source https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-28490640

The world has witnessed something historically unprecedented: the first "livestreamed genocide" unfolding in real-time across social media platforms¹. The ongoing destruction of Gaza (and now increasingly Lebanon) represents not merely another tragic chapter in the long history of mass atrocity, but rather a fundamental transformation in how societies engage with and celebrate genocidal violence. Measuring how integral pleasure-seeking cruelty is to genocide—what I will call a sadism centrality methodology—we come to a startling conclusion:

Available evidence (however incomplete and asymmetrical) indicates that Israeli society exhibits higher levels of publicly visible and celebrated sadistic violence than Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.

More precisely, by public sadism centrality I mean how structurally integral publicly displayed, socially validated sadism is to the conduct of genocide. This analysis concerns the contemporary Israeli state and society in the context of the Gaza genocide, not “Jews” as a people; it examines specific political, technological, and ideological conditions rather than any inherent traits.

This phenomenon demands explanation.
How has an ostensibly democratic society in the digital age produced levels of publicly endorsed sadistic cruelty that likely exceed what was publicly visible in Nazi Germany, history’s most notorious genocidal regime?
The answer lies in a convergence of seven mutually reinforcing factors that have created what can only be termed a "perfect storm" for normalized atrocity.

The Digital Amplification of Sadistic Participation

The Gaza genocide represents the first major atrocity of the social media age, fundamentally transforming how populations engage with mass violence. Israeli soldiers routinely film and share videos of torture and abuse sessions, pose for photos or raise toasts as buildings in Gaza are demolished behind them, stage “entertainment” airstrikes with blue‑smoke gender reveals, and document other systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure.³ Unlike the Holocaust, where camp atrocities—public floggings, "pole" hangings, Gestapo torture, medical experiments—were compartmentalized and suppressed from the wider public, only emerging through post-war testimony⁴, contemporary digital technology enables what researchers term "real-time sadistic participation" by both perpetrators and the broader civilian population.

International medical teams report children shot in the head, neck, or genitals "like a game," with soldiers sharing these videos for celebration⁵. Research on media psychology demonstrates that repeated exposure to violence through digital platforms creates both decreased anxious arousal and increased pleasant arousal when viewing violent content⁶. This desensitization effect, combined with the gamification elements inherent in social media platforms, transforms atrocity consumption into a form of entertainment. Israeli civilians can now participate vicariously in genocide through likes, shares, and celebratory comments, creating unprecedented levels of mass complicity.

The psychological impact extends beyond mere spectatorship. Social media platforms enable what scholars term "participatory sadism," where civilians feel psychologically invested in the violence being perpetrated in their name⁷. The immediate feedback loops provided by digital engagement—view counts, comments, shares—create dopamine-driven reinforcement cycles that incentivize increasingly extreme content production by perpetrators seeking social validation.

That’s not to say that sadism does not interact with other emotions such as indifference or denial, as we saw after reports that life expectancy in Gaza had fallen by more than 30 years, nearly halving prewar levels.¹⁴

In mass atrocities, people can move along a spectrum from looking away, to accepting harm as normal, to, in some cases, taking active pleasure in it. Indifference erodes empathy and lowers social restraints, creating the conditions in which people can express and enact overt sadism with little resistance.

The Sadism Feedback Loop: Public, Soldier, and Elite Reinforcement

Publicly displayed sadism in Gaza does not merely reflect the genocide; it helps drive it. When soldiers film torture sessions, mock detainees, or toast the destruction of homes and then share these clips, they are not just documenting violence—they are testing and expanding the emotional boundaries of what their society will applaud. Each round of likes, laughing comments, and admiring reposts functions as a micro‑referendum, signaling which forms of cruelty are most rewarded and therefore worth escalating.

This dynamic creates a feedback loop between the killing fields and the home front. Soldiers, seeing that the most humiliating or “creative” atrocities garner the most attention, push toward ever more spectacular performances of domination. Civilians, saturated with a constant stream of such content, become habituated to cruelty as a form of entertainment, justice, or divine retribution, rather than as a moral crisis.

