Cruelty and the Attack on Symbolization: A Kleinian Reading of Israeli State Violence in the 2023–2025 Gaza War

Cruelty and the Attack on Symbolization: A Kleinian Reading of Israeli State Violence in the 2023–2025 Gaza War

Abstract

When destruction is praised as miracle and famine is redefined and justified in the name of necessity, language itself becomes an instrument of violence. This article examines how Israeli state discourse and policy during the 2023–2025 Gaza war enacts what psychoanalysis calls an attack on symbolization, meaning a collapse of thinking and meaning-making that turns violence into cruelty and moral certainty. Drawing on Kleinian and post-Kleinian theory including Klein, Bion, Segal, Ogden, and Kristeva, it translates intrapsychic mechanisms such as splitting, projective identification, attacks on linking, manic contempt, and envy into a structural logic of governance. The article calls this mode of governance “pseudo-symbolic,” defining it as the substitution of mourning-enabling and reality-related symbols with metonymic markers that excite affect while blocking meaning, such as “ruin as miracle” and “annihilation as pride”. The analysis outlines diagnostic indicators of this process, illustrated through official statements and cultural policies, and shows how populist regimes mobilize anti-symbolic processes to sustain violence and denial.

Introduction

In recent years, scholars have drawn attention to the growing populist rhetoric that opposes “ordinary people” to intellectuals and experts, casting intelligence itself as suspect (Motta, 2024; Motta, Stecula, & O’Brien, 2018; Mede & Schäfer, 2020). This attack on the figure of the intellectual is not merely political but symbolic: it dismantles the mediating functions of language, knowledge, and reflection that sustain collective thought. Anti-intellectualism thus becomes a cultural form of disavowal—an assault on symbolisation that mirrors the psychic dismantling of the capacities to think, link, and mourn. Psychoanalytically, this hostility to intellect corresponds to what Bion’s (–K), the antithesis of the drive toward knowledge, denoting an active attacks on linking and knowing, used as a defence against intolerable affect and doubt (Bion, 1959; Bion, 1962).

Violence, in these accounts, is not only inflicted but simultaneously disavowed and transfigured into satisfaction. This convergence of mass death, denial, and the sanctification of destruction makes visible the psychic mechanisms that sustain state cruelty and demands not only political but also psychoanalytic interpretation. A psychoanalytic lens makes it possible to approach such violence not merely as policy or ideology but as an attack on the very functions of symbolisation and thought. It asks how destructiveness, when unprocessed, becomes organised through institutions, language, and collective fantasy.

Klein shows us one dire consequence of not thinking: when the ego cannot bear anxiety and transform destructive impulses into symbolic representation, destructiveness remains untransformed and turns outward as cruelty. What cannot be symbolised attacks both the object and the very functions of thought and meaning. In this psychic state, aggression fuses with denial, and the capacity to link, mourn, and recognise the other disintegrates (Klein, 1930).

This paper explores how cruelty becomes an organising logic of contemporary political life. When violence is administered through law, policy, and discourse, the state reproduces destructive drives under the guise of order or necessity. Contemporary state violence is therefore not only an exercise of force but an assault on the symbolic capacities that sustain meaning, responsibility, and thought. The analysis focuses on Israeli state violence during the 2023–2025 Gaza war as a case study in the institutionalisation of psychic mechanisms.

The atrocities of the 2023–2025 Gaza war have been marked by extreme violence, blatant denial of reality, and perverse enjoyment that defies understanding. By mid-September 2025, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported over 65,000 Palestinians killed and approximately 166,000 injured since October 2023; among these, 18,592 children had been killed and over 42,000 injured (Health Ministry; Save the Children; Gaza media).

The war was ignited by the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israel, in which more than 1,200 people were killed, including over 300 children, and more than 250 hostages were taken into Gaza (BBC, 2024; Haaretz, 2024). This atrocity marked the largest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust and left profound collective trauma.

The intensity of Israel’s subsequent military campaign can, in part, be understood as an act of revenge and an attempt to restore mastery and retaliatory control in the face of unbearable humiliation. Revenge, while undeniable, does not explain the scale or direction of the campaign. Framed rhetorically as “self-defence” and the “return of the hostages,” the assault functioned less as a practical operation than as a means of converting injury into moral certainty and destructiveness into necessity. The ongoing bombardments, systematic destruction of infrastructure, and mass civilian deaths demonstrably failed to secure the hostages’ release or protect Israeli civilians. The ongoing purposelessness of these acts suggests a shift from military purpose to psychic economy, where devastation itself becomes the bearer of meaning.

