Without the destructive emotions that fuel violence, however, war and terrorism would end. Their essence may actually be hatred or the perennial thirst for revenge.
That war provokes hostile emotions — hatred, vengefulness, rage — is a dime-store truism. Two centuries ago, military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote that in war “the emotions cannot fail to be involved.” As a Prussian general, he took part in the campaign that ended with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815. This familiarity with the battlefield adds some weight to his otherwise shallow observation.
Extensive military experience also lends force to another of Clausewitz’s apparently obvious comments. In his treatise On War, he describes violence as war’s “essence.” Terrorism, war’s comrade, shares the same key asset. Without the destructive emotions that fuel violence, however, war and terrorism would end. Their essence may actually be hatred or the perennial thirst for revenge.
Several years before the Second World War broke out, Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote an open letter to physicist Albert Einstein. In it, he agrees with his fellow pacifist about man’s “active instinct for hatred and destruction.” The letter ends with the question: “How long have we to wait before the rest of men turn pacifist?” Freud provides his own answer by adding that “there is no likelihood” of suppressing humanity’s “aggressive tendencies.” Like Clausewitz’s point on the violent nature of war, Freud’s view of human aggression needs no debate. Armed conflicts prove them right time and again, the latest full-blown example being the Israel-Hamas war that began on October 7, 2023.
If in some fanciful tomorrow the defiant emotions skulking in the depths of consciousness surrendered to reason and moral norms, even militarists and warmongers would join the masses to embrace pacifism. They’d commit to nonviolence as once urged by Mohandas Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. Conflicting interests between communities and states would prompt peaceful solutions based on mutual respect and our common socio-economic needs. Each side would acknowledge the irrationality of fighting to seize everything — land above all — and conceding nothing.
As it is — and as the above-mentioned psychoanalyst, physicist, and military strategist would all confirm — human nature hasn’t yet cast off its aptitude for retributive violence. Powerful as they undoubtedly are, however, noxious emotions like vengefulness usually need real offences or injustices as triggers. History books and yesterday’s newspapers confirm that, as impetus for vengeful acts against individuals or communities, personal grievances are just as effective as political ones. The latter grab the lion’s share of attention only because of their wider impact.
Whether personal or political, vengeance at its extreme explodes into murderous mayhem — no less often today than in the so-called primitive past. In his treatise on sociology, Vilfredo Pareto wrote about the evildoings in 1913 at Orgosolo on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, not only because they were “typical of the past” but because, he argued, they illustrate “what can at any time be the future.” When men believe, rightly or wrongly, that they’ve been denied fairness under the law, they’re liable to take justice into their own hands.
Vengeance may once have worn the Sardinian mastruca, a sleeveless sheepskin jacket, but it will don whatever clothing or military uniform the period favours. With deep roots in evolutionary biology, revenge is a continuously revamped inheritance. A human being who has never contemplated revenge is as rare as one who has never been humiliated or wronged.
Pareto recounts how an intergenerational feud between two groups of families in central Sardinia, dating back to a nebulous dispute over an inheritance, erupted anew with the rejection of a marriage offer that had dared hop across the divide between the two clans. The thwarted side evened the score by spurning the very next young suitor who came calling from the opposite camp.
Given the obstinate, infectious nature of vengefulness, this first retaliation against a perceived affront to clan dignity likely replicated itself in a cycle of tit for tat. The result may have been a de facto ban on marriages between the clans. More wedlock hopefuls would have been rebuffed along with the original sweethearts.
While nuptial bells in the church steeple kept silent watch over the volatile mountain town of Orgosolo, a body turned up in a local well. Contrary to a police investigation that concluded the drowned man had committed suicide, the deceased’s relatives accused their sworn enemies of murder. They also accused their foes of a second murder even though that kinsman was shot by police while trying to evade arrest. Their distrust of officialdom ran as deep as suspicion of their enemies.
Groundless though these accusations seemed, they sprang from an earlier breaking point: a jury’s acquittal of the “murderer” of a third member of the aggrieved families. Denied their “just” verdict, they suspected their enemies of having bribed court officials and police. No longer satisfied with the typical offences of banditry — torched barns, stolen livestock, personal assaults, even kidnapped children — their vengeance turned savage.
An Italian newspaper described the “bloody vendettas” that left three men dead, their bodies “riddled with bullets and knife-cuts and horribly mutilated.” One of the victims had had his ear cut off. Post-mortem mutilation was a gratuitous addendum to the already ample warning of the murders. It told the victims’ kinfolk that the slayings alone could not satisfy the killers’ limitless thirst for revenge.
