How the Brutalized Become Brutal

On Israel, Spain, and the Neurology of Mass Violence

A starving child in Gaza looks upon the rubble of his former home.

On October 7, 2023, militants from Hamas—a Palestinian political and militant organization that governs the Gaza Strip—launched a surprise attack on southern Israel. They breached the border, killed more than 1,200 Israeli civilians, and took around 250 hostages, including children and elderly people. Entire families were massacred. It was the deadliest single day for Jewish people since the Holocaust.

Nothing about that is justifiable.

And yet, in the months since, Israel’s response has not been about justice.

It has been phenomenally disproportionate. It has been about annihilation.

As of mid-2025, Israel has killed more than 58,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza—the majority of them women and children. Entire neighborhoods have been flattened. Hospitals, schools, and refugee camps have been knowingly bombed. Humanitarian aid has been sadistically blocked. Famine and disease are spreading. Most of the hostages are now presumed dead—many killed in Israeli airstrikes.

More than 85% of Gaza’s roughly 2.3 million residents—about 1.9 million people—have been internally displaced from their homes during Israel’s military campaign.

Since the breakdown of the ceasefire in mid-March, an additional 680,000+ Palestinians have been forced to flee.

And earlier, between October 7, 2023, and March 2025, UN/Israeli sources reported another 714,000+ displaced, as Israeli evacuation orders emptied whole towns and pushed civilians into ever-smaller pockets of Gaza.

In sum, nearly all the inhabitants of Gaza are now displaced, living in tents, shelters, schools, or the open, with few promises of returning to anything like home anytime soon.

Let me repeat that: Israel has killed or displaced every single person in Gaza. Every. Single. Person.

Let’s be clear: Hamas does not represent all Palestinians, just as Israel does not speak for all Jewish people. These are governments. Militaries. Ideologies. They are not the people they claim to protect. Many Jewish people in Israel and around the world have risked their freedom, reputations, and safety to oppose what is being done in their name.

But still, this question haunts us:

How does Israel, governed by people with personal and generational memory of the horrors of ethnically motivated genocide, come to occupy the role of genocidal power?

And deeper still:

Why, over and over again, do the most brutalized people become the most brutal in turn?

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Spain, Genízaros, and the Inheritance of Cruelty

History offers some clues.

In 711 CE, the Iberian Peninsula was conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus. The Muslim reign of Al-Andalus lasted nearly 800 years. While the early centuries were marked by periods of relative tolerance—Jews and Christians were permitted to live as dhimmi, or protected religious minorities—this changed over time. By the 12th century, under stricter dynasties like the Almohads, forced conversions, persecution, and exile became more common.

For centuries, Catholic Spaniards lived under the rule of a religious “other.”
And when they finally reclaimed power in 1492, they responded not with humility—but with vengeance.

They launched the Spanish Inquisition, a four-century campaign to root out and punish heresy. Jews and Muslims were given a choice: convert, flee, or die. When the Spanish crossed the ocean into the Americas, they brought this brutality with them.

Here in my home state of New Mexico, Spanish colonizers borrowed a horrifying strategy from the Ottoman Empire: child conscription.

The Ottomans had conquered the Iberian Peninsula in part through a practice of kidnapping local boys between ages 5 and 8, brutally training them as soldiers (Janissaries), and sending them to conquer their own people when they came of age. The idea was that their families, having missed them for so long, would greet them with open arms—and the boys, now brainwashed and beaten, would kill their own.

The Spanish did the same here.

They took young Native boys, erased their identities, and raised them as servants and soldiers—then used them to commit genocide against their own home villages. These children were called Genízaros.

Those who had once been forced to kneel now forced others to do the same.

Time and again, history shows us: The brutalized do not always respond with empathy or compassion.

Sometimes they become brutal in turn.

Often, they become worse.

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Fear Hijacks the Brain—and the Nation

Why does this happen? Why do we refuse to learn compassion?

The answer may lie in our neurology.

When we’re threatened—physically, emotionally, existentially—our brain diverts power from the prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for empathy, reason, and regulation, to the more primitive amygdala, which governs survival responses. Fight. Flight. Freeze.

This shift isn't conscious. It’s biological.

Once a trauma pathway is laid down—especially in childhood, or across generations—it becomes easier and easier for the brain to default to fear. To hypervigilance. To violence.

We see this same dynamic in families.

A child who grows up in an abusive household learns early that love and violence can come from the same source. Their brain becomes wired for survival, not connection. The amygdala learns to scan constantly for danger. The prefrontal cortex gets overridden again and again.

And when that child grows up, if they don’t heal their trauma wiring, they may repeat what was done to them—even if they don’t want to.

Not because they’re evil.

But because they are hurt, scared, and neurologically primed to lash out before they can think. To dominate before they can be dominated. To avoid ever feeling powerless again.

This doesn’t excuse their actions.

But it helps explain them.

Brutalized nations, like brutalized children, often respond to fear with cruelty, control, and overcompensation. The pain doesn’t disappear. It boomerangs.

Entire societies can exist in a constant state of perceived threat.
Sociopathic leaders know this. They use it to stay in power.

