Some Thoughts on The Meaning of Blood in Hamas’s Psychotic Mind

Elsewhere I have written about the way Hamas and jihadi terror reduce human beings to fragments and objects — how the body becomes weapon, message, and political instrument of horror. Today I want to go deeper, into something more intimate and more ancient than strategy: blood. What it means. What it costs. What it can, against all reasonable expectation, create.

This is also a story about a dying man’s gift, a five-star hotel in Tunisia where women were not permitted their own rooms, a PLO professor who became my unwitting roommate, and Yasser Arafat in exile just down the road. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Hamas Declares Its Need

In orchestrating the mayhem of October 7th, Hamas sought to provoke Israel into a major land invasion of Gaza. A core pillar of this strategy was to engineer high numbers of Palestinian casualties. This was not a tragic miscalculation. It was the design. Hamas’s political leader in Doha, Ismail Haniyeh, confirmed it himself, bluntly, in a video address days after the massacre:

“We are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit, so it awakens within us resolve, so it awakens within us the spirit of challenge and [pushes us] to move forward.”

There it is. Not a slip. Not a euphemism. A declaration. Hamas does not simply tolerate Palestinian casualties — it requires them. Blood is not collateral damage in their calculus; it is the engine. Palestinian bodies falling in sufficient numbers would generate international outrage, sustain the revolutionary narrative, and keep Hamas politically alive. This is what the psychoanalyst in me recognizes as a death-driven organization: one that feeds on loss because loss is the only fuel it knows.

On Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, sirens cut the air. The country stands still. Families go to graves. The word blood — dam — hangs over everything. I want to talk about what blood actually means, psychoanalytically and culturally, because Haniyeh’s statement is one of the most revealing windows into the jihadi psyche we have ever been handed in plain language. And I want to tell you the story of how I came to understand it — not through a text, but through an act.

Literally Giving Blood

For most of my adult life, I understood blood the way most Western secular people do: biologically and metaphorically. Blood ties meant family. Bloodshed meant violence. Giving blood meant a civic donation, a needle and a biscuit afterward. I had grown up inside a family structure that functioned like a clan — hierarchical, loyalty-bound, with its own internal codes about who mattered and who didn’t. As the youngest and the littlest female of two, I occupied the lowest rung. I was the scapegoat. And yet, all of that intimacy with clan dynamics had not taught me what blood truly meant to people who live inside shame–honor cultures. I had been close to the fire without feeling its heat.

The education I needed would come from an unlikely source: a man who, for a long time, refused to acknowledge I existed.

Before I went to the University of Minnesota, I had been studying Ladino — Old Spanish written in Hebrew script, the language the Sephardic Jews carried into exile after 1492. I wanted to deepen that work by studying its mirror image: aljamía, Old Spanish written in Arabic script, the tradition the Muslims carried with them when they too were expelled. The two are twins separated at the Expulsion — the same vernacular tongue, bifurcated into two scripts, two diasporas, two silences. To understand one properly, I felt I needed to understand the other. There was one scholar in the country who had the expertise I needed. I wrote to him three times. He never answered a single letter.

I applied to Minnesota anyway. I was awarded a Bush Fellowship — a full doctoral scholarship — and I went. He became my dissertation advisor.

He was a Lebanese Christian raised in Bogotá, Colombia, his family part of the great Levantine trading diaspora that had spread through Latin America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — Lebanese and Syrian Christians who brought with them their commercial networks, their Arabic, their Maronite faith, and a social world organized entirely around blood: family honor, clan loyalty, the obligations of kinship that crossed oceans and generations without loosening their grip. He had grown up inside that world. He carried it in his bones even as he became one of the foremost scholars of medieval Islam in the Western academy. He wrote the classic history of Muslim Spain — the standard text on the subject,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)