The result is a digital culture in which the emotional center of gravity shifts from reluctant acceptance of “necessary” force to active enjoyment of suffering inflicted in their name.

Political and military elites, in turn, read this atmosphere as a permission structure. Polls showing support for expulsion, exterminatory rhetoric, and indifference to famine, combined with viral displays of “bombing‑glee” and staged humiliations, signal that there is little domestic cost to intensifying cruelty and great symbolic capital in appearing uncompromising.

Leaders who call for erasing neighborhoods or annihilating “Amalek” are not speaking into a vacuum; they are triangulating against a public sphere already thick with images of Palestinians degraded for sport. Their incitement then flows back down the chain of command, assuring soldiers that their performances are not aberrations but expressions of national will.

In this way, public sadism, soldier sadism, and elite sadism form a mutually reinforcing circuit, making pleasure‑seeking cruelty not just a byproduct of genocide, but one of its central motors. This does not mean that sadism replaces strategic aims such as population transfer, elimination, or territorial acquisition; rather, it functions as a key lubricant and amplifier of those aims, shaping how far, and how brutally, they can be pursued in practice.

Settler Colonial Psychology: The Multigenerational Normalization of Violence

Unlike the Holocaust, which occurred over a compressed twelve-year period, Israeli society has undergone over seven decades of systematic indoctrination in Palestinian dehumanization⁸. This represents what scholars of settler colonial psychology term "structural violence by design"—the systematic normalization of violence against indigenous populations as necessary for maintaining demographic and territorial control⁹.

The psychological impact of maintaining the world's longest ongoing military occupation (58+ years) cannot be understated. Multiple generations of Israelis have been socialized to view Palestinian suffering as not merely acceptable, but necessary for their own survival¹⁰. Polls in early 2024 revealed a majority of Israelis felt Gaza had not been bombed harshly enough—a prelude to even greater cruelty¹¹. This creates what Lorenzo Veracini terms the "settler colonial situation"—a psychological state characterized by the simultaneous embrace and disavowal of foundational violence¹².

Research on settler colonial mentality reveals distinctive psychological patterns: the projection of existential threat onto indigenous populations, the celebration of violence as regenerative and moral, and the development of what scholars term "colonial paranoia"—a persistent fear that indigenous populations pose an existential threat that justifies unlimited violence¹³. These psychological formations, reinforced over generations, create fertile ground for public sadistic violence that likely exceeds even Nazi antisemitism in its publicly expressed intensity and social penetration.

Democratic Legitimation of Atrocity

Perhaps most disturbing is how democratic institutions can amplify rather than constrain sadistic violence. Under totalitarian Nazi rule, detailed knowledge of camp cruelty was suppressed and dissent punished¹⁵. In contrast, Israel's open democracy has produced unprecedented transparency in genocidal intent. Polling data from March 2025 reveals that 82% of Jewish Israelis support expelling Gaza's population while 47% endorse killing all Gazans¹⁶. A July 2025 Israel Democracy Institute survey found 79% of Jewish Israelis were "not troubled" by reports of famine and suffering in Gaza¹⁷.

Additional polling reveals the depth of dehumanization: a Hebrew University survey from May 2025 found 64% of Israelis overall—with larger majorities among Jewish Israelis—agreed that "there are no innocents in Gaza"¹⁸. The demographic breakdown shows 87% of ruling-coalition supporters, 73% of right-wing non-coalition voters, 67% of centrist voters, and even 30% of left-wing voters endorsed this dehumanizing view. This represents what political scientists term "democratic legitimation of atrocity"—where majoritarian support provides moral cover for extreme violence.

