in Hebrew and avoids drawing attention to negative migration — 69,000 Israelis left the country. Only 19,000 returned. For the first time in Israel’s history, the international migration balance turned negative. Since the current government took office, more than 200,000 Israelis have emigrated. Yair Lapid, the opposition leader, described it in January as an unprecedented wave of negative migration. Israel’s financial newspaper Calcalist put it more bluntly, arguing that ‘the first priority of the next government must be to stop the severe bleeding of negative migration from Israel.’

Those leaving are disproportionately the young, the educated, the secular, the economically productive. They occupy the heart of Israel’s military, commerce, finance, and high-tech sectors. Their decision to leave isn’t necessarily motivated by sudden love or concern for the Palestinians. They’re looking round them and into the future, and they’re tired of living in a state of perpetual war. They don’t want to sacrifice their children’s futures, lives and wellbeing for the doomed and evil cause of an exclusively Jewish state.

At the same time as Israeli Jews are leaving, Israel is quietly importing foreign labour at record speed. The number of foreign workers has surged by nearly 80 per cent from 109,200 in 2023 to 195,700 today, with a government quota set at 336,000 — over 3 per cent of Israel’s entire population. This was driven largely by the exclusion of Palestinian workers after October 2023. Roughly 156,000 Palestinians worked in Israel before the war, but only 34,000 had returned to Israeli employers by the end of 2025. The policy was introduced with no comprehensive planning and no public debate. The Calcalist report says that the “expanded framework is expected to allow foreign workers into a long list of industries that had not previously experienced labor shortages.”

Permission to Rape

The man who is currently the IDF’s Chief Military Rabbi, Eyal Karim, issued religious rulings permitting soldiers to rape non-Jewish women during wartime ‘out of consideration for the difficulties faced by soldiers.’ “It is permitted to breach the walls of modesty and satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive gentile (non-Jewish) women against their will, out of consideration for the difficulties faced by the soldiers and for overall success,” the newly-appointed Israeli military Rabbi said in a 2002. The ruling resurfaced and caused controversy when he was appointed in 2016. (He has apparently changed his tune since).

Another senior rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu chief rabbi of Safed, son of a former Chief Rabbi of Israel (Mordechai Eliyahu), and a contender for the Chief Rabbi role himself, has argued soldiers would lose their will to fight if denied the same ‘right.’ Electronic Intifada reports that this has ‘largely gone unnoticed’.

These are not fringe voices. These are the kind of men who occupy the most senior religious positions in the state and its military and who ultimately seek to rule the country by Jewish religious law. Those who are leaving don’t want to live in a society run by Medieval religious law, under the control of repugnant, psychopathic rabbis who condone rape and who treat ‘non-Jewish women’ as objects whose purpose is to satisfy the ‘needs’ of Israeli soldiers. The fact that there has been no international backlash against Israel — I haven’t seen any — and not even from feminist organisations, testifies to the world’s complicity and double standard.

The country’s educated classes tend to have Western sensibilities (except with regard to Palestinians). They can read the room, and they’re voting with their feet. Those who allow their children to grow up and serve Israel’s society and its military, condemn them to a life of psychological and moral ruin.

When I left in 1991 I was the same as those who are leaving now. I wasn’t politically enlightened. I may have been ‘lefty’, but I was still a product of Israel’s insidious indoctrination. I was ten years away from renouncing my Israeli citizenship and becoming an anti-Zionist — from seeing history more clearly, grasping the settler-colonial reality and Israel’s end goal for the Palestinian people.

I left because two years into studying politics at university, it became clear to me that all I could expect was a life by the sword forever. I wanted a chance at a full life, not a life ruled by aggression, suspicion and paranoia. As a woman, I didn’t like the tightening stranglehold Jewish religion was having on society. I didn’t like how women were treated, and I wasn’t going to sit and wait while the religious mob took over and started dictating to me what I could wear, or eat, where I was allowed to go, telling me that I should sit at the back of the bus so men could have the front, and that I should obey my husband.

As the eighties drew to a close, I lived in fear that my rights as a woman would be taken away any day. I was thirty-five years too early, but I was right. Everything I believed was going to happen, even without understanding the settler colonial reality, is happening, including Israel’s fanatical escalation of its plan to remove every last Palestinian from all of historic Palestine by any means necessary.

The Israeli government’s response to the growing wave of Jewish migration out of the country is to launch ever-more-aggressive campaigns to recruit Jews from abroad. The latest programme is called ‘Aliyat HaTekuma — ‘Aliyah of Renewal’, or something more like ‘immigration for rebuilding’. It targets France, Britain, Canada and Australia with grants, housing subsidies, fast-tracked bureaucracy, and now a five-year income-tax exemption for anyone who immigrates in 2026. The government has set a target of 30,000 new Jewish immigrants this year. Finance Minister Smotrich, who has been leading the settlement expansion campaign in the West Bank, announced: “The year 2026 will bring a revolution in Aliyah1 — not as a slogan, but as a practical plan of action. I call upon Jews in the Diaspora and Israelis abroad: come home.”

Civilian Society Shrinking, Military Society Expanding

While the civilian population is shrinking, the military is expanding and these two factors are interconnected. Israel’s public television channel Kan 11, has recently broadcasted a feature on a new infantry pilot programme called ‘Jaguar’. Jaguar is an all-women battalion (gdud) created in the wake of October 7, tasked with border protection. The report celebrated it as a testament to Israeli equality and national resilience. The soldiers’ faces were blurred or covered throughout. The blurring of faces is not modesty. Since an Israeli soldier vacationing in Brazil fled the country in 2025 to avoid prosecution under universal jurisdiction for alleged Gaza war crimes, the Israeli military has required soldiers’ faces to be obscured in media coverage and is warning soldiers against social media posts about their service.

The Kan 11 report was meant as a proud morale lifting weekend piece, designed to celebrate and inspire an increasingly stressed and dispirited population. In the UK and US women have been embedded within the military in combat roles for decades. But in Israel this is new. Women have traditionally fulfilled support and training roles in Israel’s military, but have never participated directly in combat. Jaguar is still at the pilot stage. Other units are also experimenting with having women in combat roles. This report from Ynet tells the story of five combat female soldiers, all religious. Three of the women immigrated from the US specifically to join the Israeli army — this suggests that desperate Israel is sending emissaries to Jewish communities in the US specifically to recruit soldiers. The three women are from New York, Los Angeles and New Jersey and they discuss what it’s like to be religious and a female combat soldier.

These are not eighteen or twenty-year-old conscripts. Some have been recruited directly from civilian life. Women in their twenties and thirties, presumably with jobs, careers, lives — brought into military service at a moment when Israel is simultaneously attacking in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran and tightening its grip on the colonised West Bank. The US can replenish Israel’s weapons indefinitely. But it cannot give Israel people. These stories are evidence of a militarised society that has expanded its military apparatus beyond its capacity and is desperate.

There is a pretence of equality in these stories — a feminist angle — alongside naked nationalism and settler colonial zeal. Anyone tempted to see this as an example of how ‘progressive’ Israel is, needs to recognise that this ‘progress’ rests on extremely thin ice. The same rabbinical establishment now praised for embracing Jaguar and other women’s combat units, has spent years declaring female military service ‘entirely forbidden’ under Jewish law. Eyal Karim — the IDF’s current Chief Military Rabbi who ruled that raping non-Jewish women during wartime is permissible — has separately argued that women’s enlistment damages ‘the modesty of the girl and the nation’.

In 2026, a coalition of senior rabbis went further still, warning that a Supreme Court ruling requiring equal combat opportunities for women ‘endangers soldiers’ lives’ and ‘damages Israel’s social cohesion’. They instructed that judicial rulings contradicting religious authority should not be obeyed. Rabbi Yigal Levenstein, head of a pre-military academy, said in 2017 that religious women who serve in the military become ‘crazy’ and lose their religious values and Jewishness.

This is not a society quietly progressing toward equality. Recruiting women into combat roles is a wartime stopgap, tolerated for now because Israel cannot fill its ranks without women. Just as women were sent back to the kitchen once their labour during the First World War was no longer needed, and women’s football was banned by the FA in 1921, the female soldiers currently celebrated as ‘warriors’ in masked and blurred-faces are being used, not liberated. Nothing in Israel’s religious establishment suggests this will last. Ilan Pappé has been warning that Israel is rapidly becoming a religious state that he calls the ‘State of Judea.’ Once those rabbis are firmly in charge, any progress Israel has made for its Jewish population will be undone.

The cost of this militarisation is now visible in the most mundane corners of Israeli civilian life. Roughly seventy-two US Air Force refuelling tankers now occupy Ben Gurion Airport’s tarmac, with dozens more at Ramon Airport near Eilat, leaving the country’s only major international gateway to operate at about a third of its capacity. Israel’s own Civil Aviation Authority chief warned that ‘the defence establishment lacks sufficient understanding of the severity of the damage to civil aviation’, and that turning Ben Gurion into a military base ‘harms not only the airlines, but all citizens of the country’.

Transport Minister Miri Regev wrote directly to Netanyahu warning that up to 2.4 million flight tickets for the summer and holiday season could be cancelled, telling him that ‘mass flight cancellations for summer vacations and holidays at a time when the Israeli public needs calm and normalcy more than ever will damage national morale and civic resilience’ — and that the responsibility ‘will be rightly attributed to the government’s inability to provide a solution to a solvable problem’. Hundreds of Israeli families have already had hotel reservations in Eilat cancelled outright to make room for American troops. This is what militarisation in the service of an unsustainable settler-colonial project looks like.

Jewish Israeli society is now so thoroughly subordinated to its own war machine that it can no longer move as freely within or beyond its own borders as it used to. This is another symptom of a settler-colonial project crumbling under its own internal contradictions. That a government minister felt the need to complain about it is not just bizarre — it reveals something close to the heart of why so many Israelis are leaving. Israel was always a contradiction in terms. It wants to be a heavily and permanently militarised settler-colonial state punching above its weight that would, somehow, also deliver a comfortable, secular, Western capitalist life — foreign holidays, mobility, prosperity. The contradiction is now becoming visible in the most literal way possible. The war machine and the holiday flight are now competing for the same parking space at Ben Gurion airport, and the war machine is winning.

The Man From Bat Yam

A few days ago Kan 11 reported that Israeli police arrested a man in his thirties from Bat Yam and charged him with performing security-related tasks for Iran. He was apparently recruited via social media, for money. Bat Yam is where I grew up. It’s a Jewish-Israeli city south of Tel Aviv, heavily working class, historically nationalist, the kind of place that votes Likud and hangs flags on independence day. He did this for money, not ideology.

In the Israel I grew up in, this would have been almost unthinkable — not because Israelis were uniquely patriotic in some abstract sense, but because the social contract held. Military service was a shared burden. The economy, though never easy, functioned. The siege mentality, for all its psychological damage, produced a genuine sense of collective purpose. You sacrificed because everyone sacrificed, and the state delivered something in return: community, a sense of belonging to something larger than yourself but most importantly, a safe haven from a world that ‘hates Jews and wants to annihilate them’.

Mordechai Vanunu was made into a horrifying example of what happened to those who betrayed the state and this worked for a long time. But something is changing. A man from Bat Yam has calculated that Iranian money matters more than national loyalty. The hundreds of billions flowing into military expenditure, weapons replenishment, the wars in Iran and Lebanon, the settlement project in the West Bank — none of it is improving his life. He is being asked to sacrifice for a project that increasingly serves settlers, arms manufacturers, and a political class that has hollowed out Israeli civil society in pursuit of profit and territorial expansion, while ordinary Israelis in Bat Yam count the cost.

This case may be anecdotal. But anecdotes are still data, and this one points toward something structural: the social contract that made the Israeli state function for its Jewish citizens is fraying at the base.

In a recent interview with Chris Hedges, Alistair Crook said:

Israel’s settler colonial project is failing

History offers a template for what comes next, though the details will obviously be specific to this time and place.

The British Empire did not end because it was militarily defeated. It ended because the project became unsustainable — the human cost to British society of maintaining it, the economic reality, the impossibility of continuing to suppress the justified demands of colonised peoples indefinitely. The end came faster than almost anyone predicted, and it came from multiple directions simultaneously. India in 1947 shocked people who had assumed British rule would continue for generations.

The Zionist project is facing something similar. Not one fatal blow, but a simultaneous unravelling: the demographic reality that no amount of aliyah recruitment can reverse, the international isolation deepening as the violence becomes impossible to hide, or justify even to Israel’s most loyal enablers, the economic and social consequences of permanent militarisation, and the internal social contract shredding as those with options leave and those without options grow increasingly unwilling to die for a project that does not serve them.

The Zionist promise was always: come here, sacrifice, and it will be worth it. You will be safe. You’ll feel at home, and the Jewish state will stand between you and the next holocaust.

One of the reasons Israeli Jews have always been so fanatical about their country is the paradoxical sense of impermanence. Deep down every Israeli Jew fears that this experiment in creating a Jewish ghetto in the Middle East wouldn’t last. The data increasingly validate this intuitive fear. And Israel continues to bomb, to displace, to demolish, to settle — racing against a clock it cannot stop, to complete a project that the world is finally, slowly, refusing to pretend is something other than what it is.

Settler-colonialism has succeeded in Australia, Canada, the United States, but only because the indigenous population was all but annihilated. Thankfully, Israel has not achieved this. Despite seventy-eight years of incremental genocide — Gaza and the West Bank are an escalation of the same process, not something new — the Palestinian people have not disappeared, and Israel is now attempting, with increasing desperation, to finish what those other settler-colonial projects completed long ago. Despite its claims to ‘specialness’ Israel is not an exception in history. It is the last act of a chapter of history that should be ending.

The violence will continue. It will probably get worse before it gets better. Ilan Pappé is probably right that the worst excesses come at the end, and the end may not be as far away as the bombs would have you believe. But as we continue to put pressure on a crumbling edifice, we need to remember that the Palestinians are on borrowed time. Israel is collapsing, but my worry is how many Palestinians, and others it will attempt to take with it.

This article contains disturbing descriptions of abuse

A state or a group fighting a genuine war of survival — however brutal — has the logic of survival on its side. The brutality of resistance is directly proportionate to the brutality and injustice inflicted by perpetrators. A woman who survives decades of domestic violence and control may one day take up a weapon against her abuser. Whilst domestic abuse and control are disturbingly common, violent resistance by victims is rare. When a victim resorts to extreme and possibly lethal action against her abuser, it is because of the cumulative and escalating abuse and harm, and because the perpetrator brutally quashed and punished every previous attempt to resist — no matter how modest.

In any system where the stronger party exploits their power to abuse the weaker, it is the perpetrator who is responsible for the extreme actions the victim is driven to take just to survive, or attempt to liberate themselves. And yet throughout human history we have routinely blamed, maligned and abandoned victims. The evidence is overwhelming, historically and clinically, and it’s one of our greatest deficiencies as a species: humanity is perversely biased in favour of abusers psychologically and structurally. It’s a pattern I’ve spent my professional and personal life witnessing, observing, and working against.

Israel is committing the worst crimes and depravities imaginable against a captive people with complete impunity. When Israel’s victims resist — and they have no other choice — they are maligned, dehumanised and punished. Those who try to support them are maligned, dehumanised and often punished too.