They were justified rhetorically as acts of eradication, framed in terms that evacuate reality and collapse the distinction between militants and civilians (AP, 17 Sept. 2025). UN experts have described Gaza City as unlivable (Reuters, 15 Sept. 2025), while a UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that starvation is being used as a method of warfare (The Guardian, 16 Sept. 2025). Despite such findings, Israeli officials have repeatedly denied the existence of famine, attributing hunger to Hamas or to logistical failures (The Guardian, 25 July 2025). Media coverage has often minimised or ignored mass death (The Guardian, 17 Aug. 2025). Government representatives have at times framed devastation itself as a source of pride—e.g., Minister May Golan’s declaration, “I am personally proud of the ruins in Gaza” (Haaretz, 2025)—and others have gone further, calling the devastation a “miracle,” transforming large-scale suffering into a sanctified object of celebration (Bitton, 2024; Leifer (2025). This convergence of mass death, denial, and the sanctification of destruction makes visible the psychic mechanisms that sustain state cruelty and demands not only political but also psychoanalytic interpretation.

Psychoanalysis offers a language for understanding this organisation of violence beyond strategy or ideology. The notion of an attack on symbolisation elucidates how the psychic functions that mediate between affect and representation, self and other, knowledge and responsibility are dismantled. What begins as a failure to symbolise within the individual—the inability to tolerate frustration, loss, or ambivalence—finds its structural equivalent in the bureaucratic and rhetorical practices of the state. Official discourse collapses distinctions between reality and fantasy, between necessity and cruelty, between defence and annihilation. Policy itself comes to perform what the mind does when overwhelmed by unprocessed aggression: it projects, splits, and erases the capacity to think about its own destructiveness.

This argument builds on earlier psychoanalytic efforts to link the inner world and the political sphere, while departing from them in scope and focus. Scholars such as Hanna Segal (1957, 1973) and Wilfred Bion (1957, 1962) have shown how psychic mechanisms—envy, splitting, manic defence, and attacks on linking—shape symbolic life and its breakdown. Later theorists, including Thomas Ogden (1989/1992), Julia Kristeva (1982), and Ronald Britton (1998), extended these ideas to explore how symbolic thought depended on the capacity to bear ambivalence and maintain a reflective space of relation. Yet most accounts remain at the level of culture or metaphor. What has not been sufficiently theorised is how such mechanisms are materially enacted within institutions—how an attack on symbolisation is translated into administrative logic, shaping decision-making, law, and the management of life and death. My aim is not to diagnose the state in clinical terms but to use these psychoanalytic insights to conceptualise collective processes otherwise difficult to grasp.

While Kleinian and Bionian concepts have occasionally been extended to social and political contexts, such uses remain rare and largely metaphorical. Hanna Segal (1987) applied Kleinian theory to ideological denial and nuclear anxiety, interpreting political destructiveness as a projection of the paranoid–schizoid position. Bion’s Experiences in Groups (1961) and Menzies Lyth’s (1960) study of institutional defences explored how organisations managed anxiety through splitting and denial. Hinshelwood (1993) further examined how institutional cultures reproduced attacks on thought, while Weintrobe (2021) used Kleinian formulations of manic defence and denial to interpret systemic uncare and destructiveness in contemporary society. Yet the idea that such psychic mechanisms might become structurally enacted through the bureaucratic and rhetorical practices of the modern state remains underdeveloped.

This paper therefore builds upon these precedents arguing that Segal’s and Bion’s mechanisms can be used as operative logics that illuminate the functioning of the modern state. In this view, symbolic equations and attacks on linking describe how policy and administration can be the result of attacks on thought. The focus of the paper is on tracing how these psychic mechanisms enable the systematic production of cruelty. By  applying intrapsychic insights to institutional dynamics, this paper contributes a conceptual model for understanding state violence.

The Israeli case provides a particularly condensed example of this dynamic, where military omnipotence and theological redemption merge into a single moral language. Yet the mechanisms described here are not unique to Israel. They speak to a broader phenomenon characteristic of contemporary populist and authoritarian regimes: the systematic dismantling of symbolic life. Across contexts, populist movements exploit collective anxiety and humiliation by offering certainty in place of thought, identification in place of relation, and purity in place of mourning. The Israeli case is thus used here as a lens through which to examine a larger structure of feeling and governance—one in which cruelty is not a breakdown of the political but its psychic foundation.

