Image by Ömer Faruk Yıldız.
Since October 7th, 2023, Israeli soldiers and civilians have posted videos documenting heinous crimes: murder and torture of incapacitated, disabled and blindfolded Palestinian detainees, murder of journalists and medical personnel, use of dogs as tools of abuse, destruction of civilian infrastructure, desecration of cemeteries and mockery of Muslim and Christian clerics and sacred sites, particularly in Jerusalem, Gaza and Lebanon.
Recent testimonies from Gaza-bound flotilla activists detained by Israeli authorities are consistent and disturbing: physical and psychological abuse, denial of medication, water and toilet access, constant looping of Israel’s national anthem, sexual assault and what multiple witnesses describe as Israeli captors laughing: visibly, sadistically enjoying themselves. What’s more, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security, paraded among tortured activists, filmed himself reveling in their suffering and treating their degradation as campaign material.
This is not a new Israeli tactic; Palestinians have been reporting on their subjection to Israeli sadistic cruelty for years. Now, however, this barbaric behavior has been exposed with its systematic implementation on white, Western allies of the Palestinian cause.
Intergroup Schadenfreude
The enjoyment of another’s suffering has a name: schadenfreude. It is a documented psychological and social phenomenon enabled by the creation of distinct in-groups and out-groups and amplified by the dehumanization of out-groups.
Several studies in social psychology have examined the neurobiological basis of cruelty with implications for schadenfreude.
The Milgram Experiment (1961) tested obedience to authority by instructing participants to administer escalating electric shocks to an actor for wrong answers. Despite hearing simulated screams, 65 percent delivered the maximum, supposedly lethal voltage, revealing how ordinary people will violate their own moral convictions when ordered to by an authority figure. Milgram described participants as entering an “agentic” state, in which they willingly transferred all their agency to an authority figure. This phenomenon is especially prevalent in vertical hierarchical systems.
The laughing, sadistic jailer is a structural phenomenon Philip Zimbardo documented in his notorious Stanford Prison Experiment (1971), which showed how ordinary people (university students in Zimbardo’s experiment), when randomly assigned the role of “guard” in a simulated prison, quickly adopted (unscripted) authoritarian and abusive behavior toward “prisoners.” Zimbardo had to stop the experiment after a mere 6 days, though ti was planned to continue for far longer. He concluded that situational factors (the role, the power dynamic, the environment) override personality and morality. People become cruel because the situation permits and incentivizes it.
The mechanism of how schadenfreude forms and sustains itself has been studied by Mina Cikara at Harvard. Her team’s findings show that the construction of identities with in-group/out-group distinctions renders the brain’s reward circuitry sensitive to the out-group’s suffering. This process of group identity formation modulates the default human capacity for empathy. The out-group becomes neurologically “other” in a manner which changes how their suffering registers in the brain’s reward system; i.e., the greater the “othering,” the more reward, the less empathy. This same reward system activates proportionally to the degree of dehumanization: the more people are conditioned to see someone (or an entire group) as less than human, the more neurologically rewarding their suffering becomes.
Colonial schadenfreude
Colonial white supremacist ruling classes offer their enforcers a hierarchy of incentives and rewards for participation in aggression: material gain and social status for those adjacent to power, and impunity for the sanctioned degradation and torture of the designated out-group for foot soldiers.
Many Israelis enjoy mocking Palestinian people, as documented by the Palestinian-American social media creator Hamzah Saadah. Indeed, they have been encouraged by their regime to delight in the subjugation of Palestinians for decades, yet Israel’s complete disregard for international law now signals the deterioration of accountability with neo-fascistic force reigning over humanity.
Ben Gvir, of Iraqi and Kurdish heritage and born into the lower rungs of Israel’s white supremacist hierarchy, exemplifies the foot soldier enforcer: currying favor with the ruling class through overt racism against Palestinian people, using degradation of the designated out-group as a means of social elevation and reward.
The flotilla testimonies reveal this out-group has been expanded shamelessly. It now includes anyone who stands with Palestinians, regardless of nationality.
This is a feature, not an aberration of colonial systems, which continuously extend their dehumanization efforts to enable expansion of territorial targets for theft and oppression. What’s new is the visibility: we now witness it on our screens across the world, and so far the international community has declined to confront it.
The question becomes structural: Is the world prepared to accept this as the new normal? And what does it signify that figures like Ben Gvir now set the tone for how Israel treats both occupied Palestinians and citizens of other nations who support their human rights?
Hope in undoing conditioning
Schadenfreude is a conditioned response, promoted by a ruling class which manufactures identity contingent on the segregation and exclusion of an out-group designated for dispossession. The out-group is dehumanized and rewards offered for its dispossession and ultimate genocide.
The question becomes: what would it take to disrupt and end this monstrous schadenfreude reward conditioning?
Solidarity across group lines, critical education and accountability serve as alternative reward mechanisms which can reconnect oppressors to their humanity by rekindling suppressed empathy circuits. In this way, both oppressor and oppressed can begin to be rehumanized: the oppressor through recovery of empathy and recognition of the humanity of the oppressed.
This does not mean accepting colonial domination in any guise, particularly the liberal canard of “reconciliation” that treats oppressor and oppressed as morally equivalent. False empathy between unequal parties only entrenches domination further. It can only work through co-resistance: oppressors joining (and being led by) the oppressed to dismantle the oppressive structure itself — Zionism and other enabling white supremacism across the world — through truth, accountability, boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS), justice, the right of return and reparations.