A central part of Israel’s fraudulent framing is the pretence of victimhood. Jews as a group were victims historically. But Israel was never a victim. From its birth as a settler-colonial project, Israel was always the perpetrator. Israel has no right to cloak itself in Jewish victimhood. Positioning itself as a victim is a calculated lie. Perpetrators always lie and conceal their crimes. As a powerful settler-coloniser, Israel is perpetrating a colossal crime against humanity. Supported and armed by key Western governments, chiefly the US, Israel holds all the power in this abusive system. In a world already biased in favour of abusers, this works. Israel is protected and enabled. Its victims are abandoned to suffering and erasure.

Sadism in the Service of Genocide

When I watch footage of Israeli soldiers filming themselves in the ruins of Palestinian homes, posing with children’s toys, trying on women’s underwear, celebrating over bodies, smiling as they lounge on living room furniture outside a home that was just bombed to rubble — when I see videos of soldiers attacking Palestinian men, women and children in the colonised West Bank — I see something that reaches beyond political analysis. As a psychotherapist, what I see on display is psychopathology — diseased human psychology.

There is a distinction between a predator and a sadist. A lion killing an antelope isn’t a moral issue. No matter how sorry we feel for the antelope — we know the lion is not evil. The lion is a lethal predator, but there is no malice in its actions.

What we are watching in Israel is something different. There isn’t even an attempt to hide the pleasure the politicians and the soldiers take in their abuse of Palestinians. The filming. The social media posts. The statements from politicians and ordinary citizens go beyond any security rationale into explicit, ostentatious enjoyment of human suffering.

While bombs were still being dropped, Israeli Defence Minister Katz announced that Shia residents south of the Litani River in Lebanon would not be allowed to return until unspecified Israeli conditions were met — and then ordered the accelerated demolition of their homes, explicitly invoking Gaza’s Beit Hanoun and Rafah as the model. This is not the language of a state defending itself. It is the language of a state that has given itself permission to enjoy the destruction.

Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, provides the clearest possible illustration of what this enjoyment looks like at the highest level of government. In May 2026 he posted a video of himself walking among foreign activists from the Gaza aid flotilla — bound, kneeling, faces to the floor — waving an Israeli flag over them and smiling as a bound woman was shoved to the ground by masked officers. He told the guards around him not to be bothered by their screams. Ben Gvir is seen waving a large Israeli flag and shouting in Hebrew, “Welcome to Israel! We are in charge here!” Israel’s national anthem is blasted over a loudspeaker, and he shouts “Am Yisrael Chai”1 at a bound detainee trying to argue with him. This was not leaked footage. He posted it himself as if it were something to be proud of. Ben-Gvir reportedly physically forced his way onto the naval ship to film this, pushing aside a lieutenant colonel who tried to block him and asked him to wait for approval. That detail underscores that this wasn’t incidental access — he went out of his way to create this footage.

Days earlier, Ben-Gvir filmed himself entering the solitary confinement cell of Marwan Barghouti — the Palestinian leader many regard as the closest equivalent to Mandela, held since 2004 and now barely recognisable, wasted and gaunt. Ben-Gvir told him: “Whoever messes with the people of Israel... we will obliterate them.” He posted that too. And in prisons across Israel, he has had oversized photographs of Gaza’s ruins hung in the corridors Palestinian prisoners must walk through to reach the yard — pointing to one, in footage he released himself, and noting with apparent satisfaction that a prisoner had recognised his own destroyed home. “This is how it’s supposed to look,” he said.

As a clinician I have no doubt at all that Ben-Gvir is a diagnosable psychopath. He is having the time of his life right now, enjoying what every psychopath craves — complete control over helpless, captive people. He isn’t doing what he does out of patriotism. He is fulfilling his depraved fantasies, they just happen to also serve the aims of the state of Israel. We know psychopaths film themselves in the act of abusing others so that they can watch the recordings over and over again at their leisure. This is common practice among pedophiles. I can’t help but wonder what else Ben Gvir is doing when he is not in front of cameras.

This is not an aberration or a rogue soldier acting outside the chain of command. This is a government minister. It is the policy-making level of the Israeli state, on camera, enjoying itself. An Al Jazeera analysis of the episode captured precisely what distinguishes Ben-Gvir from the rest of Israel’s political establishment. For Netanyahu, the sin was not the torture or humiliation of the activists; the sin was broadcasting it to the world. Ben-Gvir, by contrast, performs these abuses for his domestic audience, confident he will face no real consequences. One wants the cruelty hidden. The other wants it seen. But no one thinks there is anything wrong with the cruelty itself.

Manufacturing the Capacity for Cruelty

Recently, a reader alerted me to a phenomenon I hadn’t heard of before, that is confirmed in Israel’s media and on the Israeli government’s website. In the past ten years there have been widespread cases of the burning alive of animals, especially stray cats and dogs, in bonfires on the festival of Lag Ba’omer (ל״ג בעומר). When I was a child, we all loved Lag Ba’omer. You got to stay out later than usual, outdoors with your friends, eating potatoes you cooked in the fire, just having fun. I do remember that we burned effigies of whoever happened to be Israel’s enemy leader at the time, and sang songs about killing all Arabs. It was ‘fun’.

But I never remember anyone doing what people have been doing in Israel for the past ten years — throwing live animals into bonfires. It’s such a problem, that the government and animal rights organisations have had to step in and tell people to keep their pets indoors. There are some attempts at prevention, but I’m not hearing about anyone being prosecuted or sent to prison for this. The fact that it has been going on for ten years points to a practice that is taught and passed on generationally.

The reports suggest it is teenagers who do this — young people on the cusp of starting their military service. The fourteen-year-olds of ten years ago are twenty-four-year-olds post compulsory service, and serving in the Israeli military right now perpetrating the atrocities we see in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. This correlates perfectly with the kind of mentality you need to foster if you want soldiers ready and willing to commit harm, and be desensitised to the suffering of other human beings. Psychopathic systems require people to ‘pass tests’ — to demonstrate they would be prepared to do anything to defend their group. It’s the same as when a new gang member is ordered to beat up, or rape someone to prove they are worthy of becoming a member and be trusted by the group. Whilst not an official state policy, this ten-year-old horrific phenomenon is a natural sociological development that reflects a society that requires psychopathic traits as a necessity for completing its settler-colonial project. Practising on helpless animals, or witnessing their abuse without taking any action, desensitises people to the abuse of children and people in general. People with empathy would not be able to carry out Israel’s plan to complete the erasure of the Palestinians and their removal from all of historic Palestine.

A UN commission of inquiry found that Israel’s use of sexual violence was systemic, serving to “dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part.” Multiple detainees independently described dogs being used to rape them at Sde Teiman — Israel’s concentration and torture camp — one Palestinian lawyer told Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor he witnessed it directly: a captain sprayed something on a stripped, restrained man, then “unleashed the dog on him. The dog raped the young man, literally speaking.”

A 35-year-old detainee named Amir gave a similar account to Euro-Med Monitor: stripped naked with others, a dog urinated on him, then “raped me, penetrated my anus in a trained manner while I was being beaten. This continued for several minutes.”

The choice of weapon here is not incidental. In Jewish religious tradition, dogs are considered the most despised of all animals — seen as the dirtiest, the most inferior, and possessing the vilest characteristics imaginable. To use a dog to rape a Palestinian man is not simply torture. For those capable of conceiving it, it is the deliberate construction of the ultimate possible humiliation, drawing on a symbolic vocabulary embedded in the perpetrators’ own religious culture. There is also a psychosexual dimension to this. Men do not arrive at the idea of training an animal to rape another man without some relationship — however repressed, however disavowed — to the act itself. In a society where religious orthodoxy demands the suppression of homoerotic desire, its eruption in this form, as an instrument of domination and humiliation rather than desire, is not a contradiction. It is exactly how suppressed impulses find their way into psychopathic expression: redirected, weaponised, and aimed at those the perpetrator has already been taught hold no human worth. There is no other way to say this — it is disgusting beyond belief.

This sadism is not only individual pathology. It is also a cultural product — the predictable outcome of decades of systematic dehumanisation embedded in education, military culture, political discourse, and media. Israeli children are taught from infancy that Palestinians are not human beings like them. The result is not only a society containing and enabling psychopaths — though it clearly does — but something in some ways more alarming: a collective suspension of normal moral functioning toward a specific group, maintained and reproduced by the state itself.

Whilst there are clear cases of individual psychopathy among politicians, prison guards, soldiers and others in Israel’s genocidal apparatus, not every member of a genocidal society is a psychopath. But you don’t need a majority of psychopaths for atrocity to become normalised and sustained. All you need is psychopathic leadership at the top, and a population that is willing to collude, turn a blind eye, distract itself, or that has been rendered unable, or is too stupefied to express empathy and resist.

In Israel this happens on multiple levels simultaneously. Formal coercion — the harassment and arrests of dissenters — has increased in recent years. But the most effective and successful method to enforce conformity has always been the informal kind. Social and professional ostracism, the labels of ‘traitor’ and ‘antisemite’ used against anyone who steps out of line, mob attacks — oppression by consensus — has been the norm in Israeli society from the start. In Israel, simply expressing empathy for Palestinians can get you into trouble, officially or unofficially.

Hannah Arendt Warned Us

When I was at school, and later during my university years my Zionist teachers taught that the Nazis were not content merely to kill Jews. Humiliation and the deliberate destruction of human dignity were a big part of the project itself — shaving heads, tattooing numbers, rape, medical experiments, degradation in every conceivable form, and all manner of deprivation before death. The cruelty was not incidental to the killing. It was the point. This is what we were taught marked Nazism as the deepest possible evil.

Israel is now doing precisely this to the Palestinians and the audacity of it is staggering. Somehow, in the mind of Israeli society, what they are doing is different, even as it follows the same logic their own education identifies as the marker of absolute evil. This is exactly what Hannah Arendt’s warning was about. It was never only about Germany. The capacity for moral failure is a general human capacity, not a German one. Ideological certainty, dehumanisation of an out-group, bureaucratic distribution and abdication of responsibility create the conditions, and then ordinary humans’ collusion does the rest.

Hannah Arendt offers a warning from history that the depraved behaviour we see towards the Palestinians and activists can happen anywhere, done or enabled by anyone, including — especially — those who consider themselves immune because of what was done to Jewish people in the past. It’s hardly surprising that Israel vehemently rejected Arendt and her message. Israel should have listened to her warnings, but it had to reject them because by the time she offered them, the settler-colonial project was in full force.

And there is no doubt that psychopathy has always played a central role in settler colonial and colonial projects. Only psychopaths, devoid of all capacity for empathy and normal human emotions, could possibly conceive of projects whose explicit aim is conquest, theft, ethnic cleansing, subjugation and domination. Only psychopaths can take pleasure in causing suffering, and normalising it. When psychologically healthy human beings — even those with trauma — witness, collude with, or participate in acts that humiliate and harm others, they inevitably suffer from something that in the clinical literature is called ‘moral injury’. Moral injury is a recognised form of trauma that comes from acting immorally, or witnessing an action that violates one’s own moral code.

The danger in racism, or any campaign that promotes the dehumanisation, subjugation and humiliation of a group of people is that they enable and encourage psychopaths and psychopathic behaviours. Once the normal rules of society break down or are suspended, the psychopaths come out to play. It is not possible to orchestrate a settler-colonial project — a genocide — that is ‘humane’, ‘gentle’ or ‘benevolent’. Once the evil system is established, psychopaths come out of the shadows to find that their ‘skill set’ is suddenly desirable. They then assume formal and informal roles in a system that is welcoming and grateful to them. Israel will not stop its own psychopaths, because it needs them. They are the only ones capable of bringing Israel’s aims to completion. There is a reason the likes of Ben Gvir and Netanyahu are in power. It’s not a temporary ‘deviation to the right’. Without psychopaths there is no settler colonialism.

For everyone else, distance becomes the mechanism of survival. A pilot far above a city can avoid thinking about the human beings he is slaughtering as he releases his payload. During my own military service, between 1982 and 1984, a friend who was a naval officer told me he was glad to be stationed below deck when his ship fired on apartment blocks in Beirut — because then he didn’t have to see the damage he was inflicting. That is moral injury finding its only available exit: not to refuse, but not to look.

And yet the Israelis I grew up among, and the Israelis who populate today’s social media with their celebrations of Palestinian suffering, do not think of themselves as evil. They think of themselves as good, loyal people, defending their families, reclaiming their ancestral homeland, doing what ‘must be done’. They preposterously suggest that I, or indeed anyone who speaks against what they’re doing and who supports their victims, is bad. They dare to claim that supporting the Palestinians and opposing Israel is ‘radical’, extremist and unfair to ‘poor little Israel’.

The British Empire never thought of itself as evil either. It thought of itself as superior, divinely mandated, and entitled to the resources it took and to the removal of anyone who stood in its way. It is not a coincidence. Britain gave birth to Zionism and to the state of Israel. It offered a blueprint for its political system, its bureaucracy and its military and it inspired everything Israel is doing. The moral architecture is identical, and it’s hardly surprising that Britain’s leaders on either side of the political divide are still enabling Israel and doing absolutely nothing to stop it.

I woke up early last Sunday morning to news that Israel has been attacking Iran again, in retaliation for Iran attacking Israel, in retaliation for Israel expanding its violent incursion into Lebanon. At the time of writing, the fighting has stopped. For now.

On the 5th of June 2026, the day after a US-mediated ceasefire agreement, Israeli strikes killed at least twenty-one people in Lebanon, including two Syrian children on a motorcycle, a municipal council member, and a paramedic whose ambulance was hit while delivering bread to a besieged family. The following day Israeli forces killed a brigadier general, a captain and a soldier of the Lebanese army — not Hezbollah — in a strike on a military vehicle. According to The Times of Israel, “The IDF said the vehicle was ‘moving suspiciously’ in an active combat zone where movement ‘requires prior coordination’ with Israeli forces.” Israel’s arrogant and domineering expectation is that Lebanon should ask Israel’s permission to move its own soldiers on its own roads. This incident is being ‘investigated’ by the Israeli military.

The damage Israel is inflicting in Lebanon is staggering. Since the invasion began on 2nd of March 2026 more than 1.2 million people — including 390,000 children — have been forced to flee their homes, making it one of the world’s fastest-growing displacement crises. This is roughly one in five of Lebanon’s entire population of 5.9 million. UNICEF reported that Lebanon was seeing nearly 19,000 children displaced every day during the peak weeks of the assault. This new wave of displacement and pain comes on top of the 2024 displacement wave. Around 64,000 people in Lebanon were already displaced from earlier Israeli assaults.

Over a million people displaced in a country of 5.9 million isn’t ‘collateral damage’. It is the stated goal — Israel’s Defence Minister explicitly said Israel plans to destroy Lebanese border towns and continue occupying the south.

Last Friday, 5th of June, Israeli soldiers murdered a seven-months old baby after opening fire on his family’s vehicle. The Bethlehem family were visiting the father’s family in Tel Rumeida, Hebron. They were attacked by Israeli soldiers who claimed they were ‘worried the vehicle was speeding towards them’. Back in March a Palestinian couple and their two children ages 5 and 17 were murdered in kafr Tammun in the Jordan valley. There too the soldiers claimed they were worried that the vehicle was speeding towards them. It’s doubtful that two family vehicles with children in them were looking for trouble, when Palestinians know their lives are worth nothing to Israel, and they could be killed in cold blood. The murdering soldiers are saying what they were told to say. The Israeli state media are reporting that the military is ‘sorry’, and that the Friday incident is ‘being investigated’. The list of crimes committed by the Israeli military is so long, it would take a century to investigate all of them. Excuse me if I’m not holding my breath when a perpetrator is proposing to investigate their own crimes. These sham investigations are nothing more than a stalling tactic, just like Israel’s pretend ‘negotiations’.

