Genocide with Glee: Israel is the Apex of Human Sadism

The Israelis commit genocide because they enjoy it. They post their war crimes online because they are proud of them. They target children because it brings them pleasure.

Israeli IDF soldiers, often seen smiling and dancing, appear to revel in the killing, torture, and rape of innocent Palestinians.

The Nazi extermination machine was designed to kill with clinical precision. SS officers who displayed sadistic pleasure in their work were court-martialed. The Reich demanded emotionless efficiency—industrial murder stripped of human passion, conducted like an assembly line operation. Kill with scientific objectivity, they were told. No glee. No relish. Just methodical extermination.

Envying the Nazis

Today, as Israeli soldiers gun down starving Palestinians at food distribution centers—mousetraps disguised as humanitarian aid—a different kind of genocide unfolds before our eyes. This one is committed with sadistic glee, broadcast on social media, celebrated with laughter. Israeli opposition leader Yair Golan inadvertently revealed the truth when he said "our soldiers are killing children as a hobby" before the ferocious backlash forced his retraction. But the words had escaped. The mask had slipped.

Which is worse? The cold, mechanized genocide of the Nazis or the gleeful, sadistic extermination being carried out in Palestine? It is a question that haunts me as I watch Israeli soldiers post videos of themselves destroying hospitals while laughing, targeting children in the skull and chest for sport, creating elaborate death traps for the hungry and desperate, and sharing footage of their gang rapes of orphaned Palestinian children and starving women on social media.

The polling data tells us everything we need to know about Israeli society's moral collapse. Only five percent think the slaughter of the Palestinians has gone too far. Nearly half of Israeli Jews support outright genocide—not as defined by international lawyers, but in its most literal sense: when asked if Israeli soldiers should "kill everybody" when they conquer a Palestinian city, 47 percent said yes.

This is a society that has embraced eliminationist ideology with enthusiastic participation. Decades of Zionist envy —cloaked in victimhood— for the very efficiency their Nazi tormentors had displayed has finally provided the long-wished-for opportunity to wield that same genocidal power themselves. Not against the original perpetrators, of course. Those blond, Germanic Europeans have been safely rehabilitated back into the Western fold, their crimes sanitized by time. After all, systematic racial terror is, and has always been, only reserved exclusively for non-European peoples of color—whites have excluded themselves from such treatment. So the fury of the previously powerless must find new targets among the world's most vulnerable: the Palestinians, whose only crime was existing on land coveted by those who learned too well from their former executioners.

The Israeli plan for Gaza had three components: ethnic cleansing (which failed when Arab states refused to accept millions of Palestinian refugees), making Gaza permanently unlivable (which succeeded), and mass extermination as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention (which continues with growing intensity).

Gang Raping Children

But unlike the cold and calculated Nazi killing machine, this genocide is committed with visible pleasure. Israeli soldiers don't hide their sadism—they celebrate it. They create TikTok videos of their war crimes. They laugh as they blow up schools and hospitals. They design elaborate psychological torture for starving civilians, promising food aid and then opening fire when the desperate arrive. UN report after UN report documents systematic campaigns of sexual violence*: male interrogators gang-raping Palestinian women while filming their crimes, eleven-year-old girls tied naked and blindfolded to beds, crying for their parents through the night as soldiers take turns entering their cells to satisfy their depraved appetites. This is genocide as entertainment, child rape as sexual gratification, the complete merger of sadistic pleasure with state policy.

The food distribution centers epitomize this sadistic methodology. Palestinians are forced to travel miles through rubble and sniper fire to reach these supposed humanitarian sites, only to discover they are death traps. The food packets require heating, but there is no fuel. Even when Palestinians manage to obtain these packages, they often contain spoiled or inedible items. It is not mere negligence—it is calculated cruelty designed to maximize suffering before death.

