“We Need This Blood”

Some Thoughts on The Meaning of Blood in Hamas’s Psychotic Mind

This post was originally written as post 48 of a series of War Blog Posts following October 7th. It is substantially revised and will be part of a series with the next blog posts.

Elsewhere I have written about the way Hamas and jihadi terror reduce human beings to fragments and objects — how the body becomes weapon, message, and political instrument of horror. Today I want to go deeper, into something more intimate and more ancient than strategy: blood. What it means. What it costs. What it can, against all reasonable expectation, create.

This is also a story about a dying man’s gift, a five-star hotel in Tunisia where women were not permitted their own rooms, a PLO professor who became my unwitting roommate, and Yasser Arafat in exile just down the road. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Hamas Declares Its Need

In orchestrating the mayhem of October 7th, Hamas sought to provoke Israel into a major land invasion of Gaza. A core pillar of this strategy was to engineer high numbers of Palestinian casualties. This was not a tragic miscalculation. It was the design. Hamas’s political leader in Doha, Ismail Haniyeh, confirmed it himself, bluntly, in a video address days after the massacre:

“We are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit, so it awakens within us resolve, so it awakens within us the spirit of challenge and [pushes us] to move forward.”

There it is. Not a slip. Not a euphemism. A declaration. Hamas does not simply tolerate Palestinian casualties — it requires them. Blood is not collateral damage in their calculus; it is the engine. Palestinian bodies falling in sufficient numbers would generate international outrage, sustain the revolutionary narrative, and keep Hamas politically alive. This is what the psychoanalyst in me recognizes as a death-driven organization: one that feeds on loss because loss is the only fuel it knows.

On Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, sirens cut the air. The country stands still. Families go to graves. The word blood — dam — hangs over everything. I want to talk about what blood actually means, psychoanalytically and culturally, because Haniyeh’s statement is one of the most revealing windows into the jihadi psyche we have ever been handed in plain language. And I want to tell you the story of how I came to understand it — not through a text, but through an act.

Literally Giving Blood

For most of my adult life, I understood blood the way most Western secular people do: biologically and metaphorically. Blood ties meant family. Bloodshed meant violence. Giving blood meant a civic donation, a needle and a biscuit afterward. I had grown up inside a family structure that functioned like a clan — hierarchical, loyalty-bound, with its own internal codes about who mattered and who didn’t. As the youngest and the littlest female of two, I occupied the lowest rung. I was the scapegoat. And yet, all of that intimacy with clan dynamics had not taught me what blood truly meant to people who live inside shame–honor cultures. I had been close to the fire without feeling its heat.

The education I needed would come from an unlikely source: a man who, for a long time, refused to acknowledge I existed.

Before I went to the University of Minnesota, I had been studying Ladino — Old Spanish written in Hebrew script, the language the Sephardic Jews carried into exile after 1492. I wanted to deepen that work by studying its mirror image: aljamía, Old Spanish written in Arabic script, the tradition the Muslims carried with them when they too were expelled. The two are twins separated at the Expulsion — the same vernacular tongue, bifurcated into two scripts, two diasporas, two silences. To understand one properly, I felt I needed to understand the other. There was one scholar in the country who had the expertise I needed. I wrote to him three times. He never answered a single letter.

I applied to Minnesota anyway. I was awarded a Bush Fellowship — a full doctoral scholarship — and I went. He became my dissertation advisor.

He was a Lebanese Christian raised in Bogotá, Colombia, his family part of the great Levantine trading diaspora that had spread through Latin America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — Lebanese and Syrian Christians who brought with them their commercial networks, their Arabic, their Maronite faith, and a social world organized entirely around blood: family honor, clan loyalty, the obligations of kinship that crossed oceans and generations without loosening their grip. He had grown up inside that world. He carried it in his bones even as he became one of the foremost scholars of medieval Islam in the Western academy. He wrote the classic history of Muslim Spain — the standard text on the subject, the book anyone in the field knows. His history was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1973 and yet there was not one word of jihad in it. When Tariq ibn Zayd invaded with his army in 711 AD it was as if he came as a tourist. Yet this scholar was the man I had needed to find, and he had not answered my letters.

He had not wanted to train me because I was a Jew, though he never said so directly. The answer was in the silence. The unanswered letters had already made his position plain; now he confirmed it in person. And yet, for reasons neither of us fully articulated, we proceeded. The relationship was not easy. There was friction in it, wariness, the particular tension of two people from communities with a long, unresolved, and bloody history trying to do serious intellectual work in close proximity. I monitored myself carefully. I kept showing up.

Then he fell gravely ill. A blood cancer specific to the Mediterranean gene pool. The diagnosis carried an irony I did not miss: this man, for whom blood and lineage were the organizing architecture of the social world, was being destroyed from within by his own blood.

As a Jew, I began to visit him — practicing bikur kholim, the mitzvah of visiting the sick, one of the obligations that Jewish tradition considers among the most fundamental expressions of human solidarity. I went approximately every ten days. I baked angel food cakes, which were easy to digest, and brought them. He was undergoing transfusions. There was an amputation. The visits were not easy. He was not a man who accepted vulnerability graciously, and illness had not softened him. But I kept coming.