All over the colonised West Bank attacks against Palestinians are accelerating. Theft, destruction of Palestinian property, intimidation, disruption to daily life, harassment, and random cold-blooded murder — are all on the rise.

Five days ago, Smotrich announced that a planning committee had approved over 2,162 new Jewish homes across three West Bank settlement areas. “They include 1,006 units ​in a new settlement near Jerusalem, 922 near the Palestinian city of Nablus and 234 near Hebron”. The Israeli cabinet approved 34 new settlements in a single decision in April, bringing the total approved by the current Netanyahu coalition to 103 — the largest batch approved in decades, breaking the record set in May 2025 when 22 new settlements were approved.

The Wrong Frame

Israel is violently expanding in all directions. To some, this behaviour might appear disproportionate, irrational, even self-defeating. It makes more enemies. It destroys the last remnants of credibility Israel might still have as a negotiating partner. And it deepens international isolation. How can a state that claims to be fighting for its survival keep doing things that undermine its own security? The answer is that many analysts and commentators are measuring Israel’s actions against the wrong goal. I suspect some are doing it intentionally, but others might be genuinely ignorant. If you want to understand a person or a group you need to focus on what they do, not what they say. Israel’s words are meaningless, but Israel’s actions are clear. If you look past the deliberate confusion, biased analyses, and all other ‘noise’, it is quite clear what Israel’s actions mean.

Israel is not primarily fighting for security. It is completing a settler-colonial project. Once you understand that, everything that might appear incoherent or confusing becomes entirely rational.

Israel claims its goal in Lebanon is to secure a buffer zone to protect its northern settlements from attack. There may be some truth in this, but it is not the real or full goal. Israel’s assault on Lebanon is clearing a space into which to expel over three million West Bank Palestinians — an ethnic cleansing operation Israel is preparing for, and waiting for the right moment to execute. That moment will likely come when the world’s attention is consumed by global economic crises, other wars, civil unrest elsewhere and chaos in general. Israel needs global chaos to serve as a smokescreen behind which it can complete the removal of the Palestinians from all of historic Palestine.

Israel sees subduing Hezbollah as necessary — but not for the reasons it states. Eliminating Hezbollah’s threat is a prerequisite for the expulsion itself. Israel cannot safely push millions of Palestinians across its northern border while Hezbollah retains the capacity to respond. Lebanon must be neutralised not to protect Israeli settlers in the north, but to receive the Palestinians Israel intends to remove from the West Bank. And once those Palestinians are there, Israel will need to control them — a displaced, dispossessed, and angry population on its doorstep would be an existential threat by any measure. That control will be brutal, because it always is. What Israel is planning is not merely ethnic cleansing within its current borders — it is the extension of the settler-colonial project beyond them, into the sovereign territory of a neighbouring country.

Killing Lebanese army officers is sending a message that even sovereign Lebanese military authority is subordinate to Israeli military will in the region. This is a warning to Lebanon not to interfere with Israel’s plans.

Approving new West Bank settlements while simultaneously initiating military assault on multiple fronts may seem like recklessness. But in reality it is a race to create facts on the ground before the window closes.

In the meantime the killing in Gaza continues — not only with conventional weapons but through deliberate abandonment to starvation, disease, and engineered squalor. Israel hopes that by the time it moves to empty Gaza, there will be far fewer people left to deal with.

Israel hates Iran so much because it is the only sovereign country that openly supports the Palestinians and that names Israel’s settler-colonialism. Israel cannot safely finish eliminating the presence of Palestinians from all of historic Palestine while Iran is still there as an independent state with a mind of its own, rather than another US client state run by corrupt client leaders happy to live a life of luxury on US bribes.

Israel’s violence and expansion are not a departure from the project. They are the project and the Palestinians are on borrowed time.

A comment on paid subscriptions

Substack encourages writers to activate paid subscriptions. They take a small cut to enable them to provide this, otherwise free-to-use platform. I am grateful to the readers who have pledged money for monthly or yearly subscriptions, but I have no intention of monetising my work.

I do not want to turn my writing into an obligation, but even more importantly, I don’t believe in a tiered system where those who can pay get preferential treatment over those who can’t, such as the right to comment, or privileged content. This hierarchy of ‘worthiness’, especially based on such an arbitrary principle like how much money people have, couldn’t be further away from my values.

If you do feel moved to make a contribution to support my writing, see the ‘buy me a coffee’ button below. If you haven’t seen it before, it is a way of offering a donation to freelance writers. Payments are processed securely by Stripe on the ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ site. I believe people can keep donations anonymous if they wish. This is entirely voluntary. Everyone is and always will be welcome to read my work free of charge.

Thank you so much for reading my work!

Buy me a coffee 🙏🏼

Join Us: Book Club on Palestine — Mid Summer Series

Four Wednesdays. Four essential authors. Live conversations and Q&A.

This summer the Book Club on Palestine brings together four writers whose work cuts to the heart of Palestine, Zionism, and resistance — in history, in the clinic, in memoir, and in story.

Each session is a live ‘Meet the Author’ conversation, open to everyone.

When: Wednesdays at 19:00-20:00 London / 14:00-15:00 New York

Where: Zoom — register once for any or all sessions

Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/njwcFwJZTTm4bQjKZV7log

• The Book Club on Palestine was founded by Samer Hamadeh, and I have had the privilege of hosting most of our sessions since the beginning.

• The BCoP runs both full-book series and one-off Meet the Author events.

• All are welcome — whether you’ve read the books or simply want to hear the authors speak.

• Please visit the BCoP YouTube Channel for recordings and clips from past meetings.

• BCoP on social media: Facebook

The BCoP runs entirely on volunteer effort. If you have skills in any of the following areas and would like to contribute, we’d love to hear from you:

• Social media and online promotion

• Web or technical support

• Event coordination

• Outreach and community building

For more details on volunteering to help the BCoP please click here.

Even a few hours a month makes a real difference. Thank you!

A comment on paid subscriptions

Substack encourages writers to activate paid subscriptions. They take a small cut to enable them to provide this, otherwise free-to-use platform. I am grateful to the readers who have pledged money for monthly or yearly subscriptions, but I have no intention of monetising my work.

I do not want to turn my writing into an obligation, but even more importantly, I don’t believe in a tiered system where those who can pay get preferential treatment over those who can’t, such as the right to comment, or privileged content. This hierarchy of ‘worthiness’, especially based on such an arbitrary principle like how much money people have, couldn’t be further away from my values.

If you do feel moved to make a contribution to support my writing, see the ‘buy me a coffee’ button below. If you haven’t seen it before, it is a way of offering a donation to freelance writers. Payments are processed securely by Stripe on the ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ site. I believe people can keep donations anonymous if they wish. This is entirely voluntary. Everyone is and always will be welcome to read my work free of charge.

Thank you so much for reading my work!

Buy me a coffee 🙏🏼

(If you have received this by email, please click on the title to read the latest version. I often correct typos and continue to edit my essays after publishing the first version).

When I wrote my critique of an interview Avi Shlaim gave in Germany last year, I sent him a copy as a courtesy. My article critiqued his comments about Judaism, and his perception of Zionism. In his reply, Shlaim agreed with me about Judaism.

However, he disagreed that “genocide is inherent in settler-colonialism and that it was there from the start.” He went on to say:

Shlaim not only claims bizarrely that the genocide in Gaza is a result of a failure to ethnically cleanse Gaza — why cleanse it, when did it start? — it also contains a thinly veiled piece of advice. If he considers Bartov to be a greater expert than himself, then so should I. It was this that piqued my curiosity about Bartov, and led me to his new book, Israel: What Went Wrong?

My own journey — from a young Israeli woman formed entirely within the story Zionism tells about itself, to someone who has examined that story against the historical record and found it not tragic but criminal — is the vantage point from which I read Israel: What Went Wrong? The very title of the book already raises the alarm. It implies that Israel was originally fine but somewhere along the way something went wrong. I have heard this story before.

Bartov is Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. He is Israeli-born, raised in a Zionist household, a former officer in the Israeli military, and the son of a man he describes in his dedication as “the last Zionist” — by which he means the last of a particular kind: the one who believed in the dream, the one who thought Israel could be both Jewish and democratic, both a refuge and a democracy, both particular and universal in its values.

Bartov’s book has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and I hope the irony of this will become clear. Reading it is a disorienting experience. The colonial whitewashing is buried so deeply inside truthful and even compassionate analysis, that it takes considerable effort to find the thread that holds the deception together.

In the introduction Bartov writes,

“Some would argue” is one of the most telling phrases in the entire passage. It allows Bartov to acknowledge the settler colonial analysis but only casually, as if it were a marginal piece of scholarship. He ignores the work of historians who have made that case rigorously and at considerable personal cost, the testimonies and experience of the Palestinian people from the start of the Zionist movement, and the evidence from within the Zionist movement itself — Ben-Gurion’s diaries, the transfer committees, the explicit planning for demographic displacement that predates 1948 by decades.

Ilan Pappé, Rashid Khalidi, Nur Masalha — these are not fringe voices making an ideological argument. They are serious historians working from primary sources. To wave them away as “some would argue” is bewildering. But I don’t think it’s an oversight. I think it’s a choice, and it does not honour an eminent and privileged scholar who uses his position to shape public understanding.

Herzl was the father of modern political Zionism — specifically the organised political movement aimed at establishing a Jewish state. As we were taught in Zionist history classes in Israel, his 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) and his convening of the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 were the founding moments of that political project. Herzl didn’t envisage or plan for Jews to live alongside the non-Jewish local population of Palestine. The plan was to replace and disinherit them.

Bartov acknowledges that the settler colonial analysis is “in part true” (which part is true and which part isn’t?) — then immediately says it “largely misses” Zionism’s ideological and emotional motivations and the self-perception of its adherents. Zionist self-perception? What kind of an argument is this? Criminals routinely claim good intentions and hold positive self-perception. It helps them secure support and obscure their crimes. This is not a reason to set aside the evidence — it is a reason to be more suspicious of the narrative. Bartov should recognise the Zionist narrative about itself for what it is. Instead he asks us to do what he does — pretend not to see.

Bartov wants to preserve the myth that Zionism began as a genuine humanist project that then went wrong. But if the settler colonial framework is correct from the outset, there is no innocent origin to mourn. If what Patrick Wolfe called the logic of elimination — erasure, replacement, genocide — was present from the beginning, then there is no tragedy of a state that started with great ideals and was subsequently corrupted. There is only a crime that was always going to happen because it was always intended to happen. Israel didn’t go wrong. Israel itself is what’s wrong.

As a psychotherapist, and as someone who comes from Israel, what I see in this book is not primarily an intellectual failure, though it is that too. I see Bartov’s tribal attachment and loyalty still playing a part in his psychology and clouding his intellectual judgement. It is the same process that has stopped Noam Chomsky from ever embracing the BDS movement.

Bartov is neither stupid nor ignorant. He is a genocide scholar who has spent his career looking directly at the worst things human beings do to each other. He knows what genocide looks like and he has said so publicly in a New York Times opinion piece titled ‘I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.’ (15th July 2025). By this point, a genocide scholar who refused to name what is happening in Gaza would have no credibility left. Bartov named it because he couldn’t afford not to. And yet Israel: What Went Wrong? is filled with sorrow for a supposed dream betrayed. Sorrow for what Israel has ‘become’, for the myth that he and all liberal Zionists needed Zionism to be.

Anger is the emotion of someone who recognises a wrong clearly enough to hold someone responsible for it. Sorrow is the emotion of someone still attached to what they are grieving. Bartov is grieving a Zionism and an Israel that never existed. But he should be angry at the fact that a previously persecuted people decided to save themselves by committing the crime of settler colonialism. What he laments as corruption of Israel’s leadership is merely a byproduct of a project that never wavered from its original goal. Gaza isn’t an aberration or a sudden product of a movement to the right, or of a society becoming more extremist — it isn’t something that happened because Zionism has been corrupted. Zionism was always a crime and Gaza was always going to happen. Palestinians who survived in and around Israel over the decades have always lived on borrowed time.

My own severing of tribal attachment took years and was not painless. The break was not merely intellectual. It was moral. At a certain point the question stopped being what is the correct historical analysis and became what kind of person do I want to be. Do I want to be someone whose values are universal — who believes that no human being is more important than any other, that no people has more right to exist, be safe, live well and grow than any other — or do I want to be someone whose values bend when it is my tribe in the dock?

That is the question Bartov has not answered. His book is the record of his refusal to answer it. And this refusal exposes him as a stock standard liberal Zionist.

Liberal Zionism is not a moderate position. It serves a deadly function. Its effect has been to perpetually postpone the reckoning. Consciously or not, liberal Zionists buy time for Israel to complete the settler colonial project. Every time the evidence becomes undeniable, every time international opinion begins to shift, liberal Zionism produces a new wave of anguished, credentialed voices saying: ‘yes, this is serious, but let us understand how we got here, let us not oversimplify, but what about October 7th?’ And while those self-absorbed disingenuous questions are being asked, the clock is ticking. More land is taken. More people are killed. More facts are created on the ground. Then the next atrocity makes headlines and the cycle begins again.

I do wonder what liberal Zionists will think and feel if, heaven forbid, Israel succeeds and we live to see Palestine emptied of all Palestinians. They will have to live with the reality that by placing tribal loyalty ahead of basic human solidarity, they enabled a colossal crime against humanity. They will have to face the fact that they stalled, bought time for Israel to complete its bloody project, and that they made a choice — however unconscious — to collaborate with genocide.

Bartov did not write this book to enlighten or educate. He wrote it for himself. This book is Bartov’s way of preparing a comfortable refuge for his conscience in case Israel succeeds in completing the settler-colonial vision the Zionists dreamed up in the late 19th century. He can always claim he was a critic of Israel, which he is, and that he named the genocide in Gaza, which he did. He may live comfortably with this, but I see it for what it is.

Liberal Zionists claim to hold universal values while remaining loyal to Zionism and Israel first. But universal values are just that — universal. They do not privilege one group over another. As I have said in previous essays, real empathy is unconditional. Selective empathy is not real and people who express empathy selectively cannot be trusted. Bartov and other liberal Zionists think of themselves as good people. They sleep at night. But by continuing to deny the nature of Zionism — despite all the evidence — they reveal their support for settler colonialism and genocide when these are committed by the group to which they feel belonging, love and duty. They believe their group will save them if the world once again turns against Jews. Liberal Zionism is fundamentally a selfish position rooted in fear and self-preservation.

The fact that Bartov has been condemned by some Zionists for going too far is not a badge of honour. It requires almost nothing to be condemned by Zionists. You need only fail to be in love with Israel. What matters is not that some Zionists find him too critical. What matters is what his framework protects and what it obscures.

What it protects is a myth — that Zionism began as a legitimate and humane project that was subsequently corrupted by bad leaders. What it obscures is the evidence that the displacement of the Palestinian people was not a corruption of Zionism but its very intention. Interestingly, the phrase ‘settler colonialism’ appears only eight times in the entire book, including in the index and the recommended reading section.

Bartov’s book has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. George Orwell’s great subject was the corruption of language in the service of power — the way political prose is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. Bartov’s prose is elegant and his distress at Israel’s crimes is genuine. But the irony is that the function of his book is Orwellian in precisely the sense Orwell meant. It makes the continuation of a settler colonial project sound like a tragic historical question still open for debate.

