The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Dance of Competitive Victimhood and Narcissistic Politics
The Psychological Underpinnings of the Israeli-Palestinian War
My teacher, Prof. Sam Vaknin published a brilliant and touchingly poignant speech today, providing psychological insight into the Israeli-Palestinian war as a presentation of religious, cultural, and state-born narcissism. Whether narcissism presents on a micro- or macrocosm level, it's interesting to me that the remedy of empathy, as an antidote to narcissism, is always the same throughline, it's just a matter of scale. Interpersonally or geopolitically, narcissism rears its head in an us vs. them mentality over and over again.
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Overview of Entitled Competitive Victimhood
There is a trauma response playing on both sides. Israel is a product of the Holocaust and the Palestinians have their Nakba. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a form of competitive victimhood: a clash between two entitled and self-centered, disempathic victimhood movements. Like every conflict in history, it gives rise to: Paranoid ideation and conspiracism, Narcissistic defenses (cognitive distortions such as grandiosity), Impaired reality testing, Magical thinking, Splitting (dichotomous thinking): We are all good, our enemies are all bad, Reactance (defiance and contumaciousness), Recklessness, Mood lability and emotional dysregulation, Suicidal ideation coupled with religious righteousness (Masada, shahada). The parties to the conflict abuse and manipulate each other by externalizing aggression, gaslighting, and projective identification (provoking the other party to behave in a way that conforms to expectations and negates a negative self-image).
Transcript:
Another sleepless night as thousands of innocent civilians are slaughtered and massacred in the most horrifying and graphic ways in Israel and Gaza, the latest round in a war that has been going on since 1882 when the first Jewish settlers arrived from overseas and occupied land in what used to be at the time Palestine, joining an existing settlement of Jews throughout the Holy Land.
We are all acquainted with the trite and tired arguments on both sides: the Jews' historic right to the land of their forefathers; the Arabs, a Palestinian continued presence in the same territory; the religious edicts of regarding a Jewish state amidst the Muslim world in an affront against God's cosmic order and will; the Jews as the last of the colonialists and Israel is the only remaining colonial outpost in a world that has moved on to other forms of government and other organizing principles. We all know the grievances, who did what to whom, repeatedly in dozens of bloody rounds, massacring, slaughtering, and killing each other, sometimes with glee and joy, and sometimes inadvertently and sometimes because there is no other choice, but beyond the historical, religious, political, scientific, theoretical considerations, arguments and debates, beyond the eggheads butting heads, what do we have, what is the psychology of this intractable problem, a conflict, the longest ongoing conflict, in modern history?
Why doesn't it seem closer to a solution at all? And I'm talking about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, not the conflict between Israelis and Arabs, which is nearing its solution. Many Arab states have signed peace agreements and established diplomatic relations with Israel. I'm not talking about the conflict between Judaism and Islam.
That has never really been a real thing. I'm not talking about any of this. I'm talking about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Both these peoples lay claim to exactly the same piece of land, the size of New Jersey in the United States, and both of them demand 100% of this land. Both parties are intransigent, inflexible, uncompromising, and devout in their dedication and commitment to maximizing outcomes at the expense of the other.
Both of them regard the situation as a zero-sum game because of this skewed viewpoint, they are incapable of reaching any accommodation, striking a deal of coexistence and perhaps mutual prosperity. Instead, they kill each other's babies, women and the elderly, and of course, each other's military.
What is the military? 20-year-olds, flowering in the prime of their lives. This is the military on both sides. These young men and women are dying, and they are dying because of the psychology behind this conflict, and that is the topic of today's video. My name is Sam Vaknin, and for a change, I'm not only the author of Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited, I'm not only a former visiting professor of psychology, but I am also an Israeli and an analyst of international affairs.
I'm trying to balance these two. As an Israeli, of course, to some extent, I'm biased, although I'm highly critical of Israel, especially in the last 20 or 30 years. Under the criminal and demented regime of the authoritarian pseudo dictator, quasi dictator, Benjamin Netanyahu. But I'm trying to balance the fact that I'm an Israeli and a Jew with my allegiance to the truth as I see it.