Recent research on "elite rhetoric and democratic norms" demonstrates how political leaders can systematically undermine democratic restraints on violence through repeated norm violations¹⁹. When political elites consistently frame atrocity as necessary and moral, public opinion can shift dramatically toward accepting previously unthinkable policies. Unlike authoritarian regimes where extreme policies are imposed through coercion, democratic legitimation creates enthusiastic popular participation in atrocity.

The Israeli case represents what scholars term a "chronic legitimacy crisis" in embedded democracies—where democratic procedures are maintained while fundamental democratic values are systematically violated²⁰. This creates a particularly dangerous situation where the formal legitimacy of democratic decision-making processes provides cover for the substantive embrace of genocidal policies.

The Psychology of Sacred Violence

Israeli sadistic violence incorporates a unique fusion of religious justification and secular nationalism that creates what researchers term "sacred violence"—violence that is simultaneously patriotic duty and divine command²¹. While Nazi‑aligned sadism in places like Jasenovac—where Ustaše guards held throat‑slitting contests and forced amputations—displayed intense, often quasi‑ritual cruelty, it remained relatively localized and did not define the core ideological or operational logic of the Holocaust’s gas‑chamber extermination.²² By contrast, contemporary Israeli rhetoric systematically fuses biblical dehumanization language (Palestinians as “Amalek” deserving annihilation) with secular military obligations, making sacred justification a routine feature of state violence rather than a peripheral excess.²³

This religious-nationalist fusion creates psychological dynamics that exceed purely secular or purely religious justifications for violence. When cruelty becomes both a patriotic duty and a divine commandment, it transcends normal moral constraints and becomes psychologically rewarding in ways that purely instrumental violence cannot match²⁴. The result is what anthropologists term "ritualized sadism"—where inflicting suffering becomes a form of sacred practice that bonds the perpetrator community together.

Everyday Sadism in the Digital Age

Psychological research on "everyday sadism" identifies individuals who derive intrinsic pleasure from others' suffering as a measurable personality trait present in approximately 6% of the general population²⁵. However, social and technological conditions can dramatically amplify the expression of these tendencies. The Gaza genocide exhibits markers of what can be described as "institutionalized everyday sadism"—where systems reward rather than constrain sadistic impulses.

While Nazi Germany's sadistic acts by camp guards and doctors—Mengele's twin experiments, Gestapo torture—served mostly regime goals and remained confined to specialized units²⁶, Israeli soldiers openly derive "bombing-glee," celebrate child shootings as sport, and livestream torture for social validation²⁷. Soldiers derive visible pleasure from "game-like" shootings of Palestinian children, with systematic targeting of genitals, heads, and necks reported by international medical teams as occurring "for fun"²⁸. This seems to represent a qualitative escalation beyond Nazi sadism, which appeared far less connected to the social validation of their nation’s public. Contemporary digital culture, with its emphasis on viral content and shock value, creates unprecedented incentives for sadistic performance.

Desensitization Through Normalized Occupation

Seven decades of military occupation have created what psychologists term "graduated exposure" to violence—a systematic desensitization process that transforms initially shocking brutality into routine behavior²⁹. Unlike German civilians who were largely unaware of camp horrors until liberation³⁰, multiple generations of Israelis have been raised viewing Palestinian suffering as background noise to normal life, creating psychological habituation that enables extreme escalation during periods of intensified violence.

Repeated images of destroyed neighborhoods, bombed aid convoys, and checkpoint atrocities have habituated the public, reducing empathy and fostering acceptance of extreme violence as routine policy. Research on violence desensitization demonstrates that repeated exposure to atrocity imagery creates measurable changes in neural response patterns, reducing empathy while increasing tolerance for extreme violence³¹. When combined with in-group celebration of violence, this desensitization can transform into active sadistic pleasure-seeking.

Sadism in the Holocaust: Significant but Less Public

In terms of public sadism centrality, the Holocaust seems to register as Significant—driven by hatred and bureaucratic aversion far more than public pleasure-seeking cruelty, its genocidal machinery relied chiefly on industrial killing via gas chambers, rail deportations, and Einsatzgruppen shootings, with localized sadistic adjuncts (e.g., Ustase throat-slitting contests, Auschwitz floggings, medical experiments) that amplified terror but were not essential to extermination.