“Vengeance,” wrote philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, “almost inevitably degenerates into tyranny.” After the slaughter, the families of the three victims were “so terror-stricken,” said a local official, that none of them dared leave home without a police escort. Policemen had to stand guard at the house of the menaced clan’s old patriarch.
As chronicled down through the ages, vengeance has had at its disposal one last ferocious indignity: the desecration of the dead. A famous example in literature occurs in the ancient epic poem, the IIiad. Greek warrior Achilles slays the Trojan prince, “glorious” Hector, to avenge the killing of Patroclus, “dearest” of Achilles’s companions.
Hector’s death alone doesn’t satisfy Achilles’s vengeful “heart of iron,” however. He straps Hector’s feet to the back of his chariot so that as he rides away the dead Trojan’s head gets “dragged in the dust.” In Homer’s war-verse, fallen men are also stabbed, beheaded, and disembowelled. Psychopathic revenge, impervious to shame, spurns the ethical imperative against defiling corpses.
Crimes of vengeance don’t belong only to supposedly primitive cultures, long vanished, in which hostile tribes retaliated against insults with violence and death to defend their honor and reputation for invincibility. Too numerous and familiar are contemporary examples to support Pareto’s conviction back in 1916 that, whatever official justice may dictate, the workings of bloodthirsty revenge will endure well into the future.
In that future that Pareto readily anticipated, specifically on October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists broke through Gaza’s perimeter fence into Israel’s western Negev where they murdered over a thousand civilians and kidnapped hundreds. Their savagery has been too well documented to need repeating here. Suffice to say that the killers and assailants destroyed and mutilated with the zeal of ancient invaders or the Sardinian outlaws of 1913. “The slaughter of a foe,” wrote Freud, “gratifies an instinctive craving.” These executioners were no more likely to second-guess themselves than the avenging warriors of the Iliad.
Unlike the Sardinian fugitives, however, who, “breathing the air of vengeance,” hid in the woods above a terrified village in the outlands of Italy, Hamas militants eager for martyrdom had to bide their time in money-pit tunnels underneath Gaza before ambushing into Israel. The “bandits” of Orgosolo were among the many precursors to the well-armed and -financed terrorist groups of today.
The principal message of the October attack was, of course, aimed at Israel’s leadership, civilian and military. The incursion declared the Palestinian Islamist group a fearsome enemy capable of unleashing, on Israeli soil no less, the full power of its vengeance, undetected by Israel’s vaunted surveillance capability. Essential to the plan was the element of surprise so as to inflict maximum humiliation on a state whose true centre of gravity is an army as formidable in the Middle East today as was that of the Roman Empire when it ruled over ancient Palestine. In Israel, the army is indeed, in the words of political theorist Hannah Arendt, “the national institution par excellence.” Israeli men and women are conscripted into the Israel Defense Forces at 18.
The individual perpetrators of the October 7 massacre also intended a personal message to reach their commanders back home. Steeped in the warrior culture of to-the-death loyalty, their de facto dispatch straight from enemy territory proclaimed that their commitment to the political cause hadn’t wavered. Not racked with doubts, they had proven themselves worthy of respect and martyrdom.
Circumstances, locations, and participants may vary but cannot obscure that universal, well-documented sequence running from moral or political grievances, ignored or discounted, to bitterness and hate, and lastly to retributive violence. Every act of vengeance has a backstory of ill-treatment or oppression. It should go without saying that filling in these origin-story details isn’t tantamount to justifying revenge massacres and hostage-taking.
The cruel, prolonged deprivations Palestinians have suffered as a result of Israel’s more than half-a-century-long military occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, have been too well-documented — notably in the 2022 report, Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians, by human rights organization Amnesty International — to need elucidating here. A brief summary would list the means restricting Palestinians’ freedom of movement: the fence/wall winding around the West Bank, military checkpoints and roads blocked by gates, a strict pass system, travel bans, and arbitrary arrests and detentions. It would also catalogue the discriminatory measures forcing the Palestinian population into ever more crowded, impoverished enclaves: mass evictions from, and demolitions of, their homes, the construction of illegal Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land, the illegal annexation of East Jerusalem, and the imposition of access-restricted zones around Gaza.
Prolonged, systematic denials of basic freedoms by an external master explain why a majority of Palestinians, almost three-quarters, polled at the end of 2023, believed that Hamas made the “correct” decision to attack on October 7. However, contrary to this initial overwhelming support for Hamas’s deadly raid into Israel, the opinion poll also found that a vast majority believes that attacking or killing civilians violates international humanitarian law. This discrepancy may be explained in part by the surprising fact that an overwhelming majority of Palestinian survey respondents hadn’t seen the videos of the atrocities committed by Hamas militants against Israeli citizens.
