Israeli journalist: Participating in acts of cruelty bolsters ties among the dominant group and triggers rewards – social acceptance, political capital & feelings of supremacy. Sadism flourishes when the people on the sidelines remain indifferent, because then the perpetrators feel free to escalate the harm they do to others.
By Amira Hass, Reposted from Ha’aretz, January 07, 2026
“The Arabs have 52 states? Let them go there.” That’s how influencer Hadar Muchtar sums up her vision of cheap apartments for young Jewish couples in the West Bank. And she smiles.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir parades around like Napoleon in the Negev Bedouin village of Tarabin and smiles. Ingratiating ads show laughing women living happily in a community for Jews only, built on more lands and springs stolen from Palestinians west of Ramallah. Soldiers grin from ear to ear against the background of the buildings they just blew up in the Gaza Strip.
There are also some seigneurs with curly sidelocks who sprawl on mattresses on a Bedouin community’s land and smile. They are convinced that this community is the next in line for eviction, so that in its place a cut-price villa could be built for happy Jews.
We are a happy, self-satisfied people, pleasurably contemplating our next steps until total victory is achieved. Until the final expulsion.
There are also moments of striving for victory, or victory itself, where the smiles in the background aren’t photographed. Tightening a handcuff on a detainee until his circulation is cut off. Kicking him in the back. His groans. And another detainee. And another. And thousands like them.
Or evicting a family from its home within 10 minutes. And another family. And another 10 and another 100,000. A soldier with his rifle pointed as he watches the elderly mother running away in a panic, her clog falling off her foot in her haste. A judge upholding the ban on a 62-year-old doctor from Gaza leaving for the country where his son lives. There’s no evidence that his economic situation is difficult, the learned judge ruled.
There’s also Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich as he loots another few hundred million shekels from the Palestinians and soldier who confiscates a family’s car. Control over others is pleasurable.
Is the click of the button that releases a bomb from a drone forte or piano? Or is the volume dependent on whoever plays the video game or whoever claps when they see the smoke towering on their screen? But they will skip watching the extraction of the gobs of flesh and severed limbs trapped under the rubble. That’s too graphic. It would be a pity for their smiles to be wiped off.
The bulldozer uproots another olive tree, and then thousands more, on orders from the head of the army’s Central Command, Avi Bluth. If the driver in his armored cab can’t enjoy the noise as he crushes the branches and flattens the ripe olives, then he’ll enjoy what he can see – the woman with her hands in the air, her gaping mouth testifying that she is screaming, as she throws herself down on the overturned earth.
Does the sadist know that he is one? That is a fascinating psychological question, ChatGPT flattered me, and explained the difference between clinical sadism and day-to-day sadism.
Are occupiers sadists? I asked. She cautiously replied that they aren’t sadists automatically, but that occupation often creates situations of humiliation and cruelty that are affiliated with sadism. The Israeli army doesn’t meet the clinical definition of a sadist, she said, disagreeing with me. But she agreed that long-term ruling over another people could create behaviors that resemble sadism.
And doesn’t indifference to the suffering that society causes others turn into a mental health problem, create a kind of collective sadism? While psychiatry hasn’t adopted this definition as a clinical disorder, my interlocutor said, there is definitely a social and moral pathology here.
Indifference is fertile ground for the growth of sadism. Participating in acts of cruelty bolsters ties among the dominant group and triggers rewards – social acceptance, political capital and feelings of supremacy. Sadism flourishes when the people on the sidelines remain indifferent, because then the perpetrators feel free to escalate the harm they do to others.
Amira Hass is an Israeli Journalist.
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