The Psychology of Genocide: Inside Israel’s Machinery of Violence

A landmark report from the Journal on Rehabilitation of Torture Victims and Prevention of Torture (also known as the Torture Journal) brings unprecedented focus to Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories, exposing how the Israeli occupation of Palestine, collective trauma, and social conditioning intertwine to make torture and genocide possible. The latest double issue of the Torture Journal, Vol. 35 Nos. 2–3 (2025) marks a watershed moment in the study of torture, violence, and state oppression. For the first time in its three-decade history, the journal dedicates an entire volume to a single conflict: the ongoing Israeli occupation and its catastrophic impact on Palestinian life.

Founded by the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT), the Torture Journal publishes peer-reviewed research on torture, rehabilitation, and prevention. Its mission is primarily to document abuses, strengthen survivor care, and build international accountability mechanisms. The 2025 double issue (Vol. 35 Nos. 2–3) focuses entirely on Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

REPORT: One occupation, two realities: Psychosocial mechanisms that make genocidal acts possible, by the Torture Journal Editor-in-Chief, Pau Pérez-Sales (Source: The Royal Library of Denmark)
12453-3257-PB

The Social Psychology of Genocide

In his haunting editorial, Dr Pau Pérez-Sales asks a question rarely posed in legal or diplomatic debates: How does a society learn to accept the unacceptable?

His essay, “One Occupation, Two Realities,” examines the Israeli occupation of Palestine as not just a geopolitical or military project but a psychosocial ecosystem, one that normalises violence through fear, rage, and dehumanisation.

Citing public-opinion surveys in which 79 percent of Israelis said they were “not troubled” by famine in Gaza and 64 percent agreed “there are no innocents” there, Pérez-Sales concludes that “the occupation has created a collective psychology where cruelty is coded as security.”

“Human rights law cannot, on its own, interrupt a genocidal process driven by social consensus.” Pau Pérez-Sales, Torture Journal (2025)

He identifies twenty psychosocial mechanisms, collective trauma, religious exceptionalism, militarised identity, bureaucratic impunity, that together “render genocidal acts not only possible but socially acceptable.”

Life Under Siege

The journal’s special section on Israel and the Occupied Palestine gives voice to those living inside the catastrophe.

In “Living Through the War in Gaza,” Hatem Yousef Abu Zaydah delivers a raw, first-person chronicle of survival amid bombardment, famine, and loss. “Every sound is a question,” he writes. “Will it reach my family this time?”

Mahmud Sehwail and colleagues document “The Psychological Effects of Torture of Palestinians Detained in Israeli Prisons After 7 October 2023.” Their findings reveal systematic use of sensory deprivation, forced stress positions, and prolonged solitary confinement, leaving survivors with extreme post-traumatic stress and “a shattering of personal identity.”

Another collective work, Maha Aon et al.’s “What Is There Left After Losing Oneself?”, compiles 100 testimonies from Gaza describing electric shocks, starvation, and forced witnessing of killings. Together, they reveal “a logic of extermination, not excess.”

Torture as System, Not Exception

Across multiple studies, torture emerges not as random cruelty but as a structure of governance.

• Layan Kateb and Rania Al-Faqih’s “Colonial Carcerality and Systematic Torture” shows how emergency laws and military orders create a legal machinery of arbitrary detention, what they call “a colonial carceral state.”
• Grant Shubin, in “Gender Power as a Tool of Torture,” details how sexual violence and gender humiliation are deployed to dominate and degrade.
• Samah Jabr and Maria Helbich argue that torture functions to “dismantle Palestinian consciousness,” echoing María José Lera’s analysis of prisoner-writer Walid Daqqa, whose incarceration sought to “erase identity itself.”

“Torture is not an aberration, it is the grammar through which occupation speaks.”
Excerpt from ‘Torture as a Tool of Domination’

Necropolitics: When Survival Is the Battlefield

In “The Necropolitics of Gaza,” John Hawkins describes the siege as an “architecture of death,” where control over electricity, food, and mobility transforms life itself into an instrument of coercion.

Kathryn Ravey, in “Starvation as Torture,” traces deliberate deprivation of food, especially targeting children, as a calculated strategy of domination and a breach of the Geneva Conventions.

Joel B.’s “Children as Human Shields” documents cases where minors are coerced into military operations, calling it “torture through enforced vulnerability.”

Beyond Gaza: Medicine and Speech Under Attack

Violence, the issue shows, extends beyond Gaza’s borders.

• Nasrallah et al. catalogue attacks on medical workers and hospitals in Lebanon, classifying them as grave breaches of humanitarian law.
• Mika Foux records the trauma of torture survivors within Israel, where fear and censorship silence dissent.
• And Dana Abuqamar, in “Punitive Measures Against the Pro-Palestinian Movement,” warns that Western governments’ crackdowns on activists amount to “psychological and political torture” aimed at suppressing solidarity.

From Documentation to Prevention

While the volume catalogues suffering in painstaking detail, its deeper goal is to understand how to stop it.

Pérez-Sales and his contributors urge a holistic approach to rehabilitation, one that restores dignity and community alongside mental health. They call for institutional accountability that addresses the systems enabling torture, and for social interventions that challenge the narratives making it permissible.

“Genocide,” the editorial concludes, “is not an event but a process. It is prepared, step by step, thought by thought, until empathy collapses and atrocity feels inevitable.”

“The occupation is not only a military reality, it is a social project, a way of thinking that reshapes both oppressor and oppressed.” Pau Pérez-Sales, Torture Journal (2025)

Bearing Witness

Published on 15 October 2025, Torture Journal, Vol. 35 Nos. 2–3 stands as both record and warning. It reframes torture not merely as what happens to bodies, but as what societies allow to happen through them.

At its heart lies a simple plea: that understanding must precede prevention, and that silence, too, can be a form of violence.

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

21st Century Wire is an alternative news agency designed to enlighten, inform and educate readers about world events which are not always covered in the mainstream media.

Source: https://21stcenturywire.com/2025/11/13/the-psychology-of-genocide-inside-israels-machinery-of-violence/