Hamas, the Global Blood Libel, and What We Refuse to See

Uri Zehavi’s Rooted Truth: Israel’s Case Against the Deniers performs an essential service. At a moment when the accusation of “genocide” against Israel circulates with moral certainty and rhetorical speed, Zehavi restores the dignity of evidence. His legal and historical analysis is disciplined, serious, and necessary. His book deserves wide readership. It should be read by all who care about truth and moral responsibility.

Zehavi secures the legal, historical, and moral ground. Yet once that ground is secured, another task remains: to excavate the deeper psychological architecture that makes the libel possible in the first place.

History teaches something difficult. Factual refutation alone has never defeated a blood libel.

To understand why, we must move beneath ideology and into psychology.

Murder–Suicide, Not Martyrdom

More than two decades ago, in The Banality of Suicide Terrorism, I argued that so-called “martyrdom operations” are more accurately understood as murder–suicide. Strip away the religious rhetoric and political theater, and what remains is a distorted form of bonding — a violent fusion of self and other rooted in early developmental failure.

These acts are not simply strategic. They are relational.

The perpetrator does not experience himself as psychologically separate. He remains fused to authority figures, group identity, and imagined witnesses, particularly the mother. Violence becomes a way to secure recognition, regulate shame, and preserve belonging.

Hamas — and other jihadi movements — reveal more than they understand. They lack psychological insight. They are blinded by their own unmet developmental needs. Their rage exceeds murder itself because it is fueled by early psychological deprivation.

They believe they are demonstrating strength. Psychologically, they are exposing enmeshment and fusion.

Shame–Honor and the Maternal Bond

In shame–honor cultures, autonomy is dangerous. Separation from the mother is unconsciously prohibited. Dependency is masked as dominance.

The “heroic mother” celebrated in propaganda is often a cover story. The little boy who becomes the militant remains psychically dependent upon his mother from whom he cannot psychologically separate. The despised female — the sister, the daughter — is chronically devalued because she mirrors vulnerability and her birth did not give her mother honor only her son’s. Everyone is flooded with anxiety and rage.

This is not “culture.”This is developmental distortion reproduced socially.

The refusal to see the maternal bond also creates blind spots on our own side. In the months preceding October 7, the young IDF lookout soldiers — the tatspitaniyot — repeatedly reported anomalies along the Gaza border. Their warnings were documented, yet not fully integrated into decision-making. These were young women whose role required vigilance, attunement, and sensitivity to early warning signs. Psychologically, such perception echoes the maternal function: noticing subtle shifts before catastrophe occurs. In male-dominated hierarchies under sustained threat, this form of perception can be unconsciously devalued. What is attuned is misread as anxious; what is relational is dismissed as subjective. Refusing to examine the maternal bond leaves institutions vulnerable to ignoring precisely the kind of perception that prevents disaster. This is not an accusation. It is a psychological observation about blindness born of discomfort.

And it is not uniquely Islamic. Variants appear in domestic violence across Western shame–honor families as well. Enmeshment, humiliation, control, and conditional love are universal risk factors for aggression.

When early bonding is structured around fear, terror, anxiety and conditional acceptance, aggression becomes a language.

October 7: Ritualized Pathology

October 7 was not unprecedented in psychological structure. It was escalation through repetition.

The hostage-taking.The filmed murders of the massacre.The staged coffin ceremonies.The theatrical cruelty.

This was performance.

The violence demanded an audience.

It was directed outward at Israelis and at the world — particularly through social media — but also inward, reinforcing a culture in which suffering proves loyalty and death confirms meaning.

This is not strategy alone. It is psychological organization.

The Global Blood Libel

The global reaction revealed another layer.

Within days, Israel was recast as genocidal aggressor. Hamas was contextualized. Jewish self-defense was reframed as moral crime.

This is not new. It is the blood libel, modernized.

“The Global Intifada” functions psychologically as projection. Unprocessed rage, humiliation, ideological confusion, and dependency are displaced onto the objects: Jews and the Jewish state.

Facts become secondary. Emotional coherence becomes primary.

The libel persists not because it persuades rationally, but because it organizes anxiety — because it works by attaching itself to the primitive maternal anxieties present in every human psyche. Everybody has a mother. There is a built-in universal maternal communicative circuit, readied to receive this projection.

Even more troubling is the widespread collusion. It is terrifying to stand against a collective emotional wave. It is risky to refuse the group narrative. Denial becomes safer than clarity. Blindness becomes protective.

Why the blindness?

Because to see clearly would mean confronting developmental failure, maternal enmeshment, misogyny, and psychic dependency. That is far more threatening than repeating slogans.

Why Language Was Not Enough

I spent eight years writing The Jihadi Dictionary, beginning in 2008, cataloguing recurring symbolic and psychological patterns across jihadi movements. The work received serious scholarly recognition, including praise in the German psychoanalytic journal Psyche.

But language alone has limits.

Which is why I wrote A Soldier’s Guide to Hamas’s Genocidal Psychosis: The Unconscious in Psychological Warfare — Beyond Ideology, Before Words.

Terrorism operates through imagery. Through fragmentation. Through shock. Psychopathy disorganizes the mind. That disorganization is reflected in PTSD.

Approximately five to ten percent of soldiers and civilians exposed to such imagery will need deeper psychological integration. Naming the structure of what they are witnessing and what they have experienced reduces fragmentation. It restores symbolic order.

Stripping Away the Pageantry

My first book was originally titled The Sheikh’s New Clothes. It was meant to expose the false moral costume surrounding suicide terrorism — to strip away the rhetoric and reveal what lay beneath.

Potomac Press later renamed it The Banality of Suicide Terrorism, linking it to Hannah Arendt’s phrase. That was not my conceptual framework.

My focus has always been developmental exposure.

Once the spectacle is stripped away, the mystique dissolves.

What remains is tragic repetition — violence born of unmet early psychological needs, reenacted theatrically, defended ideologically.

What Must Be Done

Sun Tzu wrote that one must know the mind of one’s enemy. In his age he did not have the opportunity to study early childhood development, therefore it is missing from his theory.

In this case, that means understanding attachment — including the maternal bond — whether we are comfortable doing so or not.

Policy must include:• Early childhood development programs that promote autonomy and secure attachment.• Protection of girls from chronic devaluation.• Psychological literacy in military and diplomatic training.• Recognition that projection and blood libel are mechanisms of psychological displacement, not principled legal reasoning.

Without developmental clarity, policy will remain reactive.

The global blood libel cannot be defeated by facts alone.

It must be understood.