As an analyst, and I hope I will succeed in this delicate treading of the line in this video, what goes on in the minds of Hamas, of the Islamic Jihad, of Fatah, of Palestinian refugees in camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Palestinians in the diaspora. What goes on in their minds? What goes on in the minds of Jews all over the world? Of Israelis of military service age, all their Israelis, what passes in their minds and what compels them to behave in ways that ultimately are self-destructive and self-defeating, because this is going nowhere. This is going nowhere. This is leading to no favorable outcome. This is not self efficacious.
This is ruinous to both parties. Every decision each of the parties makes, every such decision drives the deciding party closer to the edge of the cliff and very often beyond. What is behind this essentially suicidal behavior? It is very telling that both parties have their own suicidal myths, and suicidal ideation, which is often coupled with religious righteousness.
Israel has the Masada story, a group in Israel, of Jewish far-right extremists in today's terms who fought off the famed and celebrated Roman Sixth Legion in Masada, an outpost in the desert, and they succeeded in holding off the hallowed Roman army for a very long time until they had no choice and under the siege, they all committed suicide in a suicide pact.
That is one of the founding myths of Israel, a suicide. Similarly, in Islam, religious righteousness is associated with shahada and jihad. Shahada, which essentially means witnessing, is conducting a life that is right in the eyes of God, but it also means committing suicide. In order to further military or political goals, at least that's the interpretation of the Hadith and Jihad is striving to conduct your life in a way that is good and would incur God's pleasure and approval. But Jihad is also a holy, righteous, religious war in which, of course, one dies as a shaheed, as a martyr. So death and suicide are at the heart and core of the ethos and the myths that motivate both these people, the Jews, and the Palestinians, the Muslims, and the Muslim Palestinians.
And so it's a bad starting point. On both sides, there is a trauma response and a fight response. It's both parties, the Jews and the Palestinians are in the throes or in the wake of trauma, they are in a post-traumatic condition. Israel is the product of the Holocaust—the greatest and most horrible genocide ever perpetrated.
The Germans killed well over 6 million Jews in an industrial, heartless, faceless process. The Holocaust is a major trauma. The entire Jewish people, regardless of their origins, regardless of their locations, are heavily traumatized to this very day. The Palestinians have their Nakba, the disaster or the catastrophe of 1948 when they were expelled from their homes by the advancing Jewish army on the one hand, and encouraged by their own arrogant leaders to leave their homes because the Jews would soon be defeated and thrown back to the sea where they came from. These are two motivating, identity-defining traumas on both sides.
And so the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a form of competitive victimhood. These are two victimhood movements. There's a clash between two entitled and self-centered victimhood movements. This competitive victimhood, of course, gave rise to narcissism and psychopathy on both sides. These movements, Zionism, on the one hand, and the Arab national movement on the other, were hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths, who currently constitute the leadership on both sides.
On the Israeli side and on the Palestinian side, thugs, bullies, murderers, dictators in the making, and criminals are in charge today of the state of Israel and of all major religious Palestinian movements, such as Hamas. Like every conflict in history, the parties gave rise to specific, psychological dynamics.
Conflict triggers narcissistic defenses. Conflict, also known as dissonance in clinical terms, creates cognitive distortions. In the case of Israel, conflict led to the emergence of grandiosity, a sense of immunity to the consequences of one's actions, and a sense of invulnerability and invincibility. All of them, of course, are counterfactual. All of them were falsified on October 7th, but not only on October 7th, on multiple other occasions. The Israeli army has been repeatedly defeated time and again, and yet this is denied and repressed in the collective Israeli consciousness, reframed as victory.
Similarly, of course, there are cognitive distortions. On the Palestinian side, which also involves forms of grandiosity, the belief that the Palestinians are fulfilling some kind of godly or divine mission on earth, that the fight is of cosmic proportions, and that it signifies some apocalyptic timeline.
These are all grandiose notions for a group of bedraggled, unkempt terrorists who murder babies, rape women, and kill men in their beds, especially elderly men.