One afternoon as I was leaving, I stopped at the door. His wife was standing there. Something moved in me — not a thought, exactly; more like an instinct rising past the careful, watchful part of myself that had always been on guard around him. I turned to her and asked:

“Do you need me to give blood?”

She teared up. I heard myself say: “Consider it done.”

I went to the hospital. I gave blood. It was credited to his account. The next time I came to visit, something in the room had shifted in a way I cannot fully describe except to say that the wariness was gone. Not softened — gone. In the world he came from — Lebanese, Levantine, organized around the sacred obligations of kinship — I had crossed a threshold. I had given of my body. I had made myself, in the most literal biological sense his culture recognized, family. Not through argument. Not through years of demonstrated loyalty. Through blood, offered freely. The oldest currency there is.

A Dying Man’s Gift: La Marsa, Tunisia

As he was dying, he did something I did not expect. He gave me his invitation to present at an academic conference funded by the Saudis in La Marsa, Tunisia.

I want you to sit with what that means. This man — who had not answered my letters, who had not wanted to train me because I was a Jew, who came from a world in which blood determined who was inside the circle and who was not — was now, as he lay dying, handing me his place at the table. Entry purchased with blood. My blood, given to him. Now returned to me as passage into a world that had no reason to receive me.

The conference was large — perhaps three hundred scholars. It was held at a gorgeous five-star hotel on the Mediterranean coast. And I was the only Jew.

The hotel management informed the conference that women could not have their own rooms. I was assigned a roommate: a professor of Spanish at Indiana University, pleasant, professional, scholarly. We shared the room without incident. I found out later that she was a member of the PLO.

And Yasser Arafat was in La Marsa. He had been expelled from Lebanon following the 1982 war and had relocated the PLO’s base of operations to Tunisia. He was there, just down the road, while I — a Jewish woman who had given blood to a Lebanese Christian scholar in Minnesota — sat in a five-star hotel presenting academic research to three hundred people, none of whom were Jewish, with a PLO member sleeping in the bed next to mine.

I have never forgotten the particular quality of that surreality. The Mediterranean outside the window. The scholarship inside the room. Arafat somewhere nearby, presiding over his exile. And me, there because a dying man had decided that the blood I had given him was worth repaying.

That is what blood given — rather than shed — can do. It can open doors that were not built for you. It can move you into rooms where you have no business being, by any ordinary accounting. It can make you, against all logic, someone’s representative.

Three Faiths at One Funeral

When he died, I was asked to eulogize him at his funeral.

There was a muezzin. There was a priest. And there was me — a Jewish woman, a rav from Riga's granddaughter, a psychoanalyst who had spent her career trying to understand the minds that produce terror. Three Abrahamic faiths stood at one grave, and I spoke for the Jews.

I quoted from Job — the great question from the Hymn to Wisdom, chapter 28, verse 12:

וְהַחָכְמָה מֵאַיִן תִמָּצֵא וְאֵי זֶה מְקוֹם בִינָה

V’ha-chokhmah me’ayin timatzeh, v’ei zeh makom binah

“But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?” — Job 28:12

It was a generous quote. Spoken at the grave of a man who had spent his life searching precisely there — in the borderlands between languages, between civilizations, between peoples who had every reason not to speak to one another. He had found it, imperfectly, humanly, in that difficult and irreplaceable place. And I, the Jew he had not wanted to train, was the one who said so.

He had been a Lebanese Christian steeped in the study of Islam, a Latin American by formation, a medievalist by vocation — a man who had spent his life at the crossroads of civilizations and had not always been at ease there. He had not wanted to train a Jew. And in the end, all three of the traditions that claim Abraham as their father came to bury him together. There was no violence in that room. There was grief, and respect, and the ancient human recognition that a life had mattered.

I think about Haniyeh’s words — “We are the ones who need this blood” — and I think about standing at that grave. Blood can be shed. Blood can also be given. The same substance, the same irreducible bodily reality, and the difference between those two acts is the whole distance between civilization and its destruction. One act obliterates. The other, quietly, without ceremony, makes family where there was none. Makes a place for you at a conference in Tunisia. Makes you the one who speaks at the funeral.

Blood Shedding for Vengeance

Like a vampire, Hamas wants blood — but only to spill it. Hamas inhabits a delusional world in which blood is simultaneously the currency of honor, the proof of sacrifice, and the mechanism of political power. It is the most primitive possible organization of meaning, and it is entirely serious — and yet it is also grounded in the magical thinking of a child who is developmentally arrested before separating from his mother.

The jihadi lives in a completely imaginary world constructed around the demonization of the other. The narrative is so distorted that terror becomes, within its own logic, a form of self-defense. This is what makes it so resistant to rational argument: the psychotic system is internally consistent. It has its own hermetic logic. You cannot reach it from the outside through facts, because facts are precisely what it has organized itself to exclude.

