The Defensive Need for Moral Equivalence

October 7 immediately hits the observer with a severe asymmetry arising from the atrocities committed by Palestinian groups that reach levels of depravity that exceed recognisable explanatory frameworks such as oppression, resistance, or ordinary warfare.

The sharp asymmetry automatically creates a problem of representation. How can this conflict be presented in a way that is intelligible? One way to do this is by creating a narrative in which you have two recognisable actors that the West can readily understand and relate to, in conflict with one another.

So, instead of grappling with “these particular atrocities reveal something qualitatively unusual that requires explanation” the problem is flattened into “both sides suffer, use violence, have grievances, and commit wrongs.” Sometimes condensed into the often repeated banality masquerading as balanced wisdom “They’re both as bad as each uvver”.

The Anal-Sadistic Levelling of Difference

Can psychoanalysis say something about how and why this happens? Chasseguet-Smirgel coined the charming sounding concept of the anal-sadistic universe to describe a regressive mode of functioning whereby important distinctions that denote reality are flattened out into equivalence.

During normal psychological development, we begin to realise that reality is structured by differences and boundaries that exist regardless of our wishes. This recognition is frustrating and painful because it develops out of an earlier narcissistic state in which separateness, limitation and difference are not yet established; the infant experiences themselves as the centre of the universe. All of a sudden others emerge as separate beings. These others have capacities we do not have and have relationships in which we are not fully included. Others are no longer extensions of our own wishes.

In pathological adult functioning, the anal-sadistic universe is a mode of functioning that dissolves boundaries and levels out real differences because they are experienced as frustrating limits. Things become equivalent and interchangeable. It is sadistic because it involves the triumphant destruction of the boundaries and differences that imposed those limits on the self.

This is not the same as the crude denial of “October 7 never happened.” October 7 can be acknowledged while the distinctions needed to understand it are dissolved. October 7 can be transported into the realm of political familiarity by absorbing the atrocities into a relatable and familiar symmetrical conflict between two actors, each with their own grievances and forms of violence, and with two sets of victims.

From Radical Boundarylessness to Moral Equivalence

I have previously used the term radical boundarylessness to denote a defining feature of the Hamas atrocities. The collapse of ordinary psychological boundaries gave the violence an exceptional depravity qualitatively different from the Israeli military response. The most basic level of psychological functioning depends on the capacity to establish and preserve boundaries such as me and not me, inside and outside, self and other etc. In exceptional psychological states, bodily and social boundaries become unstable and break down. October 7 revealed a remarkable absence of basic boundary differentiations expressed on a collective level.

• adult / child: the same atrocities crossed age boundaries, including infants and children.

• living / dead: the boundary between the living and the dead was absent as corpses were subject to mutilation, sexual violation, display and celebration

• private / public: extreme violence was filmed and publicly celebrated

• spectator / participant: members of the public moved from witnessing to participation

• one form of violence / another: distinct atrocities accumulated upon the same body

• whole / fragmented: bodies were dismembered, decapitated and otherwise reduced into parts rather than treated as intact persons.

• inside / outside: bodily boundaries were violated through penetration, insertion and exposure of internal organs.

During October 7 categories that should remain distinct were reduced to equivalence: adult and child, living and dead, private and public, spectator and participant, whole and fragmented, inside and outside.
The Western discourse then repeated the same collapse of distinctions at the level of moral judgement. In both cases, equivalence dissolved distinctions that should keep unlike things apart.

These include:

• aggressor / victim acting in self defence: Deliberate mass killing, mutilation, sexual violence, celebration and hostage-taking and Israel’s subsequent military response are rendered equivalent

• deliberate civilian targeting / civilian death during warfare: the distinction between civilians deliberately targeted for extensive and profound atrocity and civilians dying as a result of military operations is dissolved.

• atrocity / military action: radically different kinds of violence become interchangeable under the general category of “violence”

• hostage / prisoner: incomparable forms of captivity become interchangeable

• perpetrator / victim: responsibility for a particular act becomes submerged beneath a symmetrical picture of mutual suffering

• offence / self-defence: the distinction between initiating violence and responding to it loses organising force

• qualitative difference / quantitative difference: differences in the kind of act are converted into differences merely in scale, casualty numbers or suffering

The pathology lies in using common elements to erase everything that differentiates two different things. The centre of the Venn diagram becomes so dominant that the differences which should order reality and judgement disappear.

The Atrocity Reappears in Moral Equivalence

The boundarylessness of the atrocities and Western moral equivalence have in common a pattern where distinctions that are deeply meaningful and ordinarily inviolable are destroyed and collapsed into equivalence.

Moral equivalence has a clear defensive function that is sadistic in form. The defensive function arises from its ability to flatten out differences that would prove challenging and frustrating to Western discourse. Its sadistic function is less obvious but nonetheless present in that the differences between the atrocities enacted by Palestinian groups and the Israeli response are not just overlooked; they are degraded in order to produce sameness. Through this sadistic levelling out, defence is equated with barbarism and victim and aggressor are made to occupy the same moral plane. Israel can be recast as the offender, escalating to accusations of being genocidal. This leads to the legitimisation of claims that ‘Israel does not have the right to exist’. I have written in a previous article that the accusations of genocide against Israel create the conditions for calls for the actual genocide of Israel. Moral equivalence is one of the rhetorical devices that allows for this conclusion.

Much of the post-October-7 discourse has not only deeply misunderstood the atrocity, but through moral equivalence, the form of that misunderstanding may have reproduced, at the level of thought, one of the key psychological components evident within the actual atrocities.

The atrocities produced equivalence through the collapse of boundaries in action; moral equivalence produces equivalence through the collapse of boundaries in thought.

1. Those who carried out the atrocities already possessed the psychological capacity for extreme atrocity

The atrocities of October 7 belonged to a shared and planned repertoire. They were not improvised or confined to individual perpetrators. They were not due to battlefield excess, and did not arise out of the situation de novo. The clear recurrence of a highly defined set of extreme violations across different sites with different perpetrators supports this. The perpetrators also arrived psychologically able to execute these atrocities of October 7. The shared capacity in itself is significant quite apart from the evidence that the atrocities were planned.

2. Extreme violation was pursued for its own sake

The absolute savagery of the atrocities of October 7 was organised by a core aim which I termed maximal transgression. As opposed to random out of control savagery, there was a deliberate and organised execution of the most severe human violation each situation would allow. The consistent enactment of maximal transgression indicates that extreme violation had value in its own right, independent of strategic gain. A group that can methodically plan and enact the most severe forms of human violation as a natural aim has far greater psychological implications than a group committing savage atrocity through transient loss of control. In addition we are confronted with the natural facility with which it was executed. This leaves us with a population whose psychological makeup values, seeks and celebrates extreme sadistic violation.

3. Necrophilic gratification as a collective phenomenon

The presence of collectively enacted necrophilia indicates that the perpetrators view death as gratifying and the dead body as an object of excitement and sexualisation. What ordinarily appears as an extremely rare and private pathology emerged here in a socially shared collective form. Necrophilic gratification was therefore not a severe psychopathology limited to individual perpetrators but part of the collective culture on October 7.

4. The same destructiveness remained even when killing stopped

This is perhaps one of the starkest themes to emerge from the analysis because it grounds the events of October 7 in an enduring and fundamental organising principle of psychological life, of which October 7 was one expression. The term death drive sounds archaic and abstract, but I could find no alternative that would communicate the finding that destructiveness is the primary organising principle of life.

The term encapsulates why the most extreme forms of violation, such as post-mortem sexual violence, were persistently sought after and celebrated, independent of any functional gain. The analysis of captivity supports the primacy of the death drive because its operation guided activity beyond killing and atrocity. This was revealed through the deformed and corrupted forms that care and reparation took.

Life in general was organised and shaped by the same destructive principle.

5. A culture that celebrates death and destruction

The term death cult names the collective expression of the death drive described above. Death and destruction are positively valued, celebrated, defended and part of a collective identity. The prevalence of necrophilic atrocity, the public celebration of corpses and the wider affirmation of October 7 support this. A death cult is a collective where death and destruction function as a wider organising force.

6. The atrocities were concrete expressions of the most primitive destructive phantasies

The actual morphology of the violence of October 7 is an extremely important but overlooked factor. In Kleinian psychoanalysis, the most primitive and severely disturbed levels of psychic organisation, which operate under the dominance of the death instinct, produce phantasies of attack at the most absolute edge of destructive possibility: envious, sadistic and directed towards total destruction of the object. The violence of October 7 reproduced those precise forms in actuality.

The repeated attacks on genitalia, breasts, pregnancy, infants, bodily interiors and family relationships are the forms referred to above. They are therefore not just meaningless atrocities. Their consistency and specificity indicate the enactment of the very forms of violence that Kleinian analysis associates with the most primitive and psychopathological levels of psychological functioning.

Part of the reason the specific form of the atrocities is overlooked and lumped under the category of “atrocity” is their disturbing nature. Through Kleinian analysis however, we can see that these forms belong to a recognisable primitive psychological organisation which is meaningful.

7. Repair that reproduces the destruction it is meant to undo

The totality and pervasive nature of this primitive organisation persists even when destruction gives way to apparent repair. I use the term teratogenic repair to show a form of restoration that cannot recognise either aggression or the independent reality of the other. The result is repair so deformed that it produces destruction in another form.

In states of primitive psychological fixation, before the capacities for relating and repair are stabilised, the extreme destruction characteristic of these primitive states is followed by manic repair because genuine reparation has not yet become developmentally available. The object is attacked, mutilated, castrated, chopped up into pieces in phantasy and then magically restored without any real recognition of the aggression that destroyed it. It is alarming that the captor actually does what Klein only describes in fantasy; he destroys the hostage’s world and then in manic and delusional form imagines love, marriage and creating a family to restore what he has destroyed. The political version follows the same logic. Palestinian restoration through a mass right of return would be achieved through the demographic destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. In both cases the proposed repair is teratogenic: it is harmful to life in itself and produces further destruction rather than reparation. Instead of repairing the damage, it denies the aggression that produced it and restores by eliminating the independent existence of the other.

8. When aggression fails, suffering becomes proof of innocence

The primacy of the death drive as the governing principle becomes apparent when it is revealed outside killing. This was seen in captivity through the deformed forms of care. It is also the organising force underlying grievance, within which thwarted rage is experienced as suffering.

Thwarted rage arises from the unbearable sense of impotence when the desire to destroy the other is repeatedly frustrated. The rage, which cannot be successfully directed to its target, boomerangs and is experienced and expressed as intense suffering. It has nowhere to go.

At the same time, social and political interpretations only see the visible suffering and not the aggression that helped produce it. As a result, suffering is seen as proof of innocence and proof of persecution. The reinforced belief in innocence and persecution amplifies both the rage and suffering, which sets up further cycles of atrocity.

The education system repeats this structure with the emerging generation by affirming a world divided between Palestinian innocence and Israeli persecution. Violence and martyrdom can then be framed as resistance or virtue whilst minimising Palestinian aggression and responsibility.

This psychological setup immortalises grievance and impotent rage. It keeps Israel and Jews as the cause of Palestinian suffering and as targets of renewed aggression. The mutilation, necrophilic violence and maximal transgression of October 7 were fuelled by the mechanisms described above. When the other is perceived as the cause of your constant suffering, no atrocity is too great.

9. The deepest horror was the scale of the psychological disturbance

The conclusions of this analysis are derived from the extensively documented atrocities of October 7 that included genital mutilation of adults and children, sexual violence against children, forced sexual acts between related children, attacks on pregnant women and infants, the killing and mutilation of family members in front of one another, necrophilic violence and post-mortem sexual mutilation. I repeat this not for the sake of repetition but because it is important to hold this in mind when weighing up the validity of the present analysis.

I have stayed with the descriptive data of the Silenced No More report as closely as possible and allowed the data to speak for itself. Yet here lies an unusual paradox in the analysis. By staying close to the descriptive data, the analysis is rendered almost unusable, because it drives us towards findings that exceed the moral and psychological limits of what many can permit themselves to think about another group of people, especially a group long held in an idealised victim position. The resistance is therefore less evidential and more psychic and moral as again and again extreme atrocity and annihilation are positively valued to the extent that they occupy the place that life and generation would ordinarily hold.

The most disturbing fact of October 7 is not that atrocity happened. It is the sheer depth and collective scale of the psychological abnormality it revealed. Modes of functioning associated with the most regressed and severely disturbed states of mind were not confined to individual perpetrators but appeared across the wider culture itself. This is why the concepts of the death drive and death cult are so unusually precise: they refer to a culture in which destruction is gratifying, morally justified and collectively celebrated.

The implications of such conclusions undoubtedly stimulate a stampede into more familiar explanations such as trauma, oppression, grievance, revenge, resistance or loss of control. These explanations make violence and atrocity easier to comprehend because they are based on some recognisable goal where atrocity is an ugly by-product. The analysis here, however, points somewhere profoundly more problematic and complex. It may well be that within this unfathomable psychological complexity lies the apparent political insolubility of the Palestinian question, obscured by primitive and severely disturbed forms of psychological functioning operating collectively, repeatedly and with social affirmation. What remains unthinkable is projected into the political, into questions of territory, policy or power, whilst the forces sustaining this lie elsewhere.

The real horror of October 7 lies not only in the extreme violence, but in the possibility of a culture in which profound psychological disturbance has become organised, shared and morally sustained, while Western political and cultural systems have helped validate the grievance that supports it.

“Free Palestine” has become more than a political slogan. Since October 7, it has been repeated alongside massacre, abduction, celebration, threats against Israel and the exclusion of Jews from public life. Through that repetition, the phrase has acquired a psychological force far greater than its literal meaning.

The Nazi use of the swastika provides an earlier example of the same process. Before Hitler adopted it, German nationalist and occult groups were already using the swastika as the sign of an ancient Aryan race, solar power, racial strength and the rebirth of Germany. Hitler turned it forty-five degrees, made it black and placed it inside a white disc on a red flag. Under Nazism, it became a promise of Aryan victory over the Jews and German rebirth through Jewish destruction.

In occult practice, a sigil is charged by concentrating will, emotion and enacted force into it until the sign becomes the bearer of what it represents. Nazi Germany charged the swastika on the scale of an entire state. The persecution, blood and murder carried out beneath it entered into the symbol itself, giving real force to its promise of Aryan victory through Jewish destruction.

However, the force concentrated in the swastika found an equally immediate counterforce in the V sign.

In January 1941, the Belgian politician Victor de Laveleye used a BBC broadcast to urge people throughout occupied Europe to mark the letter V wherever possible. It stood for victoire, victory, in French and vrijheid, freedom, in Dutch. Its Morse pattern, three dots and a dash, matched the opening rhythm of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. It could be drawn on walls, tapped out, broadcast by radio or made with two fingers, allowing the same sign of resistance to spread across occupied Europe.

Crowley, working through contacts connected to Ian Fleming, the BBC and Naval Intelligence, developed the occult use of the V as a counter-symbol to the swastika. He drew upon the central drama of Golden Dawn ritual, in which Osiris is murdered and cut into pieces, Isis searches for the scattered remains, and Osiris is restored to life. Between his destruction and resurrection stands Typhon, the force that tears the old form apart. The raised arms forming a V are the sign of Typhon. Crowley’s logic was: if Nazi power had been concentrated in the swastika, the sign of the destroyer could be raised against it to break that power apart. The V became the counter-sigil through which the destructive force of Typhon was turned towards Hitler’s defeat.

The V did not answer Nazism point by point because it operated outside the realm of intellectual argument. The swastika was met in the symbolic realm by another sign in direct opposition to it. Where the swastika promised Nazi victory through conquest and Jewish destruction, the V was charged to destroy the force carried by the swastika and defeat Hitler.

The BBC broadcast its Morse rhythm throughout occupied Europe, where supporters reproduced the sign in public, and Churchill used the gesture constantly in the media. Through that repetition, the V became powerfully charged.

The same process now applies to “Free Palestine.”

October 7 charged the slogan with a filmed and celebrated massacre. It was then broadcast to the world leading to further celebrations of the attack, support for Hamas, demands for Israel’s destruction and the tearing down of hostage posters.

Social media became the supercharger. It took the force released by the atrocities and reproduced it millions of times through images, slogans, music and collective display. “Free Palestine” now carries far more than a political demand. It has become the contemporary anti-Zionist equivalent of the swastika in symbolic function: a sign charged by violence against Jews and by the promise that their destruction would constitute liberation.

The Jewish world has no sign capable of meeting this force.

Where is the Jewish V?

Eight Themes of Abuse in Captivity

The previous articles traced a pattern of highly specific atrocities on October 7, including killing, rape, genital mutilation, post-mortem sexual violence, dismemberment, desecration, filming and celebration. It crossed men, women, infants, children, families, the living, the dying and the dead. The atrocity was also received and celebrated by the wider Palestinian society around it. I described this as maximal transgression.

The previous sections of the Silenced No More report showed what the Hamas-led Palestinian social world did when it killed. Captivity shows what this social world did when killing had to give way to preservation. This does not make captivity a lesser atrocity. The report describes terror, degradation and disgust extended across time: a total nightmare in which survival was folded into the abuse.

What happened during captivity was the afterlife of maximal transgression. A system organised around death is now required to preserve life, and the ordinary conditions of life become organised through death.

Eight themes of abuse repeatedly emerge from the captivity section:

1. Pornographic Scripting of Sexual Coercion

2. Coerced Intimate Visibility

3. Forced Nudity / Strip-Search Degradation

4. Forced Male Intimate Shaving

5. Total Domination and Torture

6. Coerced Witnessing

7. Forced Sexual Violation of Minor Family Members

8. Teratogenic Family Fantasy

1. Pornographic Scripting of Sexual Coercion

There were numerous accounts in the captivity material where sexual coercion was inflicted through recognisable pornographic scenarios: doctor-patient, massage, body-search, inspection, showering, injury-checking or homosexual seduction of heterosexual males.