Both parties, therefore, have impaired reality testing. They're unable to grasp reality as it is because they need to deny it. They need to repress it. They need to reframe it in order to avoid narcissistic injuries and narcissistic mortification in public. Both cultures, the Jewish Israeli culture and even much more the Palestinian Muslim Arab culture are based on shame, on not losing face, and on maintaining one's reputation.
It's very much a mob, a mafia mentality. And so they need to ignore reality and inhabit a fantastic space, a paracosm in which they are perfect, in which they can do no wrong, in which they are always morally upright. This impaired reality testing leads to wrong decision making, erroneous choices. It is the path to hell, a hell mutually imposed upon one another. There's a lot of magical thinking involved: “If I only ignore the Palestinians, they will go away,” “If we only attack Israel, it will fall apart.” Magical thinking. “My thoughts shape reality. My words have power. I'm going to magically, wizardry, sorcery of sorts, I'm going to transform the world, solve my problems, simply by wishing them to go away somehow, and I'm going to act and pretend as if there are no more of these problems, these issues. I'm going to besiege the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, well over 2 million people, most of whom are refugees. 1948. And their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. I'm going to just ignore them. I'm going to besiege them. Forget about them. I'm going to annex territory, and establish illegal settlements everywhere because I can and I can because I want to, and I want to because God is on my side, and so is history.” This is magical thinking. And of course, on the Palestinian side, there's even more magical thinking.
Even more egregious than magical thinking, magical thinking leads to a gradual psychotic break, a departure from reality. All activities and all operations are conducted within a mental space that is solipsistic, self-contained, self-sufficient, and frankly, insane. Both parties are demented. Both of them require medication on a regular basis.
They are so divorced from reality and from the mere fact of each other's existence, and so this leads to reactance. Reactance is associated in clinical psychology with psychopathy. It's an antisocial feature; it involves defiance, contumaciousness (the rejection of authority/the other's authority), defiance against the other, pushing back, in your face, see if I care, I'm gonna do it, regardless of the cost.
Both sides—it's not limited to Israel, although it sounds a lot like Israel, and so the losses mount, and they are enormous. And the parties are unable to move on. Israel has built a thriving economy, a scintillating cultural sphere and life. The Palestinians have tried to hope under impossible circumstances, but both of them are locked into this dance macabre.
Both of them are unable to let go of the other, because the other, the pernicious, nefarious, malevolent other, the demonized other, has become a determinant of their identity. Palestinian identity is in opposition to the Israeli. The Israeli is the other. What does it mean to be a Palestinian if not to hate Israel and oppose it in every way?
Palestinian resistance is Palestinian identity. And there's no resistance without Israel and Israelis. Similarly, the Israelis came to define themselves via their conflict with the Arab world and with the Palestinians, the two parties, Palestinians and the Israelis engage in negative identity formation.
Identity politics relies on negating the other, rejecting the other, demeaning and debasing the other, humiliating the other, ignoring and denying the other, and ultimately exterminating the other, but not too fast. Because what would happen then to one's identity? One needs an enemy in order to feel that one exists. It's a form of self-harm and self-mutilation.
Israel is committing suicide by Palestinians and Palestinians are committing suicide by Israel.
It's a form of recklessness, disregard for the consequences of one's actions, no long-term foresight and planning, and no intelligence employed or deployed into any of these decisions and choices. It's short-term; it's knee-jerk; it's impulsive; it's crazy-making; it's acting out. It's decompensation, the loss of all psychological defenses, which leads to violent, externalized aggression.
And both parties, of course, react to this ongoing self-inflicted trauma the same way that individuals react to trauma. There's mood lability, elation, and then depression. There's emotional dysregulation, emotional thinking, and emotional decision-making. People are driven by negative affectivity, such as rage, envy, vengefulness, vindictiveness, and hatred.
The parties to the conflict abuse each other, and manipulate each other, as the exclusive modes of interacting with each other. They don't talk to dictate. They don't communicate. They posture. They don't shake hands. They shake guns. They don't sit down to reach a compromise. They sit down to engage in one-upmanship.
It's a zero-sum game in the sense that the other's gains are your loss. And your gains are their loss. And it's a hundred to zero. It's winner-takes-all. It's you or me.