The Palestinians who backed the decision to launch an attack in Israel, though apparently oblivious to its utter brutality, harken back to those Sardinians who helped their kin evade justice for brutal murders in 1913. A leading official familiar with the circumstances of the “bitter hatred” dividing Orgosolo’s notorious families explained why the fugitives who had mutilated their victims could nevertheless count on their clan’s loyalty. Their relatives were convinced that these men, together with their families, were denied “fair treatment.” They weren’t “criminals,” therefore, but rather “victims of oppression taking justice into their own hands.” In Sardinia, “procuring justice for oneself by whatever means and at whatever cost,” added the official euphemistically, “is never considered dishonourable.” In a culture of honour, unbreakable ties of kinship superseded common decency to rationalize even brutal murder.
Time-honoured revenge, an irrepressible force in the cycle of existence, is as functional today in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories as it was in 1913 Sardinia. The above-mentioned poll also found that a majority of Palestinians favours “armed struggle,” rather than negotiations or non-violent resistance, as the best way to end Israeli occupation. Linked to this belief is yet another held by the majority: Israel’s goal in its current military offensive is to destroy Gaza and kill its people or force them out.
Hamas wasn’t deterred from carrying out its assault by the greater numbers and superior weaponry of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). It knew that the military odds would be stacked against it in any direct confrontation with the IDF. “Vengeance is not justified by realistic considerations,” wrote de Beauvoir. “Nonetheless, it answers a need so deep that it can hold practical interests in check.” As true in Sardinia at the turn of the last century as in Palestine today, fanatical avengers aren’t good and rational men with clear ideas on setting everything right.
Israel’s military response to October 7 — “over the top” in the words of President Joe Biden — has been months of unrelenting bombardment that has flattened great sections of Gaza, resulting in, at the time of writing, the deaths of over 37,000, mostly women and children. (By just one comparison, the indiscriminate aerial bombing of Dresden in 1945 killed 25,000.) Netanyahu has vowed “mighty vengeance.” He and his war cabinet (recently disbanded) would confirm Clausewitz’s opinion of the “fallacy” held by “kind-hearted people” that there exists “some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed.”
The IDF has made good use of its superiority over its notably weaker adversary by waging an air and ground onslaught of unparalleled ferocity. The Israel-Hamas war is as lopsided as any in history. To the easily persuaded, Netanyahu projects strong leadership by blowing up whole residential blocks and hospitals. Nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been forced out of their homes.
Repeatedly, Netanyahu has promised to eradicate Hamas in a “total victory” — a propagandist phrase as drearily predictable as it is largely devoid of meaning. The war in Gaza will only toughen the fanatical craving for revenge — as the military “victories” of history have proven. After the war, Israel will face an even more uncertain security future.
Gaza’s total destruction is no more rational a means of ensuring safety for Israelis than the October 7 attack was a logical step towards securing justice and equality for Palestinians. War commanders, vigilantes, and resistance fighters — each with varying capacities to inflict retribution — share the same tragic delusion of complete triumph. “In a gnat and an elephant,” wrote Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne, “the passion is the same.”
The mountain town in Sardinia where herding was once the main form of survival, and whose vigilante shepherds once terrorized their enemies, has since then reinvented itself as an open-air gallery. Hundreds of murals adorn the walls of present-day Orgosolo. Above the entrance to “da Candela” coffee bar hovers a triptych dated “30 September 2000,” the start of the second Palestinian uprising, or intifada, against Israeli occupation.
The panels capture successive moments from video footage taken by a TV cameraman of a Palestinian father shielding his son from an exchange of gunfire between Palestinian security forces and Israeli soldiers at a military outpost in Gaza. The last panel shows twelve-year-old Muhammad lying across his father’s lap, a pool of blood forming beneath him. He died from his gunshot wound.
Mural art may serve as a mournful counterpoint to the wearied conclusion that the instinct for retributive violence will forever hold humanity in a death grip. If, on the one hand, Muhammad’s mural expresses unassuageable loss and suffering, it also affirms — painted as it was far from the conflict that claimed the boy’s life — that we live, as Freud wrote to his fellow pacifist, “in fellowship under the same sky.” The painting asserts our common humanity, and calls for peace. Before this latest vengeful conflagration, murals graced the walls of Gaza too. 