Safe Spaces for Baby Killers

Consider the moral universe we now inhabit. Israeli students who participated in this genocide arrive at American universities, and when their classmates avoid them, this is labeled "antisemitism." We are told we must be "inclusive" of those who enabled or directly participated in the systematic murder of — most likely — hundreds of thousands of children. We must be "pluralistic" toward those who laughed as they targeted toddlers in the chest and skull.

Norman Finkelstein likens these students to the Nazi camp guards who imprisoned his parents. I think of my grandparents, who survived French colonial genocide in Algeria, and I know with absolute certainty that embracing the Zionist equivalents of their tormentors would constitute the ultimate betrayal of their struggle. If a French paratrooper who had voluntarily participated in the rape chambers of Algiers, who had gunned down Algerian children in the streets, who had thrown suspected "terrorists" from helicopters into the Mediterranean, had shown up at university after the war, should professors have been "inclusive" of his perspective? Should classmates have welcomed him to study groups and invited him for drinks at the campus pub? The very question answers itself—yet this is precisely what we demand of Palestinian students and their allies when we insist they embrace Israeli soldiers fresh from their killing sprees in Gaza.

Few images capture the depths of depravity in Israeli society more vividly than Israeli soldiers masturbating on the destruction of Gaza.

The question is not merely academic. These Israeli soldiers committed genocide with glee—posting their crimes on social media, joking about their killing sprees, celebrating each destroyed hospital and school. They are not soldiers following orders with reluctant compliance; they are enthusiastic participants in eliminationist warfare.

International Law is Non-Existent

The UN system died during Israel's genocide in Gaza. Not just because of the mass killing, but because Israel and the United States demonstrated that international law does not constrain imperial power. They launched wars of aggression with complete impunity, destroying any pretense that the "rules-based order" has meaning beyond propaganda.

We live in a world where might makes right, where genocide is broadcast live on social media, where the extermination of children becomes a hobby for soldiers, where starving civilians are murdered at food distribution sites, and where the international community responds with studied indifference.

The Nazi genocide was mechanized, industrial, ostensibly "scientific." The Israeli genocide is personal, gleeful, lustful, and sadistic. Both represent the depths of human evil, but there is something uniquely disturbing about genocide committed with obvious pleasure, celebrated on social media, cheered by the perpetrators' society.

Which is worse? Perhaps the question itself is obscene. Genocide is genocide, whether committed with cold efficiency or sadistic glee. The victims are equally dead. The societies that enable such crimes are equally damned.

But as I watch Israeli soldiers laugh while gunning down Palestinian children, as I read polls showing overwhelming Israeli support for total extermination, as I witness the complete collapse of international law and human decency, I cannot escape the conclusion that we are witnessing something uniquely depraved: a genocide committed not despite moral revulsion, but because of moral enthusiasm.

The Israelis commit genocide because they enjoy it. They post their war crimes online because they are proud of them. They target children because it brings them pleasure.

That observation matters. It tells us something profound about the moral abyss into which Israeli society and its Western backers have fallen, and about our own culpability in enabling monsters who rape and kill for sport while claiming victimhood.

When students avoid their Israeli classmates who participated in genocide, they are not being antisemitic. They are being human. The real question is not why decent people shun baby killers, but why we live in societies that expect us to embrace them.

- Karim

*Footnote: The pro-Palestinian movement's deafening silence on systematic sexual violence against Palestinian children, women and men represents one of its most shameful moral failures. Multiple attempts to contact Electronic Intifada about these documented atrocities have gone unanswered. Ali Abunimah mentioned the UN sexual assault report once, promising to discuss it after reading it, then allowed it to disappear into the memory hole. We know the horror of Japan's "comfort women" during World War II—many of them children—yet we learned about those crimes only decades later when survivors finally broke their silence. It is a moral disgrace that we will likely confront Israel's systematic sexual torture of Palestinian children only when it becomes sanitized history, rather than confronting this unspeakable evil while it unfolds before our eyes. The movement's selective outrage reveals a profound cowardice: apparently some war crimes are too uncomfortable to acknowledge, even when committed against the very people we claim to defend.

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