It is not. The debate is over. What remains is a crime against humanity that began not on 7th October 2023, when it became too visible to deny, but in the very early days of the Zionist movement. Is Bartov that naive that he doesn’t know the so-called ideals of Zionism were fiction created for internal and external consumption? In its first few decades Israel had to present itself as a country with Western values and sensibilities in order to secure the support it needed to build itself economically, fortify itself militarily and ensure effective diplomatic cover. Its intention was always to finish what the Nakba started. I’m sure Bartov knows this, but he is just another liberal Zionist buying time for Israel to finish its project.

Throughout the book Bartov diagnoses the pathology of Israeli society with considerable precision while still refusing to trace that diagnosis to its true origin. His central question is revealing:

He looks honestly enough at 1948 itself — the expulsions, the military operations, the Nakba. What he does not look at honestly is what led to 1948. The settler colonial project did not begin with the state. It began decades earlier — with land purchases, with tower and stockade (חומה ומגדל) settlements, with the deliberate creation of facts on the ground, with a systematic demographic strategy whose goal was always a Jewish majority at the expense of the non-Jewish people already there.

It is the liberal Zionist version of asking how slavery might have been made more humane rather than whether it should have existed at all. The foundation that Bartov will not examine is that Israel is the deliberate product of a settler colonial project. No constitution, however enlightened, addresses that fact. You cannot constitutionalise your way out of settler colonialism.

And there is a deeper problem with the constitutional framing. It keeps Israeli Jews as the centre and focus of the analysis — asking what kind of state they might have built, what kind of society they might have become. Palestinians appear only as potential beneficiaries of better Israeli governance, not as people with rights and claims that exist independently of what Israel decides to do with them. That is the most fundamental erasure in the book — not of the Nakba’s facts, which Bartov does mention, but of Palestinian agency, personhood and the right to stay where they are and not be erased or replaced. These do not depend on Israeli constitutional generosity for their validity.

There is something else operating in this book beyond tribal loyalty. Bartov’s entire analytical framework reproduces the classic colonialist narrative without appearing to notice. The Zionist movement, in his telling, was an enlightened project that carried the promise of progress, democracy and humanist values into a contested land — corrupted not by its premise but by its execution. This is the colonialist trope in academic dress: the civilising mission that went wrong, the dream of making the desert bloom soured by bad leadership and historical circumstance. It is the same narrative structure that justified every European colonial project — we came with good intentions, we brought progress, things went wrong along the way. Scholars of decolonisation have long identified this as the coloniser’s epistemology — a framework that centres the coloniser’s intentions and self-perception while rendering the colonised invisible except as objects of the coloniser’s project. Bartov cannot see outside that frame because he was formed inside it.

In the introduction to Decolonizing the Study of Palestine: Indigenous Perspectives and Settler Colonialism after Elia Zureik, Ahmad H. Sa’di says:

Bartov’s book not only betrays his colonialist bias, it is also an attempt to walk an impossible line — to retain his credibility as a genocide scholar while not completely abandoning his tribe. He names the genocide in Gaza because he has no choice; to deny it would damage his standing. But everything around that naming — the sorrow, the constitutional fantasy, the tragic framing, the “some would argue” — is the sound of a man desperately trying to remain inside a story that his own evidence has demolished.

A comment on paid subscriptions

Substack encourages writers to activate paid subscriptions. They take a small cut to enable them to provide this, otherwise free-to-use platform. I am grateful to the readers who have pledged money for monthly or yearly subscriptions, but I have no intention of monetising my work.

I do not want to turn my writing into an obligation, but even more importantly, I don’t believe in a tiered system where those who can pay get preferential treatment over those who can’t, such as the right to comment, or privileged content. This hierarchy of ‘worthiness’, especially based on such an arbitrary principle like how much money people have, couldn’t be further away from my values.

If you do feel moved to make a contribution to support my writing, see the ‘buy me a coffee’ button below. If you haven’t seen it before, it is a way of offering a donation to freelance writers. Payments are processed securely by Stripe on the ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ site. I believe people can keep donations anonymous if they wish. This is entirely voluntary. Everyone is and always will be welcome to read my work free of charge.



Thank you so much for reading my work!

Buy me a coffee 🙏🏼

For All Mankind is now in its fifth season, and if you resist getting too distracted by the science fiction, the technology, and the special effects, you notice the mirror the series holds up to us.

The series has three recurring actors, and I don’t mean characters. I mean structural forces: state organisations, private enterprises, and — caught between them — ordinary people trying to survive within those machines, or resist them, or sabotage them from within or without.

The picture For All Mankind shows us is nothing more than our actual reality. Enormously powerful actors, state, corporate, technological, pushing in their own directions, each serving their own interests, whilst regular individuals try to make sense of their lives inside systems that were never designed with them in mind. Those who resist — the ones the series invites us to care about — are not perfect. They carry human flaws and insecurity, and the fear of retribution against themselves and their families for stepping out of line and resisting.

For All Mankind does not offer solutions. It can’t. It is written by people who inhabit the same world we do. But what it does — and what all good cinematic writing does — is make us identify with its characters deeply enough to ask ourselves: where would I be in that situation? Which role would I actually play? If you’re honest with yourself, you probably know the answer.

There is a recurring theme that runs through every season: the good people — those who fight back, or who attempt to change the machines they were originally part of, who sometimes sabotage from within, those who defect — make alliances across the very borders and divisions created by those in power. The character of Ed Baldwin (brilliantly played by the Swedish American actor Joel Kinnaman) is a highly decorated American pilot and astronaut, practically a legend. He starts out a patriot, fiercely and passionately loyal to his country and its systems. But as the story develops, he finds himself in solidarity with people he was indoctrinated to believe were his moral enemies, Soviet, North Korean astronauts and others.

Ed Baldwin’s character isn’t the only one. The same theme runs right through in all seasons and involves many key characters. Those who were traditional enemies fall out of love with their countries or the companies they work for and end up meeting through their shared humanity. They discover they have the same concerns for their families, the same desire to do right by the people they love, and the same dawning realisation that the faceless and powerful organisations they serve are not operating in anyone’s best interest except their own. That betrayal, the empathy across all the traditional divides and shared humanity become the basis not only of collaboration, but of lifelong friendships and the willingness to make sacrifices for the sake of those friendships.

Nothing fundamentally changes across the decades the series spans. Insatiable corporate greed, governmental cynicism and control, pointless rivalries between nations, exploitation of ordinary people’s need to earn a living and their desire to be loyal to something larger than themselves: all of it gets exported wholesale to Mars. There is always a minority of people fighting against big machines that exploit them, and genuine scientific curiosity hijacked for the purpose of pointless predatory competition, greed and rivalry. And just like in our very real universe, all of it is dressed up to appear as if it is in our best interest. Mars may be a new physical frontier representing incredible technological evolution, but the human logic, if you can call it that, never changes, never evolves.

The title For All Mankind was taken directly from the plaque left on the moon by the Apollo 11 mission: “We came in peace for all mankind”. But I find myself wondering whether the writers meant something more by it — whether the title functions as a kind of gift. We are giving you a mirror. We are showing you what humanity is, what it keeps doing, what it exports wherever it goes. The technology will not save us. If we don’t evolve we will carry our murderous competitiveness, our greed, our shortsightedness, our hierarchical instincts, our capacity for exploitation, our cruelty, and our extractive nature, all the way to the furthest reaches of the solar system.

Unless we change, nothing will change.

The writers may not know what change actually looks like. But I witness change and evolution repeatedly in my clinical work. I have also experienced it. I grew up with abuse and trauma that nearly destroyed me. I know what it’s like to recover from it; to no longer live in the shadow of it, no longer driven by fear and confusion, no longer hijacked by a frightened five-year-old at the worst possible moments. Most people — even those fortunate enough to have been raised in relatively safe and loving environments come to therapy with chronic low-level fear (anxiety).

What neuroscientific research confirms and that the framework of Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) brought into my profession is the fact that something genuinely different is possible. People can change the architecture of their brains and while it isn’t necessarily easy the principles are simple and everyone can grasp them. Our prefrontal cortex — the part of our brain that gives us ethical and moral thinking and enables us to regulate ourselves and live with ease as true adults — can be brought into real integration with the limbic system. This prevents us from being hijacked by our limbic system, from being always at the mercy of an ancient survival responses that no longer serve us.

But here is the hard thing that For All Mankind keeps showing us without quite saying it: it is not enough for good people to come together across borders and form movements. Revolutions, even when they succeed, tend not to produce what they promised — because the people who rise to lead them are too often the same kind of people who were running the old system, drawn to power precisely because of what power means to them. Unless we are changed — genuinely, neurologically, relationally changed — then any movement we build will eventually be vulnerable to being hijacked by the very predatory dynamics we were trying to overturn. History has proven this repeatedly and the evidence is all around us. We don’t need to replace one alpha with another. We need to stop organising ourselves around alphas.

It does not escape me that a series so preoccupied with institutional corruption, injustice, exploitation, greed and individual courageous dissent is produced and distributed by Apple TV — a multi billion dollar company born in the heartland of American capitalism. Perhaps the writers are using the platform to smuggle in a message anyway. Perhaps they are simply making very expensive television. Perhaps — and I think this is probably the honest answer for most of us — it functions as sophisticated comfort, something that lets us feel we’ve engaged with the problem whilst continuing along the same path, the silent majority soothed by art that names the cage without opening it.

Human art has always been good at showing us that the patterns don’t change, that it’s always the same story, that no matter how much technology we accumulate, no matter how many advancements we think we’ve made, ultimately, we carry the same ancient mindset with us — across millennia, and now perhaps across the impossible distances of space.

The question For All Mankind keeps leaving in my mind, even when the credits roll, is the oldest one: What do we actually want? Do we want merely to continue to exist — to manage, to cope, to survive inside the destructive machine we’ve created in our traumatised image — or do we want to discover what human potential actually holds, and try to reach it?

Maslow asked it more precisely than I can:

A comment on paid subscriptions

Substack encourages writers to activate paid subscriptions. They take a small cut to enable them to provide this, otherwise free-to-use platform. I am grateful to the readers who have pledged money for monthly or yearly subscriptions, but I have no intention of monetising my work.

I do not want to turn my writing into an obligation, but even more importantly, I don’t believe in a tiered system where those who can pay get preferential treatment over those who can’t, such as the right to comment, or privileged content. This hierarchy of ‘worthiness’, especially based on such an arbitrary principle like how much money people have, couldn’t be further away from my values.

If you do feel moved to make a contribution to support my writing, see the ‘buy me a coffee’ button below. If you haven’t seen it before, it is a way of offering a donation to freelance writers. Payments are processed securely by Stripe on the ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ site. I believe people can keep donations anonymous if they wish. This is entirely voluntary. Everyone is and always will be welcome to read my work free of charge.

Thank you so much for reading my work!

Buy me a coffee 🙏🏼

Tomorrow, Scotland votes. Reform UK is polling at around 18% — level with Labour, and a genuine force at Holyrood for the first time. Their central pitch is immigration control. A focus on immigration control is not just cover for a nasty white colonial mindset, and out of step with our health as a species — in the most concrete practical terms, it’s also the wrong answer for Scotland.

We are one species. The borders that divide us are recent inventions, drawn mostly by violence and driven by primitive survivalism and greed. The person who crossed a sea or boarded a flight to build a life somewhere new is not our enemy. They are, in the most literal sense, our kin. A politics that treats human beings as a problem to be repelled is a diminished politics, and voting for it diminishes us.

For those who prefer the language of self-interest rather than kinship, the facts are clear — and they have just been restated in a report that appeared on the BBC on 28th April. According to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford:

Reform don’t understand human interdependence. They and their equivalents hate anyone who has any needs at all, including people within our societies. I can imagine a nightmarish scenario — not unlike the Sanctuary Districts in the Star Trek: DS9 episode Past Tense — where unemployed or poor people, deemed inconvenient by society are simply removed from view. It’s science fiction, but it was always meant as a cautionary tale. If Reform had their way and could do whatever they want, I can imagine they would create camps for poor people to keep them out of sight.

This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Across the United States, cities are already forcibly clearing homeless encampments — ‘sweeping’ tent communities off streets and out of parks, with people losing their belongings, their documents, and their connections to services in the process. Small collections of tents have begun appearing in London too, and an asylum seeker encampment in Dublin — a warning of things to come, some observers suggest, for how this phenomenon could spread. In Australia they already have nasty camps for asylum seekers. In the US Trump’s ICE has created camps for those he deems ‘undesirable’ where some may languish for years and some have already died. As of March 2026, 46 people had died in ICE custody or detention since the start of Trump’s second administration in January 2025. The number of deaths in 2025 exceeded the highest seen in over two decades. One death in January 2026 was ruled a homicide by the El Paso County Medical Examiner, despite ICE reporting it as a suicide. And in Israel there are detention camps for Palestinians where torture is rife and people just disappear indefinitely. The logic of removing inconvenient people from sight is already well established. The idea that under a Reform-style regime this could be extended is not so far-fetched.

6,700 asylum seekers are hardly a national threat, and the hotel housing isn’t an inevitability. It is an abject failure of policy and imagination by politicians. Asylum seekers should be allowed to work and contribute while they’re here, whether they remain or end up leaving after their applications are assessed. These are human beings who are often traumatised and desperate for human kindness. They flee the unliveable as any one of us would do if life became untenable where we are for whatever reason. It is a recurring human error to think that what happens to someone else, somewhere else, will never happen to us where we are. When the shoe is on the other foot, we might learn our lesson, but we don’t need to wait until it happens. We can use our imagination and learn from history and experience. We don’t know what the future holds for any of us and we can’t assume that things will never change where we are. What if we had to flee and became dependent on the kindness of others?

Reform is guided by the same ancient primitive tribal instinct that told our ancestors to look after ‘their own’ and drive away (or exploit) the ‘other’. Immigration isn’t a modern phenomenon. Humans always migrated out of necessity, away from hardship and in search of better conditions. Reform are deceiving people because they don’t object to all forms of migration. Colonialism and settler-colonialism — theft, murder and the dispossession of people who already occupy a place — are also a form of migration and Reform love that. They love Israel. But they hate migrants like me who don’t want to take from anyone or replace anyone. They just want to join their fellow human beings in a new destination and live alongside them.

Migration has been the only thing holding the numbers up in Scotland’s declining population. The National Records of Scotland, publishing new projections just last week, revised their figures sharply downward: Scotland’s population is now projected to peak in 2033 and then fall, reaching 5.47 million by 2049 — 1.3% lower than today. Only a year ago, the projection was for growth to 5.78 million by 2047. That is a reversal of over 300,000 people in a single revised forecast, driven primarily, in NRS’s own words, by migration falling from unusually high levels. According to the Scottish Government Immigration White Paper 2025, Scotland’s working-age population will only continue to grow if migration is maintained at current rates. Without it, there is no workforce to sustain pensions, no staff for care homes, no economic base for the rural communities that are already emptying.

Reform’s answer is to pull up the drawbridge and make sure the moats are full of crocodiles. They promise to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, create a deportation command, and withdraw from every international treaty they believe limits border control. Their leader in Scotland unveiled a billboard in Glasgow depicting migrants in a dinghy, with the words “Scotland is at a breaking point”. Their manifesto warns of ‘strangers’ being prioritised ahead of Scots. I am ‘strangers’.