This theme concerns sexual coercion organised through a recognisable script, rather than through direct force alone.

2. Coerced Intimate Visibility

Coerced Intimate Visibility refers to captors making private bodily acts visible and controllable: showering, using the toilet, washing, and whether the bathroom door could be closed.

The core factor is the removal of bodily privacy. Going to the toilet carries a particular psychological charge because it concerns bodily control, dignity and separateness. In captivity, even this most private and undefended area of bodily life is made visible.

An anxiety that commonly appears in anxiety dream material becomes a method of abuse.

3. Forced Nudity / Strip-Search Degradation

Forced Nudity / Strip-Search Degradation refers to forced undressing, body searches, repeated stripping, group exposure and the removal of underwear. This takes place in front of captors, either alone or with other hostages.

4. Forced Male Intimate Shaving

The report identifies at least three cases of forced male intimate shaving with no cases involving female hostages.

The core features are forced undressing, shaving under observation or being shaved, pubic or whole-body shaving, naked humiliation, sexualised comments, comparison of male genitalia and unwanted bodily contact. In one account, the captor introduces the hostage’s daughter through a marriage question and asks if the spouse who is forced to witness the scene likes big penises.

5. Total Domination and Torture

The core feature here is that the hostage is kept alive, but life is reduced to deprivation, terror, humiliation, forced service and bodily control. Agency and subjectivity are radically stripped away.

There are numerous examples in which multiple forms of abuse are inflicted upon the same hostage: chaining, bathroom control, monitoring of menstruation, sexual questioning, sexual assault, deprivation of light and food, threats of repeated assault, beating, suspension, humiliation, interrogation, the pressing of a gun to the hostage’s face, forced contemplation of death, a possible final message to family through another hostage, the use of a filthy sack after interrogation, and degrading domestic tasks.

6. Coerced Witnessing

There are numerous incidents in which one hostage is tortured, degraded or assaulted, while another is forced to watch, plead, intervene, pressure the victim or remain helpless inside the scene.

In one case, a hostage is brought in during another hostage’s torture and pressured to make that person falsely confess. In other cases, family members or spouses are forced to witness one another’s degradation or assault.

A defining feature is that the bond between hostages, spouses or family members is degraded and weaponised.

7. Forced Violation of Minor Family Members

Forced Violation of Minor Family Members refers to a case in which two minor hostages, who were family members, were forced into a sexualised activity with each other and then subjected to further sexual and sadistic abuse by captors.

The abuse is based on the fact that the minors are family members. The family relation becomes an instrument of abuse.

8. Teratogenic Family Fantasy

The captivity material contains numerous examples in which captors proposed an idyllic domestic future to female hostages: declarations of love, marriage, children, a home, rings and parental approval. I use teratogenic to describe an attempted form of love and family life so deformed by its conditions of formation that it cannot become viable. The monstrosity lies in the inversion: women were abducted from murdered or tortured family worlds, and the captor then imagined himself creating a new family with them. In fantasy, he appears as loving husband and future father rather than as the perpetrator who helped destroy the family from which the hostage was taken.

The themes have been introduced in the order in which they appear in the report. The order is documentary rather than developmental. The discussion explores how they connect and what they reveal when read together.

Discussion: How the Themes Connect

The captivity material is harder to organise than the earlier atrocity material of October 7 because it does not present one obvious structure. Some behaviours look like an established repertoire of captivity: stripping, searching, surveillance, bathroom control, threats, filming, deprivation and humiliation. Others appear more idiosyncratic, such as pornographic scripting, marriage fantasy, phallic comparison and specific sexualised humiliations.

The connecting thread comes from the encounter between captivity and the Hamas-Palestinian world of October 7: the world of killing, mutilation, desecration, filming and celebration.

Captivity brings that world into prolonged contact with areas of life that killing would bypass such as bodily care, privacy, sexual intimacy, family bonds and domestic future. These areas are corrupted by the world that now controls them. Care becomes coercive control, intimacy becomes pornographic scripting, and family becomes something to poison and replace.

Total Domination and Torture is the most direct form of this corruption. Here captivity has no disguise. Chaining, deprivation, assault, interrogation, death threats, guns to the face and forced service form a single regime of domination. The hostage survives, but only in a condition as close to death as life can become.

Failed Intimacy and Corrupted Care

Pornographic scripting is the first example of the wider pattern. The captor does not need seduction in order to force sex or sexual compliance. He already has power over the hostage. The script therefore may suggest a desire for intimacy and that the hostage might come round to him, and that reluctance might reveal hidden desire.

The scene borrows the gestures of seduction, flirtation or sexual play, but the result is a deformed imitation of intimacy. When the fantasy of response cannot be sustained, the scene either continues as empty performance or moves into open coercion.

Coerced intimate visibility and forced nudity show the same deformation in the area of care. Bodily care and privacy are mutated into coercive control, something closer to an extreme form of domestic abuse where the captor monitors the hostage’s body, movement, exposure, facial expression and mood. Privacy is taken away and the body is treated as something the captor can inspect and regulate. Bodily care is organised through surveillance and command.

From the Body to the Family

Forced Male Intimate Shaving indicates a movement from bodily humiliation into family degradation.

Only male hostages were subjected to intimate shaving. The meaning is unclear and it cannot simply be read as feminisation. In an Islamic frame, pubic hair removal belongs to fitrah and applies to men as well as women. Shaving male pubic hair does not therefore make the man symbolically female.

The shaving is forced, watched and sexualised. In one example the captor exposes the man, handles him, compares his penis with another hostage’s. The shaved hostage is described as having a large penis, taking something private and forcing it into public display where it is discussed by the captor.

The abuse uses the man’s exposed body to attack his position as husband and father. His wife is forced to witness this and her supposed sexual preference is commented on. His daughter is brought into the scene through a marriage question. The captor inserts himself into positions that should be barred to him: sexual rival, husband, future son-in-law. Through the humiliation of the man’s body, the family’s internal boundaries are attacked.

Before the fantasy family appears, the real family’s protective function is attacked.

In Coerced Witnessing, the family bond becomes the target. A spouse, parent, child, sibling or fellow hostage is forced to witness, plead, mediate or helplessly participate in the degradation of another. The witness is someone who should be able to protect or remain loyal to the other person. Instead, the bond is made powerless.

This is the specific cruelty of coerced witnessing. The relation is kept painfully present while being stripped of protective force, making the bond a site of torment.

The violation of minor family members intensifies this. Here the family bond is made helpless and poisoned from within. Acts absolutely barred by the family relation are forced into the family bond. What should protect the child becomes contaminated and the family is transformed from a structure that protects into a structure of abuse.

This prepares the ground for the fantasy family. Before the captor imagines marriage, children, home and future, the real family has already been attacked at its most basic level: protection, taboo, loyalty, childhood and bodily safety. The fantasy family appears after the real family has been degraded and made unable to protect its own members.

Teratogenic Family Fantasy: Manic Repair

Through the progressive degradation of the real family, a fantasy family appears.

The captor declares love to the hostage and proposes marriage, saying they can have children together, build a house and set up a permanent life in Gaza. He pictures himself as a legitimate husband and offers wedding rings and seeks parental approval. In one account, the mother and intended wife smiled, terrified they would be shot dead if they seemed unhappy with the proposal. When parents are absent, the fantasy becomes more florid as he imagines riding into Israel to obtain their approval before returning to Gaza with the hostage as his wife.

This is the extremity of the fantasy. The captor has helped produce the scene in which the hostage’s family has been murdered, tortured, displaced or rendered helpless. He holds the hostage in captivity. Yet in his fantasy, instead of being a perpetrator, he is a suitor, husband, son-in-law, house-builder and future father. The violence that made the fantasy possible has vanished from his account of himself.

This is why forced marriage is too small a description. The fantasy is that murder, abduction and captivity can be transformed into love, blessing, marriage and family life. The captor does not repair the world he has damaged. He replaces it with a domestic fantasy in which he is innocent and central.

This is manic repair. Damage is not recognised; it is covered over by a grandiose fantasy of love and future. It is delusional because the fantasy depends on erasing the reality that produced it. It is teratogenic because the fantasy is deformed from the start: an idyllic family generated out of atrocity, captivity and denial.

The detail about Israel is especially revealing. Israel, the country attacked on October 7 and the world from which the hostage was violently torn, becomes the imagined place of romantic authorisation. The site of rupture becomes, in fantasy, the source of blessing.

The result is a teratogenic family: a monstrous imitation of family life in which the hostage’s life, body, future and family position are absorbed into the captor’s world.

From Broken Family to Fantasy Family

The fantasy family gathers the earlier themes into a single structure. The captivity material progressively degrades the individual and the family as a single field, so that bodily violation, broken protection and domestic fantasy belong to the same deformation.

Teratogenic repair names this deformation at the point of formation. In biology, a teratogen is a toxic agent that acts during foetal development and produces malformation or non-viability. The damage is not secondary. The form is damaged as it comes into being, because the conditions of formation are already toxic to life.

The world of October 7 is organised around the most transgressive atrocities, their celebration, and the absence of any recognition of wrongdoing. Its implicit position is: I have done nothing wrong. When that world enters the areas of intimacy, family, marriage and domestic future, repair is never reached. What appears instead is already damaged at birth.

The captivity material reveals something worse than the absence of repair: the appearance of a distorted imitation of life where repair should have been. Because there is no “I have done this,” and no recognition that the hostage has been damaged by the captor’s own violence, repair cannot begin. What appears instead is a malformed substitute.

This is the analytic value of the captivity material. It reveals the incapacity for repair through the thing that appears in repair’s place.

Conclusion

October 7 shows obliteration through maximal transgression and celebration. The perpetrators do not appear burdened by “I have done this.” The acts are experienced as triumph and entitlement. The system that produced October 7 commits atrocity and fails to know atrocity as wrongdoing. This argues against any inherent capacity for repair.

Captivity shows what happens when the same world is forced into preserving life rather than killing. The result is catastrophic deformation. October 7 obliterates through direct atrocity; captivity obliterates through manic repair. The subjectivity of the hostage is not registered, and the hostage is absorbed into a fantasy in which injury and separateness disappear. This is not failed kindness. It is obliteration by fantasy.

The massacre destroys the victim as body; captivity destroys the victim as separate reality. In both, the other person exists only inside the perpetrator’s narcissistic world. The world that produced October 7 can destroy life directly, and when it tries to create life, it destroys it through monstrous imitation. This does not reveal a capacity for repair or resolution. It reveals the deformation of life where repair should have appeared and future life might have begun.

The Abduction Was Not Just a Transition

Initially I imagined the process of taking the hostages into captivity would function as a transitional passage between the attack sites and the later period of captivity in Gaza. One might expect it to be little more than capture, removal and transfer. Instead, even this short section confirms the patterns that have already emerged across Nova, the kibbutzim and the military bases. The abduction phase is itself a site for further extreme violation, precisely and sadistically executed.

The Violence Becomes Mobile

At the attack sites, the earlier articles identified recurrence, specificity of actions. Genital targeting, bodily desecration, filming, public humiliation, corpse display, all moving toward the most extreme violation possible within each site. The abduction material shows these same themes appearing during capture and transfer. The victim is no longer only attacked in place. The violence becomes mobile, extending horrifically throughout the transfer process and eventually into captivity.

Family Destruction Became Part of Capture

Ninety-two women and girls were taken hostage from multiple locations. Eighty women and girls were taken hostage and later released. Seven women were murdered during the course of their abduction, and five women were taken hostage and later murdered in captivity. At least forty-one mothers were abducted. Nineteen mothers were taken alive together with their children; four mothers were taken after they had been murdered; and eighteen mothers were taken alive without their children. Among minors aged 0 to 18, twenty-one girls and thirteen boys were taken hostage and later released. In addition, two infant boys, four-year-old Ariel and nine-month-old Kfir, were taken hostage with their mother and were later murdered together.

The numbers show that abduction was not simply the removal of isolated individuals. It involved the seizure of people inside family relationships, maternal bonds and intergenerational structures.

Sexualised Violence Without Borders

During abduction across the 3 attack sites, sexual and physical assault, forced nudity, public parading, groping, binding, restraint, and coercive intimacy with captors occurred. This confirms one of the central findings from the earlier articles: sexualised violence did not remain confined to any single setting and the sexual atrocities were enacted without boundaries; they were inflicted on men and women, adults and children, infants, the living and the dead.

This section clearly confirms the earlier analysis showing boundary collapse. In the first articles, the material showed violence moving across boundaries between killing, sexual violation, mutilation, post-mortem abuse, filming and display. In the abduction phase, the same collapse appears again. Victims are not only taken. They are beaten, stripped, handled, humiliated, displayed and controlled. Men and boys were also subjected to gendered forms of violence, including stripping, beating and sexual humiliation intended to degrade or emasculate. The pattern is blunt: sexualised atrocity had no stable boundary as it was not limited to women, to the living or to adults. This occurred across all attack sites and during the transfer into captivity.

The Family Bond Was Turned Into a Weapon

Abduction is clearly deeply traumatic, but during October 7 the abduction occurs alongside the abuse, torture, murder or separation of family members. The maximal transgression specific to abduction is that the family itself becomes part of the abduction scene. The victim is taken hostage while the family is being destroyed and tortured around them.

Dead Bodies Were Also Taken Hostage

The abduction phase also confirms the earlier theme of post-mortem violation. Some victims were taken into Gaza after they were murdered and desecrated. Dead bodies were taken hostage and treated as trophies, bargaining instruments, and continuing weapons against the family. The more extreme dimension of post-mortem violation, necrophilia, also appears through acts such as parading partially naked or mutilated bodies through crowds whilst filming and disseminating these images.

This highlights the theme of cumulative transgressive escalation. In the earlier analysis, killing and sexual violence were intensified through committing multiple atrocities on the same victim; facial destruction, forced witnessing, filming, post-mortem abuse, genital mutilation, burning, display and public celebration. The abduction section demonstrates the same maximalism of atrocity in the context of victim transfer. Capture is enacted alongside family separation and destruction. The abducted person is moved from one site of atrocity into another, and the family is pulled into the process through terror, recognition and suspended knowledge.

Filming Turned Abduction Into Spectacle

Women and girls were subjected to forced stripping, forced nudity, barefoot transfer, injury to the legs or feet, and public parading. Multiple abductions were filmed by perpetrators and circulated on social media, showing women, alive or dead, partially naked, beaten and taunted. This is consistent with earlier articles, where filming adds to the violence because atrocity is converted into a trophy, propaganda and a weapon that can be replayed, circulated and forced upon others.

The Crowd Becomes Part of the Violence

The report describes a widely circulated video showing a hostage. Her body is face down, partially naked, visibly injured and motionless in the back of a pickup truck, as she was paraded through the streets of Gaza. Armed perpetrators and civilians surrounded the vehicle, cheering and spitting on her body. The earlier theme that the violence drew on a shared repertoire becomes harder to dismiss. The atrocity is not treated by the surrounding public as unintelligible, horrifying or socially alien. In that scene, the desecrated dead body is received as something to celebrate. The hostage’s mother encountered the video through circulation, and the family saw her body on the pickup truck, half undressed, twisted, with her head hanging down. They saw the vehicle entering Gaza, surrounded by people celebrating. They saw her head lifted by her dreadlocks and people spitting on her.

Another hostage describes the crowd as jubilant, cheering, with people in the streets, dancing, celebrating. The terrorist driving the vehicle kept honking the horn so everyone would see what was inside the car: a woman and four very young children. A ‘prize.’ . . . the terrorist kept grabbing the shirt of a 10 year old girl and lifting her up, so people could see that he had captured a little girl. Taken together, the two scenes show the range of what constitutes celebratory public exhibition: the desecrated dead body as trophy, and the living woman with children as prize.

This builds on the concept of the death cult and elevates the phrase from being just a rhetorical insult. It instead refers to a governing principle in which death and torture hold positive value in the same way that love and creativity would. In ordinary cultures, life is celebrated but here, the crowd is charged by the violation of what is most sacred: a child, a mother, a murdered young woman, a family bond. What should induce mourning or horror is instead a source of excitement. The psychological inversion is severe. Death and degradation are not hidden as shameful excesses. They are displayed and celebrated.

The scene demonstrates that the torture and humiliation of hostages was publicly legible and emotionally shareable within the surrounding social environment. The consistency of the atrocities across multiple sites already suggested that the repertoire was psychologically and ideologically available before the attacks. The public cheering around abducted and desecrated bodies supports this and suggests that extreme atrocity does not only reside in armed perpetrators but is recognised, joined and celebrated by the broader culture surrounding them.

Precision Beneath the Barbarism

One of the most disturbing features of the abduction phase is that it demonstrates that underneath the barbaric atrocity lies precision. The violence may look manic and chaotic, but it is not. The chaos has psychological form and points to a relationship to death and atrocity that is socially embedded and publicly endorsed, rather than isolated outbursts of battlefield savagery.

In Limine

Something else appears in the transfer into captivity material which becomes a much more prominent theme during actual captivity. One released hostage described being touched on the way to Gaza. She then woke up half-naked, surrounded by captors. Later one of the men came over, hugged her, told her she was beautiful, and said she was going to marry him. He told her that this was going to be her life.

Conclusion

The transfer into captivity was not a mechanical phase between the attack sites and Gaza. The same pattern appears again: precision and structure beneath the barbarism, all in the service of inflicting the maximal atrocity available to each situation.

During abduction, the maximum transgression available was to take victims while they witnessed relatives being tortured, executed or separated from them.

This phase also included the use of post-mortem violation where victims were murdered and then taken into Gaza as trophies, bargaining objects and continuing weapons against their families.

