https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/how-2-debunked-accounts-of-sexual-violence-on-oct-7-fueled-a-global-dispute-over-israel-hamas-war

There’s a bit by Zizek where he’s quoting Lacan. Lacan uses the analogy of a jealous husband who believes his wife is cheating on him.

Jacques Lacan claimed that, even if a jealous husband’s claim about his wife — that she sleeps around with other men — is true, his jealousy is still pathological. Why? The true question is “not is his jealousy well-grounded?”, but “why does he need jealousy to maintain his self-identity?”.

The man has a deep-seated psychological need to be a victim. He needs the idea of the cheating wife to maintain this identity. In this case, his obsession with his cheating wife, even if it’s true and she’s sleeping around with everyone in town, is part of a pathology meant to protect his psyche from breaking.

That’s the Lacanian part. As Zizek often does, he takes this type of individualized psychoanalysis and expands it up to the realm of societal ideology. The example he gives is of the Nazis and their obsession with the Jews.

Along the same lines, one could say that even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true — they exploit Germans; they seduce German girls — which they were not, of course, their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological, since it represses the true reason why the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position.

An example he gives is that Jews were exploiting Germans. And this is, on its face, can be a true statement. Some Jews were bankers and therefore charging interest and profiting from Germans. Some young Jews were going around and seducing young German girls. Etc.

But the fact is, it doesn’t matter if the Jews are doing this or aren’t doing that. The Nazi obsession with the Jew has nothing to do with the Jew seducing young German women. The obsession is a necessary prerequisite for the Nazi to maintain their ideological position. A Nazi needs the Jew to be a scapegoat. To be a symbol of the Other- to use as an ambiguous threat; a vague amorphous barbaric enemy.

The Jews control the world and the global capitalist system. They are devious and scheming and mean to exploit us. On the other hand, the Jew is a stupid primitive animal who has inferior genes. They are everything and they are nothing.

I would take this and use this article as an example of a pathological ideological obsession on the Israeli side.

Even if the claims are true, which from what I’ve read there isn’t much evidence at all, that Hamas raped many young women on Oct 7th, I’d argue that it’s pathological. The Israelis need the idea of the barbaric and savage Palestinian in order to maintain their ideological position. When they talk about the rapes, it doesn’t matter if the rapes really happened or not. It’s there for an ideological purpose.

And just like the Nazi claims about the Jews- using small truths to create a large lie- the Israelis are following line by line with the playbook.