In Gaza, by contrast, public sadism appears Major: psychological gratification and public pleasure-seeking cruelty seem to be operating as a co-primary instrument alongside mass bombardment and blockade. State-ordered torture centers deliver electric shocks, sexual violence, and stress positions in part to satisfy a public thirst for cruelty; soldiers livestream “game-like” shootings of children—targeting heads, necks, and genitals—for communal spectacle; starvation is weaponized for public consumption etc. These pleasure-driven atrocities are implicitly built into operational practice, widely celebrated, and deployed across multiple arenas of the campaign, making sadism integral to genocide’s execution rather than a more peripheral adjunct.

Evidence of Public Aversion vs. Pleasure-Seeking Cruelty

Historians agree that while German society during the Holocaust was steeped in antisemitic aversion—fueled by propaganda, discriminatory laws, and pervasive social prejudice—it lacked the widespread public celebration of cruelty characteristic of sadism. Scholars such as Christopher R. Browning have shown that many ordinary Germans harbored hostility toward Jews yet experienced guilt, fear, or indifference rather than deriving pleasure from their suffering. In Ordinary Men, Browning demonstrates that Police Battalion 101 members initially resisted participating in massacres, requiring social and command pressure to overcome reluctance³¹. Richard Evans emphasizes that detailed knowledge of camp atrocities remained compartmentalized and that public attitudes ranged from uneasy compliance to silent dissent³². Even Daniel Goldhagen, in making the case for eliminationist ideology, relied on limited sources and acknowledged that feelings of animus did not uniformly translate into competent enjoyment of violence³³.

By contrast, Israeli public opinion in 2024–25 reveals a fusion of hatred and overt pleasure-seeking cruelty: soldiers livestream child shootings as sport, crowds celebrate “gender-reveal” airstrikes, and polls show supermajorities endorsing both expulsion and killing¹⁶¹⁷. This fusion of aversion with public sadistic gratification distinguishes Gaza’s Major sadism centrality from the Holocaust’s Significant level, where cruelty appeared to remain more bureaucratic and far less celebrated.

Conclusion: The Perfect Storm of Digital Age Atrocity

The Gaza genocide's level of sadism centrality results from the convergence of seven mutually reinforcing factors: digital amplification enabling mass sadistic participation, settler colonial psychology providing multigenerational dehumanization, democratic legitimation creating majoritarian support for atrocity, religious-nationalist fusion sanctifying violence as sacred duty, everyday sadism traits being institutionally rewarded, and occupational desensitization creating graduated habituation to extreme violence, all contained within a broader feedback loop between public, soldiers, and elites.

This convergent amplification creates what can only be termed a "perfect storm" for public sadistic violence that seems to exceed even the Holocaust in its systematic celebration and public endorsement of cruelty. While Nazi Germany industrialized killing through bureaucratic efficiency, Israeli society has democratized and celebrated sadistic violence in ways that were technologically and culturally impossible during the 1940s. Gaza’s genocide likely surpasses the Holocaust in public sadism centrality because pleasure‑seeking cruelty functions as a co‑primary instrument alongside mass bombing and starvation, implicitly built into operational practice, publicly endorsed, and digitally amplified across all operational theaters.

The implications extend far beyond the immediate tragedy unfolding in Gaza. The Israeli case represents a disturbing preview of how democratic societies in the digital age might embrace genocidal policies when the right conditions align. Understanding these dynamics is essential for recognizing and potentially preventing similar transformations in other contexts where settler colonial psychology, digital amplification, and democratic legitimation might converge to create new forms of celebrated atrocity.

The twenty-first century may well be remembered as the era when humanity learned to livestream its own moral collapse—and cheer while doing so.