It also strengthens and extends the death cult analysis beyond just the armed perpetrators. Crowds of Gazan civilians, including young children, responded with jubilation. Desecrated corpses and children, including a captured ten-year-old girl became objects of public celebration, supporting the use of the term ‘death cult’ as a psychological description, beyond rhetorical insult.

The military-base material reveals the same underlying pattern already visible at Nova and the Kibbutzim. Across Nova, the Kibbutzim and the military bases, the violence repeatedly moves towards what can be described as maximal transgression: the tendency towards the most extreme violation available. This underlying principle remains constant. What changes is the form through which it is expressed.

At Nova, the conditions of mass attack, movement and pursuit permitted one expression of this pattern. At the Kibbutzim, the intimate setting of homes and families permitted another, including violence against children and infants and the torture and killing of family members in front of one another. At the military bases, greater control over victims permitted the convergence of multiple forms of mutilation and post-mortem violence upon the same bodies.

Convergence of Violence

The report repeatedly describes:

• faces destroyed by multiple gunshots;

• eyes shot out;

• skulls smashed in;

• brains exposed;

• heads nearly blown off;

• breasts targeted;

• genitals mutilated;

• genitals burned;

• objects inserted into genitalia;

• bodies dismembered;

• limbs severed;

• bodies burned beyond recognition.

That is the finding.

The significance is not that these forms of violence are new. They have already appeared elsewhere in the report. The significance is that the same forms repeatedly converge upon the same bodies. Victims were found with eyes shot out, skulls smashed in, brains exposed and heads nearly blown off. The recurring repertoire reaches its most concentrated expression through the accumulation of multiple forms of violence upon the same victims.

Throughout the October 7 attacks, the genitalia repeatedly emerge as a focal point of violence. Genital mutilation, genital burning and the insertion of objects into genital areas occur across multiple locations and victim groups, with no distinction between men, women and children.

Maximal Transgression

Maximal transgression describes the tendency for violence to exploit whatever opportunities a particular situation provides for the most complete and extreme violation available.

At the Kibbutzim it included torture and mutilation of children and infants, and the torture and killing of family members in front of one another. At Nova it appeared through mass killing, sexual violence and public display. At the military bases it appeared through the convergence of multiple forms of mutilation and post-mortem violence upon the same bodies.

Evidence consistent with necrophilic activity was present across all three sites.

The violence repeatedly exploits whatever opportunities a particular environment provides for the most complete and extreme violation available.

Corpse Weaponisation

One distinctive feature of the military-base material is the post-mortem use of explosives.

The report documents female soldiers’ bodies fitted with explosives and required examination by bomb-disposal specialists before burial. It also documents the insertion of explosive devices into genital areas.

Unlike the transgressions described elsewhere in the report, this practice possessed an obvious operational purpose. Explosives concealed within bodies could injure or kill military personnel and recovery teams slowing down efforts to take control of the bases.

Yet even here the tactical and the transgressive are intertwined. A grenade does not need to be inserted into a genital cavity to function as an explosive device. The operational purpose is fused with the same pattern of bodily violation, genital targeting and post-mortem desecration already visible elsewhere in the material.

Beyond Sadism

The consistency of these acts and their filming across multiple locations, perpetrators and victim groups cannot be explained by spontaneous sadism. The attacks occurred simultaneously, yet the same forms of violence repeatedly emerged across different sites. Their recurrence indicates that these forms of violence were already embedded within the attack before it began. The question is how this repertoire was transmitted. Training, doctrine, ideological instruction and cultural reinforcement are obvious candidates.

In ordinary warfare, violence aims at defeating an opponent, destroying military capability, terrorising an enemy population or achieving a strategic objective. The violence documented here repeatedly extends beyond those aims and converges upon forms of violence in which destruction does not appear simply as a means of achieving an objective. It increasingly appears as an objective in its own right.

This is what gives the concept of a death cult its explanatory power. Violence and killing occur in many human conflicts. What distinguishes the pattern documented here is the repeated movement beyond military necessity, beyond coercion and beyond terror into forms of violence organised around destruction itself. If the death drive is understood as the source from which destructive actions emerge, then the acts repeatedly documented throughout the report stand unusually close to that source.

This observation has important implications. Political conflicts are ordinarily organised around goals such as territory, security, power, recognition, negotiation, revenge or deterrence. Even extreme violence is usually directed towards an outcome that can, at least in principle, be achieved. To the extent that destruction becomes an objective in its own right, the possibility of resolution becomes increasingly remote because the violence is no longer clearly directed towards a condition that can be negotiated, satisfied or brought to completion.

In this light, the recurring pattern documented across Nova, the Kibbutzim and the military bases is less consistent with a movement pursuing an attainable political settlement than with one repeatedly drawn towards destruction as an end in itself.

What Does the Violence Reveal?

The phrase “death cult” is often used so casually in discussions of Hamas that it risks becoming meaningless. The term has no precise or universally agreed definition and is frequently used as little more than a rhetorical insult. This article instead attempts to define the phrase psychologically in light of the violence described throughout the Silenced No More report.

A genuine death cult is not simply a movement that speaks about martyrdom, glorifies sacrifice or celebrates death rhetorically. It describes a culture, ideology or psychological structure organised fundamentally around destruction rather than the preservation of life. The decisive issue is not willingness to die for martyrdom or kill alone. It is the extent to which destruction becomes emotionally invested in, psychologically organising and elevated above the ordinary human impulse to preserve life.

The central question running through my analysis of October 7 has been this:

What does the form of the violence reveal about the perpetrators, the ideology and the culture that produced it?

The violence described throughout the Silenced No More report repeatedly moved beyond killing and toward maximal transgression. Genital mutilation, burning, sexual torture, desecration and prolonged bodily violation pushed the violence toward the furthest available boundary; physically, psychologically and symbolically.

The torture, mutilation and sexual violation, both ante-mortem and post-mortem, of infants and very young children revealed the furthest point of that movement.

The report describes violence inflicted on infants only a few months old through to children under ten years old. What is striking is that the same repertoire repeatedly inflicted on adults was also inflicted on infants and children:

• genital mutilation;

• genital burning;

• insertion of objects;

• facial destruction;

• dismemberment;

• prolonged torture;

• sexual abuse whilst alive and with dead bodies.

Child Death and Child Torture

The question is what these acts reveal.

The first part of the answer lies in how the ideology already relates to child life.

A movement repeatedly accused of using children as human shields is already relating to child life differently. Child life becomes strategically usable; capable of generating sympathy, political pressure and ideological reward. Children become expendable material in pursuit of larger objectives.

This may explain the killing of children, but it does not explain torture.

Treating child life as expendable may help explain the killing of children. It does not explain the repeated torture, mutilation and sexual violation of infants and very young children. Once the violence repeatedly moves beyond killing and into prolonged sadistic desecration, the governing principle behind the violence becomes far more visible.

Freud: Eros and Thanatos

In Freud’s metapsychology human existence is shaped by two opposing forces. One moves toward life; preservation, attachment, continuity, protection and creation. The other moves toward destruction, dissolution, annihilation and death. Freud referred to these opposing forces as Eros and Thanatos.

The repeated torture, mutilation, burning and sexual violation of infants and children described throughout the report reveals the second principle in one of its clearest forms. The violence repeatedly pushes beyond death alone and toward desecration, annihilation and maximal violation.

The extreme sadism reveals that destruction is no longer simply a means to an end. Destruction appears emotionally and ideologically elevated. Death is no longer inflicted solely in pursuit of political objectives. The annihilation and violation of life hold primary psychological, symbolic and ideological value. This is the point at which the phrase “death cult” ceases to function as rhetoric and begins describing a governing structure.

The extreme sadism of October 7 reveals the elevation of death over life because acts that would ordinarily evoke extreme disgust instead appear invested with gratification, excitement and psychological charge. The torture, mutilation and desecration described throughout the report do not read as reluctant violence carried out in pursuit of an objective. They repeatedly suggest emotional participation in destruction. Pleasure has become fused with acts that ordinarily provoke horror, revulsion and inhibition.

Infant Torture and the Inversion of Human Inhibition

Infants and very young children ordinarily evoke the strongest protective, nurturing and affectionate responses human beings possess. But here, responses that would ordinarily produce disgust and inhibition instead appear fused with pleasure, excitement and ideological meaning.

That inversion reveals a profound reversal of ordinary human responses toward vulnerable life. The prolonged desecration suggests not indifference toward infants and children but emotional investment in their violation. The torture of infants therefore becomes one of the clearest indications that destruction has acquired emotional, psychological and ideological value. The violence suggests a profound inversion in which annihilation acquires the emotional appeal that protection and care ordinarily possess.

The violence reveals a structure in which death and destruction hold greater emotional and ideological force than life.

Klein, Spoiling and Primitive Aggression

Killing eliminates. The violence described throughout the report instead moves into spoiling.

Klein observed that under primitive states dominated by paranoia, envy and the death instinct, bodies become imagined in phantasy as containing life, nourishment, fertility, babies, genitals and goodness. Aggression then turns toward those contents.

The phantasies take the form of cutting, tearing, burning, poisoning, spoiling, emptying, damaging genitals, attacking babies inside bodies and destroying bodily interiors.

This gives the repeated genital mutilation and bodily desecration described throughout the report a deeper psychological significance. The violence does not simply kill. It attacks the body as a container of life, potency, continuity and future generation. Genital mutilation, attacks on bodily interiors and the torture of infants therefore take on a deeper significance because they enact, in external reality, the primitive fantasy of spoiling life at its generative source.

Envy, in Klein’s sense, does not simply seek destruction. It seeks to spoil goodness; to violate, contaminate and annihilate what is experienced as life-giving, fertile, nourishing or worthy of love.

Taken together, Freud and Klein illuminate the underlying psychological structure revealed through the violence. The repeated torture, mutilation, genital attacks and desecration point toward forms of aggression organised around spoiling, violation and annihilation as a primary purpose.

The torture of infants is especially significant because it reveals the extent of the sadism in its clearest form. Infants ordinarily evoke the strongest human inhibitions against violence. Their repeated torture, mutilation and sexual violation therefore reveals how completely those inhibitions have been inverted. Acts that would ordinarily provoke horror, disgust and protection instead appear fused with pleasure, excitement and ideological meaning.

The atrocities suggest not only hatred toward an enemy population, but a psyche, ideology and culture governed increasingly by principles of destruction rather than preservation; death rather than life.

From Death Instinct to Death Cult

This may also help illuminate one of the central political questions surrounding the conflict; why destruction repeatedly appears to overpower preservation, even when pathways toward coexistence, compromise or long-term stability become available.

Peace presupposes the continued dominance of life-preserving principles; the capacity to tolerate compromise, preserve continuity and imagine a future beyond grievance, sacrifice and annihilation. The form the violence took on October 7 points in the opposite direction.

One possible implication is that prolonged ideological environments organised around martyrdom, sacred violence, humiliation, dehumanisation, collective grievance and sacrificial meaning may orient psychic life toward destruction as an organising principle. Across generations, death, revenge and annihilation can begin acquiring greater symbolic, emotional and ideological force than coexistence, preservation or future life.

Within such a structure, violence no longer functions solely as a means to political objectives. Destruction becomes meaningful, emotionally charged and psychologically organising. This is the point at which the phrase “death cult” ceases to function as rhetoric and begins describing a genuine ideological and psychological reality.

This is why ordinary descriptions of the material often feel psychologically inadequate. Terms like “violence,” “war crimes,” “terrorism” or even “atrocity” flatten the internal structure of what is actually being described. The issue is not simply that terrible acts occurred. It is the precise way the acts repeatedly intensify and accumulate, pushing each situation toward its furthest available symbolic extreme.

The cumulative escalation can be seen throughout. In one documented Kibbutzim incident a young woman is shot while semi-conscious on the bathroom floor. She is shot specifically in the face. Family members are forced to witness the resulting injury. The scene is then filmed using the family’s own phone before surviving relatives are abducted into Gaza. The escalation unfolds in layers:

• killing;

• but killing via facial destruction;

• forced family witnessing;

• recording;

• future replay through the family device itself;

• then hostage-taking.

The same structure appears throughout the material. A victim is gang raped. The violence then escalates further into post-mortem sexual abuse, genital mutilation, burning and bodily display. The genital region is attacked in multiple ways: cut with sharp instruments, penetrated with objects, burned with accelerants or otherwise mutilated after death. Bodies are then displayed in increasingly degraded forms, ranging from naked exposure and genital injury to decapitation, dismemberment and mutilation beyond recognisable sex. The acts are filmed, celebrated and socially shared. Crowds gather around bodies shouting, cheering and spitting. Children are present within some of these crowds. Again the escalation unfolds in layers:

• killing;

• sexual assault;

• post-mortem abuse;

• genital mutilation;

• burning;

• display;

• filming;

• public celebration;

• cheering crowds;

• children incorporated into the cheering crowds.

The same escalation structure appears in relation to children who were victims. A child losing parents through violence is already psychologically catastrophic and unbearable. But the violence repeatedly pushes beyond that threshold. Children are forced to witness executions. They are made to step over the bodies of murdered parents. They are then abducted into Gaza. Again the structure intensifies step-by-step:

• parental killing;

• forced witnessing;

• physical contact with the bodies;

• hostage-taking displayed before cheering crowds that include other children.

In one Kibbutzim home, first responders discovered the naked body of a young Israeli woman bound to a bed. Multiple nails had been embedded into her groin and lower abdomen and a spike-like object had been inserted into the genital region. The body showed extensive mutilation around the intimate area. Nearby, a second body had been mutilated so severely that forensic teams could no longer determine whether the victim was male or female. These are not random injuries. The violence repeatedly intensifies beyond killing into invasive sexual torture, destruction of sexual anatomy, bodily transformation and annihilation of recognisable human form.

The material repeatedly suggests that no category remained exempt from the escalation structure. One young male victim was stripped, beaten, stabbed, shot, dragged publicly and filmed while perpetrators shouted over his body. His legs appear to have been deliberately broken beforehand. Breaking both legs massively intensifies helplessness, bodily destruction and immobilisation before the body is then publicly displayed and transported. Again the violence escalates layer-by-layer:

• capture;

• immobilisation;

• deliberate destruction of mobility through the breaking of both legs;

• stripping and exposure;

• public dragging;

• filming;

• collective spectatorship and participation.

The violence repeatedly converges on the most protected and symbolically charged human boundaries available within each scene:

• children;

• family bonds;

• the sexual body;

• the dead;

• the face;

• the home;

• recognisable human identity itself.

And the escalation repeatedly extends beyond the immediate victim into witnesses, relatives, recording, circulation and collective spectatorship.

This is why the filming is psychologically central rather than incidental. The recording becomes another escalatory layer added onto the actual violence. A killing becomes more transgressive once:

• relatives are forced to witness it;

• the victim’s degradation is permanently preserved;

• the act becomes replayable indefinitely;

• the footage is circulated socially;

• crowds gather around the images and bodies;

• spectators spit, cheer and celebrate;

• children are incorporated into the witnessing crowds themselves.

The recording becomes another layer of the violation itself rather than a neutral record of it afterward.

The cumulative escalation also means that throughout the attacks the perpetrators move beyond rapid killing or hostage extraction and invest additional time into gang rape, mutilation, corpse abuse, filming, burning, torture and public celebration. The maximal transgression increasingly appears to be a central aim of the activity being pursued rather than just a by-product of it.

The cumulative escalation may also contribute to why the material becomes so difficult to discuss coherently in ordinary conversation. The frustration many people experience is not always reducible to political disagreement or bad faith denial. There is often a more primitive representational problem emerging on all sides. Language begins to fail under the weight of cumulative escalation.

Ordinary political vocabulary compresses radically different structures into the same flattened categories:
“violence,”
“atrocities,”
“war crimes,”
“terrorism.”

But language struggles to preserve escalation once acts approach symbolic extremes. Specificity begins collapsing into abstraction. What disappears is the step-by-step structure through which additional violations are repeatedly added onto the original act: killing becomes mutilation, mutilation becomes filming, filming becomes public celebration, public celebration incorporates cheering crowds and even children. The exact sequence through which each atrocity intensifies toward its furthest available transgressive configuration becomes difficult to hold in ordinary speech.

This can produce one form of representational failure in those trying to describe the material: an inability to speak adequately because the available language feels radically too weak for the specificity of what is being represented.

One way of grasping the structure more clearly is through a simple thought experiment: how would one make many of these acts more transgressive than they already were? Once the escalation sequences are laid out concretely, the answer becomes psychologically revealing because there are often very few symbolic thresholds left to cross. The violence repeatedly appears to converge on ever increasing escalatory acts for which very few further symbolic thresholds remained to be crossed.

Working through the Silenced No More report, certain recurring themes and structures are emerging. One of them appears to be this pattern of cumulative transgressive escalation: the repeated convergence upon the furthest available symbolic violation within each immediate situation across multiple locations and perpetrators. When taken together with the wider material, this may ultimately reveal something important about the perpetrators, the psychological and ideological conditions surrounding the violence, and aspects of the broader symbolic environment in which such acts became collectively enacted.

The same structures recur repeatedly. Genital targeting. Genital mutilation. Genital burning. Sexual torture. Post-mortem sexual acts. Staged bodies. Deliberate genital display after death. These are not described as isolated incidents emerging from one deviant individual. They recur across the material in ways that gradually assume a pattern.

The material increasingly resists reduction to familiar categories such as battlefield brutality, opportunistic sexual violence or even sadistic homicide in the conventional sense. This becomes especially important in light of repeated attempts after October 7 to explain the atrocities primarily through spontaneous overflow, chaos, civilian excitement or loss of control during the attacks. Yet the recurrence, specificity and repetition of particular forms place growing pressure on those explanations.

In forensic psychiatry, post-mortem sexual acts are not all automatically understood as necrophilia in the classical psychiatric sense. In high-arousal violent states, perpetrators sometimes report little psychological distinction between the dying victim, the newly dead victim and the corpse immediately afterward. The behavioural sequence simply continues across the boundary of death.