The paper proceeds in three stages. First, I outline a psychoanalytic framework, drawing on Klein’s theory of symbolisation and its collapse, together with later elaborations by Bion, Segal, Ogden, and Kristeva. Second, I apply these insights to Israeli political discourse and institutional practices during the 2023–2025 Gaza war, showing how sadistic enjoyment and pseudo-symbols organise collective denial, envy, and aggression. Finally, I consider the implications of the dismantling of symbolic life for understanding the psychic underpinnings of politics and contemporary forms of cruelty.
This article reconceptualizes the Kleinian “attack on symbolization” from an intrapsychic metaphor into a structural logic of governance. I specify how classic mechanisms—splitting, projective identification, attacks on linking, manic contempt, and envy—are materialized institutionally through policy, budgeting, administrative sanction, and rhetoric. Methodologically, I propose diagnostic indicators for state-level assaults on symbolization and apply them to the 2023–2025 Gaza war.

Conceptually, I introduce pseudo-symbolic governance: the replacement of symbols that sustain mourning and recognition with metonymic markers (ruin as “miracle,” annihilation as “pride”) that discharge affect while blocking meaning. This framework therefore extends Segal and Bion from culture and groups to administration, offering diagnostic criteria—triumphal metonyms, denial or deflection against mourning, and the institutional disciplining of symbolic spaces—that make it possible to locate, time, and potentially reverse state-level attacks on symbolization, and to identify institutional sites of repair where symbolization can still be protected (see ACRI, 2024).
The analysis draws on a purposive selection of official statements, policy initiatives, legislative proposals affecting academia and culture, and major media commentary produced during the 2023–2025 Gaza war. These materials are examined interpretively to trace recurring patterns of splitting, denial, triumph, envy, and attacks on linking across political and institutional discourse. Rather than a quantitative or coded study, this approach is conceptual and hermeneutic: it reads policy and rhetoric as enactments of psychic mechanisms, mapping how administrative language and procedure reproduce anti-symbolic logics.

Klein, Symbolization, and the Politics of Sadistic Enjoyment

Melanie Klein’s writings, together with later extensions by her followers, offer a conceptual framework for understanding how psychic life can either sustain or destroy its relation to reality. Central to this framework is the process of symbolization: the ego’s capacity to transform anxiety and destructive impulses into thought, representation, and identification. When symbolization functions, it supports empathy, mourning, and the preservation of links between self and object. When anxiety becomes too great to contain, symbolisation collapses and anxiety can not be metabolized, leading to destructiveness that overwhelms the ego, giving rise to sadism, envy, and perverse enjoyment.

For Bion, thinking arises from the containment and transformation of raw experience into thinkable form; when this fails due to excessive anxiety, the mind defends itself by launching attacks on the links that enable thought. He denotes this anti-thought process as (–K): a refusal of knowing that evacuates meaning and dismantles connections between thoughts, feelings, and objects (Bion, 1955, 1959, 1962). This blocks the transformation of experience into meaning, leaving action governed by omnipotent assertion rather than reflective thought. In political discourse, this appears as certainty in place of inquiry, slogan in place of symbol, and eradication in place of relation.

Klein’s analyses of these dynamics—and the elaborations by Bion, Segal, Ogden, and Britton, who explored how symbolic thought depends on the capacity to bear ambivalence and maintain a “third position”—illuminate how psychic defences against anxiety may corrode meaning itself. The following subsections trace these themes—symbolization and its collapse, manic defences, envy, sadism, and the depressive position—in order to ground the later discussion of their political enactments.

1. Symbolization and Its Collapse

Melanie Klein’s work provides a framework for understanding how the capacity for symbolization sustains psychic links to reality, and how its failure under the pressure of anxiety and denial gives rise to destructiveness, envy, and sadistic enjoyment. In The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego (1930), she argued that symbol formation depends on the ego’s ability to bear anxiety and transform destructive impulses into representation. Drawing on Ernest Jones’s claim that the pleasure principle motivates symbolization by equating different things through the pleasure they evoke, and on Sándor Ferenczi’s suggestion that identification was the precursor of symbolization—rooted in the infant’s effort to rediscover its own bodily organs in external objects—Klein emphasized that anxiety activated identification. Projected outward, anxiety renders objects persecutory and drives the search for new ones, a process that forms the very basis of symbolization but also exposes it to collapse when destructive impulses overwhelm the ego.

Klein elaborated this in The Psycho-Analysis of Children (1932), where she linked symbolization to the conflict between life and death instincts. The ego’s survival depends on its ability to sublimate aggression and maintain relations with sustaining objects; when this fails, fragmentation and omnipotent fantasies dominate. She later returned to the theme in Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms (1946), where she showed how splitting, denial, and projective identification disrupted the integration of external reality. In this paranoid–schizoid position, unbearable anxieties are expelled into objects that become persecutory and must be attacked. The collapse of symbolization thus produces not only cruelty but also perverse enjoyment, sustained by attacks on both reality and the possibility of thought.

