The Crocodilian Logic of Zionism
Image by Tahir osman.
Since 7 October, 2023, the Israeli government has experienced a sense of relief. It believed it no longer needed to pretend to care about Palestinians as human beings and could pursue their annihilation and dispossession openly. These have depended on two factors: international impunity, guaranteed by US imperial backing and subservient Western governments, and internal Israeli genocidal enthusiasm cultivated over decades and extending across society.
Support for dispossession depends on the ruling class’s cultivation of segregation between in-and-out groups, fearmongering and propaganda, alongside rewards for aggression, including material gains such as land and other resources, elevated social status and impunity for aggression against the constructed out-group. This manipulation of fear and reward conditions societies to accept genocide as normal, even righteous, because they have been neurologically wired to steal.
The latest example of this dynamic came when Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir proposed surrounding Ketziot prison with a moat of Nile crocodiles (Crocodylus niloticus) to guard Palestinian prisoners.
Who knows, maybe the crocs will be enticed by a benefits package similar to that of newly arrived settlers. After all, both are being recruited to help secure the Zionist frontier.
An appeal to the reptilian brain
Nile crocodiles possess extremely powerful jaws, are opportunistic carnivores, can grow up to 6.1 meters (20 feet) in length, and weigh over 450 kilograms (1,000 pounds). They typically ambush prey near waterholes before executing a “death roll” to subdue large animals (including people). Due to the crocodiles’ inability to chew their food, the roll serves as the primary mechanical tool to break bones, tear flesh and rip the hapless victim into manageable, bite-sized pieces for swallowing.
Ben Gvir’s proposal, which mimics Donald Trump’s failed Alligator Alcatraz, is tragically far from satire. In fact, the National Security Ministry has budgeted around $7 million for the construction of the moats, which are underway. This includes long-term plans for the reptiles’ maintenance and care.
For now, however, the plan has been placed on hold; not out of concern for Palestinians who may be subjected to these barbarically punitive measures, including a death roll, but because of concerns for the animals’ welfare.
The crocodile proposal offers a revealing window into how systems of domination and dehumanisation condition societies, particularly those lower on the in-group hierarchy, to derive rewards from cruelty in service of ruling-class theft.
Similar to many Israeli policies since 7 October, it functions as political theatre designed to reward the most primitive impulses associated with the brain’s emotional/ limbic system and related pathways (what is colloquially called “the reptilian brain”) of domination, fear, humiliation, revenge and schadenfreude (pleasure derived from another’s misery).
While Zionist ruling classes indulge in land and resource theft in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, Ben Gvir appeals to those for whom humiliating and abusing people perceived as inferior provides a psychological boost, reinforcing a sense of superiority.
Conscription of crocodiles also provides a political spectacle aimed at harvesting votes, a dopamine delivery system for an Israeli public conditioned to celebrate cruelty as virtue. Within this genocidal milieu, Ben Gvir reigns supreme, ascending the Israeli political hierarchy with the prime minister’s office firmly in his sights.
As Richard H. Smith details in The Joy of Pain: Schadenfreude and the Dark Side of Human Nature, a recurring theme among perpetrators is that many were themselves mistreated in the past and sought opportunities for payback. In Israeli society, however, this extends across society, with people encouraged to embody a victim mentality reinforced by the conflation of Zionism and Judaism, drawing on the historical experiences of world Jewry, from the Holocaust to the decontextualisation of Palestinian resistance to Zionist oppression and colonisation.
Indeed, schadenfreude serves as a cheap reward for aggression in service of ruling-class theft of land and other resources, as reflected by the shameless and gleeful sadism demonstrated by Israeli soldiers, particularly since 7 October, for which imperial and domestic impunity promise a lack of accountability and therefore permission and even encouragement to engage in it.
Photos of bound and blinded Palestinian civilians alongside grinning Israeli soldiers have even been used as social currency, including on dating apps.
Dehumanisation and recovery
Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist, author and revolutionary thinker, analysed how colonialism dehumanises both the oppressed and the oppressor, with the dehumanisation of the latter expressed through the humiliation and abuse inflicted upon the former.
Engagement in the destruction of Indigenous society epitomises the dehumanisation of the oppressor, which destroys the physical humanity of the oppressed while eroding its own humanity through the forsaking of what makes it human: the capacity for empathy across racial, gender and other constructed divides.
The crocodile episode reflects the extent to which Israeli Zionist society has forsaken its humanity in service of theft, and how its ruling class suppresses empathy while appealing to primitive “reptilian” neural processes of fear and reward to service its greed.
For nearly three years, the Zionist rampage has relentlessly destroyed any semblance of empathy toward the Palestinian people, replacing it with escalated dehumanisation, disgust at their culture, history and existence, and glee at their suffering. What remains is an endless descent into moral depravity and cruelty, where racism, colonial theft and capitalist individualism are celebrated as the very foundation of an identity, and escape from this construct is actively discouraged through threats of severe social and physical punishment.
This is precisely what systems of domination depend upon: convincing people that what has been conditioned is “natural” and therefore cannot be undone, or else. Yet what has been conditioned can be unlearned, and what has been wired for domination can be rewired toward empathy, solidarity and co-resistance by restructuring the social hierarchies that sustain domination.
This is the central argument of my forthcoming book with historian Ilan Pappé, Wired to Steal: Zionism and the Shaping of the Western Mind: an examination of the behavioural and neurological mechanisms through which systems of domination, including Zionism, condition people to participate in, and even derive reward from, the dispossession of others, while showing how that conditioning can be undone.
This piece first appeared in The New Arab.