In those cases, post-mortem sexual acts are understood not as attraction to corpses and more as continuation of violent arousal, sadistic immersion, domination or inability to stop once the victim is dead.

Some of the October 7 material could potentially be interpreted that way but the broader accumulation complicates that explanation.

This is because the Silenced No More report does not describe isolated or ambiguous acts crossing accidentally into death. Instead it describes recurring post-mortem sexual abuse alongside repeated genital focus after death, staged positioning of bodies, arranged scenes and ongoing sexual manipulation of corpses after life had ended.

What emerges is not simply violence continuing beyond death, but an elaborate sexual process in which death itself is central.

Unlike mutilation, stabbing or dismemberment, post-mortem sexual acts often leave relatively little obvious public evidence. The victim cannot feel the act, there is no direct tactical value and often no immediate audience. Yet the bodies were repeatedly left to be discovered, staged and interpreted afterward.

The corpse therefore does not remain outside the violence after death. It remains within the structure of the violence itself. Death does not terminate the sexual violence but becomes integrated into it. The corpse retains ongoing psychological and sexual significance after life has already ended.

One witness described a male victim whose genitals had been severed and a female victim whose hand had been deliberately positioned holding the severed genitals. The witness stressed that the scene appeared “engineered” and explicitly described the behaviour as moving “into necrophilia.”

The significance of this example is not just in the mutilation. Human beings have mutilated bodies in war for centuries. What is significant here is the deliberate post-mortem sexual arrangement of the bodies. The scene appears arranged sexually and communicatively rather than merely chaotically destructive.

Importantly, this is the only explicit use of the term “necrophilia” within the report itself. The report overall remains cautious and restrained in its terminology and does not attempt to frame the broader phenomenon explicitly through the concept of necrophilia. That restraint is understandable because necrophilia carries far heavier psychiatric and psychological implications than post-mortem sexual violence alone.

Necrophilia ordinarily refers to corpse-directed sexual attraction, gratification or erotic investment. Psychiatry typically imagines this as a rare and highly individual pathology rooted within the private psychological world of the offender: isolated corpse-fetishism carried out secretly by solitary individuals.

The October 7 material raises a disturbing possibility that does not fit comfortably within that conventional framework. That is the distinction between private and collective.

What increasingly stands out in the report is not privacy or isolation but collectivity, recurrence, preparation and communicative display.

The significance of the recurrence is that it becomes harder to explain the acts as isolated behavioural overflow, spontaneous loss of control or the presence of a few deviant individuals within a chaotic attack. Once post mortem sexual acts recur across multiple perpetrators, victims and locations, questions of prior permissibility, psychological preparation, ideological reinforcement and collective sanctioning begin emerging inevitably.

How many people could repeatedly perform post-mortem sexual acts spontaneously, without prior psychological preparation, ideological permission, group reinforcement or gradual desensitisation? Once such acts recur collectively across multiple perpetrators and locations, the possibility of some prior structure of permissibility within the wider ideological, cultural or behavioural environment becomes difficult to dismiss.

The same issue arises elsewhere in the report regarding genital burning. Burning intimate body areas with accelerants is logistically and psychologically more involved than shooting or stabbing. It suggests advance permissibility and psychological preparation rather than impulsive overflow alone.

This raises the possibility that the October 7 atrocities involved organised and collectively sanctioned necrophilic dynamics embedded within the violence itself. Rather than isolated private corpse-fetishism, the material increasingly suggests that corpse-directed sexual violence became collectively permitted, psychologically reinforced and integrated into ecstatic group violence.

Importantly, the possibility that such acts may have arisen through collective, ideological or cultural induction rather than primarily through private individual desire does not necessarily remove them from the category of necrophilic violence. The social origin of corpse-directed sexual acts does not alter the underlying structure of the behaviour itself. If anything, it may represent a historically unusual expansion of necrophilic dynamics from isolated private pathology into collectively enacted violence.

Humanitarianism and Necrophilic Violence

The October 7 material collides violently with a cause that, across large parts of the West, is framed through humanitarian language, anti-colonial struggle and victimhood. Governments, NGOs, sections of the United Nations system, universities, activists, journalists and celebrities have repeatedly presented the Palestinian cause through the language of humanitarian suffering, liberation, resistance, human rights and protection from aggression.

The recurring reports of post-mortem sexual violence, genital mutilation, staged bodies and corpse-directed sexual acts occupy the furthest possible extreme from the humanitarian and moral structure through which the cause has been legitimised and defended. This contradiction cuts directly through the humanitarian framing surrounding the cause.

The contradiction becomes especially acute once we move toward the possibility that recurrent post-mortem sexual violence, corpse-directed sexual acts and necrophilic dynamics had become collectively enacted, culturally permitted and psychologically embedded within the wider ideological environment surrounding the cause.

Two radically different realities now sit side by side:

on the one hand, a movement globally framed through humanitarian discourse, anti-colonial morality, victimhood and resistance;

and on the other, recurring indications of collectively enacted corpse-directed sexual violence from the October 7 material.

This is especially significant in relation to the possibility of necrophilic dynamics because necrophilia is not a morally neutral category. The term carries profound associations with severe pathology and collapse of ordinary human boundaries. The possibility that such dynamics may have been culturally permitted and psychologically embedded within the wider ideological environment surrounding the Palestinian cause radically transforms the meaning of the material itself. The atrocities no longer sit outside the humanitarian framing surrounding the cause but must instead be confronted and incorporated within it.

Preliminary Psychological Analysis of the Report

Earlier this week the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children released Silenced No More: Sexual Terror Unveiled; The Untold Atrocities of October 7 and Against Hostages in Captivity, a nearly 300-page report documenting sexual violence, torture, mutilation, humiliation and desecration carried out during the attacks and in captivity.

This article is a preliminary psychological analysis based only on the Nova, kibbutzim and military-base sections reviewed so far. The report itself is vast and documents only part of the wider October 7 atrocities. The material discussed here therefore represents only a fraction of the violence described across the report and wider attacks.

The report documents atrocities of extraordinary brutality. What also stands out, however, is the recurrence of highly specific patterns of sexual violence, mutilation, burning and bodily desecration across simultaneous attack sites.

At the time of writing, I have intentionally not yet reviewed the report’s later thematic-analysis sections, preferring first to examine the underlying material directly and allow recurrent structures and patterns to emerge independently.

Multiple patterns are beginning to emerge from the material reviewed so far. In this article, however, I want to focus specifically on the relationship between repetition, specificity and consistency across multiple perpetrators operating simultaneously in different locations.

Violence Across Three Phases: Alive, Dead, Displayed

The combination of extreme bodily mutilation, sexual sadism, corpse abuse, filmed humiliation and celebratory violence immediately evokes the territory normally associated with highly sadistic killers, both fictional and real. In forensic psychology and criminology, the most extreme forms of violence are often associated with offenders whose brutality extends across several phases: what is done to the victim while alive, what is done to the body after death, and how the body is staged, displayed or treated afterward.

This is the territory associated with figures such as Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, the Tool Box Killers, Taylor Schabusiness, or fictional figures such as Hannibal Lecter. In such cases the violence often becomes ritualised, personalised and psychologically authored.

The October 7 material repeatedly contains these same broad categories of atrocity. Victims are subjected to acts while alive; the bodies are then further violated after death; and the corpses are subsequently exposed, displayed, filmed, mutilated, and celebrated over .

The psychologically striking feature is that atrocities of this level of brutality and depravity are normally associated with highly individualised sadistic offenders whose violence becomes ritualised, personalised and psychologically authored. Here, however, similarly extreme forms of sadistic violence recur in highly formulaic ways across multiple perpetrators and simultaneous attack sites, as though a single sadistic repertoire were expressing itself across a collective body.

Emerging Structure of the Violence

The same broad categories recur repeatedly across Nova, the kibbutzim and the military bases. One recurring structure already beginning to emerge is that violence frequently concentrates around the genital region through shooting, cutting, burning with accelerants, insertion and amputation. What appears across the material so far is a recurring range of bodily destruction extending from severe genital mutilation and disfigurement, where the wider body remains relatively intact, through progressively wider bodily devastation involving mutilation, burning, dismemberment, decapitation and, in some cases, destruction of the body beyond recognisable human form altogether. The material therefore appears to contain not only recurrent acts of violence, but a recurrent and deliberate spectrum of bodily destruction. This emerging structure will require separate analysis in a later essay.

Across the material reviewed so far, the following categories recur repeatedly across the three sites examined so far:

• rape and gang rape;

• necrophilia and postmortem sexual abuse;

• genital targeting through shooting, cutting, burning and insertion;

• mutilation of male and female genitalia;

• concentrated lower-body burning;

• facial and cranial destruction;

• repeated close-range gunshots to faces, eyes and heads;

• exposure and display of naked or partially naked bodies;

• postmortem disfigurement and desecration;

• decapitation;

• severed heads;

• bodies found with single limbs removed, multiple limbs removed, or major parts of the body missing;

• bodies reduced beyond recognisable human form;

• filming, celebration and humiliation surrounding corpses.

Formulaic Atrocity Across Simultaneous Attack Sites

Although Nova, the kibbutzim and the military bases differed in setting, the attacks occurred broadly simultaneously across multiple locations and involved different perpetrator groups operating in parallel rather than a single unit moving sequentially from site to site. Yet despite this, the enactments themselves appear strikingly formulaic and recurrent. The violence does not feel individually invented each time. It feels drawn from a shared repertoire already psychologically and operationally available to the perpetrators before the attacks began.

The specificity indicates that the recurrence is not confined to broad categories such as killing, rape or mutilation, but extends into highly particular and recurrent forms of bodily violation, such as the genital-focused patterns repeatedly documented across separate attack sites: genitalia being shot, cut, amputated and burned with accelerants, objects inserted into genital regions, and destruction that in some cases remains concentrated around the sexual body before expanding outward into wider bodily devastation.

That point is analytically decisive.

Under ordinary instrumental military logic, one would expect attackers primarily to enter communities, kill as many people as possible, seize hostages and withdraw. Large portions of the violence documented here instead appear to involve prolonged bodily violation, humiliation, staging, mutilation, burning, filming and postmortem abuse that consumed additional time, attention and participation beyond immediate tactical necessity.

Ordinary battlefield killing also does not naturally produce recurring combinations of rape, genital mutilation, genital burning, postmortem abuse, including necrophilia, corpse display, filmed humiliation and systematic bodily desecration across multiple simultaneous locations.

Nor would one expect multiple unrelated perpetrators, operating simultaneously across separate locations, independently to converge on highly similar patterns of mutilation and desecration.

The recurrence itself therefore becomes part of the phenomenon.

The Convergence of Individual and Ideological Sadism

The material increasingly suggests the convergence of individual sadism with organised ideological sadism. The perpetrators themselves carried out, celebrated, filmed and participated directly in the acts. This is psychologically important because it moves the violence beyond the possibility of emotionally detached obedience or purely instrumental execution. One could imagine highly trained forces reproducing extreme brutality coldly under instruction while remaining psychologically distant from the acts themselves. But the repeated evidence of celebration, excitement, humiliation, filming, chanting, corpse display and participatory degradation suggests something far more ego-syntonic: the violence appears psychologically aligned with the perpetrators’ emotional and ideological investment rather than merely externally imposed upon them. The recurrence, specificity and consistency of the violence across simultaneous attack sites further suggest that these acts were embedded within a wider collective structure containing shared models of humiliation, genital targeting, bodily desecration, postmortem abuse and celebratory degradation.

The material thus far suggests the existence of:

• a pre-existing repertoire of violence;

• shared symbolic targets;

• shared expectations regarding what should be done to bodies;

• socially transmitted models of humiliation, degradation and desecration;

• collectively organised forms of sadistic violence and bodily destruction.

The consistency, specificity and recurrence of the violence across simultaneous attack sites are becoming too marked to explain adequately through spontaneous improvisation, chaotic battlefield brutality or isolated individual sadism alone.

At the same time, the repeated evidence of celebration, filming, humiliation, chanting, corpse display and participatory degradation suggests that the perpetrators were not engaging in emotionally detached obedience or merely carrying out externally imposed brutality. The violence appears psychologically ego-syntonic, with individual sadistic participation aligning emotionally and ideologically with a wider collective structure of violence.

The perpetrators therefore appear to have arrived not simply with permission to kill, rape and abduct, but with a specific repertoire of bodily violation already psychologically, ideologically and socially organised in advance.

And that may ultimately prove to be one of the key findings emerging from the material reviewed so far.

In her recent British Vogue profile, Francesca Albanese says she wants the world to “wake up.”

The striking feature of the article is not its politics.

It is that it appears in the most powerful publication in the fashion world without a fashion image.

With all the visual authority of British Vogue behind it, the magazine could muster only thick-framed glasses, a smirk and a description of her voice as “sing-song.” That is what appears where a Vogue image would normally stand.

This absence tells us something about what is being introduced to the reader as a moral voice.

Fashion has taken serious risks before, and not small ones.

In the early 1990s, Corinne Day’s photographs of Kate Moss for The Face changed fashion imagery across the world. The confident, athletic supermodel of the late 1980s gave way to something thinner, paler and more withdrawn. Moss appeared in ordinary rooms, natural light and unposed moments that felt closer to lived experience than performance.

Those photographs became known as heroin chic.

They were controversial because they echoed anorexia and drug culture. Yet they carried enormous visual force. Fashion did not retreat from that controversy. It absorbed it and created art from it. Fragility became glamour. Disturbance became style. Images that once looked marginal became iconic and reshaped a decade of magazines.

Fashion showed that even unsettling material could be transformed into something visually powerful.

This comparison is significant because Vogue has photographed political figures many times. When Hillary Clinton appeared in the magazine, she was presented through the familiar visual language of Vogue: lighting, posture, a ton of make-up and composition that placed her comfortably inside the magazine’s world. Heroin chic represents something different. It was risky and subversive, yet fashion still succeeded in turning that risk into image. The Albanese profile attempts something similar. It presents a politically charged message and asks the reader to accept it as urgent and clarifying.

This time the image never appears and the question is why.

The article presents her as a moral voice telling the world to wake up. But where Vogue normally produces an image capable of carrying that authority, it produces almost nothing: thick-framed glasses, a smirk and a reference to her voice.

Compare that with Kate Moss at the height of heroin chic. Those photographs did not simply record a person. They created an image that carried an entire movement with it.

There is no comparable transformation in the Albanese profile.

That contrast is evidence.

The point of this comparison is not that heroin chic was good. It was widely criticised at the time and for good reason. The point is that Vogue was able to turn something controversial into an image powerful enough to carry authority across its pages. In the Albanese profile that process never takes place.

Celebrity culture can endorse militant causes through speech alone. Statements can be framed, softened, justified or explained away. Words allow distance between what is said and what is meant. Fashion cannot operate that way. It must translate a message into image before it can legitimise it. An image has no room for verbal manoeuvre. It either carries authority on sight or it collapses into description. In the Albanese profile it collapses into description: glasses, a smirk and a voice.

Fashion has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to absorb difficult subjects.

It has worked with emaciation, illness, prosthetic bodies, baldness, exhaustion and distortion. Again and again it has shown that material close to suffering can be translated into images with presence and authority.

Its failure here belongs to what Albanese represents and the political space surrounding it, not to fashion itself.

When Vogue introduces someone as a figure the world should listen to, it normally does so visually before it does so verbally. Its authority depends on its ability to turn a person into an image that carries conviction on sight alone.

The Albanese profile cannot do that.

Instead the article returns to the same thin details: thick-framed glasses, a smirk and a description of her voice.

This is what remains when Vogue cannot do what it normally does.

Vogue usually aestheticises what it aims to legitimise.

With Albanese, it produced something else.

The first revelation is the poverty of the aesthetic result. This is substantial in itself. One of the most powerful image-making institutions in the world placed its authority behind a political figure and generated almost no aesthetic presence. No glamour, no force, no image capable of carrying the authority the text wants to confer. The emptiness is not decorative. It is diagnostic.

High fashion normally gives visual form to what it chooses to legitimise. In this case it could not. When that does not happen, the failure belongs to what is being presented, not to the magazine.

The second revelation is what appears inside that emptiness.

A smirk.

Even that smirk is not shown. It is only described. What should have been an image becomes a shadow of an image.

Freud wrote that in melancholia “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego.” Here the shadow of atrocity falls across the image and prevents it from forming.

Instead of a figure shaped by fashion, we are left with the outline of a presence and, within it, a smirk the reader never actually sees.

British Vogue set out to introduce a voice telling the world to wake up.

In the process it revealed what that appeal looks like when translated into image.

A shadow, and within it, a smirk.

If that is what the reader is being asked to wake up to, the sooner the better.

Israel is committing genocide.

Only later, under pressure, the structure of the argument finally revealed itself:

Israel should not exist.

That final sentence did not introduce a new idea. It exposed the conclusion already contained inside the first one.

Since October 7, images of Gaza’s suffering have circulated continuously across digital media. These images are not simply received as evidence of tragedy, but are interpreted through the crown of genocide.

Genocide occupies a sovereign position in modern moral language. It marks the extreme limit of human cruelty while elevating whoever is understood to be its victim. Once Palestinians are crowned as victims of genocide, their innocence becomes unquestionable, their suffering becomes absolute, and their moral claims acquire an authority that cannot easily be challenged without appearing complicit in the crime itself.

The accusation does not simply condemn an action. It confers moral sovereignty on whoever bears it as victim.

The Palestinian cause has now been widely crowned in this way—through activist discourse, through NGO language, through court proceedings at the International Court of Justice, through claims made by Amnesty International, and through its increasingly frequent and normalised treatment in public discussion as a settled description rather than a contested allegation.

Once the crown is placed, the structure of the conflict changes. One side becomes the bearer of absolute injury. The other becomes the bearer of absolute crime.