This dichotomous thinking of black and white, good versus evil, a morality play—the parties are like actors in a play scripted by a higher power of some kind—power of history, power of their own trauma, perhaps God, but they are actors. They're not free. They're not at liberty to determine their own script, to control their own destiny, to shape their own fate.
They've handed control to the outside. They have an external locus of control, and of course, they have alloplastic defenses. They blame the other for everything that has gone wrong, for every defeat, for every failure, for every mishap, for every idiotic choice, for every malicious decision, and for the backlash and inevitable consequences and outcomes of such misbehavior and misconduct.
The parties seek to manipulate each other, exactly as abusers do. They gaslight each other. They try to cause the other party to doubt their own judgment regarding reality. They try to cast the other as crazy, insane, unreliable, demented, to be shunned and avoided because they are no longer with us, they are psychotic, or they are religious fanatics.
There's a lot of gaslighting going on, gaslighting of the other. Palestinians gaslight Israelis, especially the Israeli left, and Israelis gaslight Palestinians. There's gaslighting of the rest of the world, of course, also known as propaganda. And there's projective identification. The parties provoke each other to behave in ways that conform to their expectations.
And they need this. These provocations are not accidental, incidental, or unintended. They're premeditated. They're part of a plan. They're part of a pattern. There's a need to provoke the other in order to buttress one's self-identity, in order to remove doubts as to one's own misconduct.
Both parties, at heart, have a negative self-image. They see themselves as somewhat inadequate, somewhat bad, and somewhat wrong, and the only way to get rid of these doubts, self-doubts, the only way to reassert oneself in a position of 100% righteousness and right is to force the other party to behave in ways that remove the shame and negate the negative self-image.
So if the other party abuses you, kills you, slaughters you, and besieges you, then definitely you are the good one. And this leads, of course, to splitting. We are all good. The enemy is all bad. But how can we reassure ourselves that the enemy is all bad? Projective identification. We're going to push the enemy. We're going to provoke the enemy. We're going to make sure that the enemy behaves in horrendous, unacceptable ways. We're going to make sure that the enemy is condemned by one and all and we are going to drive the enemy to behave this way. We are going to dump our shame on the enemy. We are going to recruit the enemy to help us to feel that we are perfect, to help us with our narcissistic defenses, and fantastic, inflated, grandiose self-image.
We need our enemy to help us with this. So we need our enemy to act as an enemy. And not only just any enemy, an evil enemy, an implacable enemy, a God-hating enemy. And so both parties provoke each other to act the enemy in order to purge themselves of these bad objects, internal bad objects, the feeling that one is less than perfect.
This fleeting—we are all good, our enemies are all bad—is the exact reason why no meaningful dialogue is taking place, why all the attempts at peacemaking have failed, and why a compromise can never be struck.
The positions of both parties are maximal precisely in order to ascertain that they will never cease to be each other's enemies and lovers, as Bashevi Singer once famously wrote. Hatred and love are flip sides of the same coin. This is known as ambivalence. You love your enemy, because what are you without your enemy? Nothing. Your enemy defines you. Your enemy provides you with an identity, a purpose, and a direction. Your enemy imbues your life with meaning and makes sense of your reality. You need your enemy. Had your enemy not existed, you would have needed to invent it. The United States is doing this very often. This is the tango in which these two parties are engaged, barely on their feet, wary, dying, at least morally, if not physically, and very often physically as well, and yet unable to disentangle, to stand apart, to detach, held in each other, they lean into the horror, attempting to perpetuate it, because that is their comfort zone. That is the only thing they've known for decades now, well over a century and a half. They know no better, and they know no different. And the horrifying news is, no one can ever teach them.
At the heart of all conflicts is the inability to empathize, the incapacity to put yourself in someone else's shoes, especially your enemy's shoes, the lack of will and wish to somehow attain objectivity, neutrality, the ability to observe impartially and make decisions based on reality, including the reality of your enemy.