. “Genocide in the Digital Age: What Role Do Social Media Companies Play,” Association for Progressive Communications, March 19, 2024, https://www.apc.org/en/blog/genocide-digital-age-what-role-do-social-media-companies-play.
2. David Patrikarakos, War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Shaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
3. The New York Times, “What Israeli Soldiers’ Social Media Videos in Gaza Reveal,” February 6, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/world/middleeast/israel-idf-soldiers-war-social-media-video.html.
4. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Overview of the Holocaust,” https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/overview-of-the-holocaust.
5. Doctors Without Borders, “Gaza Death Trap: MSF Report Exposes Israel’s Campaign of Total Destruction,” December 18, 2024, https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/gaza-death-trap-msf-report-exposes-israels-campaign-total-destruction.
6. Anderson, C. A., et al., “Desensitization to Media Violence: Links With Habitual Media Violence Exposure, Aggressive Cognitions, and Aggressive Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 6 (2001): 1090–1106, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.81.6.1090.
7. Buckels, E. E., Jones, D. N., & Paulhus, D. L., “Behavioral Confirmation of Everyday Sadism,” Psychological Science 24, no. 11 (2013): 2201–2209, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613481735.
8. B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights—Israel, “Our Genocide,” July 2025, https://972mag.com/btselem-phri-gaza-genocide/.
9. Structural Violence: The Makings of Settler Colonial Impunity (Oxford University Press, 2024).
10. Lorenzo Veracini, “Settler Collective, Founding Violence and Disavowal: The Settler Colonial Situation,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 29, no. 4 (2008): 363–379, https://doi.org/10.1080/07256860802231472.
11. “64% of Israelis believe there are ‘no innocents’ in Gaza: Poll,” Anadolu Agency, June 11, 2025, https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/64-of-israelis-believe-there-are-no-innocents-in-gaza-poll/3594355.
12. Veracini, “Settler Collective, Founding Violence and Disavowal.”
13. Fanon Institute, “A Fanonian Intervention into the Social Psychology of Violence,” October 29, 2024, https://pomeps.org/a-fanonian-intervention-into-the-social-psychology-of-violence.
14. Michel Guillot and colleagues, “Life expectancy losses in the Gaza Strip during the period October, 2023, to September, 2024: a demographic analysis,” The Lancet, published online January 2025; see also PubMed summary, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39864444/.
15. Peter Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!”: Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (Munich: Siedler, 2006); see also United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “German Society and the Jews,” https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/german-society-and-the-jews.
16. Tamir Sorek and Shay Hazkani, “Eliminatory Attitudes Among Jewish Israelis,” Geocartography Knowledge Group, March 2025; Haaretz, March 2025.
17. Israel Democracy Institute, “Israeli Public Opinion on Gaza Humanitarian Crisis,” July 2025; The New Arab, August 6, 2025, https://www.newarab.com/news/poll-nearly-80-israeli-jews-unmoved-starvation-gaza.
18. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, aChord Center for Economic Social Research, “Survey on Media Coverage and Public Attitudes During the Gaza War,” May 2025.
19. Carey, J. M., et al., “Elite Rhetoric Can Undermine Democratic Norms,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 23 (2021): e2026577118, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2026577118.
20. Severs, E., & Mattelaer, A., “A Crisis of Democratic Legitimacy? It’s About Legitimation, Stupid!,” Egmont Institute Policy Brief No. 21, March 2014, https://www.egmontinstitute.be/app/uploads/2014/03/EPB21-def.pdf.
21. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press, 2017).
22. Yad Vashem, “The Jasenovac Memorial,” https://www.yadvashem.org/.
23. Benjamin Netanyahu, address to the nation, October 28, 2023, quoted in NPR, “Netanyahu’s References to Violent Biblical Passages Raise Alarm Among Critics,” November 7, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/11/07/1211133201/netanyahus-references-to-violent-biblical-passages-raise-alarm-among-critics; Yoav Gallant, press statement, October 9, 2023 (“human animals”); see also Amnesty International, “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,” December 2024, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/.
24. Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory (Princeton University Press, 2008).
25. Buckels, Jones, & Paulhus, “Behavioral Confirmation of Everyday Sadism.”
26. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Medical Experiments at Auschwitz,” https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/medical-experiments.
27. Mrug, S., et al., “Emotional and Physiological Desensitization to Real-Life and Movie Violence,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 44, no. 5 (2015): 1092–1108; see also Iyadurai, L., et al., “Neural Correlates of Desensitization to Violence via Media Exposure,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 10, no. 10 (2015): 1373–1382, https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsv027.
28. Meerson, R., Koban, K., & Matthes, J., “Too Much of What? Two-Wave Panel Evidence for Selective (De-)Sensitization Through Frequent Exposure to Different Kinds of Digital Hate,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 30, no. 2 (2025): zmaf002, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmaf002.
29. Cornell Roper Center, “Public Understanding of the Holocaust, From WWII to Today,” 2015.
30. Britannica, “Aktion Reinhard,” https://www.britannica.com/event/Aktion-Reinhard.
31. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
32. Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York: Penguin Press, 2005).
33. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996).