And once the crown rests there, contradiction becomes dangerous. Evidence that interferes with the crown begins to appear evasive, immoral, or irrelevant. A crowned narrative does not tolerate rivals. It cannot easily be contradicted without being treated as illegitimate.

This is the rigidity the literary scholar encountered.

Then the decisive moment came when, under pressure, her interlocutor finally said:

Israel should not exist.

If Israel is genocidal as such, then its continued existence becomes intolerable. The accusation already contains its remedy.

This logic already appears in attacks on Jewish targets in Western cities where the language of Palestine is invoked as justification.

Genocide is answered with genocide.

What began as the claim that Palestinians are victims of genocide ends as a justification for the elimination of the Jewish state itself. The crown first placed on Gaza returns, in literal form, as a crown placed upon Israel—this time not as accusation, but as sentence.

Step backward now to October 7.

Before, during, and after the attack, leaders of Hamas declared their intention to repeat such violence again and again. Israeli civilians were deliberately targeted. Eliminationist rhetoric describing Israel as a cancer to be removed from history has appeared repeatedly in the language of actors in Iran, where a public clock counts down toward Israel’s destruction.

These are declarations of genocide.

Inside the crowned narrative in which Palestinians are already understood as victims of genocide, these elements cannot be integrated. They must be bracketed. Not debated. Bracketed.

If they enter the story, the crown is lost.

And the crown must not be lost, because the crown authorises the ending.

The sequence therefore becomes visible:

genocidal rhetoric toward Israel exists
genocidal violence against Israeli civilians occurs
that violence is narratively backgrounded
the Palestinian cause is crowned as the victim of genocide
the crown then authorises genocide against Israel as the only morally permitted resolution

This is not confusion because it is structured and unfolds in a recognisable sequence.

Step 1 — prior genocidal intent

Prior genocidal intent and attempt toward Israel already exist in explicit form: in the targeting of civilians on October 7, in declarations by Hamas before and after the attack that such violence would be repeated again and again, and in eliminationist rhetoric from actors in Iran describing Israel as something to be removed from history.

Step 2 — the crown

Images of Gaza’s suffering, emerging within the war opened by October 7, are interpreted through the strongest accusation available: genocide.

Step 3 — narrative closure

Once the crown is placed, competing explanations become morally suspect or illegitimate.

Step 4 — anomaly suppression

October 7 and eliminationist rhetoric must be bracketed because they threaten the crown.

Step 5 — ontological transformation

Israel ceases to appear as a political state and begins to appear as an obstacle to justice itself whose removal becomes thinkable.

Step 6 — genocidal resolution

If the obstacle prevents justice, removing it becomes morally necessary and therefore justified as the resolution demanded by the crown.

This is why the narrative must remain closed. If it opens, the ending collapses.

And that is why the sentence

Israel should not exist

appears so frequently at the end of conversations that begin with the claim “Israel is committing genocide”

The crown already contained the verdict.

Both formations examined here share one unusual feature. They involve public support for organisations that openly endorse violence against the supporting group itself. That is not a general feature of coalition politics. It is specific to the Palestinian militant framework in which groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah explicitly criminalise homosexuality and define Jewish sovereignty as illegitimate. The unexpected legitimacy supplied by these alignments emerges inside that specific political structure.

This alignment follows a recognisable pattern. It stages proximity to annihilating authority under conditions of safety and converts a long historical atmosphere of “it is bad to be gay” into moral purification through symbolic submission.

A related but distinct structure appears in another phenomenon emerging around the same conflict: the Jew who acquires moral authority through public accusation of Jews as Jews.

Both formations stand out because they supply legitimacy to a cause from sources that would not normally be expected to provide it. That unexpected legitimacy gives them unusual symbolic weight.

But the similarity largely ends there. Beneath this shared surface feature, the underlying psychological mechanisms appear to differ substantially.

Two Different Structures of Alignment

In Queers for Palestine, the central movement involves identification with organisations that openly punish or erase queer existence.

queer subject
→ supports organisations that criminalise or execute homosexuals
→ moves symbolically toward annihilating authority
→ converts inherited stigma into purification through submission

This movement does not arise at random. It takes shape within a long historical atmosphere saturated with the message that homosexuality is morally wrong. Alignment with punitive authority allows that accusation to be re-entered voluntarily rather than imposed from outside. What was once condemnation becomes chosen submission, and chosen submission becomes experienced as purification.

The logic of the gesture can be summarised like this:

submission → purification → safety-through-danger

Danger is approached symbolically but not actually encountered. The protest takes place inside societies that protect the very people aligning themselves with regimes that would punish them. Proximity to annihilating authority is therefore staged rather than lived.

The structure that appears in some forms of “Jews for Palestine” rhetoric is different:

Jewish subject
→ identifies with the accuser of Jews
→ lends legitimacy to accusations against Jews
→ acquires authority through separation from their own group

This produces a different reward sequence:

authority → innocence → belonging

Authority comes first. The speaker becomes someone whose testimony carries unusual weight.
Innocence follows. The speaker is no longer part of the accused group.
Belonging comes last. Separation from Jews becomes a route into acceptance elsewhere.

The movement is not organised around submission to punishment. It is organised around ascent through accusation.

The Role of the Moral Guarantor

Public argument about Israel repeatedly relies on a recognisable move: Jewish testimony is invoked in order to secure accusations that would otherwise remain contested.

In these moments the Jewish accuser is elevated into the position of a moral guarantor.

A guarantor does not simply permit a claim. A guarantor secures it. Their presence makes accusations safer to make and harder to challenge.

The logic works like this:

non-Jewish speaker
wants to accuse Israel or Jews
↓
risk of being accused of antisemitism
↓
Jewish accuser supplies legitimacy

This role does not stop at authorising criticism of Israeli policy.

It can authorise far stronger claims:

“Israel should not exist.”
“Zionism is racism.”
“Israel is committing genocide.”

The more extreme the claim, the greater the value of the guarantor who supports it.

Examples of this escalation are not difficult to find. In one recent article written from an explicitly Jewish position of solidarity with Palestine, the author moved beyond criticism of Israeli policy and wrote:

“Yes, all Jews.”

and later:

“If Judaism has to die for Palestine to live, kill it.”

Statements of this kind do not function as ordinary political disagreement. They function as certification. They authorise accusations that would otherwise be recognised immediately as collective condemnation.

The Jewish accuser therefore occupies a distinctive symbolic position.

Not simply participant.
Not simply ally.
But certifier.

Their testimony reduces risk for everyone else in the coalition.

Absolution Through Testimony

The reward structure here differs from both celebrity activism and the alignment described in Queers for Palestine.

Celebrity supporters gain visibility.

Queer supporters gain purification and safety through symbolic submission to hostile authority.

The Jewish accuser gains something different:

absolution through testimony

Their presence strengthens accusations that others could not make with the same confidence. The Jewish accuser becomes the person whose endorsement authorises the accusation itself.

This creates a reinforcement loop:

self-denunciation
→ audience approval
→ perceived purification
→ escalation toward broader and more categorical accusations against Jews themselves

The stronger the accusation, the greater the authority of the guarantor who endorses it and escalation increases reward.

Belonging Through Separation

This points toward a deeper tension inside modern Jewish political life.

There are two very different answers to the problem of belonging.

Solution A:

belong through sovereignty

This is the logic behind Israel.

It says:

belonging does not depend on permission

Solution B:

belong through acceptance inside universal humanity

This appears more generous than it is. In practice it requires distance from Jewish collective existence itself.

Its logic becomes:

belonging depends on demonstrating innocence

The movement often takes the form:

I am not like them
therefore I may belong with you

There is an irony here.

The modern Jewish state exists precisely because belonging elsewhere could not be relied upon. Sovereignty answered the problem of permanent conditional acceptance.

Some forms of Jewish anti-Jewish testimony return to that earlier structure. Safety is pursued again through separation rather than through independence.

Both Queers for Palestine and certain forms of Jews for Palestine move symbolically toward disappearance in order to secure acceptance.

Why the Reward Differs From Queers for Palestine

The difference between the two formations becomes clearest here.

In the queer case:

I align with danger
→ I transform stigma through submission

In the Jewish accuser case:

I separate myself from the accused
→ I become legitimate

Legitimacy then produces something further:

permission to belong

Audiences recognise immediately what this permission makes possible. The accusation becomes safer to repeat. The coalition becomes easier to stabilise. The speaker becomes indispensable.

Participation in the Tribunal

At first glance, this alignment can look like submission to an executioner. In practice it more closely resembles participation in a tribunal.

The Jewish accuser does not place themselves in the position of the condemned. They place themselves among those who certify the accusation. Their role is to confirm that judgement can proceed. In doing so they move from the position of the accused into the position of witness, prosecutor, and sometimes the person whose presence certifies that the judgement is legitimate.

This helps explain the intensity visible in some contemporary rhetoric. The language does not operate as disagreement within a shared political framework. It carries the tone of verdict.

The language does not merely criticise as it claims to; It sentences.

Condemnation becomes elevation.
Accusation becomes purification.
Testimony becomes belonging.

The Moral Guarantor

The figure that emerges from this structure is not just a critic of Israel and not simply an ally of Palestine.

It is the moral guarantor.

The guarantor secures accusations that would otherwise remain unstable. They authorise claims that would otherwise be risky to make. They reduce uncertainty for everyone else in the coalition.

Because they reduce uncertainty for everyone else, they acquire authority themselves.

What appears outwardly as solidarity therefore operates as certification.

What appears outwardly as critique operates as purification.

And what appears outwardly as moral courage sometimes turns out to be something else entirely:

Ascent through accusation.

And like Queers for Palestine, this alignment is organised around a paradox. The search for safety and belonging moves through symbolic proximity to disappearance. Acceptance is pursued through separation from one’s own collective existence.

The Jew who becomes the guarantor does not simply criticise Jews. They step outside the condition of being counted among them.

Belonging is sought through distance from Jewish existence.

Existence is secured through a gesture of non-existence.

Note on Scope and Terminology:
This essay examines the psychoanalytic structure of certain forms of queer protest rather than the motivations of individual activists. It does not treat solidarity positions as pathological. The argument concerns how particular symbolic alignments can become organised within coalition movements operating under conditions of moral urgency and identity-based politics.

When the essay refers to “Palestine” or “Palestinians” in symbolic terms, it addresses an idealised image of resistance and suffering that can function as a site of identification within protest culture. The analysis focuses on how this image operates psychologically, especially where it becomes detached from political realities that include the criminalisation of queer existence. The argument therefore concerns the structure of the alignment rather than the character of those who participate in it.

A Strange Alliance

In recent years, parts of the queer activist movement have aligned themselves with political causes that openly oppose queer existence. These alliances often support regimes or cultures that criminalise, suppress, and even impose the death penalty on LGBTQ people.

This isn’t just confusion or political naïveté. It reflects a deeper psychological pattern of self-negation in which activists symbolically align with forces that oppose their own existence.

These performances do not take place within Palestinian territories governed by Hamas, where same-sex relations can carry severe legal penalties and violence against queer people is widely documented. They take place in liberal democracies where protest is permitted and often publicly supported.

Under these conditions, what would carry real danger in those settings is re-enacted symbolically rather than lived directly. The alignment therefore functions as self-negation disguised as solidarity: a symbolic identification with forces hostile to queer existence enacted within societies that legally protect it.

Solidarity or Submission? The Ethical Rationale of Queers for Palestine

Before diagnosing the symbolic dynamics of queer protest, it’s necessary to articulate the conscious rationale behind movements like Queers for Palestine. Their stance is not incoherent—it is morally and politically scaffolded.

At its core is a critique of pinkwashing: the strategic use of LGBTQ+ rights by governments to obscure or justify other forms of oppression. In this framing, Israel’s self-presentation as a haven for queer rights is read not as authentic progress, but as a distraction from military occupation and systemic violence against Palestinians. The argument follows that queer liberation should not be instrumentalised to whitewash imperial aggression.

From this view, siding with Israel simply because it offers formal rights to queer citizens ignores larger systems of ethnic domination. It refuses to take the lack of LGBTQ+ rights in Palestine as reason to endorse the country that grants them.

Taking this moral position, queer liberation is understood to require fidelity to the oppressed even when those oppressed cultures criminalise queer existence. Within this framework, supporting Israel on the basis of its LGBTQ protections is rejected as selective empathy that privileges one domain of injustice while disregarding another.

The moral framing stabilises the alignment by allowing it to remain coherent even when it involves support for forces hostile to queer existence. Within this structure, support for the cause becomes organised around internalised homophobia, masochistic submission to punitive authority, and identification with the aggressor, allowing symbolic self-erasure to present itself as justice rather than submission.

The pinkwashing argument does not easily resolve the contradiction it addresses but reorganises it. Support for movements that criminalise queer existence is reframed as a moral obligation rather than a conflict requiring explanation. In this way, contradiction can be experienced as ethical clarity rather than tension. The desire to convert incoherence into purity becomes the very theatre in which psychic submission is rehearsed.

Flirtation with Death: The Masochistic Structure of Solidarity

This form of alignment resembles a symbolic masochistic structure in which submission to punitive authority becomes experienced as morally meaningful rather than contradictory. Protesters align themselves with regimes that criminalise, and in some cases execute, queer people.

Iran provides a stark example. Same-sex relations are punishable by death under its Islamic Penal Code, and individuals have been sentenced to execution for “promoting homosexuality.” Alignment with regimes organised around this level of prohibition therefore cannot be understood purely in political terms; it has a symbolic structure that requires explanation.

In psychoanalytic theory, masochism is not simply the pursuit of pain. Freud described moral masochism as the tendency to seek punishment from an idealised authority even in the absence of conscious guilt. Within this structure, suffering becomes experienced as confirmation of ethical seriousness rather than injury. Submission to punitive authority can therefore appear as purification rather than coercion.

Klein later described how the internalised persecutory superego can be experienced as morally necessary rather than hostile, allowing submission to punitive authority to appear as a form of ethical repair rather than self-destruction. What presents itself outwardly as solidarity can therefore function inwardly as a submission to an authority imagined to possess moral clarity through severity.

Within this structure, the subject may imagine themselves as flawed and the punitive authority as capable of restoring moral legitimacy through discipline. This perception does not arise in isolation but is shaped by the long historical experience of queer stigma, exclusion, and moral condemnation that continues to organise the superego even after formal legal change. Submission becomes staged, chosen, and ritualised, transforming passive vulnerability into symbolic participation.

In this form of queer protest, that dynamic operates both consciously and unconsciously. When directed toward Hamas; a regime that openly persecutes queer people the appeal does not lie in its political programme but in its symbolic position as a severe and uncompromising moral authority. Such authority can become psychically compelling within a structure of moral masochism because it appears to possess the certainty and legitimacy the subject experiences themselves as lacking. The attraction is therefore not openly acknowledged as attraction. It shapes the symbolic organisation of the protest while remaining largely outside conscious recognition.

When directed toward Palestine more broadly, the idealisation becomes conscious. Palestine is framed as the ultimate victim, the embodiment of moral purity. Within this framework, acts of violence can be reinterpreted as expressions of innocence rather than aggression. The inversion is so complete it becomes mythic: the aggressor is symbolically recast as the redeemer.

Internalised homophobia plays a central role. Freud described how the superego can turn aggression inward, producing a need for punishment even in the absence of conscious guilt. Klein later showed how early experiences of shame and exclusion can organise a persecutory superego and a persistent need for reparation toward damaged internal objects. Within this structure, submission to punitive authority can be experienced as a way of restoring moral legitimacy at the level of unconscious fantasy.

Within this structure, queer identity can be experienced as symbolically compromised by a history of stigma and marginalisation reinforced across generations. The regime that would erase the subject’s existence can therefore appear, in fantasy, as possessing the authority capable of restoring moral legitimacy through discipline rather than recognition.

This is not solidarity in a straightforward political sense. It is a ritualised structure of submission in which identification with punitive authority is enacted under conditions of safety. The protest takes place in liberal democracies where the danger remains symbolic rather than literal. What is staged is not exposure to violence itself but identification with its authority.

Psychic Bypassing: Moral Compartmentalisation and the Whitewashing of Pinkwashing

These protest frameworks do not resolve the problem that the regimes they support criminalise queer existence. They compartmentalise it.

If a regime executes gay people, that fact must enter into any serious judgement about its moral legitimacy. Yet within these protest frameworks it is treated as secondary, contextual, or culturally specific rather than structurally revealing.

The repression of homosexuality becomes a regrettable detail rather than a diagnostic feature of the political order itself. The question of what this level of lethal intolerance reveals about the regime’s treatment of difference more broadly is rarely pursued.

This is not simple ignorance. It is defence.

Splitting keeps two incompatible realities entirely separate: the regime’s persecution of queer people on one side, and its status as a righteous resistance movement on the other. The more extreme the contradiction, the more rigid the separation must become. When this kind of separation is necessary, it means a morally decisive fact is being kept out of the judgement entirely.

Denial keeps the violence psychologically distant. Even where the persecution of queer people is acknowledged, it is treated as having no consequences for how the regime should be judged.

When several defences are needed at once to maintain a position, it usually means the contradiction they are protecting is too significant to confront directly.

Under these conditions, “pinkwashing” functions as a psychological whitewashing of contradiction and violence. A framework intended to expose moral distraction begins instead to neutralise morally decisive facts. The legitimacy of a regime becomes detached from the reality that it executes queer people.

Group dynamics intensify this process. As Freud observed, identification with a group ideal weakens the individual’s capacity for independent judgement and replaces it with the moral certainty of the group.

What results is not political clarity but moral compartmentalisation.

Safe Masochism: Support Under Conditions of Protection

These protests take place in societies where queer people are protected by law. The governments being condemned are the same ones that guarantee equality protections, fund LGBTQ organisations, and permit the demonstrations themselves.