Hanna Segal (1973, 1979) deepened this analysis by showing that envy and manic defenses did not only target objects but symbolization itself. Envy, she argued, corrodes meaning by destroying the links that sustain it, turning the good object into a target of hatred precisely because it provides sustenance. In this sense, envy compounds splitting and denial: it not only attacks sustaining objects but hollows out the symbolic process itself, preparing the ground for sadism, where destructiveness becomes a source of gratification. Britton (1998) emphasized that only the depressive position—where ambivalence and mourning were borne—stabilized symbols and made psychic repair possible.

Later theorists extended these insights beyond the clinic. Julia Kristeva (1974/1984), in dialogue with Lacan, distinguishes the symbolic—meaning, difference, law—from the semiotic, where drives and affects appear as rhythms, displacements, and fragments. Entry into the symbolic requires transforming drives into representation; when this falters, destructiveness returns as metonymic or perverse forms that mimic symbols without meaning. Although framed through Lacan, Kristeva’s later work on mourning acknowledges Klein’s influence (Black Sun, 1987/1989): Klein stresses that symbolization depends on bearing anxiety and binding sadism into representation; Kristeva shows that when this binding fails, violence reappears as metonymic fragments. The collapse of symbolization thus not only destroys objects but substitutes pseudo-symbols—charged fragments that gratify while blocking meaning.

Kristeva’s account of pseudo-symbolization clarifies how meaning collapses into repetition and semblance, while Žižek extends this logic to ideology itself. When words no longer mediate between inner and outer reality, they act as affective discharges—signifiers emptied of reference yet charged with excitation. Such pseudo-symbols sustain the rhetoric of cruelty: devastation and ruins hailed as “a miracle”. Here discourse stops signifying and begins to perform collective passion; ideological enjoyment, Žižek (2008) argues, thrives on this very slippage.

The breakdown of symbolization therefore extends into language and politics. Public discourse reproduces mechanisms Klein and Bion located in the psyche—projection, denial, evacuation of thought—so that rhetoric operates as defence, conjuring a magical equivalence of word and act. In the Israeli context, metonymic substitutions are evident: ruins reframed as “miracles,”destruction as pride and denial as strength.

2. Manic Defenses Against Anxiety

Klein (1935) claims that when the ego cannot sustain symbolization in the face of depressive anxiety, defensive maneuvers emerge that preserve psychic survival at the cost of reality-testing. These “manic defenses”—control, triumph, and contempt—shield the subject from dependence and guilt while undermining symbolization. They reassert omnipotent control, transforming the relation to objects into enactments of domination, instead of allowing mourning and integration. Contempt proves particularly destructive, assaulting objects and the potential for experiential learning by denying others' teaching capacity and upholding self-sufficiency fantasies. In clinical settings, this manifests as interpretation denigration or dialogic emptying; politically, as evidence rejection and choosing destructiveness over reflection, thereby fundamentally refusing symbolization.

Rosenfeld (1971) connects this to sadistic triumph, where contemptuous devaluation fuels destructive enjoyment while evading depressive guilt. Manic defenses thus unite omnipotent denial with sadistic pleasure when uncontained anxiety prevents symbolization.

3. Sadism as a Cultural Economy of Enjoyment

Sadism, in psychoanalytic thought, is not simply an expression of aggression but a complex fusion of drives that makes destructiveness a source of gratification. Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), described the death drive as a fundamental tendency toward dissolution and destruction, counterbalanced by Eros, which works to bind and preserve life. Sadism arises when the death drive is eroticized: aggression becomes bound to libidinal cathexis, turning destruction itself into a source of pleasure. This explains both the tenacity of sadism and its paradox: it depends on its objects for satisfaction, and therefore risks exhausting itself once its targets are consumed. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud stressed that such destructiveness is rarely contained from within; restraining it requires the external force of law and communal authority.

Klein expanded Freud’s account by reframing sadism as a psychic defense against anxiety. In A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States (1935), she showed how cruelty and contempt enable the subject to triumph over the object, warding off dependence and guilt at the cost of destroying the very links that sustain psychic life. In this formulation, sadism masks despair with omnipotence, sustaining itself precisely by attacking the conditions of symbolization. For Klein, what ends sadism is not its satiation but the painful move toward the depressive position. Only when ambivalence is tolerated—when the object is recognized as both loved and hated, and loss is acknowledged—can the compulsive cycle of sadistic enjoyment loosen. This requires mourning: the capacity to grieve the damaged or lost object rather than triumph over it.

