Susan Albulhawa — renowned Palestinian author of “Mornings in Jenin” (2006) and “Against the Loveless World” (2019) — gave the following remarks during an Aug. 23 webinar on “Mobilizing a military intervention to stop the genocide in Gaza.”

I want to talk about the psychology of the moment we’re in. I’m going to blow through a lot, in the interest of time. But I hope that folks can at least use the contours for further discussion and organizing.

I’ll start by stating what I believe is driving Israel at the moment. To do that, you have to understand or be attuned to Israeli internal discourse over the years. In general, there has been a persistent lament in Israeli society at all levels and across the full spectrum of their social, economic, political, academic, professional and religious lives that deeply regrets the fact that Ben Gurion [a founder and first prime minister of Israel] did not “finish the job.”

This lament continued to be echoed in subsequent missed opportunities to fully ethnically cleanse the land and effectuate further colonial, imperial expansion into more Arab lands.

One of the things that underpins their regret is the fact that history has proven to them that no matter how badly they behave, how barbaric and cruel they are and no matter how much pressure they feel in the moment, their propaganda will eventually wash away their crimes. People move on. They forget.

That’s what they count on.

These are the lessons they’ve internalized from experience of getting away with atrocities over and over again. And now they are pushing through what they believe is a once in a lifetime opportunity to steal prime land that comes with vast natural gas resources worth trillions of dollars and simultaneously obliterate the Indigenous Palestinian population they’ve been trying to get rid of for 77 years. Netanyahu is at the tail end of his life, and he knows that it’s now or never.

Decades of experiences that tell them the world’s condemnations are meaningless — that they can do whatever they want, and when the dust settles, they’ll just pour money into new PR campaigns; their stenographers at the New York Times and other major outlets will reframe history; they’ll buy new politicians; they’ll put out dozens more Hollywood films and television series that overtly and subconsciously exonerate them and paint their victims as villains, and they’ll indoctrinate a new generation that will not remember or care about this horrific moment in history, as they have done in the past.

That is what they’re counting on, and they’re counting on all of you — and all of us — to remain paralyzed, floundering in a theatre of words and performances of concern.

So no amount of our protests are going to deter this genocidal, Jewish-supremacist death machine. The past two years have already proven that. We have watched absolute catastrophic failure of every peaceful, diplomatic and legal avenue, all of which have been deliberately sabotaged by Israel and the United States.

So now, inaction is not neutrality. It is not diplomacy. It is not self preservation. It is complicity. It is the surrender of your agency as peoples and as nations. It is subordination of your moral compass and your very humanity to a fleeting political expediency, and eventually, your inaction now will prove to be your subjugation and perhaps destruction in times to come.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro understood this and summarized the implications of this moment perfectly. He said, “Gaza is a rehearsal of the future.” It is a preview of how powerful nations will respond to challenges from less powerful ones, particularly in the Global South. He said the holocaust in Gaza is an “experiment carried out by the rich great powers” to demonstrate what they will do and get away with against anyone who refuses to bend to their will or relinquish whatever they demand.

No random actions

Nothing Israel does is random. In collaboration with Europe, the United States and sycophantic Arab leaders, their behavior is calculated, and it adjusts according to scientifically studied and theorized psychological models of control, corruption, colonization and subjugation. The methods that are used to subjugate and control lions and other powerful forms of life for circuses are not very different from what they employ to subdue and break whole nations and whole societies.

When you become familiar with psychological concepts like “learned or programmed helplessness,” the “boiling frog” or “soup pot” principle, the “schoolyard bully” phenomenon and the “bystander effect,” our reality will crystalize before you, in the fullness of their nefariousness. We don’t have time to delve into these concepts, but very briefly:

“Learned helplessness” emerged from cruel electric shock experiments conducted on animals, wherein the animal is programmed to believe that no matter what they do, whether they run, protest, beg, cry, nothing will stop the painful shock from ripping through their bodies, until the animal just lays there and takes it, one blow after another after another, normalizing horrific violence.

Israel follows this mechanism to a tee. They commit a heinous crime, watch the shock and outrage from the global public, then follow it up with an even greater crime.

The end result is an exhausted public that begins to believe that nothing we do, no matter how hard we try or how passionately we believe, that we are powerless to materially change the outcomes. Thus, overwhelming violence becomes normalized, and a sense of powerlessness is internalized.

I’m sure all of you can think of so many examples where that applies.

The ‘boiling frog’

The corollary to this concept is the “boiling frog” or “soup pot” phenomenon. If you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump out immediately. But if you put it in a pot of room temperature water and slowly bring it to a boil, the frog will not perceive the gradual danger and will eventually be cooked alive. The slow, incremental escalation of violence is intentional and is calculated precisely to prevent a collective breaking point that would trigger a unified fight response.

Israel’s occupation of Palestine has been a 77-year slow boil. 

No one needs “schoolyard bully” explained to them. But there are hallmarks of this well-studied phenomenon in psychology. The bully intentionally escalates in stages and increments to avoid triggering a massive, unified resistance. The bully aims to inspire fear and seek dominance by targeting the most vulnerable and maximizing cruelty where resistance is least likely. We see this in Israel’s specific targeting of children and unarmed families; in the pogroms committed by Israeli settlers, backed by soldiers. Of course, we see completely different behavior when someone is actually able to fight back, like Iran.