This is not real politics. It is scapegoating and mob psychology. Applied to Scotland, Reform’s programme is a slow demolition not only of Scotland’s economy, but of our collective psychology. Mean leaders and their policies don’t just hurt their identified targets or scapegoats. They hurt everyone.

I am a migrant - twice over actually. I came here, I stayed, I became part of this place. I was welcomed here. I work and contribute like all migrants. Migrants did not create decades of underinvestment, stagnant wages, or failures in social housing supply. Migrants are often caught within those same crises, even if headlines rarely acknowledge this.

I heard a worrying story this week: someone told me that a few high school boys, old enough to vote at 16, were planning to vote Reform ‘just for laughs’. I hope they have mature parents who can discuss this with them.

I understand the impulse to treat a broken political system with contempt. But this is not a joke. The numbers are real, the consequences are long, and Scotland cannot afford to hand any power to a party whose central promise is to make our demographic crisis worse and to usher in an era of nastiness, social alienation, confusion, and economic chaos.

Don’t vote Reform.

Vote for common sense, cooperation, humanity, and courage to stand up against wrongs and for victims.

Vote for protection of our natural environment.

Vote for justice, for Palestinian human rights.

but most of all

Vote for idealism and real vision and the political will to change the paradigm — not for low aspirations and more of the same.

A comment on paid subscriptions

Substack encourages writers to activate paid subscriptions. They take a small cut to enable them to provide this, otherwise free-to-use platform. I am grateful to the readers who have pledged money for monthly or yearly subscriptions, but I have no intention of monetising my work.

I do not want to turn my writing into an obligation, but even more importantly, I don’t believe in a tiered system where those who can pay get preferential treatment over those who can’t, such as the right to comment, or privileged content. This hierarchy of ‘worthiness’, especially based on such an arbitrary principle like how much money people have, couldn’t be further away from my values.

If you do feel moved to make a contribution to support my writing, see the ‘buy me a coffee’ button below. If you haven’t seen it before, it is a way of offering a donation to freelance writers. Payments are processed securely by Stripe on the ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ site. I believe people can keep donations anonymous if they wish. This is entirely voluntary. Everyone is and always will be welcome to read my work free of charge.

Thank you so much for reading my work!

Buy me a coffee 🙏🏼

The inhabitants of Jericho committed no crime. They were no more enemies of the Israelites than the Palestinians were enemies of the Jews — or for that matter, than the resident of a home are enemies of the home invaders. They just lived there on the property the settler-colonialists coveted. According to the Book of Joshua, God choreographed their annihilation — seven days, seven circuits of the walls, the blast of the shofar, and then the slaughter of every man, woman, child and animal inside. The taking of Canaan and the story of Jericho and the deaths of its inhabitants are celebrated uncritically to this day as a miracle and a proof of faith in both Judaism and Christianity.

WARNING! Taboo-breaking material below. Not for the fainthearted.

I heard about Alice Rothchild a few years back. Believing her to be an anti-Zionist, I subscribed to her Substack. Rothchild publishes weekly reviews where she writes her own posts or highlights writings by others. Her latest bulletin stopped me in my tracks and made me question how much of an anti-Zionist she really is. There were two items that I found troubling. The first is her description of celebrating the Passover Seder with a group of anti-Zionists, and the second is a paragraph she wrote where she highlights a recent Mondoweiss article, Israelis are being recruited as spies for Iran in what security experts call an espionage ‘epidemic’. I will try to comment on the second item separately.

Rothchild is a Boston-based retired doctor, published author, and Palestine solidarity activist. Rothchild is openly anti-Zionist and we should be in agreement, except after reading her latest Substack post, I’m left questioning where she really is on her journey. I don’t believe any of us deserve a medal for being a decent human being and standing up for those who are oppressed or mistreated. So from the outset, the ‘as a Jew I support the Palestinians’ is problematic. Like Rothchild, I too have received a great deal of attention because ‘as a Jew’ I stood up for Palestinian human rights and against Zionism and Israel. But really it shouldn’t matter where you come from. Humanity is our real common heritage. A decent, moral human being looks after their fellow human beings and speaks out when they are harmed, regardless of who they are.

In the original 2012 introduction to Beyond Tribal Loyalties I wrote:

I’ve moved a long way even from what I said in that anti-Zionist introduction. More specifically, I no longer identify as a Jew. I don’t even know why I ever called myself a Jew. I was born and raised in Israel to parents whose birth certificates identified them as Jewish. But neither my parents nor grandparents were ever religious. My family did not teach faith in a god. The Jewish traditions that my school and my secular family followed were watered down versions of religious festivals. We didn’t observe any strict religious rules, but the essence of the Biblical stories and their relationship to our identity were never questioned or examined. They were a given. These stories told us who we were, why the state of Israel was there and what it was supposed to mean to us. I don’t observe anything. I don’t follow any Jewish traditions, and I certainly do not believe Jewishness is a race. So in reality I am not Jewish and what my Israeli birth certificate says about my identity has nothing to do with how I see myself or who I am.

The Passover Seder Problem

In her latest bulletin, Alice Rothchild describes the Passover Seder — the Jewish ritualised Passover meal — she celebrated earlier in the month with a “diverse group of 24 family and friends ranging in age from 3 to 85”. Never mind that I have a problem with the very idea of celebrating the Seder, I then read that Rothchild and her fellow anti-Zionists used the original Haggadah. In my comment to Rothchild I wrote this:

I referred Alice to my critique of Jewish religion, which forms part of my reaction to Avi Shlaim’s comments about Judaism in a recent interview.

For those who don’t know, Haggadah in Hebrew means something like ‘a telling’. The Haggadah is a traditional ‘order of service’ that sets out the proceedings of the Seder meal. Seder in Hebrew means ‘order’ or ‘order of things’. In a traditional Seder, even in otherwise secular families and communities, the entire Haggadah is read out and its instructions are followed precisely: when to say what, when to drink one of the four cups of ceremonial wine, which symbolic food items are to be eaten, what they each symbolise and when. Eating and drinking are interspersed with the reading of the Haggadah and every part of it has a meaning: what children say, the questions they are required to ask, how adults respond, and so on.

Back in the days of the Roman Empire, everyone was what we now call ‘religious’. All aspects of life were regulated by religious rules, so being Jewish meant living by some version of Jewish religion. The Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was the centre of that religious life — all practices and observances centred around it. This was not much different from how other ancient civilisations organised their religious lives. Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and others all built temples to their gods and focused their religious practice around them. The only distinction is that Judaism worships one god rather than a pantheon. The destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, following their brutal crushing of the last Judean rebellion against Roman occupation, was not a random act. The Romans knew exactly what they were doing. Destroying the heart and soul of an observant community dealt a devastating blow to its identity and eliminated what was also the political hub of the Judean struggle against Roman occupation.

Faced with the real threat of losing their faith and identity, Jewish religious leaders set out to create a written substitute for the Temple to ensure the people and their faith didn’t simply disappear into other cultures and faiths. If Jewish rituals could no longer be performed at the Temple, they could be performed in people’s homes and communities. The Haggadah replaced the Temple and expanded the story of Jewish identity to communities far away from ancient Palestine, many of which were converted to Judaism. Contrary to what we were told when I was growing up, Judaism was not always a persecuted religion — for a time it actively spread itself, gaining many converts in the ancient world. Until I read Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People, I had no idea that Judaism in its heyday converted many, sometimes even by the sword.

The Haggadah is a sophisticated instrument of identity transmission, combining narrative and sensory experience — food, drink, song, the warmth of family — with children’s ritual participation to tell and retell the founding myths of Jewish identity. It was created as a way to preserve Jewish identity and continuity without a physical centre of worship. Everything the Temple once provided — communal belonging, sacred narrative, a shared sense of purpose — the Seder now provided in the intimacy of the home. The Seder is never merely about Passover; or rather, Passover is itself about the foundations of that identity. The Seder isn’t just something you do. It tells you who you are. Children are at the centre of it, they are the whole point. Through powerful narrative and carefully choreographed ritual, children absorb the myths of their identity and are equipped to pass them on to the next generation through the same unchanging ceremony. The ritual has barely changed in seven hundred years, and that unchanging quality is not accidental. It is precisely the mechanism. I loved the Seder as a child and looked forward to it every year. My only gripe was that you couldn’t eat what you wanted when you wanted from the generous spread on the Seder table. You had to wait until the Haggadah told you it was time for the next dish.

How Can An Anti-Zionist Celebrate the Seder and Use the Traditional Haggadah?

The Seder Rothchild describes is explicitly framed as an “anti-Zionist liberation seder with original Haggadah.” The JVP poem she quotes in her post does name “the plague of Zionism” alongside racism, genocide and ethnic cleansing. Rothchild and her community attempt to repurpose the Exodus narrative for progressive ends, reading it as a story of liberation from oppression generally, rather than as a specifically Jewish nationalist text. But those two things cannot coexist. The original Haggadah contains the full narrative — the plagues, the killing of the Egyptian firstborn sons, the Exodus, and the destination, which is always Canaan. You cannot call that anti-Zionist. The original Haggadah is the foundational text of the very project anti-Zionists claim to oppose.

The JVP poem Rothchild quotes is worth examining closely too. It’s genuinely moving as poetry — “all of us refugees, all of us prophets” — but it is a wilful misreading of the text it draws on. It universalises the Exodus story, turning it into a general human liberation narrative that encompasses Black liberation, Palestinian liberation, LGBTQ rights. But this universalisation only works by erasing the story’s actual content and consequences. The Israelites in Exodus weren’t fighting for universal human liberation. They were fighting for their liberation, the (fully inhabited) land their God’s promised to them — exclusively. The universalisation is a modern liberal imposition on a tribal, particularist, survival and conquest narrative.

There’s also something worth saying about the emotional function of the Seder — 24 family and friends, ages 3 to 85, songs, poetry, belonging. That warmth is precisely what makes the critique difficult and what makes the ritual so resistant to honest examination. The Seder works because it creates profound communal feeling. I remember that feeling from my own childhood — and I understand exactly why it works. But that precise feeling is at the heart of tribal indoctrination, and it binds people to a narrative they might otherwise question.

The repurposing of the Haggadah narrative and the ritual of the Seder is problematic. It tries to detach the Exodus narrative from its consequences. It wants the liberation story without the Canaan story. It is selective reading — and it is intellectually dishonest. The Exodus narrative isn’t incidentally connected to settler-colonialism — it is the foundational settler-colonial text. The structure is right there: chosen people, promised land, divine mandate, and the slaughter and expulsion of the existing inhabitants. You cannot lift the ‘liberation from Egypt’ part out of that sequence and declare it clean, because it only has meaning within that sequence. The whole point of the Exodus is to get to Canaan. Egypt is the beginning of the story, not the story.

The repurposing move is deeply revealing psychologically. It’s the desperate attempt to preserve Jewish identity and Jewish ritual — to keep the warmth, the family, the songs, the belonging — while jettisoning the parts that are now embarrassing. But you can’t surgically remove the ideology from the ritual when the ritual enacts the ideology. Every year at the Seder table you rehearse the narrative. You relive it. You internalise it again. The repurposed Haggadah that mentions “the plague of Zionism” is enacting a contradiction. It uses the structure and authority of the very story that inspires and legitimises Zionism and the present state of Israel to oppose Zionism.

We should also ask what motivates JVP and people like Rothchild. They genuinely care. Their commitment to Palestinian liberation from settler-colonialism and erasure is real. But they also want to continue to be Jewish — and that is where the contradiction becomes irresolvable. To be Jewish in any meaningful sense requires engaging with the foundational texts and tenets of Jewish religious identity. And those tenets — the chosen people, the promised land, the divine mandate, the conquest of Canaan — are precisely what authorises the project they claim to oppose. JVP will challenge Zionism vigorously, but the religious soil from which Zionism grows remains untouchable. The foundational narratives are never subjected to the same critical scrutiny as the political project they inspired. That is the line they will not cross — and it is not a coincidental omission. It is a structural necessity. Cross that line and the whole framework collapses, because at that point you are no longer asking “how do we be better Jews who oppose Zionism” but something far more uncomfortable: whether an identity built on these foundations can be separated from the project at all.

Anti-Zionists or Liberal-Zionists?

A genuine anti-Zionist reckoning with the Exodus narrative would have to sit with serious discomfort — because as I said in my comment to Rothchild, that story doesn’t end with freedom, it ends with Canaan. The celebration of liberation from Egypt is inseparable from the mandate to colonise and the glee about the harm inflicted on the Egyptians.

Early in my activism I became acquainted with Egyptian diplomats in Canberra. They told me they had once been invited to a Passover Seder at the home of a senior Israeli government official in Tel Aviv. The wife recalled how stunned and shocked she felt sitting there watching the happiness, the triumphalism and the pleasure the hosts and their family expressed in recounting the plagues inflicted on Egypt. Seeing the Seder through her eyes, the final penny dropped. The Haggadah doesn’t just narrate liberation and the death and suffering that had to be inflicted to achieve it. It celebrates and revels in that suffering. If you want to understand how Israeli soldiers can delight in the carnage they have been inflicting in Gaza, remember that every one of them, secular or religious, was indoctrinated on the stories of the Haggadah. Liberal Zionists tend not to go there because going there risks destabilising the whole framework they need in order to remain both Jewish and progressive.

A truly enlightened religion would lament and mourn the suffering of its enemies, not celebrate it. If any human being is ever forced to kill or harm another in self-defence, the healthy response is not glee or triumphalism — it is grief. Grief for the suffering and death of the other, and grief for what the act of killing does to the person who commits it. I know this is possible because I have witnessed it. Many of my clients have gone through exactly this process when working through experiences in which they were forced to use aggression to protect themselves. The capacity to mourn your enemy and feel bad about your own behaviour, no matter how necessary or justified in the circumstances, is a mark of genuine maturity and moral development. The Haggadah, with its triumphant recounting of the plagues and the drowning of the Egyptian army, demands the opposite. It also validates, legitimises and permits everything Israel is and everything it is doing to the Palestinians.

Fanatical Zionists are easy to reckon with. They are actually doing the anti-Zionist movement a service in a perverse way — Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, Smotrich, the soldiers filming and broadcasting their looting and destruction, the settlers celebrating in Gaza — they strip away all pretence and show the project for exactly what it always was. They make it impossible to sustain the ‘but Israel is a democracy’ narrative.

Liberal Zionists are the sophisticated defence mechanism. They absorb criticism, reframe it, redirect it into manageable channels — two states, international law, war crimes investigations, humanitarian corridors — all language that implicitly accepts the legitimacy of the state while appearing to challenge its excesses. They give Western governments and institutions the vocabulary to express ‘concern’ without actually doing anything. And crucially, they give progressive Jews a way to feel morally clean while the project continues. The role of Liberal Zionism has always been to buy time for Israel. Every decade of ‘peace process’, every round of negotiations, every liberal Zionist op-ed in the Guardian lamenting settlement expansion, has been time Israel used to create facts on the ground. The Oslo years were arguably the most productive period of settlement expansion in Israel’s history. Liberal Zionism didn’t oppose that — it provided the moral atmosphere in which it could happen unimpeded. And there’s something more dishonest about it than open fanaticism, because it requires the liberal Zionist to perpetually not-quite-see what is directly in front of them. That’s not innocent confusion. At some level it’s a choice. I don’t think Alice Rothchild is an anti-Zionist. To me she seems much more like a Liberal Zionist.

