CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Pleasure of Cruelty: We Are all Palestinians Now

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........

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