The slogans and gestures used in these protests could not be performed safely in the regimes with which the protest identifies. In places such as Gaza or Iran, they would carry severe legal and physical risk.

This asymmetry is important because the protest expresses support for, and identification with, regimes that criminalise queer existence, but it can only do so inside societies that protect queer existence. The alignment depends on the protection of the very political order it rejects.

The alignment therefore depends on protection from the very authority it claims to support. It rehearses proximity to punitive authority while remaining safely outside its reach. That is what makes it a form of safe masochism.

Symbolic Genocide: The Parallel Between Martyrdom and Queer Protest

There is a disturbing structural parallel between the logic of militant martyrdom and the symbolic gestures of Queers for Palestine activists.

Palestinian militants have carried out attacks knowing that overwhelming retaliation would follow. The destruction that followed was not unexpected. It formed part of the anticipated meaning of the act itself. The attack therefore takes on the structure of martyrdom as well as strategy, organising itself around sacrifice rather than preservation.

Queer activists, by aligning themselves with regimes and ideologies that criminalise their existence, enact a similar structure in symbolic form. They are not physically endangered, but they publicly align themselves with forces that would erase them.

This is not a political comparison. It is a psychoanalytic one. Both acts organise themselves around a fantasy of obliteration. In one case the consequences are real. In the other they are rehearsed.

In both cases aggression is redirected toward the self and given the meaning of sacrifice and purity rather than preservation. What appears as solidarity therefore reproduces the structure of sacrificial identification without entering its reality.

Recorded Alignments with Hamas and Hezbollah

In some cases this identification is explicit. Queer protestors have carried Hamas flags alongside queer slogans, chanted “We are Hamas,” combined queer iconography with militant imagery, and expressed solidarity with organisations such as Hamas and Hezbollah despite their unequivocal positions that homosexuality is criminal and, at times, punishable by death.

These are instances of identification with organisations that openly define queer existence as illegitimate.

Identification with the Aggressor

Alignment with hostile regimes can feel stabilising rather than threatening. Identification with the aggressor describes a defensive shift in which the subject adopts the standpoint of a punitive authority instead of opposing it. The threatening position is experienced as morally serious and psychologically containing rather than dangerous.

Within this structure, support for regimes that criminalise homosexuality does not produce alarm. It becomes a way of managing anxiety. Moving toward the authority that condemns you can feel safer than standing outside it.

Borrowed Blood: The Fantasy of Being Killed

The spectacle of Palestinian death can function as a symbolic stand-in for a much older fear within queer experience; the fear of being erased.

The protest does not only respond to another people’s suffering. It uses that suffering as a stage on which the possibility of one’s own destruction can be imagined and approached.

The violence directed at Palestinians becomes charged with meaning because it represents something historically familiar: punishment, exclusion, disappearance. The dead body of the other becomes a place where the subject can encounter their own fear of annihilation at a distance.

The protest places the subject on the side of the power that would erase them if it could. In doing so, the threat of annihilation is no longer only something to fear. It becomes something that can be approached deliberately.

Here death itself becomes symbolically charged. The fantasy is no longer only that others are destroyed. It becomes the fantasy of being destroyed by the authority that condemns you.

This is not a literal wish to die, quite the contrary; it is a way of mastering the fear of being killed by approaching it voluntarily. The threat is turned into contact that has meaning.

The protest therefore stages a double identification: with the injured body and with the authority that has the power to injure it.

Within that structure, disappearance itself acquires emotional value. Being erased by the punishing force becomes imaginable as resolution rather than terror.

This is why the alignment can feel so intense. It is organised around a fantasy in which destruction is no longer only feared. It becomes something the subject moves toward.

Too Little, Too Late: Distrust of Liberal Redemption

Alongside the dynamics already described, another element sometimes contributes to the intensity of the alignment: unresolved anger toward liberal societies themselves.

Within living memory, Western institutions criminalised homosexuality, subjected queer people to psychiatric treatment, and enforced forms of social exclusion that shaped everyday life. Alan Turing was chemically castrated by the British state in 1952 for being gay. That history is recent.

Legal reform and public recognition have transformed the position of queer people in many liberal democracies, but institutional reversal does not automatically produce psychological trust. The shift from persecution to celebration can feel abrupt. It can feel incomplete. It can feel like amnesia.

Under these conditions, suspicion toward liberal claims of moral authority becomes easier to sustain. The societies that now present themselves as protectors of minority rights were, until recently, agents of punishment and exclusion.

Alignment against those societies can therefore carry an additional meaning. It expresses not only solidarity elsewhere, but unresolved anger here.

The protest becomes, in part, a refusal to accept that historical injury has been settled simply because recognition has arrived.

Conclusion: The Psychic Structure of Protest

This reading does not dismiss solidarity. It shows that the protest also functions as a site of unconscious tension.

Across the essay a consistent structure emerges. The alignment is sustained by overlapping defensive processes: unresolved anger toward liberal societies that once persecuted queer people, the persistence of internalised hostility toward queer existence, attraction to punitive authority, moral compartmentalisation, and the symbolic staging of disappearance as a way of mastering fear.

These mechanisms do not operate separately. They reinforce one another. The protest becomes a space in which historical injury, moral urgency, and unconscious fantasy are organised into a single public act.

Support for regimes that deny queer rights is therefore not purely strategic. It functions as a defensive structure through which unresolved conflict can be enacted without being recognised as such.

What appears outwardly as solidarity can also operate as repetition. The protest borrows suffering, borrows danger, and stages proximity to annihilation while remaining protected from it.

The outward claim is solidarity.
The inward structure is submission and revenge.

Some acts of violence are so extreme that the usual explanations no longer suffice.

In the Ramallah lynching of 2000 and the attacks of October 7 victims were mutilated, humiliated, filmed and displayed before cheering crowds.

The previous essay examined the form such violence takes. This essay examines the psychological structure that organises it.

In Ramallah in 2000 two Israeli reservists were beaten to death by a crowd inside a police station. One of the attackers later appeared at the window holding up blood-covered hands while the crowd below cheered. The killing therefore did not conclude the event, but what followed became integral to it.

The attacks of October 7 showed the same structure on a vastly larger scale. Victims were tortured, mutilated, burned, sexually violated and filmed. Bodies were dragged through streets while crowds celebrated. The perpetrators themselves recorded the acts and circulated the footage.

What kind of psychological structure produces violence organised around mutilation, humiliation, spectacle and celebration?

These acts violate multiple layers of restraint simultaneously. They breach ordinary human taboos surrounding the body, the norms of warfare, and even religious prohibitions often invoked in the conflict itself. Classical Islamic jurisprudence contains explicit prohibitions against mutilation of bodies, referred to as muthla, even in warfare, alongside an emphasis on respect for the dead.

Yet the acts described above involve precisely such mutilation.

If these restraints are so widely established, something powerful must be overriding them. Understanding what that is requires examining the psychological forces that shape such violence.

Humiliation, Envy and the Organisation of Violence

Humiliation goes beyond injury or defeat; it is the experience of being lowered in status, exposed before others and stripped of dignity. Because humiliation attacks identity, it produces a powerful drive toward reversal. The humiliated party seeks to re-establish superiority by degrading the opponent in turn.

Revenge in that state does not aim for balance; it aims for total reversal.

Envy intensifies this dynamic. When the enemy is experienced as possessing power, security, autonomy or status that the humiliated party feels deprived of, the impulse is no longer simply to defeat the opponent but to spoil what the opponent possesses.

Killing ends the threat, but envy demands something more. The object must be degraded, mutilated and exposed so that what was envied is visibly destroyed. Klein describes how in phantasy the envied object is attacked, broken, defiled and reduced so that nothing of value remains.

In that sense mutilation and spectacle are not accidental excesses added to violence. They are the mechanism through which humiliation is reversed and the envied object is spoiled. The victim’s body becomes the site on which that reversal is enacted.

Forensic research on perpetrators of torture, sadistic killing and extreme mutilation describes the same structure in empirical terms. When violence takes this form, it is typically organised around domination, degradation and the destruction of what is experienced as valuable in the victim. Perpetrators frequently report histories of humiliation or status injury, alongside intense resentment toward individuals who embody qualities they feel deprived of. The violence then takes a specific shape: not simply killing, but spoiling, disfiguring and exposing.

This convergence between psychoanalytic description and forensic observation is important. It suggests that when violence becomes organised around mutilation and spectacle, it is not random escalation. It reflects a consistent psychological configuration.

A similar logic can be seen in interpersonal violence. Acid attacks by spurned partners are often explicitly motivated by the desire to destroy beauty or desirability. The aim is not simply to harm but to totally ruin and destroy what is experienced as valuable in the other.

The acts described earlier follow that same structure. The violence is directed not only at life but at the body, the family and the visible markers of human dignity. It does not end with death. It proceeds through degradation, exposure and display.

Forensic research also distinguishes between violence enacted in isolation and violence enacted in groups.

In lone offenders, extreme acts are often concealed and preceded by private fantasy.

In collective settings, a different dynamic emerges. Studies of mob violence and war crimes show that the presence of accomplices, ideological framing and approving audiences can reduce inhibition and transform cruelty into behaviour experienced as legitimate or even praiseworthy.

Freud’s theory of group psychology captures how the individual’s moral authority is relocated to the group or its leaders, dissolving personal inhibition and unleashing destructive impulses within a collective conviction of absolute moral righteousness.

Under these conditions, violence is performed in plain sight.

In collective settings these dynamics are organised and reproduced through socialisation. Educational systems, media and political institutions transmit a stable and ambient narrative in which grievance, humiliation and hostility toward the out-group are repeatedly reinforced from early development onward.

In the Palestinian case, analyses of school materials and curricula show themes of dispossession, martyrdom and conflict are introduced early and sustained over time. Critics have pointed to examples in which violence and struggle are normalised within educational content, shaping how children come to perceive the enemy and the legitimacy of violence.

Under such conditions, the psychological mechanisms described above are normalised, reinforced and transmitted across generations, becoming embedded into the developing brain during periods when moral frameworks, emotional responses and the boundaries of acceptable behaviour are still being formed.

When hostility and violence are introduced at this stage not as transgression but as expectation, acts that would ordinarily provoke inhibition can instead be experienced as legitimate, even routine.

The result is a form of violence in which killing is insufficient. The victim must be degraded, exposed and reduced. The act must demonstrate reversal, spoil what is envied and establish dominance.

The parallels between the psychoanalytic and forensic formulations and the acts of October 7 are not abstract. They are visible in the structure of the violence.

The mutilation of bodies corresponds to the spoiling of what is experienced as valuable in the victim.
The public display corresponds to domination made visible and the reversal of humiliation.
The celebration corresponds to group reinforcement of cruelty.
The filming and circulation transform the act into spectacle.

Taken together, these elements show that the violence is organised in the way described in both psychoanalytic and forensic accounts: not around the elimination of the victim, but around degradation, reversal and the demonstration of dominance.

From Structure to Transmission

The features described so far explore how the violence is organised. A further question is: how does such a configuration become stable enough to appear repeatedly, publicly and without concealment?

For violence of this kind to emerge at scale, the underlying psychological structure must be reinforced, legitimised and transmitted across a wider social field.

One element is the consolidation of humiliation into a durable political identity. When grievance is not experienced as a contingent condition but as a defining feature of collective existence, the demand for reversal becomes continuous and permanent rather than episodic. Violence then acquires a function beyond immediate retaliation. It becomes a means of restoring status within a narrative in which humiliation is assumed to be permanent.

This continuity is stabilised by institutional influences. The Palestinian refugee system administered through UNRWA preserves refugee status across generations rather than resolving it through resettlement or integration. The result is the persistence of a population whose political identity remains anchored in inherited grievance. The condition that gives rise to humiliation is therefore never forgotten and structurally maintained.

A second element is developmental transmission. Forensic research consistently identifies early environments as crucial in shaping how individuals process humiliation, authority and aggression. In this context, educational and cultural systems become decisive. Where narratives of grievance, hostility and struggle are introduced early and repeated over time, they do not remain abstract ideas. They are incorporated during stages in which the brain is still forming its basic emotional and moral architecture.

Reports and analyses of Palestinian educational materials have documented the early introduction of themes of conflict, martyrdom and hostility toward the out-group. In some cases, violent imagery and scenarios appear in forms presented as ordinary or unremarkable. When such material is encountered during development, the boundary between prohibition and expectation shifts. Acts that would ordinarily provoke inhibition can instead be experienced as coherent with the surrounding moral environment.

Under these conditions, the psychological mechanisms described earlier are not simply present. They are normalised, reinforced and transmitted across generations. Humiliation becomes an organising principle, envy is directed and stabilised, and the legitimacy of violence is established before reflective judgment is fully formed.

A third element is collective reinforcement. In group settings, the presence of accomplices, audiences and ideological validation alters the structure of action.

When these elements converge, the form of the violence changes accordingly. It no longer requires concealment. Filming, display and celebration become intelligible because the act is not experienced as transgressive. It is experienced as justified, even necessary.

The spectacle is therefore not an addition to the violence. It is an expression of a social and psychological environment in which degradation of the victim is understood as legitimate and its public demonstration as confirmation of restored dominance.

Conclusion

When these strands are brought together, a coherent picture begins to emerge.

The violence described is organised around degradation, reversal and the demonstration of dominance. The victim must not simply die; they must be humiliated, exposed and reduced to an object over which power has been exercised.

This is not an incidental feature of the acts but the principal feature.

The form of the violence cannot be treated as a secondary detail. It shows that the act is not exhausted by killing, but expresses a particular psychological structure in which humiliation demands reversal and value is destroyed through spoiling.

This structure does not arise in a vacuum. It is reinforced and stabilised over time. Institutional arrangements preserve grievance across generations, and educational environments introduce narratives of hostility and conflict at stages when moral and emotional frameworks are being formed. Under such conditions, the psychological configuration described above is normalised, transmitted and made available as a way of interpreting and enacting the world.

Where humiliation is consolidated into identity, where hostility is introduced early and sustained, and where violence is framed as legitimate, the threshold for enacting such behaviour is lowered and its meaning altered.

Therefore, frameworks that interpret the conflict primarily through territory, power or grievance do not register this dimension. They classify the act, situate it within a narrative, or condemn its effects. But they do not account for why the violence takes this form, or what that form reveals about those who carry it out.

Once the form of the violence is taken seriously, the explanatory picture changes. The acts cannot be understood only as responses to conditions or as instruments within a political struggle. They must also be read as expressions of a moral and psychological configuration in which degradation and domination are central.

The fact that such acts are carried out publicly, recorded and celebrated indicates that they are not experienced as transgressions but as justified.

The question that follows is unavoidable - What kind of world must exist for acts of this kind to be recognised not as atrocities, but as moments of triumph?

These acts are certainly not subtle or ambiguous. Yet most frameworks used to analyse the conflict move past them without asking what they reveal about the nature of the perpetrators and the conflict.

The deepest question raised by Ramallah and October 7 is therefore not only what happened, but what kind of perpetrators require violence to take this form, and what it reveals that no legal, humanitarian, or political category can capture.

Legal categories such as war crime, terrorism, or atrocity classify the act but do not interpret its meaning. Political frameworks such as resistance, occupation, or settler colonialism situate the act within a narrative of grievance or power. Humanitarian frameworks condemn the suffering produced. All of these approaches perform useful functions. But none of them ask the deeper question: why does the violence take this form?

Why mutilation rather than simple killing?
Why public display rather than concealment?
Why celebration rather than shame?
Why humiliation of the body and destruction of the family bond?

These are not trivial details. The form of the violence is evidence. Acts such as mutilation, the display of body parts, public celebration, filming, and the deliberate humiliation of families indicate that killing alone was not the objective. The perpetrators required degradation, spectacle, and domination as part of the act itself. Violence had to be experienced and displayed as triumph. That requirement reveals something about the perpetrators’ moral psychology that no legal category can adequately capture.

Once this dimension is considered, the violence no longer appears merely as a tactic within a conflict. It begins to look like an expressive act that reveals the perpetrators’ inner world. A person who kills an enemy in battle reveals one thing. A person who mutilates a body, displays organs, celebrates the act, films it, and forces relatives to witness it reveals something else. Such acts suggest perpetrators for whom humiliation and desecration are not incidental but satisfying. The violence becomes a demonstration of power over the victim’s body, dignity, and family.

This dimension disappears when conflicts are analysed solely through structural frameworks. Those frameworks assign roles in advance—coloniser and colonised, oppressor and oppressed, occupier and resistor. Once actors are placed within those roles, the form of the violence is no longer examined for what it reveals about the perpetrators themselves. It is absorbed into the explanatory story.

But if the form of the violence tells us something about the perpetrators—their moral boundaries, their appetite for humiliation, their willingness to celebrate desecration—then ignoring that evidence leaves the analysis radically incomplete. The frameworks may attempt to explain territory, power, and grievance, but they fail to confront what the acts themselves disclose about those who committed them and therefore miss the deeper meaning the frameworks were intended to reveal.

A striking asymmetry appears in the moral discourse surrounding the conflict. Acts of extreme cruelty that go far beyond killing, that include mutilation, desecration, celebratory humiliation are frequently dissolved into explanations about context, grievance, resistance, or structural violence. Meanwhile statements by Israeli politicians, often made in anger after such attacks and frequently referring to Hamas rather than Palestinians in general, are extracted from their context and presented as proof of genocidal intent.

In other words, actual acts of cruelty are explained away or ignored, while rhetoric is elevated into essence.

A revealing parallel lies in the persistent accusation that Israelis harvest Palestinian organs. This allegation circulates widely despite the absence of credible evidence.

Yet in Ramallah and during the atrocities of October 7 we see bodies mutilated and organs torn from them in acts that were publicly celebrated. So, one side performs acts involving the desecration of bodies and the other side is accused of secretly harvesting organs.

The accusation is the mirror of the act.