Later theorists deepened this account. Segal (1973) showed how envy corroded symbolic links, hollowing out meaning and paving the way for sadism to become a source of gratification. Across these accounts, sadism appears inexhaustible but depends on destroying the symbolization that could integrate it. Its undoing requires either the painful work of mourning from within, or containment from without.

Contemporary political theorists have also stressed that sadistic enjoyment in politics tends to sustain itself unless interrupted by external forces. Žižek, for instance, in pieces such as Kant and Sade: The Ideal Couple (1998), argues that political authority and “law” often mask an underlying sadistic enjoyment embedded within normative structures. Kristeva, in Black Sun (1987/1989), similarly contends that destructive enjoyment in melancholia cannot resolve itself internally but requires an interlocutor or symbolic framework capable of absorbing and transforming destructive impulses. From this perspective, sadism does not naturally end; left unchecked, it recycles destructiveness into enjoyment. It ceases only when the fantasy that sustains it is disrupted either through the internal capacity for mourning, or through external symbolic intervention that re-establishes the conditions for thought and identification.

4. The Depressive Position and the Mourning and the Possibility of Repair

For Klein, psychic life never simply progresses but oscillates between the paranoid–schizoid and depressive positions. In the depressive position, ambivalence is borne: objects are recognized as both loved and hated, good and bad. This tolerance of contradiction stabilizes symbols and sustains links to reality, maintaining ambivalence and the capacity to hold conflict without collapse. 

Mourning is an essential part of the depressive position because of its dialogue with reality. Freud (1917) describes it as painful yet necessary psychic work of accepting the loss of a loved object,an ideal or an important aspect of reality. He characterizes mourning as a continual movement between the wish to maintain the bond and the reality of its loss, resulting in a gradual withdrawal of emotional investment from the lost object and the reestablishment of the ego in a changed reality. This process entails profound mental pain and confrontation with reality but ultimately permits psychic integration, growth, and the restoration of contact with reality. 

Contemporary psychoanalytic theorists emphasize mourning’s central role in sustaining symbolization and the capacity to tolerate ambivalence. Without mourning, the psyche remains vulnerable to destructive defenses such as manic denial, envy, and sadism, which foreclose processing loss and perpetuate psychic and social ruptures. Ronald Britton (1998) emphasizes that only the depressive position makes symbolic thought and mourning possible, because it accepts dependence and loss rather than disavowing them. Thomas Ogden (1989) complements this by showing how, when symbolization collapses, unmentalized experience emerges—raw, overwhelming, and enacted rather than reflected. His account underscores what is at stake: either anxiety is borne and transformed into thought, or it floods the psyche and is expelled destructively.

Taken together, these contributions show that symbolization is not simply a technical function of the ego but a fragile achievement that determines the fate of destructiveness. Where it survives, aggression can be integrated with love, allowing mourning and even creativity. Where it collapses, sadism and envy prevail, reality is repudiated, and denial becomes the dominant defense. This polarity—between the depressive position’s capacity for repair and the paranoid–schizoid fixation on destruction—frames the argument that follows. It provides the psychoanalytic lens for understanding how political life may oscillate between sustaining bonds of identification and dismantling them through violence, denial, and the perverse enjoyment of ruin.
 

Positioning within Kleinian and Post-Kleinian Political Applications

Post-Kleinian theory has, at times, been extended beyond the clinical situation to illuminate collective and cultural processes. Hanna Segal, for instance, explored the socio-political dimensions of psychic life, addressing phenomena such as nuclear proliferation, war, and the symbolic significance of public catastrophe. Her reflections on events like September 11 traced how societies defend against anxiety through idealization and splitting (Segal, 1987). More recent commentators have revisited her distinction between symbolic equation and symbolic representation in wider cultural frameworks (Hinshelwood, 2018). These analyses show the explanatory power of Segal’s concepts beyond the consulting room, yet they largely remain at the level of representation—interpreting how art, media, or collective emotion express primitive states—rather than examining how institutions themselves enact these logics.

I depart from this representational emphasis, treating the “attack on symbolization” not as a metaphor but as a policy algorithm—a repeatable set of administrative moves that can be located, timed, and potentially reversed. This approach situates the Kleinian framework alongside non-psychoanalytic analyses of governance (Arendt, Foucault, Agamben, Mbembe, Butler), clarifying how anti-symbolic enjoyment is sustained psychically within governmental forms and identifying which institutional protections—universities, courts, independent media, humanitarian corridors, etc.—remain reparative because they preserve the capacity for mourning and recognition.