The bully escalates their violence not only to maintain dominance but to test and push the limits farther each time they get away with something, and they will never be content until someone stronger, or a unified group, finally stands up to them in a meaningful way.

We see this play out over and over with Israel. They’re caught doing the unthinkable, condemnation follows, and they respond by doing something even more unthinkable. The point is to make it clear that no matter how much you protest, we will do worse; we will cross all of your red lines, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

And another hallmark is to gaslight and blame their victims. This also needs no examples. The point is not to convince but to sow doubt among the global community and to psychologically break their victims and detractors.

The final hallmark of the schoolyard bully is to reward compliance and obedience by refraining from targeting them, at least until he changes his mind. The point is to teach oppressed people that resistance leads to immediate and severe suffering, while submission will delay or possibly omit your suffering, all at their whims. We’re seeing this now with Lebanon and Jordan, in particular. 

This is where the “bystander effect” comes into play. This social and psychological phenomenon states that individuals are less likely to help a victim when other people are present. The responsibility to act becomes diffused. On a global scale, every country watches every other country, waiting for someone else to lead the intervention. This creates a paralyzing feedback loop of inaction that the aggressor or the bully crucially depends on.

The holocaust in Gaza is a clear example. The whole world sees the slaughter, the starvation, the inhumanity, the utter sadism. But the world looks to the United Nations, which is neutered by the U.S. Arab countries look to each other and collectively to the U.S. and Europe. The rest of the world hopes that by staying passive and not “rocking the boat” that they will be spared Israel’s wrath or political retribution from the U.S. Each entity, watching the others do nothing, has its own inaction reinforced.

So that is where we are. It sounds bleak, and it is, but this does not need to be the end of history. There is a way out, not just for Palestine but for the whole of the moral majority to finally break free from the yoke of a colonial elite playing chess with all of our lives in one way or another, forcing us all now to watch what our minds can scarcely comprehend being inflicted on a captive, defenseless, Indigenous civilian population.

While Israel may be scandalized by the images, they want you and me to see them. This is the experiment. This is the programming of learned helplessness.

The works of Frantz Fanon in this area are intellectually seismic events that are most relevant to the conversations and decisions that must be had at this hour. He laid it out for us – that the most insidious shackles that bind us are those within our own minds, both as individuals and as nations. We are speaking now within the confines and contours put in place by a tiny group of humans who’ve created a world order that none of us had any say in – a world order rigidly divided into civilized and savage; good and evil; first world and third world; advanced and emerging nations. Such insidious language framing our thoughts.

Fanon offered us a pathway to respond in ways that are also undergirded by scientifically studied and theorized psychological models of national and personal liberation, of decolonization and triumph.

Frantz Fanon argued (and please hear every syllable of this) that decolonization must be a violent and collective rupture.

This rupture is meant to shatter individual hope for mercy from the colonizer and replace it with a collective will to seize freedom; to seize agency and sovereignty. It is a path that forces us to recognize that our fates are tied together — that no one will be spared — and that our only hope is unified resistance.

Colonizers rewrite history

Our collective anguish before an ongoing holocaust at this hour is a deeply personal exploration of what it means to be human in the world today — a world shaped by oligarchs, sadists, corrupt leaders and an unfathomable reenactment of the kind of naked colonialism we all assumed was relegated to the past, a colonialism complete with mass slaughter, incomprehensible gore, the total stripping of agency, identity, history; the utter destruction of an ancient, Indigenous society by foreign colonizers who came to our land with their Torah in one hand and grenades in the other, stealing, killing and raping their way through history that they rewrite and replace with fairytales that they turn into school textbooks as if it’s truth.

They see this as a once in a lifetime opportunity for them to consolidate unreasonable power, but if we choose, this moment can actually be a once in a lifetime opportunity for us –for humanity – to chart a just, kinder, more sustainable, more dignified human destiny for all of us.

They put international law in place to serve their interests, to punish African and Arab leaders who stray too far from their political whims, for leaders who dare to put their own interests before the interests of this elite cabal. But when that system no longer serves them, as we are witnessing now, they just trash it, like it’s nothing. Because it was always nothing for them. It was always just a self-serving tool.

Now they have artificial intelligence and death technology no one dreamed of. They don’t need the pretense anymore, not as long as all of you remain compliant and paralyzed. The only way this ends well for any of us is through solidarity and unified action, including economic, diplomatic and, crucially, military action. It is by matching their sadistic escalations with escalation of our resistance, both in tactics and intensity.

Fanon spoke of this, and the Palestinian Resistance is a living example of what it means to refuse to live on your knees; to break the shackles of their minds; to escalate their resistance however they can; to refuse to give in to exhaustion, fear, threats and overwhelming odds.

But solidarity and unified action is the missing piece now. So yes, we’re asking you to step up to save what little remains of Gaza and the rest of Palestine. But what you might not understand is that in doing so, you’ll be saving yourselves in the end as well.