Wars and conflicts are the sad outcomes of our declining ability to empathize, a decline that started thousands of years ago. When the Palestinians see an Israeli, they don't see a baby. They don't see a mother. They don't see a sister. They don't ask themselves, what common experiences do we have? What things do we share…what do we share? What makes us more the same than different? They don't ask these questions. They stereotype two-dimensional cartoon figures, and they react to the stereotype. They react to the cartoonish rendition of the other, the enemy, and similarly, of course, the Israelis, tens of thousands of Palestinians work inside Israel.
Almost a million Arab Palestinians are Israeli citizens, and yet the Israelis never bother to get acquainted with the other's culture, the other's world, the other's life, the other's point of view, the other's pains, the other's wishes and dreams, including and especially broken dreams. There's no interface between Israelis and Palestinians.
Both ways—Palestinians are as guilty as Israelis in pretending that the other is less than human, in dehumanizing and objectifying the other in a way that both parties instrumentalize each other, they use each other's tools to obtain political goals, military aims, and most importantly, a sense of moral uprightness and superiority.
If you, if and when you empathize, empathy reduces aggression. Empathy prevents malevolence. Empathy is the antidote to narcissism. Narcissism is crucial in any conflict because narcissism helps you to pretend that this is a morality play in which you are good and fighting against evil, fighting to eradicate it and eliminate it, making the world a better place. Even the Nazis claimed that exterminating the Jews would make Europe a far better place. “It's for the greater good,” they said. This argument, the most pernicious, despicable, abhorrent, and abominable argument in human history, “it's for the greater good,” is a cover for the most heinous war crimes against humanity.
Anything that is for the greater good is evil because it overlooks the individual. It overlooks the inner life of human beings. Human beings are relational, they inhabit collectives, and they share, of course, many things in common, common ethos, common culture, and a society within which they function. That is all true.
But every human being shares with other human beings much more than he or she shares with the collective. Every Israeli has a lot more in common with every Palestinian than he would ever have with the state of Israel. And every Palestinian has a lot more in common with every Jew than he would ever have with Hamas collectives.
Our identity is human. We are first and foremost human beings. This should be our primary and possibly only allegiance and affiliation. We are members of the human tribe, the human species. We get up in the morning, we are hungry. We are thirsty. We are terrified. We are happy. We are joyful. We are laughing. We are making love. We are raising children. We have dreams. They get broken…promises. We experience pain and loss and we outgrow them and develop and become. This is a universal experience of Palestinians, Jews, Sikhs, Russians, Ukrainians, Americans, and Mexicans everywhere around the world who are human, who are bipedal everywhere, the same experience, 98% of what it is to be us, humans. The layers of statehood, nationality, citizenship, history, that's a veneer, it's a coat of paint. It's not who we are, it's not our essence and quintessence. We are, above all, human, and if we are given the possibility and the choice to empathize with other humans, the very concept of the enemy is dead.
The capability to live together, and collaborate, rests heavily and sometimes exclusively on the capacity to reimagine ourselves as the other, as our enemy. And it is through this reimagining, through the inhabiting of the space of the other, the world and life of the other, the mind of the other, the hopes and dreams and narratives and stories of the other, that we come together as humans.
And this is what's missing in conflicts such as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The other is demonized, and stripped of its humanity. The other is not human, it's devilish, it's evil, it's vermin, as the Nazis called the Jews. And if the other is not human, then slaughtering the other is justified, and shouldn't provoke any moral indignation, pangs of conscience, consciousness. Killing the other should be as simple as eradicating insects in your kitchen. This reduction of the other, of the enemy, into a non-human form is at the core of the atrocities that people commit. When they're engaged in conflict, we must never let that happen, whether you're Palestinian or an Israeli, a Jew or a Muslim, you must never let that happen.
Remember the humanity of the other. Try to be your enemy for one day. One hour, one minute, maybe it will stay your hand on the way to slaughtering a baby, bombing a family. Maybe if you go through this exercise a sufficient number of times, the conflict will be over.
Clarity is understanding. Understanding is consideration. Consideration could become empathetic. Empathy could end end wars. "For the want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of the shoe the horse was lost. For want of the horse the battle was lost..." Thank you, Professor Vaknin, for clarity.