From Psychic Defenses to Political Violence

When paranoid–schizoid defences become collective, governance tilts toward omnipotence and persecution: threats are construed as absolute, ambivalence is disallowed, and policy becomes an enactment of splitting and projection. In this register, the state secures itself not by thinking but by evacuating thought—substituting eradication for relation and certainty for interpretation.

Klein’s account of symbolization, together with the elaborations of her followers, is useful when dealing with rage, destruction, and the inability to perceive the other or outer reality. That is why I draw on their approaches beyond the clinic. When transposed into the collective sphere, these same dynamics illuminate how political life is organized—how states respond to anxiety, loss, and conflict. In the paranoid–schizoid mode, unbearable anxieties are expelled, projected outward, and attacked, while the depressive position—acknowledging ambivalence and sustaining symbolic links—remains foreclosed.

I argue that the dynamics of Israel’s right-wing government during the 2025 Gaza war are rooted in this collapse of symbolization that had led to a pattern of sadistic enjoyment or ecstasy. This produced a form of apparent hedonism—an insatiable drive to accumulate assets associated with enjoyment (money, territory and commodities) without the capacity to derive satisfaction from them, since these acquisitions functioned primarily to reassure the self that it was not the victim. As this addictive circuit intensifies, the failure of symbolization deepens: anxiety-driven persecutory scripts are projected outward and enacted, leading to a persecutory–cruelty cycle of evacuation and enactment, in which each enactment heightens anxiety by exemplifying the very horrors imagined as potentially befalling the self. In this state, violence replaces thought and cruelty substitutes for symbolic mediation. The collapse of symbolization also weakens the internal sense of a reliable good object, diminishing the capacity to feel sustained from within; as a result, other people’s needs and claims are more readily experienced as persecutory. Empathic identification thus becomes increasingly difficult—whether with hostages, their families, Palestinians within Israel, or above all, Palestinians in Gaza.

Such denial is not new. Denial of Palestinian lives and claims has long been a feature of Israeli governance (Masalha, 2003; Pappé, Bashir & Goldberg, 2018). What distinguishes the present, however, is its intensification into an active hatred of reality itself—a hatred that, as Klein argued in Envy and Gratitude (1957), fuels destructiveness when psychic mechanisms of symbolization collapse. Klein’s insights illuminate how violence is sustained not only through denial but through an assault on the very processes of thought and representation.

In this respect, Israel’s current trajectory echoes what Yehezkel Dror (1973) described as “mad states,” regimes that do not operate on the rational logic of national interest or diplomacy but on fantasies of omnipotence, loss of reality-testing, and patterns of obsessive or destructive action. Such states display a contempt for rational diplomacy, showing little interest in negotiation or realistic compromise. Political life becomes driven by fantasy, as assertions of power and omnipotence replace sober calculation. They cultivate a constant proximity to threat, escalating conflicts even at the cost of self-harm, and they maintain control through the perpetual mobilization of fear and anxiety. In this framework, “madness” does not imply irrationality in every sphere but signals a systemic rupture in the relation to reality: political survival depends less on pragmatic governance than on the compulsive enactment of destructive fantasies.

The current war illustrates such features. Israel’s contempt for rational diplomacy is evident in its attacks on UNRWA and on Doha, actions that deliberately undermine international mediating frameworks and alienate potential partners. Political life is increasingly driven by fantasy, as leaders present ruins as “miracles” and starvation as a fiction, displacing sober calculation with omnipotent assertion. The state cultivates a constant proximity to threat, escalating violence in ways that deepen isolation and invite retaliation, even at the cost of its own long-term security. Control is maintained through the perpetual mobilization of fear, with Palestinians cast as existential persecutors and dissenting citizens portrayed as traitors. These dynamics are not merely strategic miscalculations but enactments of what Dror identified as the compulsive, destructive fantasies that define a “mad state.”

Klein’s framework sharpens the implications of Dror’s diagnosis. In the paranoid–schizoid position, unbearable anxieties are split off and projected outward, producing a denial of external reality and the construction of persecutory objects that must be attacked. By contrast, the depressive position entails the painful work of acknowledging loss, ambivalence, and complexity—of recognizing that external reality contains both good and bad, life and death, hope and despair. The present political discourse in Israel reflects a fixation in the paranoid–schizoid mode: when politicians claim that “all Gazans are Hamas,” they evacuate reality of its complexity, refusing to acknowledge the obvious fact that infants and children—many born after the 7 October attack—cannot be terrorists. Such claims are not simply errors of fact but symptomatic of a psychic organization in which denial fuses with aggression, foreclosing mourning and making reality itself the object of repudiation.

