Structural Psychopathy - A Psychoanalytical Portrait of Israeli State Violence and Empathy Collapse

 

Structural Psychopathy

A Psychoanalytical Portrait of Israeli State Violence and Empathy Collapse

By Kieran Beville

The Gaza Strip is more than a geopolitical flashpoint; it is the epicentre of a decades-long humanitarian catastrophe fuelled by systemic policies of siege, displacement, and destruction. While international discourse often frames the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in political or military terms, it is imperative to examine the psychological mechanisms underpinning such sustained and normalised violence. Through the lens of psychoanalysis and political psychology, we must confront a deeply disturbing pattern: the Israeli state’s behaviour toward Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, displays traits that reflect a structural and institutional psychopathy — an emotional and moral detachment from human suffering, embedded within the state apparatus and echoed in its society.

This is not a careless application of clinical language. Psychopathy, in its clinical sense, refers to a specific constellation of traits including lack of empathy, remorselessness, manipulativeness, and a propensity for calculated cruelty. While it would be irresponsible to diagnose a collective with a condition designed for individuals, it is psychologically valid to discuss the structural analogues of psychopathy as they manifest in state policy, military strategy, public narratives, and societal attitudes. In this context, Israel's treatment of Palestinians can be examined as a form of state-level empathy erosion and moral disengagement that aligns disturbingly with these psychopathic patterns.

Since 2007, Israel has enforced a comprehensive blockade on the Gaza Strip, effectively sealing off a population of over two million people from the rest of the world. This blockade has devastated Gaza’s economy, destroyed its healthcare infrastructure, and created a situation where access to clean water, electricity, medicine, and basic nutrition is erratic at best and deliberately restricted at worst. United Nations reports, as well as documentation from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, have all described the blockade as a form of collective punishment — a violation of international law.

Repeated military campaigns have only compounded the suffering. Israel's operations in Gaza have resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children. Whole neighbourhoods have been flattened. Schools, hospitals, and UN shelters have been bombed. In the aftermath of these assaults, the Israeli government has consistently justified its actions using the language of self-defence, framing all Palestinian casualties as collateral damage or the consequence of Hamas’ alleged use of human shields. This rhetorical framework allows for the systematic erasure of Palestinian personhood. The death of a child becomes not a tragedy but a regrettable strategic mishap. The flattening of a home is not violence but neutralised threat. These narratives strip Palestinians of individual identity and agency, reducing them to functions in a military calculus.

From a psychological perspective, this is a textbook case of dehumanisation. Dehumanization is a cognitive and emotional process by which the perceived humanity of the other is denied, thereby lowering the threshold for cruelty. It is a prerequisite for atrocity. In the Israeli case, the dehumanisation of Palestinians is not only practiced at the level of military strategy but is reinforced through media, political discourse, and public education. Palestinians are frequently portrayed in Israeli media as inherently violent, irrational, or complicit in terrorism. This produces what psychologists call "empathy fatigue" — a condition where the suffering of the out-group no longer registers as morally significant.

This empathy collapse is further entrenched by Israel’s national identity narrative. The legacy of the Holocaust and the history of Jewish persecution are central to the Israeli state’s founding ethos. These historical traumas, while legitimate and profound, have been instrumentalised into a form of permanent existential anxiety — the belief that the Jewish people are always under threat and must respond with uncompromising force. When trauma is not metabolised but instead encoded into state identity, it creates a closed circuit of justification. All actions, no matter how extreme, become permissible under the logic of survival. This is what psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan refers to as "chosen trauma": the recycling of historical wounds as the basis for present-day aggression.

The implications of this are profound. A society that defines itself through unprocessed trauma can project that trauma outward, transforming from victim to aggressor while maintaining a self-image of righteousness. This inversion enables what psychologists call moral disengagement — the process by which individuals or groups rationalise harmful behaviour by disassociating it from ethical norms. In Israel, moral disengagement is institutionalised. The suffering of Palestinians is reframed as their own fault, the result of their leadership, their resistance, their culture. This is a hallmark of psychopathic reasoning: the denial of accountability and the redirection of blame onto the victim.

Public opinion within Israel reflects and reinforces these pathologies. Numerous surveys during and after military operations show high levels of support among Israeli citizens for campaigns that result in massive civilian casualties. These are not fringe views. They represent a societal consensus shaped by decades of indoctrination, militarisation, and fear. Critics within Israeli society, including Jewish scholars and activists who speak out against these policies, are routinely marginalised, smeared, or accused of treason. This silencing of dissent is not just political control; it is psychological closure. It is the refusal to tolerate empathy because empathy threatens the ideological armour.

The psychological profile of Israel's state behaviour, therefore, aligns with what can be called structural psychopathy. This is not about individual malice. It is about a system in which emotional detachment, rationalised cruelty, and moral inversion are built into the very architecture of governance and public consciousness. The state does not feel guilt. It does not change course in the face of atrocity. It doubles down. It escalates. It denies. It explains. It moves on.

In psychoanalytic terms, this reflects a profound narcissistic wound — a collective ego that cannot integrate the idea of wrongdoing without collapsing. Instead of introspection, it reacts with rage, projection, and violence. The international community, when it criticises Israel, is labelled anti-Semitic. Human rights observers are dismissed as biased. Palestinian voices are excluded entirely. This is the psychology of a system that has lost the capacity for self-reflection and remorse.

None of this analysis negates the legitimate fears and traumas that many Israelis carry. But those fears cannot justify the starvation of civilians, the bombing of hospitals, the killing of children. Trauma must not become license. If anything, a people who have suffered deeply should be the most sensitive to the suffering of others. Instead, we witness the opposite: a national policy apparatus that treats empathy as a liability.

The international community has largely failed to confront this structural psychopathy with the seriousness it demands. Statements of concern, resolutions without enforcement, and selective outrage have enabled the continuation of these policies. The silence or complicity of Western governments, particularly the United States, only deepens the moral vacuum. What is needed is not more equivocation but a clear and unflinching confrontation with the psychological and ethical reality of what is taking place.

The world must name what it sees. This is not just a military conflict. It is a sustained campaign of dehumanisation and control executed with cold emotional detachment and justified through a self-righteous national mythos. It is cruelty without remorse. It is violence without limits. It is structural psychopathy.

If the arc of the moral universe is to bend toward justice, then it must also bend toward psychological clarity. We must ask: what kind of society supports this? What kind of state justifies this? What kind of world allows it to continue?

The answers are difficult, but they are necessary. To ignore them is to abdicate not only political responsibility but our shared humanity. It is to become part of the pathology. It is to watch suffering and do nothing. It is, in the final analysis, a failure not just of politics but of empathy itself.