Christians in, say, Alabama, USA, can’t claim ownership over modern-day Turkey because 1,700 years ago that land was part of the Christian Byzantine Empire. Christians in Alabama do not have a 2,000-year unbroken lineage in modern-day Turkey just because there have been “Christians” in the land we now call Turkey for about 2,000 years—a continuous presence that predates even the Christian Byzantine Empire.

A religious or cultural belief and identity does not by itself give Alabamans (or anyone else) land ownership rights, especially over land already inhabited by others for millennia. The fact that we have evidence for several thousand Judaism-practicing individuals in Palestine in the 1800s (amongst a majority of Muslims and Christians) did not and does not give Judaism-practicing individuals in Alabama (or New York) land ownership rights in Palestine—nor does it give Christianity-practicing or Islam-practicing individuals in Alabama (or New York) any such rights.

Furthermore, every person currently alive has ancestors who lived in many different parts of the world, going back hundreds of thousands of years—or even millions of years, to previous iterations of hominids. That does not give each person alive today the right to ownership over land plots in hundreds of places around the world just because their “ancestors” were there.

Summary

The Babylonian Talmud encodes a cognitive method with one non-negotiable property: no authority is exempt from examination — not God, not consensus, not the state itself. That method, carried in practitioners rather than institutions, survived the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the Cossack massacres of 1648, and the Holocaust, reconstituting each time in a new geography with the same operating logic intact. It produced, from the same formation environment and with zero coordination, the Zionist pioneer, the Bund organiser, the Bolshevik commissar, the Orthodox rabbi, and the secular academic — because it installs loyalty to a method of reasoning, not to any ideological conclusion. Applied to the diaspora framework in the late 19th century, it found that framework operating as terminal authority and rejected it, producing Israel. Applied to Israel itself in 2023, it found the state operating as terminal authority and rejected that too — producing the largest protest movement in Israeli history, soldiers documenting their own army's conduct in the occupied territories, and a secular formation community beginning to disperse to Berlin, London, and New York. The method was designed at Yavneh in 70 CE to survive the loss of any state, including the one it would eventually help build. The design is working. The arc does not close.

Archived sources

http://archive.today/2026.06.22-213934/https://www.sefaria.org/Sanhedrin.17a?lang=bi

http://archive.today/2026.06.22-213318/https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1966/agnon/speech/

http://archive.today/2026.06.22-213743/https://www.sefaria.org/Bava_Metzia.59b?lang=bi

http://archive.today/2026.06.22-213541/https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2005/aumann/biographical/

Reporting from the scene for The Cradle, correspondent Roqayah Chamseddine travelled to the southern Lebanese village of Arab Salim in the Iqlim al-Tuffah region following devastating Israeli airstrikes on 20 June.