In shame–honor cultures, blood shed for vengeance is not merely permitted — it is morally required. Honor that has been stained can only be cleansed through willful bloodshed. Nothing else will do it. Not apology, not time, not negotiation. Only blood answering blood. This is why Hamas cannot accept a ceasefire as a resolution: resolution would deprive them of the very thing they have declared they need.

Blood, Social Media, and Mass Contagion

Hamas understands, with a kind of operational cold-bloodedness, how to weaponize this psychology at scale. Like mass hysteria, the jihadis play on group terrors, coupling them with sadism and the primitive pull of copy-cat identification. The Internet and social media are exquisitely designed for this kind of contagion. An image of blood travels faster than any argument. It bypasses cognition entirely and lands directly in the body.

The gore of October 7th was not incidental to the operation. It was a broadcast. Hamas filmed it, distributed it, watched it go viral. They understood that images would do political work no manifesto could accomplish. Primitive identifications — us and them, victim and perpetrator, blood demanding blood — travel at the speed of a share. In this sense Hamas is not medieval. It is entirely contemporary, exploiting the architecture of modern attention for the most archaic of drives.

Bloody Bonding and the Mother

The jihadis engage in what I can only call violent bonding with their enemies. This is not symbolic. It is enacted through bloodshed in the most literal sense: they bond by killing, by dying, by ensuring that blood flows on both sides. The bond is real, even if it is a bond of horror.

Underneath this is a deeper psychoanalytic reality: the jihadi is always trying to sever the tie with the mother’s body. The mother, in shame–honor cultures, is the site of the most profound ambivalence. She is the source of life, of blood, of the earliest bond — and she is also feared, because she represents a dependency the culture codes as shameful for a male. Only a female body gives birth; only a female body bleeds in ways that are visible and monthly and beyond control. That body is terrifying. The jihadi is stuck in what I think of as a permanent twilight zone: unable to fully separate, unable to fully attach healthily, oscillating between the two in a state of chronic psychological emergency that expresses itself outward as violence.

A newborn experiences the world somatically. Thought is built from the body outward. In shame–honor cultures, the earliest needs — for consistent attunement, for holding, for the slow building of a self that can bear frustration — are systematically unmet. What grows in that space is not resilience but aggression, organized around the bodily substances — blood above all — that mark the first experiences of life and death.

Victim–Victimizer–Victimization

Jihadis perceive themselves as victims while acting as perpetrators. This psychological inversion is not cynical performance — for many of them it is genuinely felt. The paranoid position organizes the world into persecutors and persecuted, and once you are lodged inside it, every act of aggression appears as self-defense. Hamas killed 1,200 people on October 7th and experienced it as resistance. This is not a rhetorical sleight of hand. It is the structure of a psychosis.

This inversion is also what makes Hamas legible — even sympathetic — to outside audiences who do not examine it closely. The language of victimhood is universally resonant. Hamas speaks it fluently while deliberately engineering the conditions that produce Palestinian suffering, then pointing at that suffering as proof of its own victimhood. The circle is closed. The dead Palestinian children are both product and evidence.

The Bloody Business of Hamas

Hamas has destroyed its own people. This is not a byproduct of their strategy. It is, as Haniyeh admitted in plain language, the strategy itself. The blood of Palestinian civilians is their most valuable political resource, and they spend it without hesitation or remorse.

Serious consideration must be given to the early childhood environments that produce this psychology — not as an excuse, but as an explanation that might eventually lead somewhere more useful than endless repetition of the same cycles. The delusional fixation on blood, shame, and vengeance was not inflicted on Hamas by Israel. It is a pathology that Hamas has cultivated, systematized, and taught to children for generations. Gaza’s children are its primary victims, long before any Israeli soldier enters the picture.

To Conclude

I stood at my dissertation advisor’s grave between a muezzin and a priest and spoke for the Jews. I had given my blood to a Lebanese Christian scholar from Bogotá who had not answered my letters and had not wanted to train me — and in giving that blood I had become family. As he lay dying, he gave me his seat at a conference in La Marsa, Tunisia, where I sat as the only Jew among three hundred scholars, with a PLO professor as my roommate and Arafat down the road in exile. And when he died, I eulogized him, while a muezzin and a priest stood witness.

None of that was written in any script I could have predicted. It was written in blood. Offered freely, without calculation, at a doorway in Minnesota.

That is what blood can do when it is given rather than shed.

Hamas knows only one direction for blood to flow. That is the true measure of what we are fighting: not only a military organization or a political movement, but a system of meaning organized entirely around death — one that will consume its own people as readily as it tries to consume its enemies, because it has declared, in its own words, that this is what it needs.

The bloodiness of October 7th will forever be engraved in the minds of their neighbors — we Israelis. I hold that truth alongside the other: that blood, offered freely across every line that ought to divide, can transform a relationship, cross a threshold, put a Jewish woman in a room in Tunisia, and make, however briefly, a world in which three faiths stand together without violence.

We are capable of both. Hamas has chosen.

This post also appears in AI Hebrew, Portuguese and French translation at nancyharteveltkobrin.substack.