When fear rules, empathy dies. Rationality dies. And those sociopaths can not only get away with murder—they’ll be celebrated as heroes for it.

Men like Netanyahu know this. So does Stephen Miller.

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Manufactured Fear Feels Just as Real

Here’s the twist: We think we hate because of what’s been done to us.

But often, we hate because someone has made us afraid.

Hate is often just the worst expression of fear.

When we lash out at immigrants, protestors, tiny schoolgirls in Gaza—at anyone labeled “other”—we’re often not responding to a real threat. We’re reacting to a perceived one. One that someone has carefully constructed for us.

The Thomas Theorem in sociology puts it this way:

“If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”

It doesn’t matter if the danger is fabricated, as is the “crisis at the border” or the “invasion of criminal aliens” (both pure lies).

If people believe it, they will behave as though it’s true. Even when the behavior causes suffering, harm and death to innocent human beings.

And when the fear hits, the prefrontal cortex shuts down. There’s no reasoning with someone in survival mode.

Propagandists know this.

Fox News knows this.

Their job is to make sure that moment never ends.

This is not new. Colonizers, fascists, and demagogues have always used fear to justify violence. Show people doctored or selective footage, scream about invasions, whisper about “replacement”—and terrified followers will do anything.

They’ll turn off their empathy. They’ll bomb hospitals. They’ll vote for tyrants. They’ll murder thousands of innocent children and call it “war.”

Fear, even more than hatred, is what enables atrocity.

And this is how cycles of violence escalate—even when the ones being attacked are the colonized, not the colonizers. It’s not revenge.

It’s preemptive cruelty, dressed up in the broken brain as self-defense.

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Hatred Feels Righteous. But It Fails.

My mother considers herself a liberal.

She watches MSNBC all day. On Facebook, her other pastime, she’s fed a constant, algorithmic diet of curated rage and terror.

When I was a kid, she was a peace-and-love hippie. She hummed, danced, smiled.

Now, she speaks of MAGA voters like cockroaches to be exterminated.

Just like her adversaries next door watching Fox News.

This is what happens when media—owned by the same corporations as the defense contractors—feeds off fear. They keep people glued to their screens, simmering in righteous rage.

We become a black-and-white, “with us or against us” society.

And anyone “against us” deserves to suffer. Or die.

It’s a sickness. And it has infected nearly everyone.

The problem is: when we try to confront cruelty with our own cruelty, it doesn’t disrupt the cycle. It fuels it.

And our cruelty becomes their justification.

It. Does. Not. End.

So no—I’m not saying we should coddle oppressors.

But we do have to understand the machinery of fear they operate—and recognize when it’s pulling us in.

Because the only way out of this mess is not more fear.

It’s a deeper, harder, more uncomfortable compassion.

It’s love.

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The Wisdom of the Elders

Many spiritual leaders across the world’s major faiths have warned us:

Hatred cannot heal hatred.

The Buddha said:
“Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.”

Jesus taught:
“Love your enemies. Bless those who curse you.”

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said:
“Do not let the hatred of a people prevent you from being just.”

These voices—centuries apart, from different corners of the world—are all saying the same thing:

You cannot end violence with more violence.
You can only interrupt it with love, restraint, and justice.

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The Practice Is the Hard Part

We know these things. We’ve always known. Every spiritual tradition tells us that hate cannot heal hate. The problem isn’t knowing. The problem is practice.

How do we stay human in a world wired to keep us outraged? How do we keep the prefrontal cortex online when everything inside us is screaming cornered animal?

I don’t have a perfect answer. But I know what doesn’t work. More violence. More shaming. More performative purity. That never gets us free.

And no—this doesn’t mean condoning atrocities. It doesn’t mean staying silent. It means doing the excruciating work of speaking truth with compassion, even when we are terrified, even when we are convinced the other side doesn’t deserve it. It means refusing to let our nervous systems be hijacked by algorithms designed to profit off our rage. It means refusing to become what hurt us, even when that feels like the only way to survive.

That’s hard. Especially online. Especially for me.

But meditation has helped. Just a breath. A pause. A small space between trigger and response. And sometimes, that breath is everything. It can save a life. It can stop a war. It can pull the future back from the fire.

I don’t always take it. But I want to. I need to. Because when I look at this world now—rage devouring empathy, trauma dressed up as righteousness—I see clearly that I don’t want to be part of that cycle anymore.

Not even a little.

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Please note: I have both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. My third-great-grandfather, Abraham Haim de Meza y del Valle, was among the first leaders of the first synagogue in New Orleans, Louisiana. That line of my family fled the Spanish Inquisition in Portugal, for Amsterdam, and then on to Curacao, New Orleans, and New Mexico. My great-grandmother, Gladys DeMeza, who was a Christian scientist when I knew her, had hidden her Jewish roots but was very opposed to my grandfather, her son, marrying my Irish Catholic grandmother. For years, I though she had adopted the English anti-Irish and anti-Catholic views of the Conant family into which she married, but later realized her fear of Catholics was rooted in something much more personal.

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