From this perspective, the systematic destruction of food supplies, infrastructure, and means of survival in Gaza can be read not only as military strategy but as an unconscious assault on the possibility of sustaining bonds of identification. Famine denial and the celebration of ruins operate as envy-driven defenses: they block symbolic connection, foreclose empathy, and transfigure destructiveness into perverse enjoyment.

In the political domain, sadism emerges as a mode of governance organized around the enjoyment of destruction. It is visible in rhetoric that delights in ruins, the denial of starvation and the celebration of devastation as a “miracle.” These gestures are not merely cynical but enactments of manic defenses that refuse mourning and strip symbols of meaning, turning them into empty markers of domination. In this sense, sadism becomes a cultural and political economy of enjoyment, sustaining violence precisely by making destruction itself the object of satisfaction.

In this sense, the governmental rhetoric that celebrates ruins or famine can be read as operating in the metonymic register. The ruins become not symbols of grief or reality-testing but metonymic signs of triumph, repeated as empty markers of strength or even as what Kristeva (1987/1989) calls “a lethal jouissance.” (Kristeva 1987/1989). Kristeva’s perspective thus sharpens Klein’s insight: sadism does not merely destroy symbols but replaces them with metonymic displacements that block meaning while sustaining perverse enjoyment,

Recent developments in Israel illustrate how the assault on symbolization extends beyond military action to the very institutions tasked with cultivating thought and representation. A series of bills currently being debated in the Knesset propose to authorize the dismissal of academic staff accused of “supporting terror,” to impose budgetary sanctions on universities deemed non-compliant, and even to revoke students’ degrees or close student organizations on political grounds. Legal scholars describe these initiatives as granting the state “draconian” powers with severe chilling effects on academic freedom, effectively positioning the university as a space to be disciplined rather than as a site of critical thought and symbolic elaboration (Israel Democracy Institute, 2024; ACRI, 2024). In Klein’s terms, this represents a systematic attack on identification and equivalence, dismantling the very mechanisms that link internal anxiety to symbolic expression.

The same dynamic can be seen in the state’s response to cultural and scientific institutions. Following the June 2025 strike on the Weizmann Institute, which destroyed fifty-two laboratories and inflicted damages estimated at two billion shekels, rehabilitation advanced largely through crowdfunding and private philanthropy rather than governmental commitment. Even the Knesset Finance Committee acknowledged the scope of the disaster, yet restoration relied heavily on donations from foundations such as Mandel, underscoring the abdication of state responsibility for scientific infrastructure. Simultaneously, cultural budgets have been redirected: tens of millions were shifted from the Ministry of Culture and Sport to religious institutions, while filmmakers and artists report being targeted for producing work that does not align with governmental narratives. In Kristeva’s (1987/1989) terms, such measures replace symbolic creativity with metonymic substitutions—ruins celebrated as “miracles,” destruction reframed as pride—leaving public life ever more dominated by pseudo-symbols of cruelty.

Counter-Currents of Symbolization

Amid the dismantling of symbolic life, some gestures reassert its possibility. Maoz Inon, an Israeli peace activist whose parents were murdered on 7 October, has repeatedly turned personal grief into public advocacy for ceasefire, exchange, and recognition, refusing retaliatory certainty. Together with his primary Palestinian peace partner, Aziz Abu Sarah, who first contacted Inon to offer condolences for his family, he has engaged in advocacy for ceasefire, hostage/prisoner exchange and reconciliation, including TED talks (2024), the “Great Peace Conference” (July 2024), and meetings with the Pope (Inon, 2024). Their joint interventions exemplify symbolic binding: the capacity to use language and relationship to contain unbearable affect, rather than discharge it through triumph or hatred. Similar counter-currents appear among hostage families who insist on mutual recognition, and among Israeli academics, artists, and civil rights groups who defend inquiry, speech, and mourning from state repression. These actions are fragile, easily marginalized or vilified, yet they preserve the psychic and institutional conditions for thought. Their significance lies not in political success but in sustaining symbolization itself, the capacity to name, represent, and remain in relation even under the weight of catastrophe.

Conclusion

This paper traced how the collapse of symbolization—central in Klein’s account and elaborated by Bion, Segal, Ogden, Britton, and Kristeva—provides an analytic lens for understanding political destructiveness. When symbolization falters, manic defenses of contempt block thought, eroding links of meaning, and sadism transforms destruction itself into a perverse source of enjoyment. The similarities to Dror’s (1973) notion of “mad states” suggest that these dynamics are not confined to the clinic but also shape political life, where fantasies of omnipotence and repudiation of reality replace rational diplomacy. In Israel’s current trajectory, ruins are celebrated as miracles, starvation is denied, and persecutory projections collapse the distinction between civilians and combatants. What emerges is not only strategic violence but an assault on the very processes of thought and representation, leading to sadistic destruction.
 