Only after noticing this inversion does the structure become clear. Violence enacted in reality is displaced into accusation against the other. The perpetrators’ actions dissolve into explanation, while the alleged intentions of their victims are elevated into moral proof.

This structure resembles projection combined with moral inversion.

This is enormously significant for the much touted settler-colonial framework. Because that framework arrives with the moral roles already assigned. The settler is the structural aggressor. The native is the wounded resistor. Once those roles are installed, the expressive meaning of the act is neutralised in advance. Mutilation, celebration, and intimate cruelty cannot register as evidence about the perpetrators because the framework has already determined who the villains must be.

This is why the neglected question is so important. If one refuses to ask what these acts reveal about the perpetrators, one is not merely omitting a detail. One is ignoring evidence about the moral psychology of those carrying out the violence.

The conflict is then interpreted entirely through structures—territory, occupation, colonialism, resistance—while the most disturbing evidence about the perpetrators themselves is quietly set aside.

But acts such as those witnessed in Ramallah and on October 7 force a deeper question:

What kind of perpetrators require violence to take this form?

Until that question is confronted directly, the conflict has not been explained at all—and neither have the perpetrators.

In February 2023 Tucker Carlson began recounting an unusual experience that he says occurred while he was sleeping. According to his own description, he woke at approximately 2:30 a.m. unable to breathe, feeling that his throat had closed and that he might be dying. When he later examined himself in the bathroom he discovered symmetrical claw marks beneath both arms, four scratches on each side. The following morning he says he found blood on the sheets.

Those around him quickly supplied an explanation. His wife reportedly told him that he had been attacked by a demon. When he later described the episode to colleagues their reaction, in his telling, was similarly immediate: such things happen; demonic attacks occur.

Carlson himself repeatedly insists that he does not know what the event was. In interviews he returns again and again to the same refrain. He has no idea what happened. All he knows is that he woke up with claw marks. He does not particularly care whether anyone believes him.

Taken at face value the story invites the obvious debate about belief. Some listeners treat it as evidence of supernatural reality, while others dismiss it as absurd or delusional.

Yet something stranger is happening in the narrative itself.

The event is framed in cosmic terms; divine speech, demonic attack, while the narrator repeatedly insists that he has no understanding of what any of it means. Interpretations appear almost immediately, often supplied by others, while the speaker remains in a posture of professed ignorance.

The result is an unusual configuration in which immense meanings gather around the story while the process of reflection through which such meanings would normally be examined remains largely absent from view.

Interpretation From Outside

Tucker Carlson’s demon story begins during the drive home from a day of quail hunting shortly before the episode itself. Carlson says he found himself speaking with intense hostility about someone he despised. His account offers little context for the hatred, but he describes what follows as a sudden and complete reversal. The contempt disappears and is replaced by what he calls overwhelming empathy and love toward the same person.

Carlson recounts describing this transformation to his brother. The response from his brother was immediate and certain: “God is speaking through you.”

Later that night Carlson wakes in a state of suffocation, convinced that his throat has closed and that he might lose consciousness. After briefly leaving the bed and stepping outside he returns to the house and his breathing gradually improves. Only then does he notice the injuries beneath his arms and discover the claw marks that have since become the centre of the story. When he shows them to his wife the explanation again arrives instantly: he has been attacked by a demon. When he later tells his producer, the response is similar: “Oh yeah, you’ve been attacked by a demon. It happens all the time.”

In each case interpretation appears immediately and from outside the narrator. Carlson himself repeatedly declines interpretive authority. He recounts the events but insists that he does not know what they mean.

The result is a curious distribution of meaning. The narrator stands at the centre of a story framed at vast metaphysical scale — divine speech, demonic attack — yet the work of interpretation circulates around him. Meaning gathers around the narrative while the speaker maintains a posture of non-knowledge.

Study and Non-Knowledge

After the episode Carlson says he spent roughly a year and a half reading the Bible intensively. He explained that he deliberately chose a plain edition without commentary because he distrusts pastors and prefers to encounter scripture without theological mediation. The decision is presented as a form of intellectual independence; he wishes to approach the text directly and avoid the distortions of institutional interpretation.

Yet the contrast with the demon narrative itself is striking. When his brother declares that “God is speaking through you,” or when his wife says that the claw marks must be the result of a demonic attack, Carlson does not describe any comparable process of examination or hesitation. Instead he frequently responds with the same refrain: “I don’t know anything. I have no idea what happened,” often followed by bursts of incredulous laughter.

The posture therefore combines two different gestures. On the one hand he presents himself as someone cautious about interpretation, unwilling to accept mediated authority and committed to studying scripture carefully. On the other hand, when those closest to him offer immediate metaphysical explanations — divine speech, demonic assault — the narrative records little sign of the same critical distance. The explanation is allowed to stand while the speaker withdraws into repeated declarations of ignorance.

Vast metaphysical claims therefore circulate around the story while the narrator insists that he has no understanding of their meaning.

Laughter and the Void

When Carlson recounts the demon episode in interviews, moments of sudden laughter often appear precisely at the point where the narrative approaches its most unresolved elements. The laughter arrives abruptly and does not clarify the story. Instead it carries the narrative past the moment where reflective examination might otherwise begin.

Comedy has long functioned as a way of exposing structures that are difficult to confront directly. Through exaggeration it can reveal patterns that remain hidden in ordinary speech. A useful illustration appears in Catherine Tate’s Sam and Paul sketches, in which two characters recount trivial incidents with escalating excitement and breathless enthusiasm. The stories themselves contain almost nothing, yet the performance surrounding them becomes increasingly elaborate.

What makes the sketches memorable is the laughter itself. The characters erupt into bizarre, loud, almost manic laughter, throwing their heads back with their mouths wide open, as though the sheer force of the reaction has detached from the content of what is being said. The audience ends up laughing at the laughter because it is so disproportionate and so oddly placed. It arrives where narrative substance is thin and yet some kind of climax has to be produced. The laughter becomes the climax.

That is what makes the comparison useful. In Carlson’s telling something similar can occasionally be heard. At the point where the story reaches its most unresolved elements he often bursts into this same kind of amplified laughter. It appears precisely where the narrative approaches the place where reflective thought might otherwise begin.

Expansion of the Pattern

The same structure appears in other subjects Carlson discusses. Immense claims emerge quickly while the reflective process that might examine them rarely becomes visible.

Nuclear weapons, for example, have been described by him as possessing a demonic origin.

In conversations about artificial intelligence he has drawn connections between modern computing and Kabbalistic traditions, invoking the legend of the Golem — the clay figure animated through sacred words in Jewish mystical lore. In that story a human attempt to create life through esoteric knowledge produces a being whose power eventually escapes control. Carlson uses the image as a way of thinking about artificial intelligence, suggesting that technological development may unleash forces beyond the capacity of their creators to manage.

Modern technological developments are therefore interpreted through older religious narratives about creation, rebellion, and spiritual danger. The movement from engineering to metaphysical explanation occurs rapidly, while the intermediate reasoning that might ordinarily connect the two remains largely absent from view.

Political Compression

A similar configuration appears in Carlson’s treatment of geopolitics, particularly in discussions involving Israel and the wars of the Middle East.

Israel frequently occupies a central place within this narrative field. Carlson has repeatedly suggested that American support for Israel reflects deeper forces shaping Western political life. Discussions that begin with concrete policy questions — military aid, regional conflict, lobbying, or alliance politics — can quickly expand into broader claims about hidden authority, civilisational struggle, or unseen power operating behind political events.

This framing also intersects with the symbolic terrain that appears in his technological discussions. In those conversations Carlson invokes the Golem, drawn from Jewish mystical tradition, as a metaphor for artificial intelligence and the dangers of creating powers that escape human control. In geopolitical discussions Israel often appears within the same imaginative landscape, where present-day political disputes are absorbed into narratives involving Jewish mysticism, hidden influence, and civilisational struggle.

Technological power, religious symbolism, and contemporary geopolitics are thus drawn into the same interpretive field. Particular events are quickly absorbed into narratives of metaphysical conflict while the chain of reasoning that would ordinarily connect evidence to conclusion remains largely out of view.

Conclusion

The demon story reveals this narrative structure with unusual clarity. A dramatic event is described, interpretations appear almost immediately, and the narrator repeatedly insists that he does not know what the event means.

These are not minor subjects. They involve some of the largest questions of contemporary life: war, technology, religion, and the future of civilisation itself. Yet the narrative movement through which such enormous claims might be examined rarely becomes visible. Instead the interpretation arrives quickly while the speaker maintains a posture of professed non-knowledge.

What emerges is a distinctive configuration of meaning and authority. The speaker stands at the centre of narratives framed at cosmic scale; demons, artificial intelligence, nuclear apocalypse, civilisational struggle, while repeatedly disclaiming interpretive ownership of what is being said. The implications expand dramatically, yet the narrator presents himself as someone who is merely reporting what others have concluded or what events seem to suggest.

The result is a peculiar configuration in which psychological inflation coexists with disclaimed authorship; a form of modest grandiosity in which claims of cosmic significance are voiced while responsibility for their meaning is shifted onto others, producing the strange spectacle of utter vacuity presented in the language of metaphysical profundity.

And when the narrative reaches the point where reflection might normally begin, Carlson throws his head back and laughs.

Did Margaret Thatcher threaten nuclear escalation during the Falklands War?

According to the psychoanalyst of French president François Mitterrand, she did.

In a private account of a 1982 conversation, Mitterrand reportedly told him that Thatcher warned France she might escalate dramatically unless Paris helped disable the Exocet missiles threatening the British fleet. France had supplied those missiles to Argentina, and they were proving capable of sinking British ships.

Whether the episode occurred exactly as described remains debated. The crisis that produced the story, however, was very real.

The Falklands Shock

In April 1982 the Argentine military government led by General Leopoldo Galtieri launched a surprise invasion of the Falkland Islands. The operation rested on the assumption that Britain would respond with diplomacy rather than force.

Admiral Jorge Anaya, one of the architects of the invasion, reportedly expressed the calculation bluntly:

“The British will not respond militarily. They will choose diplomacy.”

The Argentine leadership believed distance and limited strategic value would discourage a military response from London.

Britain’s Response

Thatcher reacted immediately. According to Defence Secretary John Nott, she was “incandescent.” In his memoir he later wrote that her anger was visceral rather than theatrical.

She reportedly told Nott and Admiral Henry Leach:

“We must recover the islands. We must show that aggression does not pay.”

Within hours Britain began assembling a naval task force to sail more than eight thousand miles to the South Atlantic.

The mobilisation was extraordinary. Britain ultimately deployed 127 ships, including Royal Navy vessels, Royal Fleet Auxiliary ships, and requisitioned merchant vessels carrying troops, aircraft, and supplies.

The United States initially attempted to broker a diplomatic settlement through Secretary of State Alexander Haig. President Ronald Reagan privately encouraged negotiations, but Thatcher rejected proposals that would have left Argentine forces in possession of the islands.

Argentina’s Capabilities

Argentina’s armed forces were regionally formidable with more than 10,000 troops deployed to the islands, supported by Mirage III fighters, IAI Dagger aircraft, and A-4 Skyhawk attack jets.

Argentina also possessed one weapon that deeply concerned the British task force: the French-made Exocet missile.

These sea-skimming missiles, launched from Super Étendard aircraft, were designed specifically to destroy warships.

The Belgrano

On 2 May 1982 the British submarine HMS Conqueror sank the Argentine cruiser ARA General Belgrano outside the declared exclusion zone. The attack killed 323 sailors, almost half of Argentina’s total casualties in the war.

The sinking fundamentally altered the naval balance of the conflict. Argentina withdrew its surface fleet, including the aircraft carrier Veinticinco de Mayo, and largely ceased offensive naval operations.

Years later Galtieri admitted his surprise:

“I never expected such a disproportionate answer. Nobody did.”

He later remarked that it had seemed irrational for a European power to fight so hard for distant islands that appeared to hold little strategic value.

The remark illustrates the degree to which the Argentine leadership had misread the political calculations being made in London.

The Exocet Crisis

With its surface fleet effectively neutralised, Argentina turned to the weapon it hoped could alter the course of the war: the French made air-launched AM39 Exocet.

On 4 May 1982, two Exocets were fired toward the British task force. One struck HMS Sheffield, causing catastrophic damage and killing twenty sailors. The second missile failed to hit a target.

The attack immediately intensified British concern about the missile system and triggered urgent diplomatic exchanges with France, which had manufactured and originally supplied the weapon.

Three weeks later, on 25 May, Argentina launched two further Exocets. One struck the container ship Atlantic Conveyor, destroying vital helicopters and killing twelve personnel. The second again failed to hit a target.

Diplomatic pressure on Paris increased during this period as Britain sought technical information about the missile system and possible countermeasures.

A fifth and final air-launched Exocet was fired on 30 May during an attack on the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible. The missile failed to strike the ship.

Argentina later improvised a land-based launcher using an MM38 Exocet removed from a ship. One of these missiles struck HMS Glamorgan on 12 June. Because this was a different naval version of the missile, fired from an improvised launcher rather than from aircraft, it would not necessarily have been affected by any countermeasures developed against the air-launched AM39 system.

Diplomatic Pressure

As the Exocet attacks continued, Thatcher raised the issue directly with President Mitterrand on 17 May 1982 and warned that any further transfer of Exocet missiles to Argentina, including indirect deliveries through Peru, would be unacceptable.

Mitterrand initially replied that France had contractual obligations with Latin American customers. Thatcher responded with a sharply worded message:

“If it became known, as it certainly would, that France was now releasing weapons to Peru that would certainly be passed on to Argentina for use against us, France’s ally, this would have a devastating effect on the relationship between our two countries.”

She added that such a development would damage the wider NATO alliance. Soon afterwards France halted further Exocet deliveries and began cooperating with Britain in efforts to counter the missile system.

The Magoudi Account

An unusual account of this confrontation later appeared in the memoir of Ali Magoudi, the psychoanalyst who treated President Mitterrand.

In his 2005 book Rendez-vous: La psychanalyse de François Mitterrand, Magoudi describes a therapy session in which the French president reportedly recounted Thatcher’s fury.

According to Magoudi, Mitterrand said:

“With her four nuclear submarines in the southern Atlantic, she’s threatening to unleash an atomic weapon against Argentina if I don’t provide her with the secret codes that will make the missiles we sold the Argentinians deaf and blind.”

He continued:

“She is furious. She blames me personally for this new Trafalgar… I have been forced to yield. She has them now, the codes.”

And finally:

“Fortunately I yielded to her. Otherwise the metallic index finger of the lady would press the button.”

Magoudi was recounting what Mitterrand told him privately, and the details cannot be independently verified. Nevertheless the episode illustrates the intensity of the diplomatic confrontation between London and Paris during the crisis.

The Final Missile

Argentina ultimately launched five air-launched Exocet missiles during the war. Two struck British ships and caused significant losses. Three failed to hit their targets.

The final missile was fired during the 30 May attack on HMS Invincible, shortly after diplomatic pressure between London and Paris had reached its peak.

The reason for its failure has never been conclusively established. Technical malfunction, electronic counter-measures, or simple chance have all been suggested. Some observers have speculated that French cooperation may have helped Britain neutralise the missile system, although no direct evidence has confirmed this.

Nuclear Shadows

The Exocet crisis unfolded within the strategic environment of the Cold War. Several British naval vessels carried WE.177 nuclear depth bombs, tactical weapons intended for anti-submarine warfare.

Rumours also circulated that a Polaris-armed ballistic missile submarine had moved into the South Atlantic as a strategic signal, although the British government has never confirmed such a deployment.

Even without explicit threats, the presence of nuclear weapons in the theatre added an additional layer of tension to the conflict.

Leadership and Alliances

The Falklands War illustrated a view of alliance politics that Thatcher later articulated clearly when the United States requested permission to use British air bases during its 1986 strike on Libya.

Reflecting on that decision, she remarked:

“…what’s the good of having bases if when you want to use them you’re not allowed to by the home country? It made America realize the Britain was her real and true friend when they were hard up against it and wanted something and then no one else in Europe was. They’re a weak lot some of them in Europe you know, weak, feeble.”

Her point was that alliances reveal their substance when they are tested, because access and operational cooperation are the moments when political commitments acquire practical meaning.

Recent debates about whether the British government under Keir Starmer should permit the use of UK air bases for allied military operations have revived precisely the dilemma Thatcher described. If access is withheld at the moment it matters most, an alliance risks becoming symbolic rather than strategic.

Following the recent Israeli–US military strikes on Iranian targets, I found myself listening to the tone adopted by certain Western political figures and media voices. Statements from politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn, along with commentary from parts of the activist and academic media ecosystem, followed a familiar rhythm.

The language was morally charged. Western aggression was condemned. Western hypocrisy was emphasised. The danger of escalation was invoked with intensity. Nothing was defended. Everything was indicted.

And yet, something felt structurally off.

It was not disagreement that unsettled me. It was the way authority seemed to be claimed through self-denunciation.

The word that eventually came to mind was Cuckoldry.

Not as insult. As structure.

This essay is an attempt to explain that analogy.

Cuckoldry once meant a husband unknowingly betrayed. In its modern erotic form, it often means something very different: a man who knowingly stages his own displacement, inviting a rival into his relationship and amplifying that rival’s potency. The humiliation is deliberate. The inadequacy is performed. The rival’s superiority exists within a frame that the husband helps construct.

The question this essay explores is whether a comparable structure appears in political life. When Western discourse publicly centres its own guilt and elevates external actors as authentic or morally superior, is it surrendering authority, or staging its own demotion inside a system it still controls?

Sexuality as Structure

Most people assume sexual desire is simple: attraction, chemistry, instinct. Psychoanalysis suggests something more unsettling. What excites us is often not just the act itself, but the role we occupy inside a scene.