For a long time I too wanted to separate Jewish religion from Zionism. I didn’t want people to use my writings to justify racism. I have long been criticised by Zionists for ‘giving ammunition to the antisemites’. The solution was to stay quiet. Not to criticise Israel and most definitely not go near Jewish religion. But silence is what enables evil to thrive at all levels of human society. Silence enables. Speaking out is the only thing we have to expose and challenge crime, with the ultimate aim of stopping it. Part of speaking out is critiquing and questioning especially what is considered to be too sacred to question.

I genuinely don’t know how you salvage an identity based on victimhood, a fixation on the survival of the group, a hierarchy of humanity, on vengeance and on settler-colonialism. Does such an identity need to be salvaged? What does it even mean to be Jewish if you aren’t observing Jewish religion? And if you are observant, you need to realise what it is you are expected to believe and ask how it sits with your human values. I believe that my position — to abandon and renounce the whole thing — is the only intellectually and morally consistent and coherent choice.

The entire Zionist project is a colossal crime against humanity — as was its mythical ancient predecessor, the colonisation of Canaan and the slaughter of all its inhabitants to make room for the twelve tribes of Israel. One crime authorised and inspired the other. We have a genocidal settler-colonial project in progress. There is no more excuse for hedging and trying to find a comfortable path salvaging something that cannot be salvaged. The genocide must be stopped. The entire project must be stopped.

Hear Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan discuss how Israel links its own identity with the myths of the Bible (From 07:51) in a podcast interview with +972 Magazine.

A comment on paid subscriptions

Substack encourages writers to activate paid subscriptions. They take a small cut to enable them to provide this, otherwise free-to-use platform. I am grateful to the readers who have pledged money for monthly or yearly subscriptions, but I have no intention of monetising my work.

I do not want to turn my writing into an obligation, but even more importantly, I don’t believe in a tiered system where those who can pay get preferential treatment over those who can’t, such as the right to comment, or privileged content. This hierarchy of ‘worthiness’, especially based on such an arbitrary principle like how much money people have, couldn’t be further away from my values.

If you do feel moved to make a contribution to support my writing, see the ‘buy me a coffee’ button below. If you haven’t seen it before, it is a way of offering a donation to freelance writers. Payments are processed securely by Stripe on the ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ site. I believe people can keep donations anonymous if they wish. This is entirely voluntary. Everyone is and always will be welcome to read my work free of charge.

Thank you so much for reading my work!

Buy me a coffee 🙏🏼

This is an afterword to my 27th April essay ‘We Were Built for Better Than This’.

I don’t know what the number of ‘likes’ on posts really means. The practice of clicking a ‘like’ button started with social media, and I’ve never paid that much attention to it. But I can’t help noticing that the number of likes on essays that not only diagnose problems but offer a clear solution, is consistently and substantially lower than essays that express indignation, pain or anger, or expose bad behaviour, injustices and crimes. This has been consistent ever since I started to publish essays here on Substack back in 2022. If the reactions to essays are anything to go by, then here is what I am thinking:

Every revolution in history has been driven primarily by pain, hurt, and rage against the existing order, rather than a genuinely developed vision of something different. As a result they have reproduced the same dominance structures they claimed to replace. We don’t just get ‘more of the same’ after a revolution, but often worse. The French Revolution produced Napoleon. The Russian Revolution produced Stalin. The US Revolution produced Trump. Trump’s voters were promised a transformation for the better of a system that has failed them, but is producing a dictatorship/quasi-monarchy instead.

Human psychology, which is a direct product of our neurobiology hasn’t changed much in the last 50,000 years. Changing the people in power without changing the neurological substrate of enough individuals is doomed to produce more of the same. Often worse, because the new predators in charge have the additional energy of recently won power, and the moral cover of having been previously oppressed.

The mechanism is always the same. Strong feelings, limbic energy, are sufficient to destroy the existing structure, but they cannot build anything genuinely different. Building something different requires the very prefrontal capacity for vision that limbic dominance overrides. Because the limbic brain is so dominant in almost everyone, essays that validate strong feelings offer a real dopamine hit. They can be very gratifying psychologically, even if the feelings they express and validate — pain, indignation, incredulity, anger — are uncomfortable or unpleasant. Less emotive essays discussing a vision of something we have not yet experienced probably don’t offer the same gratification.

Our limbic brain can only recreate what it already knows, which means what’s already wired in from lived experience, witnessing, and powerful cultural inheritance. Without prefrontal vision in charge, we’re doomed to repeat patterns both at the individual and group levels. We always end up with new people in charge running the same software as their predecessors.
I have no doubt people want change, but what we need is not merely a regime change but a complete paradigm change. We need a new vision, and enough integration (maturity) to make it happen.

Perhaps the low like count is evidence that whilst people want change, they are not yet able to believe in an entirely new vision for humanity. They may not even be that attracted to reading about it. This essay and others like it may be proving their own argument in real time through the response they generate.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

A comment on paid subscriptions

Substack encourages writers to activate paid subscriptions. They take a small cut to enable them to provide this, otherwise free-to-use platform. I am grateful to the readers who have pledged money for monthly or yearly subscriptions, but I have no intention of monetising my work.

I do not want to turn my writing into an obligation, but even more importantly, I don’t believe in a tiered system where those who can pay get preferential treatment over those who can’t, such as the right to comment, or privileged content. This hierarchy of ‘worthiness’, especially based on such an arbitrary principle like how much money people have, couldn’t be further away from my values.

If you do feel moved to make a contribution to support my writing, see the ‘buy me a coffee’ button below. If you haven’t seen it before, it is a way of offering a donation to freelance writers. Payments are processed securely by Stripe on the ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ site. I believe people can keep donations anonymous if they wish. This is entirely voluntary. Everyone is and always will be welcome to read my work free of charge.

Thank you so much for reading my work!

Buy me a coffee 🙏🏼

Strip away the tailored suits, the tech campuses, the diplomatic language, and what you find underneath is surprisingly simple: a primitive creature doing whatever it takes to survive. Our imperialist and colonial mindset — whether it shows up in wars, in economics, or in the way a parent dominates a child — is not a sophisticated system. It is survivalism, glorified. The tech billionaires, the disordered people in positions of power, the architects of endless war — they are not visionaries. They are frightened creatures hoarding resources, exactly as our ancestors did, only with far more devastating tools at their disposal. Trump’s ignorance and crassness exposes a truth that more sophisticated survivalists were always careful to hide. Too many people still view successful survivalists with an awe they don’t deserve, instead of seeing them for what they are — successful at surviving, but not so much at being human.

We still behave as if we are running across an ice age savannah in rabbit skins, scanning for predators, hoarding what we can, trusting almost no one. Modern humans with brains just like ours faced massive and dangerous predators who either hunted them or competed with them for food. Life was not safe or easy for our ancestors, and the evidence isn’t only in what we find buried in the ground. It is alive in our psychology, in the patterns we enact, and in how we still organise ourselves as societies. The evidence of where we come from is in who we are now. We are the descendants of those who were good at surviving. That is our inheritance, and it shows.

Our ancestors faced genuine existential threats: massive predators that hunted them, brutal competition for food, the ever-present possibility of extinction. The ones who survived were not necessarily the most empathic. Feeling empathy towards a hungry smilodon (sabre-toothed ‘tiger’) about to pounce and eat you or your child probably didn’t enable survival as well as the instinctual, fear-based, survivalist limbic fight-flight-freeze system. Equally, feeling empathy towards the antelope or bison you were about to hunt to feed your group didn’t work so well for physical survival. We are the descendants of those for whom fear and aggression worked. This isn’t a moral judgement. It is simply what happened.

Empathy is still with us — thank goodness. It’s evident for example in the growing number of humans who are moving towards plant based or vegetarian diets, or who oppose war and refuse to serve in armed forces. But empathy and compassion are not the dominant forces in the world. The dominant aspect of us, the one that still runs most of our institutions, our economies, that wages our wars, is the limbic system’s ancient, fear-driven imperative — dominate or be dominated, hoard or go hungry, stay vigilant, don’t lower your guard and don’t trust outsiders.

What makes our situation tragic rather than merely unfortunate is that the threats that shaped us are mostly gone. There are no smilodons or giant hyenas — they are extinct. There is enough food on this planet to feed everyone. The dog-eat-dog reality we continue to live by — the wars, the ruthless competition, our never-ending ‘othering’, the casual cruelty and cold-heartedness of our economic systems — is now entirely of our own making, and entirely unnecessary. We are running ancient survival software on a problem that no longer exists. At their root, imperialism and capitalism are just hoarding and eliminating competition. The same instinct that once drove our ancestors to secure the lion’s share of berries from the forest floor, or fish from the nearest river, is now scaled up into the control of labour forces, raw materials, trade routes, and real estate. The predator is still doing exactly what predators do. The difference is that there is no longer any excuse for it.

Those who feel themselves entitled — usually those without empathy — are humanity’s apex predators. But they cannot do what they do alone. They never could. For every ruthless, empathy-free operator at the top of the human food chain, there are thousands of essentially decent people enabling them — not out of malice, but out of their own survivalism. Those who help humanity’s apex predators have simply made a calculation: they may not have what it takes to reach the top, but proximity to power has its rewards. They settle for the scraps that come their way when the predator they serve is feeding. The more successful the predator, the bigger and more nourishing the scraps. This is how predation comes to drive and organise everything we call civilisation in a world where survival is the dominant imperative.

Democracy was a genuine attempt to elevate us from primitive brutes to beings with a more universal and inclusive mindset. The idea was that every person’s survival and flourishing mattered equally, and that no one was entitled to dominate anyone else. Power belongs to the people — to everyone. Elected leaders are lent some of this power temporarily, in order to serve those who elected them. But democracy was compromised at its very origins. Athenian democracy, the model we still invoke, was built on the labour of slaves and the systematic exclusion of women and foreigners — groups that together constituted the vast majority of the population. Democracy for some, domination for everyone else, was never really democracy at all. It took thousands of years of struggle to extend even partial democratic benefits more widely, and that extension remains incomplete and uneven across the globe.

The pattern of hijacking has never stopped. Caesar retained the institutions of the Roman Republic whilst gutting their substance. Napoleon did the same with the French Revolution’s ideals. In our time, democracy has been hijacked by billionaires who are either in power themselves or have disproportionate influence on those who were elected to serve. The result is a system that preserves democracy’s institutions whilst continuing to hollow out their substance.

Democracy is not what it should have been — a way to enable everyone to live safely and well and to grow to their potential. It has been rapidly reduced to a poor mitigator of the worst excesses of the survivalist mindset. We live with the performance of democracy but not its true spirit. And yet democracy, or something that grows beyond it, is not wrong. It is premature. It has been a failed experiment not because the idea was bad, but because it keeps being handed to people who have not yet outgrown the psychology it was designed to replace. In a society of genuinely mature human beings, something like it would arise naturally, without anyone having to fight for it.

We are not well put-together. It is quite possible we are a failed species — and the particular cruelty of our situation is that we are self-aware. Whatever is coming, if we continue on our present path, we will know exactly what is happening and why. We will have no excuse of ignorance. Self-awareness was always a double-edged gift. It is the source of our suffering — we can see ourselves, and we can see the gap between what we are and what we could be — but it is also our only real hope of closing it. The same brain regions that give us self-awareness give us our humanity. They are not separate things.

My heart breaks most for the children. Most of them are never given a chance. The adults around them should show them the way towards their potential — but adults cannot teach what they don’t know. Too many children grow up not only without good models, but in the presence of active predators — in their own homes, in the very families that are supposed to protect them and guide them towards their full humanness. Almost everyone in society fails young people. And beyond their own homes and schools, the world itself is failing them. Children are routinely murdered, maimed, displaced, and traumatised in wars and genocides they did nothing to cause — whole generations of young lives destroyed before they have had a chance to begin. It is not surprising that so many develop what we call ‘mental health problems’, and go on to repeat the same patterns as their parents and grandparents before them, all the way back to our earliest beginnings.

The fault does not lie only with the imperialistic entitled ‘alphas’ among us. We enable them. We have always enabled them. And we can no longer blame ignorance. Despite everything we know about our history, despite watching the same patterns repeat themselves with numbing familiarity, we continue to give power to the wrong people, and then express shock when they use it as predators do. Our limbic system always prefers what it already knows, however destructive, over the uncertainty of something genuinely different. We are all implicated — not equally, not in the same ways, but we all play our parts: as predators, as enablers, or as people who have simply stopped believing that anything else is possible.

There is a way out of this. I have lived and breathed it in my work, week after week, for nearly three decades. But the way out requires something most people find harder than suffering: the willingness to change.

Most people either don’t believe change is possible, or they surrender to the ancient ‘devil we know’ strategy that helped our ancestors survive on a dangerous planet but serves us very poorly now. Most people hold on to what little they have for dear life, continue to cope, continue to suffer, and will not risk the uncertainty of something different. And who can blame them? Every baby arrives in the world with an intact, unconscious hope — that they will be welcomed, that they will be helped to become whatever they are capable of becoming. Almost immediately, that hope begins to be crushed. What most children discover, very early, is that the only life on offer is a life of survival. Their families, schools, the societies around them teach them that survivalism, earning a living, getting ahead, is the only thing that matters and the only thing to look forward to. Not potential. Not becoming.

This is not a problem of poverty or privilege. It permeates every class, every culture, every society on earth. Wherever survivalism dominates, mental health always suffers. A life of survivalism for a human is a psychological dead end — a life sentence of chronic anxiety and depression. These conditions are not a sign of individual sickness. They are the entirely predictable result of asking a human being — a creature with an enormous potential for growth — to spend their whole life merely surviving. Our mental health crisis is not a medical problem. It’s a social one. We are focusing on the wrong thing.

But my clients know what the right thing is. One day they decide that enough is enough. The cost of staying the same has finally outweighed the fear of changing. What they discover is that their desire for wholeness has always been there — intact, waiting to be encouraged, nourished and supported. Just like me, they had never seen it modelled, and had often been actively discouraged from believing it was there, or that it was important. Therapy is not a process of fixing something broken. My clients are not broken. They are healthy people who were never given the right conditions or guidance to develop towards their full humanness. They are walking into the unknown because none of them have ever seen a model of what a genuinely well-integrated human being actually looks like. But they find the courage to begin because they tried the alternative and it nearly destroyed them.

In my own case it was not courage that drove me to change. It was desperation. The life I knew — lived in the shadow of childhood abuse and trauma, in a bleak, survivalist society — was something I simply could not imagine continuing. I didn’t want it anymore. I had had enough. I took the risk, walked into the unknown, and discovered it was not nearly as dangerous as what I was leaving behind.

We do not all need to be healed to make a difference. We do not even need a majority. A sizeable, determined minority — people who have had enough, who are willing to call the bluff of the brutal, survivalist way of living — can shift the course of things. Hungary’s recent election, which ended Viktor Orbán's grip on power after years of creeping authoritarianism, was not won by a population of enlightened, fully integrated human beings. It was won by people who were simply fed up. Desperation can be a legitimate and political force. If enough people decide that the cost of staying the same is higher than the risk of something different, things can change.

“How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the lightbulb needs to want to change.”

There is a reason the old ‘light bulb’ joke works. And there is a reason why when I write about dysfunction, or express anger or pain, those essays gather far more likes than the ones about change and possibility.

