“As a Jewish Australian who spent considerable time in Israel, I noticed, decades ago, something unsettling: a hardening of emotional life and a gradual erosion of empathy toward anyone outside the Zionist frame.

This presents itself clearly, especially among the young: a bluntness in moral language, a comfort with power and a way of speaking about others that feels stripped of hesitation. This is not hidden. It is not marginal. It is part of Israeli culture as it is actually lived. You hear it in ordinary conversations, in how people describe daily encounters, in the absence of pause where you might expect reflection. It is not performed for outsiders. It is internal, habitual and widely shared across Israeli society.

People sometimes call it ‘psychopathy’. That’s not quite right. It’s something more systemic than that — and more confronting for precisely that reason, because it is produced openly, not accidentally. The instinct to pathologise it comes from discomfort, from the sense that something is off. But the more accurate way to understand it is not as deviation, but as outcome — the outcome of a specific social and ideological structure.
What is taking shape is a set of conditions that reshape how young people in Israel see others, how they use power and what they come to experience as normal. These conditions are not hidden. They are visible, repeatable and embedded in everyday Israeli life.”

independentaustralia.net/polit…

#israel #settlerColonialism #ethnicCleansing #apartheid #genocide