The bizarre reflex to inflict maximum pain on others to try and erase or at least mute one’s own shame. What if it’s tribal baptism by the blood of others? What if Palestinians have to die in a macabre national ‘rite of passage’ to cement Israeli identity in brutal force and not the victim image of the Holocaust?

It seems that jewish Israelis are haunted by the warped idea that the Jews of Europe meekly let themselves be shot in ditches, starved, worked to death, gassed and burned. Those people never had a chance against the nazi death machine and I think only jewish Israelis are actually ashamed of how those people were murdered.

Israeli violence can’t be so much about the land alone. Gaza is tiny and the worst ruin on earth. What’s left of Palestinian lands in the West Bank are reservation scraps. It must be that the pain that goes with stealing land is not a byproduct, it’s the main objective.

It explains why kids have to be tormented every day, every day also before Oct 7. It explains the mocking, the insane choice of weapons, the denial of food and basic hygiene, the bestial treatment of prisoners. Israelis have to prove they have earned their seat at the national table by making others suffer, preferably by directly being involved in the murders (shooting a child in the head makes you tier 1), by cheering it on, or at least by not opposing it in any way (weak, but tacit support is better than any opposition to it)

Simply put, the genocide is a kind of ritual to have clarity about what it really means to embrace the Israeli identity and a proof of belonging.

If you liked or at least greenlit the insane level of blood and pain, you are ‘one of us’.

It’s national purification by the blood of others.