We are a stubborn and confused species that doesn’t like change — perhaps especially when it is change for the better, because better is unknown, and unknown is, to the limbic system, indistinguishable from dangerous. This is not stupidity. It is neurobiology. Left unintegrated, our brains will always prefer the familiar — however painful, however destructive — over the uncertainty of something new. It is why people repeat childhood patterns they hate and pass on damage they swore they never would. And it is why we keep repeating the same destructive patterns as a species, generation after generation, century after century.

The tragic trap is that we don’t believe in what we haven’t already experienced. Our threat-averse limbic system tells us that what is always will be. It tells us that only what we have experienced or witnessed — what is already wired into our individual and collective minds — is real. Everything else is a fantasy, a pipe dream, too idealistic. Left unintegrated, our neurobiology predisposes us to stick with what is familiar, even if it is horrible and makes us suffer. Change means changing the brain’s architecture. We know what our unintegrated brain can do. We also know what a better-integrated brain is capable of.

What is remarkable about our species is that we are not just hapless limbic brutes. We do have the capacity to imagine something we have never yet experienced. But with the limbic system at the helm we dismiss our own vision even as we deeply yearn for it. We relegate our capacity to imagine a better world to fiction and fantasy — escapism from our self-inflicted reality — instead of understanding that it is our blueprint for change, the vision we should be concentrating on realising.

Ursula Le Guin understood the tension between the familiar and the unknown. She recognised our ability to choose the unknown over the safe and familiar as fundamental to change. Her story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is one of the most precise and devastating accounts of the choice that faces each one of us — the choice between complicity in a system built on suffering, and the terrifying freedom of walking away from it into the unknown. I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t yet read it.

I am by no means the first or the last to lament our low aspirations as a species. But I am a practitioner, not a philosopher. I am fortunate to see what has long been believed to be impossible become possible before my eyes. Therapy is confidential and I don’t believe in testimonials. But I do sometimes wish there was a one-way mirror in my therapy room, and that the rest of humanity could sit on the other side and see what I see. I want people to realise that what we are told is impossible is exactly what we are built for.

As long as most human beings continue to settle for what they can bear rather than reach for what they have been falsely told is beyond them, we will remain stuck. And stuck, for us, does not mean standing still. Stuck means slowly sliding backwards — towards regression, towards psychological and spiritual suffering, towards the squandering of everything we could be. It’s really simple. Wasting our human potential causes us to suffer. The choice is ours. It has always been ours.

Afterword to ‘We Were Built For Better Than This’

I don’t know what the number of ‘likes’ on posts really means. The practice of clicking a ‘like’ button started with social media, and I’ve never paid that much attention to it. But I can’t help noticing that the number of likes on essays that not only diagnose problems but offer a clear solution, is consistently and substantially lower than essays that express indignation, pain or anger, or expose bad behaviour, injustices and crimes. This has been consistent ever since I started to publish essays here on Substack back in 2022. If the reactions to essays are anything to go by, then here is what I am thinking:

Every revolution in history has been driven primarily by pain, hurt, and rage against the existing order, rather than a genuinely developed vision of something different. As a result they have reproduced the same dominance structures they claimed to replace. We don’t just get ‘more of the same’ after a revolution, but often worse. The French Revolution produced Napoleon. The Russian Revolution produced Stalin. The US Revolution produced Trump. Trump’s voters were promised a transformation for the better of the existing system that has failed them, but is producing a dictatorship/pseudo-monarchy instead.

Human psychology which is a direct product of our neurobiology hasn’t changed much in the last 50,000 years. Changing the people in power without changing the neurological substrate of enough individuals is doomed to produce more of the same. Often worse, because the new predators in charge have the additional energy of recently won power, and the moral cover of having been previously oppressed.

The mechanism is always the same. Strong feelings, limbic energy, are sufficient to destroy the existing structure, but they cannot build anything genuinely different. Building something different requires the very prefrontal capacity for vision that limbic dominance overrides. Because the limbic brain is so dominant in almost everyone, essays that validate strong feelings offer a real dopamine hit. They can be very gratifying psychologically, even if the feelings they express and validate — pain, indignation, incredulity, anger — are uncomfortable or unpleasant. Less emotive essays discussing a vision of something we have not yet experienced probably don’t offer the same gratification.

Our limbic brain can only recreate what it already knows, which means what’s already wired in from lived experience, witnessing, and powerful cultural inheritance. Without prefrontal vision in charge, we’re doomed to repeat patterns both at the individual and group levels. We always end up with new people in charge running the same software as their predecessors.
I have no doubt people want change, but what we need is not merely a regime change but a complete paradigm change. We need a new vision, and enough integration (maturity) to make it happen.

Perhaps the low like count is evidence that whilst people want change, they are not yet able believe in an entirely new vision for humanity. They may not even be that attracted to reading about it. This essay and others like it may be proving their own argument in real time through the response they generate.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Avigail
29th April 2026

A comment on paid subscriptions

Substack encourages writers to activate paid subscriptions. They take a small cut to enable them to provide this, otherwise free-to-use platform. I am grateful to the readers who have pledged money for monthly or yearly subscriptions, but I have no intention of monetising my work.

I do not want to turn my writing into an obligation, but even more importantly, I don’t believe in a tiered system where those who can pay get preferential treatment over those who can’t, such as the right to comment, or privileged content. This hierarchy of ‘worthiness’, especially based on such an arbitrary principle like how much money people have, couldn’t be further away from my values.

If you do feel moved to make a contribution to support my writing, see the ‘buy me a coffee’ button below. If you haven’t seen it before, it is a way of offering a donation to freelance writers. Payments are processed securely by Stripe on the ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ site. I believe people can keep donations anonymous if they wish. This is entirely voluntary. Everyone is and always will be welcome to read my work free of charge.

Thank you so much for reading my work!

Buy me a coffee 🙏🏼

I am angry, and I know I’m not alone. Those we choose to run our societies are failing us, and their pattern of failure spans from the international sphere to the micro level of the individual and family right here.

There is a pattern in how those in power behave when they’re challenged after causing harm or allowing harm to occur. They commission reports, pass laws, hold press conferences. They routinely express disingenuous concern loudly enough as a substitute for real action. We have watched this happen at the largest scale imaginable where our governments who supply weapons to forces killing children in Gaza and Iran sit in international forums and speak gravely about the protection of civilians. The same leaders who enable the destruction of hospitals and water infrastructure sign pledges about children’s rights.

This is not confined to any one conflict or any one government. Children and young people in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen and beyond are being killed, starved, and permanently damaged by decisions made in capitals that simultaneously sign international conventions on child welfare. Reckless economic policies that play dice with food prices, fuel costs, and housing — decided in finance ministries and trading floors far removed from the children who bear the consequences — are another form of the same betrayal. The child going hungry in a school in England and the child under bombardment in Rafah are not separate problems with separate causes. They are products of the same fundamental malaise: children and young people are the last priority, the ones who absorb the cost of decisions made by and for adults with power.

The disconnect is not simply hypocrisy — it is a structural problem. Politicians act on what is visible and simple enough to sell to the public. What is genuinely complex, difficult, or politically costly they leave untouched.

The UK’s Online Safety Act is a domestic expression of exactly this pattern. The law, which received royal assent in 2023 and has been rolling out in phases since, is framed as child protection legislation. Its premise is that children are significantly endangered by what they encounter online — harmful content, predatory strangers, algorithms pushing them toward risk-taking behaviours, self-harm and pornography. The solution, accordingly, is to regulate online platforms, mandate age verification, and require companies to moderate what users can see. Apple has just extended this into device-level age checks. The stated justification is the safety of the young.

I do not dispute that the online environment poses real risks to children and young people. But I am a psychotherapist. I have spent decades sitting with adults who were harmed as children. I was such a child and teenager myself — one who went entirely under the radar, whose perpetrators lived out their lives without paying any price. The crimes committed against me nearly destroyed me. I am here, alive and well, not thanks to the adult environment around me or any services. It is despite them. I was fortunate enough to find my way out, but I am the exception not the rule. In every society on Earth, regardless of social class or socio-economic status, millions of young lives are destroyed by sexual and other forms of abuse before they get any chance at healthy development.

I can tell you, with the research to back it, that most of what is done to children and young people is not done by random strangers on the internet. It is done by people they know. In their families. In their communities. In institutions that are supposed to protect them. The internet did not create child abuse. The Online Safety Act hands politicians a simplified problem they can pretend to address. In reality, children and young people continue to be neglected, vilified, medicated, and blamed for their own symptoms — symptoms that are a direct reflection of the environment they are surviving in.

Another problem with the Online Safety Act’s underlying logic is that it assumes social media causes harm to otherwise healthy, happy children. But in my clinical experience, the children reaching out to strangers online, seeking validation in chatrooms, turning to social media for comfort, are already hurting. They are already confused, traumatised, frightened, already let down by the adults around them. Children who feel genuinely safe and loved, who have secure relationships they can turn to, do not need the internet to tell them they matter. It is the absence of that security — in the home, in the school, in the community — that drives children toward whatever will make them feel less alone. Restricting what they find there does not address why they went looking in the first place.

The scale of child abuse in the UK is not a secret. The Office for National Statistics estimates that nearly 29% of adults — 13.6 million people — experienced abuse before the age of 18. That figure almost certainly understates the reality. Research consistently finds that self-reported rates of child maltreatment are between 7 and 17 times higher than what official agencies record. Most harm never comes to the attention of any service. Most perpetrators are never identified. The most recent statistics briefing from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) confirms that, based on police-recorded child homicides, at least one child is killed every week in the UK — and that official figures are likely underestimates. These children are not killed by an algorithm or a stranger in a chatroom. Child homicides are most commonly caused by the child’s parent or step-parent.

Scotland, where I live and work, is no exception to this pattern and in some respects makes it starker. The most recent Scottish Government figures show that parents are the primary known or suspected perpetrator for 80% of children on the child protection register. The most common concerns identified at child protection planning meetings are domestic abuse, neglect, parental substance use, parental mental ill health, and emotional abuse — in that order. Nearly half of all children registered live in Scotland’s most deprived communities. The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, established in 2015 and still ongoing, has documented widespread abuse across residential schools, children’s homes, and foster care — institutional settings where safeguarding repeatedly failed, where abuse was reported and not acted on, and where, in some cases, it was actively covered up to protect institutional reputation. Survivors have long called for mandatory reporting to be introduced in Scotland. It has not been. Scotland, like the rest of the UK, has no legal requirement for those who know or strongly suspect a child is being harmed to report it.

The child protection system that exists to prevent this is not functioning as it should, and has not been for some time. Funding for early intervention in England and Wales — the programmes designed to support at-risk children and families before crisis point — has been cut repeatedly while demand has risen. Child protection is delivered by local authorities, and we know how severely those have been squeezed. The result is a system that triages rather than protects: social workers carrying impossible caseloads, schools uncertain whether to escalate concerns and often choosing not to, multi-agency communication that breaks down precisely at the moments it matters most.

I see the consequences of this in my consulting room every week — adults in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties telling me what happened when they were young, what they told people, and what those people did not do. I routinely work with women who escaped domestic abuse but are forced to hand their children over regularly to the abuser because of ‘parental rights’. Domestic abusers — whether controlling and domineering with or without physical violence, or dangerous alcoholics and drug addicts — have already demonstrated their complete unfitness to parent. And yet family courts treat them as if their parental rights are intact. It is the children, and usually their mothers, who suffer most post separation — powerless to protect them, and invisible to a system that doesn’t want to see them. The Online Safety Act changes none of this. Children are not unsafe because of the internet. They are unsafe because the world is unsafe for them.

There is currently no mandatory reporting law in the UK. In most circumstances, a teacher, a GP, a youth worker who knows or strongly suspects a child is being abused is not legally required to report it. Mandatory reporting exists in Australia, the United States, Canada, and much of Europe. The arguments against introducing it in the UK tend to centre on professional judgement and the risk of overwhelming an already strained system with referrals. In reality, the system protects itself and consistently places the rights of adults ahead of the rights of children and young people.

What would actually protect children is not that complicated. It would require mandatory reporting, with clear legal consequences for failure to act on reasonable suspicion. It would require properly funded child protection services — not empty words about early intervention accompanied by cuts to the budgets that deliver it. It would require schools that are trained and legally obligated to raise safeguarding concerns, understanding that a referral is not an accusation, not an arrest, not a conviction — it is the beginning of an inquiry. It would require a law that automatically classifies domestic abuse in families with children as child abuse. And it would require a family court system that is not so overwhelmed that children wait months or years for decisions about their safety.

The Online Safety Act does produce a story that politicians like. It has a named villain — tech companies, algorithms, online platforms, social media — powerful enough to seem like worthy adversaries, yet remote enough from the real sites of harm that attacking them offends nobody and costs nothing. It has a mechanism — age verification, content moderation, platform liability — that is visible and enforceable and generates headlines each time a company is fined or a new requirement kicks in. It has a measure: the number of children blocked from accessing harmful content, a figure that can be cited in Parliament and in manifestos. What it does not have is any serious relationship to where child harm actually originates, or how it might actually be reduced.

This is not accidental. Politicians are not stupid. They know what the research shows about where abuse happens and who perpetrates it. The data are publicly available. They know the child protection system is understaffed and underfunded. They know that mandatory reporting has been debated and repeatedly deferred. They know domestic abuse victims and their children are routinely let down by services. But they choose to act on what is visible, what makes them look as if they are doing something about a very serious problem when in reality they are doing nothing of substance. The Online Safety Act is not just inadequate but functions as a displacement activity that actively obscures the real drivers of harm to children. It is a monument to political opportunism and cowardice and in itself a form of active harm. Every year spent performing child protection is a year not spent delivering it, and children and young people continue to be hurt in the places where cameras aren’t pointing.

What we choose to see — and not to see — says everything about us. Politicians choose to see the dangerous algorithm, the harmful post, the unverified adult. They choose not to see the child in a home where something is wrong, the teacher who noticed and said nothing, the referral that was never made, the social worker with forty-three other cases. They have built an elaborate architecture for managing the former. The latter continues largely as it was.

I began with the international scale because the psychology is the same. The capacity to act on what is visible and politically convenient while leaving the real causes of problems untouched is not a structural inevitability. It is a choice made by people who are self-serving, lacking in empathy, and fundamentally cowardly — pragmatic enough to do what is convenient for their own positions and pensions, and unprincipled enough to call it leadership. Not every politician fits this description. But the shape of the system reflects who holds power within it.

Bombing a country and passing an age verification law are obviously not equivalent acts. But they share the same absence of accountability for the conditions that produce harm. And in both cases it is ordinary people — ordinary children — who pay the price. The children who are failed today will be the adults in my consulting room tomorrow — if they make it that far. They are suffering because the world is harming them, and those who could fix it choose not to.

A comment on paid subscriptions

Substack encourages writers to activate paid subscriptions. They take a small cut to enable them to provide this, otherwise free-to-use platform. I am grateful to the readers who have pledged money for monthly or yearly subscriptions, but I have no intention of monetising my work.

I do not want to turn my writing into an obligation, but even more importantly, I don’t believe in a tiered system where those who can pay get preferential treatment over those who can’t, such as the right to comment, or privileged content. This hierarchy of ‘worthiness’, especially based on such an arbitrary principle like how much money people have, couldn’t be further away from my values.