Desire arranges people into positions — dominant or subordinate, admired or exposed, sufficient or lacking. The charge often lies in that positioning rather than in the physical act alone.

Sexuality, in this sense, is not random. It has a structure. We return to emotionally charged situations and recreate them sexually in ways that feel exciting rather than overwhelming.

In Sigmund Freud, adult desire grows out of earlier conflicts such as rivalry, shame, fear of exclusion, anxiety about adequacy. A fetish is not arbitrary. It is what Freud called a compromise formation: a way of approaching something that once felt threatening, but under safer conditions. Repetition compulsion simply means that we revisit emotionally charged themes and stage them differently, so that what once made us feel powerless now feels chosen.

Sándor Ferenczi applied this to trauma. A person who once felt overpowered may later recreate versions of that dynamic, but this time directing the encounter. What was once endured now becomes orchestrated.

In Jacques Lacan, desire circles around lack. We are drawn back to the very place where something felt missing or forbidden. Anxiety can become excitement when it is staged rather than suffered.

Sexual life, then, is a theatre of power, recognition, sufficiency, and displacement.

To explore this more concretely, we will turn to cuckoldry.

From Disgrace to Theatre

Historically, a cuckold was a husband deceived by his wife’s infidelity. The image derives from the cuckoo bird laying its eggs in another bird’s nest. A man unknowingly raising another man’s child.

In medieval Europe this symbolised humiliation, loss of status, and masculine inadequacy. In The Canterbury Tales it is comic and in Othello it is tragic. In both cases, the humiliation is imposed. The defining feature is loss of control.

Modern erotic cuckoldry reverses this.

In the humiliation-centred form of cuckoldry examined here, the husband orchestrates the entire arrangement. He invites the rival, stages his own displacement, and amplifies the other man’s potency. The humiliation is not suffered, it is actually engineered.

The Triangle

Cuckoldry has three roles:

• The husband, who appears displaced and inadequate.

• The rival, who appears sexually potent.

• The wife, who represents recognition.

The wife is central. Her desire confers status. The rival’s potency matters only because she appears to recognise it. The husband’s humiliation stings because her gaze determines legitimacy.

Without her recognition, there is no displacement. Without displacement, there is no charge.

The entire scene revolves around who is recognised as sufficient.

Transgression

In one common configuration of cuckoldry, the husband orchestrates the scene:

• He negotiates the parameters.

• He selects or approves the rival.

• He sets limits.

• He retains emotional centrality.

• He can end the encounter.

This is not universal. There is also a “hotwife” variant where the wife drives the dynamic. But the configuration we are analysing here is the humiliation-centred one, where the husband stages his own insufficiency.

The rival appears dominant, but only inside the frame of the act. His superiority is constructed through comparison. He is more potent, more sexually satisfying, more virile. The husband positions himself as inadequate in contrast. The wife’s apparent preference reinforces the hierarchy. Within the scene, the rival occupies the top of the structure.

But this dominance is conditional because he has been selected and he has been invited. His access depends on the husband’s agreement to the arrangement. Boundaries are negotiated in advance. The duration, the circumstances, even the language used to amplify his superiority are often agreed beforehand.

Outside the scene, he does not displace the husband’s relational position. He does not inherit the marriage. He does not become structurally central. Once the encounter ends, he leaves. The primary bond remains intact.

His potency, then, is theatrical. It exists because the husband permits it to exist inside the bounded frame of the encounter.

What gives the scene its charge is transgression.

Another man enters a space where he does not belong. The marital boundary is breached. The husband invites a third figure into an intimate sphere that conventionally excludes him.

That intrusion is precisely what generates intensity.

The husband stages his own displacement. He amplifies the rival. He invites the breach but the breach is contained.

If the rival truly replaced him, the erotic charge would collapse into panic. The humiliation must feel real enough to sting, but not real enough to destroy the structure.

At the end of the encounter, the rival leaves. The marriage remains. The “potent” man was potent only inside the fantasy.

The husband appears abject, but he retains authorship.

This is inversion as mastery.

Political Cuckoldry

Now translate the structure.

In this political version, the Western speaker takes the role of the husband who lowers himself. He declares his own civilisation morally compromised. He emphasises its guilt, its hypocrisy, its historical crimes.

Into that scene he introduces a rival.

That rival may be a state, a movement, or an ideological force that stands in open tension with liberal democratic norms — on women’s rights, gay rights, pluralism, or free speech. Yet instead of being treated primarily as repressive or illiberal, this rival is reframed as authentic, resistant, or morally vital.

The rival’s force is amplified.

The Western subject casts himself as inadequate in comparison.

He speaks as though his own civilisation lacks moral authority, while the external actor embodies conviction or courage.

The transgression is central.

Just as another man is brought into a marriage where he does not belong, an external force whose values clash with liberal democratic principles is brought into Western moral discourse and granted legitimacy within it.

The breach is deliberate.

The rival’s presence inside the moral space heightens the drama.

But the stage remains Western.

The discourse unfolds in Western universities, media institutions, legal systems, and digital platforms. The institutional framework that hosts the denunciation does not disappear because it is criticised.

The Western subject may lower himself rhetorically and the rival may be elevated symbolically but the institutional framework that stages the exchange does not change hands.

Impotence and Inversion

In humiliation-based cuckoldry, the husband confronts anxiety about inadequacy. He cannot secure potency in conventional terms. So he reorganises the field.

Instead of competing directly, he eroticises his weakness.

Instead of excluding the rival, he amplifies him.

Instead of defending the boundary, he invites transgression.

This is what Freud meant by a compromise formation. It is a solution that allows a person to manage an anxiety without fully resolving it.

The humiliation does not eliminate the insecurity. It transforms it into excitement.

Because the insecurity remains, the scene must be repeated. Often it escalates. The rival must appear more potent. The husband more diminished. The transgression sharper.

Translate this structurally.

If political agency rests primarily on moral inversion rather than institutional power, then denunciation becomes the strategy.

Western guilt must be centred more forcefully.
Rivals must be elevated more dramatically.
Transgressions must become more pronounced.

The escalation can look like this: increasingly framing anti-Western or authoritarian actors as authentic resistance, while minimising or displacing attention from their brutality when it complicates the moral theatre.

The rhetoric intensifies because structural power does not shift.

The inversion must be renewed to sustain its force.

Iran

Now ground this in something concrete.

When Iranian protesters are beaten, imprisoned, or killed for demanding basic freedoms, the moral frame should be clear. Women are resisting compulsory veiling. Young people are resisting repression. Citizens are demanding speech, dignity, and autonomy.

Yet segments of Western discourse pivot almost immediately to other concerns: international law violations by Western states, Western hypocrisy, geopolitical context, critiques of American leadership. The centre of gravity shifts. The protesters recede from view.

The Iranian state is not always defended outright. Instead, it is drawn into a broader moral drama in which Western guilt remains the organising principle. The regime becomes a counterweight, a reference point, an instrument in a larger indictment of Western power.

The transgression remains central. A regime that systematically represses women, suppresses dissent, and punishes homosexuality is nevertheless positioned within Western moral discourse as a legitimate actor in the same ethical arena. Its presence inside that space generates intensity precisely because it sits in tension with the liberal norms that define the arena.

This mirrors the erotic structure more closely than it may first appear.

In humiliation-based cuckoldry, the rival is invited into the marriage and granted temporary dominance; the invitation itself is transgressive. He is amplified, compared favourably, and placed at the centre of the scene. Yet he cannot remain. If he were to replace the husband in a durable sense, the erotic structure would collapse into real loss. The charge depends on containment and eventual exit.

In the political version, the rival does not literally leave. Instead, he is contained. His moral potency exists inside a Western-authored framework. He is invoked, amplified, and treated as a serious counterweight, but he does not assume control of the institutions that host the discourse. Universities, media platforms, legal systems, and cultural institutions remain structurally Western.

The third figure remains present in the narrative, but he does not inherit the stage.

The rivalry unfolds within a container whose authorship has not actually shifted.

The Western subject lowers himself rhetorically. The rival is elevated symbolically. The institutional structure remains intact.

Conclusion

If the parallel holds, it is not flattering.

In humiliation-based cuckoldry, the man who feels inadequate does not defeat a more potent rival. He invites him in. He stages his own insufficiency. He amplifies the other man’s strength in relation to his wife. For a time, he appears displaced. Yet the marriage remains his. The rival’s potency exists inside a scene he helps construct. The humiliation becomes a way of managing impotence rather than overcoming it.

In the political analogue, the actor who cannot challenge entrenched power directly does something structurally similar. Instead of seizing institutional authority, he relocates the struggle to the moral stage. He declares his own civilisation compromised. He amplifies an external rival as authentic or resistant. He invites that rival into the discourse and stages civilisational inadequacy in relation to him.

But the institutional container does not change hands.

The rival is elevated symbolically, not structurally. The Western framework that hosts the denunciation remains intact. The inversion generates intensity, but not transformation.

Because the underlying impotence remains, the scene must be replayed. The denunciation sharpens. The rival must appear more potent. The transgression must become more dramatic. The moral self-lowering deepens.

The structure repeats.

The speaker seems to give ground, but he gives it inside a structure that he still occupies. The rival seems to take centre stage, yet he does so on a platform built, moderated, and maintained by the very civilisation being denounced.
What appears as challenge may be a choreography of impotence staged as agency.

That is the unsettling implication.

In Manufactured Suffering, I argued that in Gaza suffering is not invented but deliberately induced, exposed, prolonged, and integrated into political function. The comparison to Munchausen by Proxy was structural rather than decorative. In that disorder, a caregiver makes a child ill through poisoning, starvation, tampering with medication, or fabricating symptoms, and then escorts the child through repeated medical interventions. The procedures take place and the pain and suffering are real, as the medical files grow thicker with documentation. What makes the condition perverse is that the caregiver’s identity and raison d’être become anchored to the child’s continued illness. If the child were to recover and become independent, the caregiver would lose the role that sustains her status, recognition, and psychological coherence.

That clinical model illuminates Hamas strategy and the international response to it with disturbing precision.

But it does not explain the broader system within which Hamas operates.

Hamas is funded, trained, and armed by the Iranian regime and embedded within its regional doctrine. The visible theatre of Gaza, the cameras, casualty reports, humanitarian corridors, and diplomatic urgency unfolds at the frontier of a political ecosystem whose centre behaves very differently. Hamas imposes violence that is rapidly seen and globally absorbed. Iran imposes violence that it works hard to conceal, even as it finances and equips the confrontation in Gaza.

The relationship is not only financial or strategic; it is methodological.

Inside Iran, the regime disciplines its own population directly through imprisonment, execution, intimidation, and calibrated lethal force. The violence is imposed by the state and contained within its borders. Through Hamas, however, a different mechanism operates. Palestinian civilians are placed in conditions of confrontation, retaliation is provoked, and destruction follows in a space structured for global visibility. The harm is no less real, but it is indirect. In Munchausen by Proxy, the caregiver may not strike the child openly; instead she induces illness and places the child into a medical system that performs invasive procedures. The doctors carry out the surgeries and insert the tubes, yet the originating violence lies with the caregiver who created the condition that made those interventions necessary. In a comparable way, the Iranian regime does not need to pull every trigger in Gaza. By funding, arming, and directing Hamas, it creates confrontations that reliably provoke retaliation. The destruction that follows is delivered by others, but the conditions that make it predictable are engineered upstream.

It is therefore essential to hold both dynamics together and recognise them as components of a single functioning system that distributes violence across different arenas.

To understand Iran’s governing logic more clearly, we must move from the exhibitionistic pathology that illuminated Hamas to a different family structure: the dynamics of coercive domestic abuse.

Two Family Systems: Displayed Harm and Hidden Harm

Iran’s governing logic is better understood through the structure of coercive domestic abuse. In households organised around fear and control, harm is not displayed for outside recognition but concealed in order to prevent outside intervention. Communication is monitored and restricted. Dissent is punished. Access to the outside world is controlled. Exposure threatens authority because it invites scrutiny. Violence, surveillance, and intimidation may be severe, but they are managed so that they do not circulate beyond the household. Silence is structural because isolation protects control.

Munchausen by Proxy operates differently. There, harm must be visible. The sick child is repeatedly brought before doctors and institutions. The caregiver’s legitimacy depends upon public recognition of fragility. Institutional response becomes part of the reward structure.

Iran resembles the coercive domestic model. When protests emerge, internet access is restricted, journalists are detained, and repression is forced back behind informational barriers. Demonstrators are shot in the streets, prisoners are executed after rapid trials, and some injured protesters have reportedly been arrested or harmed even while receiving medical treatment. Others have been deliberately disfigured as punishment and warning. These actions function in the same way as violence within an abusive household when the victim seeks outside help: exposure is met with intensified harm. The objective is deterrence and containment in order to maintain control.

Hamas, by contrast, operates within the exhibitionary structure, where crisis unfolds inside an environment saturated by cameras, NGOs, and rapid global circulation.

In one structure, authority is stabilised by restricting exposure. In the other, authority is stabilised by incorporating exposure. The violence is real in both cases. What differs is how its visibility is regulated.

The Frontier Spectacle and the Interior Clampdown

The connection between Hamas and Iran becomes clearer when their roles are examined together rather than separately.

Hamas absorbs confrontation in a space structured for visibility. Gaza is embedded in international media networks, humanitarian systems, and diplomatic circuits. When violence escalates, images circulate rapidly, statements are issued, aid frameworks activate, and political actors reposition themselves. The crisis becomes immediately legible and morally charged.

Iran governs differently because it determines where violence is allowed to circulate. Domestic repression is structured to prevent comparable transmission. Internet shutdowns, detention of journalists, suppression of NGOs, and punitive measures against protesters are designed to keep instability from becoming externally destabilising theatre.

This distribution creates a strategic asymmetry. At the frontier, instability is visible and emotionally absorbing. At the centre, coercion is contained and throttled. The international system engages intensely with the exposed edge while the regime that finances and equips that edge remains comparatively insulated from equivalent scrutiny.

The arrangement is not incidental. It depends upon separation. The frontier integrates visibility into its governing logic. The centre preserves authority by restricting visibility. If repression inside Iran circulated with the same saturation as destruction in Gaza, the distribution of roles would be disrupted.

Seen together, the pattern reveals a coordinated allocation of exposure across different environments.

One Structure, Two Methods

The relationship between the two regimes is operational. Iran funds, trains, and arms Hamas and situates it within the doctrine of the so-called “Axis of Resistance.” This is structural coordination rather than symbolic alignment. Confrontation is delegated to the frontier. Retaliation is absorbed there. Humanitarian emergency is generated there. Western attention is captured there.

The crisis that saturates global media unfolds at the perimeter of a system whose centre remains comparatively shielded from similar scrutiny.

To analyse Hamas in isolation is therefore incomplete. The violence that engulfs Gaza is not detached from the regime that equips it. Inside Iran, dissent is crushed directly through imprisonment, execution, intimidation, and informational blackout. Through Hamas, another population is placed into a theatre where retaliation and destruction unfold under conditions of high visibility.

The methods differ. The governing logic converges. Violence is distributed according to strategic advantage.

The Family Dynamic and the Logic of Splitting

Family systems theory clarifies how such a distribution can persist without being recognised as unified. In coercive domestic abuse, victims often split the perpetrator into two figures: the “real” loving partner and the “temporary” violent one. The violence is attributed to stress, provocation, or external pressure. The hope that the good self will re-emerge stabilises the relationship despite repeated harm.

A similar split can appear in Western perception. Hamas is treated as the visible crisis actor, while Iran is relegated to background context. Alternatively, Iran’s repression is explained as reactive or circumstantial rather than understood as structural governance. The violent dimension is interpreted as deviation rather than design.

Within Iran itself, another split is enforced between loyalist and dissenter. Protesters who challenge clerical authority are suppressed in ways designed to prevent international theatre. Their suffering does not circulate with the same saturation as Gazan destruction. One domain becomes hyper-visible; the other remains obscured.

These perceptual divisions mirror the system’s internal distribution of exposure. Exhibition and confinement appear separate even though they operate within a coordinated ecosystem.

Opposite Methods, Shared Dependency

Both regimes depend upon sustained crisis to maintain authority.

If Gaza were demilitarised and governed through plural civic structures, Hamas would lose its claim to indispensability. Its legitimacy is tied to confrontation and siege.

If Iran were liberalised, with genuine political competition and open dissent, the clerical–military establishment would fragment. Its authority rests on managing threat and suppressing opposition.

The divergence lies in management of exposure, not reliance on emergency.

Hamas operates within a system of global visibility. Iran restricts visibility to preserve internal control. The confrontation at the frontier absorbs attention while repression at the centre avoids comparable scrutiny.

The crisis that dominates screens is not detached from the regime that keeps its own crisis off them.

Why Treating Them Separately Misleads

International institutions, media systems, and humanitarian agencies are deeply embedded in the visible half of this arrangement. Gaza becomes a continuous site of engagement through aid delivery, reporting, and diplomatic intervention. The world responds to what it sees.

Meanwhile, the regime that finances and equips the confrontation model faces far less sustained mobilisation in response to its internal repression. Executions, imprisonment, and suppression inside Iran rarely generate comparable saturation.

This is not merely moral inconsistency. It reflects a structural allocation of exposure. Violence is made visible where it activates global response and constrained where such response would threaten authority.

The previous essay traced a politics of induced and displayed fragility. This essay traces a politics of concealed coercion. Considered together, they reveal a coordinated distribution: exhibition at the frontier and confinement at the centre.

When the exposure at the frontier and the suppression at the centre are recognised as coordinated rather than coincidental, the analytic frame shifts. Gaza is not an isolated eruption of instability, and Iran is not a distant background actor. The same governing logic distributes violence differently across space: visible confrontation where it mobilises reaction, concealed repression where it prevents destabilisation. Until that distribution is acknowledged as a single system, response will remain reactive, fragmented, and strategically misdirected.