Photograph Source: U.S. Department of State – Public Domain

A Question

Hanin Majadli, is a brave and clear-sighted Israeli-Palestinian journalist at Haaretz, Israel’s mostly liberal newspaper. She recently (Haaretz, 3 January 2025) asked a question that must be floating about in the minds of millions of Jews: “How is it possible that morality and decency, supposedly the leading values in this [Jewish] household, do not include observing what is happening in Gaza? How can this morality coexist with active participation in a war in which every day Palestinian families are killed, babies freeze to death and children are shot in the back?” The household she is referring to belonged to a soldier recently killed in Gaza. Among his exploits in life was the great fun he claimed to have when torching homes in Gaza. Yet he is being eulogized as having been raised in an environment that represented the best of Jewish values.

This seminally important question is not only relevant to “nice Jewish boys and girls” mutating into barbarians (“cogs in a brutal killing machine”). It is relevant to any group of relatively civilized people exposed to combat within a context that has consistently dehumanized the “other.”

Majadli partially responds to her own question. “The answer may lie in blindness: Many Israelis, including those who are dedicated to Jewish morality, do not perceive Palestinians as equals, but rather, at most, as a backdrop for the Jewish national struggle.”

She is correct as far as she goes, but something is still missing. How do you produce this blindness while maintaining that “moral self-image”? As it turns out, it may not be that difficult. Here is a theory of my own, made up of three parts: (1) Localness, (2) Closed Information Environments and (3) Thought Collectives. These three elements can come together to explain Hanin Majadli’s observation.

The first thing we should understand is that (1) most of the Jewish citizens of Israel grow up—and have their perceptions shaped—by their local cultural context. This is a ubiquitous process within most national groups and tends to tie the citizenry to a common outlook. The modern nationstate attempts, and largely successfully so, to sustain a sense of loyalty to the state as an integral part of the local culture. (2) States do this through the control of education and mass information. Effectively, this creates a “closed information environment” when it comes to perceptions supporting loyalty. Over time (3) what results from this effort is a Thought Collective. That is, a state where the vast majority of people, whatever their internal differences might be, will perceive an advertised threat (whether it is in fact real or not) to the national state as a threat to their culture and way of life. One important stratagem operating within the “thought collective” is the dehumanizing of whoever allegedly raises such a threat.

Through this process the citizens’ perception of his or her environment is divided in two—those on the inside (the self-reinforcing us) and those on the outside (the alien “other”). And, one thing the........

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