As sadism sustains itself through cycles of destruction and enjoyment, it draws vitality from what it attacks. Freud (1920, 1930) suggests that its persistence depends on the very object it seeks to destroy. The pleasure of destruction thus contains its own exhaustion: sadism lives off the object it attacks, and in doing so reveals its ultimate dependence on its preservation. The question, then, is how this logic translates into the political sphere, and at what cost the sadism is preserved.

Klein (1934, 1940) and Bion (1962) suggest a potential interruption of this circuit through an “other” capable of containing destructive projections, metabolizing them, and eventually making guilt and mourning thinkable. But this assumes an other who can hold and transform violence rather than mirror it—an assumption that becomes unstable in the political sphere. Yet, such interventions falter when they take painfully concrete forms. Military measures, in particular, are easily absorbed into the sadistic economy, becoming fresh objects of hatred and prolonging cycles of violence rather than limiting them. A further complication is that the intervening “other” is not our metaphorical therapist, concerned with symbolization and reality-testing, but a political actor who often behaves in structurally similar ways to the sadistic system it seeks to restrain: escalating omnipotent fantasies, privileging force over thought, and attacking the very conditions for reflective distance.

The Trump administration’s 2025 posture around the Israel–Iran escalation offers a condensed illustration: on one side, signaling possible U.S. participation in strikes that risked further libidinal investment in omnipotent solutions; on the other, intermittently backing a Gaza ceasefire/hostage framework that carved out only a narrow, fragile space for binding and negotiation. Trump’s “Trump Riviera” vision for Gaza can be read in this light as well: an omnipotent redevelopment fantasy that effaces suffering and recasts devastation as a stage for narcissistic saviorhood. Similarly, attacks on symbolic institutions—such as freezes and cuts to public research agencies and ideological pressure on universities—undermine precisely those sites where reality-testing and complexity might be sustained (see also Rose, 2023 for more on the Trump administration).

These dynamics converge with cultural research suggesting a growing normalization - and even celebration - of sadistic themes in entertainment and digital media, signaling a shift in how aggression, power, and domination are experienced, represented, and consumed (Sehgal, 2018). In such a climate, the political “other” is repeatedly invited to participate in, rather than contain, lethal enjoyment. In Bion’s terms (1962), when two formations governed by –K encounter one another, the relationship cannot function as container and contained; instead, it becomes a closed circuit of mutual projection, denial of dependency, and evacuation of responsibility.As Uysal et al. (2022) show, populist mutual reinforcement along a “people versus elites” axis systematically disqualifies mediating institutions and precludes the emergence of reality-testing “thirds,” amplifying anti-thinking and leaving destructive circuits of excitation and attack largely unchecked.

Historical experience complicates this option, as external interventions are notoriously prone to failure: they deepen entrenchment, generate new resentments, and often reproduce the very destructiveness they are meant to end (Tuchman, 1984). In the Israeli case, external involvement included on the one hand, diplomatic pressure, financial restrictions, and weapons embargoes, measures ostensibly aimed at limiting atrocities, while on the other hand selling weapons via covert or even open channels,  which may accelerate the destructive dynamics the overall actions were meant to halt. This highlights the fragility of possible remedies and raises a further question: can external force ever be reliably counted on as a repairing force?
 

Given these limits on external intervention, attention must turn to the internal symbolic infrastructures that enable reflection rather than repetition. Halting destructiveness requires the safeguarding of the symbolic capacities that sustain thought. In the context of this paper, academia and the arts exemplify such infrastructures: they are not cultural luxuries, but symbolic forces—embodiments of K—that sustain questioning, complexity, and the capacity to symbolize loss, as opposed to the –K dynamics of denial, projection, and omnipotent simplification.

When these institutions are attacked, whether through political repression, populist contempt, or forms of isolation that undermine their work, the damage is not only political but psychic. Without robust symbolic frameworks, there is no shared space in which mourning can occur, no access to ambivalence, and no ground for repair. This leaves an open and urgent question: how might societies strengthen and protect the institutions and practices that sustain symbolization in the face of mounting pressure to dismantle them?

Protecting these fragile capacities cannot, by itself, end violence. Yet it may be one of the last remaining forms of resistance against the psychic and cultural forces that insist that destructiveness is inevitable and that no other world can be imagined.

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