If you do feel moved to make a contribution to support my writing, see the ‘buy me a coffee’ button below. If you haven’t seen it before, it is a way of offering a donation to freelance writers. Payments are processed securely by Stripe on the ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ site. I believe people can keep donations anonymous if they wish. This is entirely voluntary. Everyone is and always will be welcome to read my work free of charge.

Thank you so much for reading my work!

Buy me a coffee 🙏🏼

Last Saturday I missed it. This Saturday I didn’t. The Network of Photographers for Palestine (NPP) is a Scottish-registered collective of activists and photographers dedicated to giving Palestinian photographers a worldwide audience. They recognise that mainstream media representation of Palestine is grossly biased, and they are working to correct it. They make their exhibitions available digitally to anyone who wants to host them locally. Browns Gallery on Castle Street in Inverness — one of the most respected contemporary art spaces in the Highlands — volunteered a generous space to exhibit the photographs of six Palestinian photographers at the NPP’s request.

Below is a short video of my friend Wendy, who is on the NPP Board of Directors, speaking briefly about the NPP and the exhibition. I then want to show you some of what I saw — alongside what senior Israeli officials have been saying about the people in these photographs.

Israeli officials have been competing to say the most dehumanising things they can about Palestinians. Dehumanisation has a purpose. It makes it easier for a society to accept — and even cheer for — the wholesale murder of people who have been stripped of their humanity in the public imagination. We have seen this before. It is a well-documented feature of every genocide in history. You tell people that the other group are animals, vermin, a plague, a biblical enemy that God himself commands you to destroy — and then the killing becomes not just possible but righteous. Israel has not stumbled into this language. It is the language of exterminatory intent. This is what is happening now, in plain sight, with the full support of the world’s most powerful governments.

What follows is a selection of photos from the Browns exhibition. They have all been taken by photographers living under occupation, siege and a deliberate and systematic programme of extermination. I am sharing images I took with my phone camera at the gallery. The quality of my photos doesn’t do justice to the originals, and you will see some lighting issues I couldn’t prevent. But the images are clear enough and the captions are exactly as they appear near each photo in the gallery.

I have interspersed the images with quotes from senior Israeli officials — the Israeli Prime Minister, ministers of the government, Knesset Members. Read their words. Then look at the images. Then ask yourself what the word ‘human’ means, and who gets to decide.

Abby Martin’s recent video documents further statements by Israeli ministers, officials and members of the public — and it is worth watching if you can bear it. You can see these people’s faces and body language as they say the unsayable, trying to outdo each other, go further, be crueller, strip away whatever remains of Palestinian humanity in their own minds.

What is striking is that they feel no shame. They say these things on camera, in public, without hesitation. They do not realise — or do not care — that in trying to dehumanise Palestinians they are revealing themselves. Every word is a self-indictment. The barbarism they project onto others is entirely their own.

The Network of Photographers for Palestine makes these exhibitions available to venues across the country and around the world. If there is an exhibition near you, go and see it. Stand in front of these photographs. Read the captions. The photographers took these images at enormous personal risk, under bombardment, under siege, under occupation. The least we can do is make sure we bear witness as our fellow human beings are being targeted for annihilation by a criminally insane society and its regime, aided and abetted by the world’s most powerful countries.

To find exhibitions, support the NPP’s work, or host an exhibition yourself, visit nppalestine.org.

A comment on paid subscriptions

Substack encourages writers to activate paid subscriptions. They take a small cut to enable them to provide this, otherwise free-to-use platform. I am grateful to the readers who have pledged money for monthly or yearly subscriptions, but I have no intention of monetising my work.

I do not want to turn my writing into an obligation, but even more importantly, I don’t believe in a tiered system where those who can pay get preferential treatment over those who can’t, such as the right to comment, or privileged content. This hierarchy of ‘worthiness’, especially based on such an arbitrary principle like how much money people have, couldn’t be further away from my values.

If you do feel moved to make a contribution to support my writing, see the ‘buy me a coffee’ button below. If you haven’t seen it before, it is a way of offering a donation to freelance writers. Payments are processed securely by Stripe on the ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ site. I believe people can keep donations anonymous if they wish. This is entirely voluntary. Everyone is and always will be welcome to read my work free of charge.

Thank you so much for reading my work!

Buy me a coffee 🙏🏼

I’m on Avi Shlaim’s mailing list. His latest dispatch included a link to an interview he gave to ‘Reclaim the Narratives’ last September in Berlin. Reading Avi Shlaim’s book The Iron Wall when it first came out in 2001 kickstarted my journey out of Zionism. Up until then I was a ‘soft Lefty’ and an unconscious apologist for Zionism, without recognising what it actually was. I now recognise The Iron Wall to be highly limited, but given my complete indoctrination in, and ignorance of what Zionism is, it was at the time profoundly challenging for me.

Shlaim was not an anti-Zionist when he wrote The Iron Wall. He was what I’d call a liberal Zionist, which is what I was. Liberal Zionists might criticise the state of Israel, but don’t ever question its right to exist as an exclusively Jewish settler-colonial project at the expense of all the non-Jewish indigenous people of Palestine. When the question comes up they sidestep it or gloss over it. I realise now that liberal Zionists are still more loyal to the state of Israel than to universal human values, and they seem to propose something absurd, which is that it is possible for settler-colonialism to be a bit more gentle and considerate.

In recent years Shlaim finally moved to a full anti-Zionist position, and I don’t doubt his complete empathy for Palestinian suffering and his support for their cause. But as I listened to his interview, I realised that despite his anti-Zionist stance, there are still gaping holes in Shlaim’s consciousness about Zionism and Jewish identity or faith.

A blind spot about the genocidal nature of Zionism

Shlaim admits that Zionism is by definition racist based on the simple fact that it has always sought to create a national entity based on one ethnicity and to the exclusion of others, most notably the indigenous Palestinians. Shlaim distinguishes between societies that are racist — and there are still plenty out there — and countries that are officially racist. He correctly cites Israel’s 2018 Jewish Nation State Law as evidence that Israel is officially a racist state. This law alone should have been grounds for Israel’s immediate expulsion from the United Nations. That it wasn’t tells you everything about the world we live in.

Shlaim recognises the inherent racism of Zionism but not its genocidal nature. He admits that he was reluctant to use the word ‘genocide’, until he saw Israel’s actions in Gaza. He quotes his own autobiography, where he wrote, “For all its sins, Israel has never committed genocide”. He goes on to say that “the identity of the state of Israel is inextricably linked to the Holocaust. … And it seemed perverse to accuse the Jewish state of perpetrating a genocide”.

This is an honest admission — Shlaim is an honest man — but here lies the first blind spot. How can you recognise Zionism as a settler-colonial project and only concede genocide based on Israel’s actions in Gaza since October 2023? Shlaim is a scholar who professes to follow the evidence. But the genocidal intent and plan are evident from the start of the Zionist movement in the late 19th century — almost eight decades before Israel was created.

Settler-colonialism is, by its very nature, a policy of elimination. As Patrick Wolfe argued, “The distinction between dominion and occupancy illuminates the settler-colonial project’s reliance on the elimination of native societies.” (Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409).

Colonialism and its instruments, or an apartheid regime, would qualify as ‘dominion’, whereas settler-colonialism is a policy of erasure, removal and replacement — elimination of the native — which takes place in many forms, not just killing. A home invasion, with the intent of replacing the existing inhabitants with the invaders’ people cannot be spun to be anything other than what it is — an intentional act of elimination.

Legal frameworks are created after an event or a phenomenon has been identified. You don’t need laws against theft in a society where theft doesn’t exist. You only need a law against a particular human behaviour once it’s been perpetrated, recognised, and deemed something society doesn’t want. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was based on what the Nazis did. There were many genocides throughout human history, but the Nazi genocide was committed by a ‘modern and civilised’ society using the most advanced technology available at the time, and the full legal, bureaucratic and technological machinery of a modern state. The UN Convention reflects what the Nazis did and defines those particular actions as genocide. ‘We recognise they did certain things, and think they were very bad. We don’t want it to happen again, so we’re going to make a rule that says you can’t do those things and if you do, there will be consequences’.

The Convention includes the definition of genocide and what act in relation to genocide are punishable:

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Article III

The following acts shall be punishable:

(a) Genocide;

(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;

(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;

(d) Attempt to commit genocide;

(e) Complicity in genocide.

If you want to split hairs, you can try to examine Israel’s actions against each of the items in Article II to test whether or not what Israel is doing qualifies as genocide. Genocide scholars around the world including in Israel itself have already agreed that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a genocide.

If, in its time, the Nakba was seen for what it was and the Palestinians were listened to, things could have been very different. When it became obvious that Israel was in contravention of UN General Assembly Resolution 194 — already a pretty weak legal tool — the world looked the other way. Israel was never going to allow the Palestinians it has violently driven out to return. It systematically destroyed their homes, villages and towns so they had nothing to return to. From 1948 onwards, Israel has been progressively taking over all Palestinian land and resources to give to Jewish settlers, or appropriated them for state use. Zionism should have always been recognised for the settler-colonialist movement it is, and settler-colonialism should have been included in the Genocide Convention. The very same human mindset that has been enabling the annihilation of the Palestinian people is behind all of our human problems.

Gaza only made the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people more visible to more people, because it was live-streamed and has been so visibly barbaric. But Zionism was and always has been a genocidal movement that has been committing genocide incrementally since 1948. Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, Lebanon are just an acceleration of the genocidal plan — not anything new.

In a post-Second World War world with a colonialist mindset, no one wanted to include settler-colonialism under this Convention. If settler-colonialism was defined as genocide and included in the Convention, the world’s most dominant powers would have faced immediate indictment.

Both history and the law are written by those who hold the power to control and manipulate narrative, memory, and the way we interpret reality. In our world, power is not benevolent — it is the ability to impose one’s will on others by any means available: economic, political or military.

We live in a world that is still in the grip of a colonial mindset. The bullies with the biggest guns and the most exploitative and extractive economies still dominate the international playground. There is little doubt that settler-colonialism is, by its very nature, genocidal. To wake up now and call Israel’s attack on Gaza genocide, but ignore the genocidal intent of the Zionist movement, is disingenuous at best. The Zionists weren’t just racist — they thought nothing of replacing an entire indigenous population with Jews. It doesn’t matter what excuse settler-colonialists offer to justify their actions; the intent was always eliminatory. All through the existence of the state of Israel this was evident. The world didn’t choose not to care. It chose to enable it.

A blind spot about Judaism and Jewishness

Another glaring blind spot I recognised in Avi Shlaim’s interview concerns his view of Judaism. Shlaim says, “I’m Jewish and the core values of Judaism are truth, justice, and peace. … The essence of Judaism is non-violence.” He suggests that Netanyahu and the coterie of religious Zionists who surround him have perverted what he regards as the true values of Judaism.

Like many secular, traditional or religious Jews, Shlaim ignores the foundational identity myths that define Jewishness. Most Jews would not physically harm anyone outside the group (domestic abuse, child abuse, discrimination against homosexuality and its punishment, economic exploitation, exist in all Jewish communities as they do in all societies). But to suggest that the core values of Judaism are ‘truth, justice and peace’, or that Jewish faith is inherently non-violent, is deeply problematic.

Even secular Jews celebrate some version of Jewish festivals where Jewish foundational myths are repeated unexamined. In every seder — the Passover ritualised dinner — no matter how watered down, Jews celebrate the killing of all the firstborn sons of Egypt as the culmination of the plagues inflicted on the Egyptians by God. It doesn’t matter that this probably never happened; it is celebrated uncritically as a necessity because the Israelites were under threat. The killing of innocent Egyptian children is presented not as a moral problem, but as a divine gift — and that framing goes entirely unexamined.

To the best of my knowledge, no one in Jewish circles — secular, traditional or religious — has ever questioned the morality of the brutal genocide the Israelites, led by the mythical military leader Joshua, committed in Canaan. Jewish people are brought up on this story as a cornerstone of their identity, never stopping to examine the ethics of invading a fully populated territory, killing all its inhabitants and replacing them with the twelve tribes of Israel. There, right there in the story of the genocide in Canaan, is the seed that sprouts the Zionist movement.

Too many Jews, most of whom will never commit an act of violence against a Palestinian or anyone else, nonetheless support Israel and its actions. Shlaim doesn’t support Israel and is now openly opposing Zionism. Like me, he made a choice to place human values above group loyalty, and neither of us deserves a medal for it. Good human beings feel empathy and compassion to all of humanity. Judaism, however, demands loyalty to the group first. Orthodox Jews do not ‘marry out’ and most secular Jews follow the same rule. This reveals that in Judaism, the survival and continuity of the group come before any universal human value.

In his essay Thanking God I’m Not a Goy Daniel Klein who was born and raised as an Orthodox Jew on a colony in the West Bank writes:

"“It is upon us to praise the Master of all, to give greatness to the Former of creation, who did not make us like the goyim (nations) of the lands, and did not place us like the families of the earth, who did not make our portion like theirs, nor our fate like all their multitudes, for they bow to vanity and emptiness, and pray to a god that cannot save.”

This prayer is called Aleinu. It concludes every single Jewish prayer service, three times a day. Religious children will repeat it thousands of times before turning eighteen, and anyone who has walked into a synagogue has heard it.

Though goy technically means nation, ask any Jew what a goy is and they will likely say “non-Jew.” That interpretation is why the prayer demands apologetics.”

Critiquing Jewish religion has long been taboo, for fear that pointing out its problems might seem to justify the persecution European Jews suffered — persecution that continued as discrimination in the US, UK and Australia until late last century. Nothing justifies persecution, racism, discrimination, violence, no matter what. Victimhood is not a human characteristic; it is a position created by an imbalance of power, which is why victims are never at fault — only perpetrators are. However insular or superior Jews may have felt as a group, they didn’t deserve to be persecuted. You can dislike someone for their beliefs or customs, but you don’t discriminate against them, expel or kill them. If they act illegally or harm others, the law exists to address that — which is precisely what the world is failing to do in relation to Israel.

But Jewish religion and identity need to be critiqued and examined. I think Shlaim really believes in the version of Judaism he was taught or that he constructed, but sadly, it is fictitious. The whole spectrum of Jewishness, secular, traditional, orthodox, and ultra orthodox, suffers from the same malaise. The faith and its traditional and secular offshoots all revolve around the survival of the group. Loyalty to the group above all else is what makes a Jew a good person in the eyes of their community.

Jewishness is directly responsible for Zionism, both the original secular version, and the prevalent religious one that is gradually taking over Israel with the intent of completing the settler-colonial project and creating a religious Jewish state. Any group, secular or religious, that places group survival and loyalty to the group at the centre of everything and that teaches a mix of hostility and fear towards the outside world is essentially a cult.

I no longer recognise myself as Jewish. This is not only because I do not adhere to Jewish religion, not even its most watered down traditions, or because the idea of a Jewish ‘race’ is ludicrous and fictitious. It is because I have renounced the idea that belonging to one particular group, however loosely, is essential to my identity and survival. I cannot belong to any group that thinks and operates like a cult.

If everyone who identifies as Jewish placed shared humanity above all else, Jewishness as it is now would simply disappear. And that is precisely the fear at the heart of Jewish identity — the fear of ceasing to exist as a distinct group. It is a fear that drives insularity, exceptionalism, and ultimately Zionism itself. If Shlaim were to examine that fear honestly, and confront the Jewish undercurrent running through Zionism, the last inconsistency in his position would finally dissolve.

Hear Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan discuss how Israel links its own identity with the myths of the Bible (from 07:51) in a podcast interview with +972 Magazine.

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