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At the heart of Netanyahu’s delusion is the belief that his interests are the same as Israel’s

A neuropsychologist’s view: Only a person whose judgment and decision-making had been altered by power could claim the military actions of the last year constitute a path to ultimate victory for Israel

Binyamin Netanyahu has been prime minister of Israel for 17 of the 28 years between 1996 and today. Photograph: Abir Sultan/AP
Binyamin Netanyahu has been prime minister of Israel for 17 of the 28 years between 1996 and today. Photograph: Abir Sultan/AP
Ian Robertson
Sat Oct 26 2024 - 07:00

On September 9th, 1993, the prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, received a letter from Yasser Arafat in which the Palestinian leader renounced violence and officially recognised Israel. Rabin replied later that day, officially recognising the Palestine Liberation Organisation. This was not easy for either leader – just two months before, Rabin had ordered a one-week military operation in Lebanon, in response to Hizbullah rocket fire into Israel.

Violence begets violence and cruelty begets cruelty. Fear creates the emotional triggers for our most primitive impulses – for punishing, causing pain and exacting revenge. In a state of fear, the brain’s emotion centres, such as the amygdala, go into overdrive and disrupt rational and long-term thinking. A part of the brain which was the last to evolve in humans as a species, and which is the last to complete its development in our mid to late 20s – the prefrontal cortex – is the only antidote to vengeful emotion. This part of the brain can, with great effort and over time, send inhibiting messages down to these emotion centres and tone them down. This changes brain chemistry to allow these more rational, strategic and long-term thinking parts of the brain to operate properly again. Statesmen such as Rabin are human civilisation’s equivalent of the prefrontal cortex. Yes, they feel the rage, the fear and the impulse for revenge, but they master them. And by doing so they are able to look into the future and see only a ghastly ping-pong of violence stretching endlessly ahead; they understand that there must be another way, albeit an emotional painful and stressful one.

In July 1995, Binyamin Netanyahu led a mock funeral procession at an anti-Rabin rally. It featured a coffin and hangman’s noose and Netanyahu and his crowd chanted “Death to Rabin”. On November 4th, 1995, Rabin was murdered by an extremist Jewish man called Yigal Amir, who was opposed to Rabin’s peace deal. In 2022, the Times of Israel reported that the head of Israel’s Labour Party, Merav Michaeli, had accused Netanyahu of being complicit in the assassination of Rabin.

Netanyahu is an educated man with undergraduate and master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, so his refusal to engage with US requests to pursue diplomatic solutions to the conflict are not caused by his being incapable of long-term, strategic thinking. However, he has also been prime minister for a total of 17 of the 28 years between 1996 and today. Great power held over long periods has distorting effects on the human brain which can cause enormous problems for the countries with power-intoxicated leaders. This is why even in communist China the Communist Party used to completely change its leadership every 10 years. That is, until Xi Jinping took over, whose forces have recently been circling Taiwan.

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Had Hamas not embarked on its bestial attack last October, Netanyahu would most probably no longer be prime minister and would be under the judicial cudgel for alleged corruption

As a neuropsychologist, I have studied and written about the effects of power on the brains of leaders. What we see in Netanyahu is someone whose brain was profoundly changed by exposure to power. As with Vladimir Putin, it is his psychology – a mix of self-belief and paranoia – that is driving his decision-making; and as with Putin, he has lost the ability to distinguish his own interests from the interests of the country.

Research shows that leaders with autocratic tendencies start wars much more often than do other leaders. Netanyahu’s attempts to weaken judicial constraints on political power in Israel suggest he is in this mould. Autocrats are war-prone because their dictatorial behaviour makes them many domestic enemies and the best way to neutralise political opposition, other than assassinating and jailing as Putin does, is to rally the nation around a perceived external threat and take it to war. Political enemies can then be crushed by accusing them of wartime treason.

Observers believe Netanyahu, like Donald Trump, needs to hold on to power for as long as he can because the alternative is jail. Had Hamas not embarked on its bestial attack last October, Netanyahu would most probably no longer be prime minister and would be under the judicial cudgel for alleged corruption. And the only way he can hold on to power is by continuing a merciless war and refusing all diplomatic paths.

Another reason why autocrats wage war is that their power intoxication distorts their judgment, creates dangerous overconfidence and blinds them to risk. It also destroys empathy, diminishes self-awareness and makes them feel all-powerful, omnipotent, even godlike. This happened to Napoleon, Hitler and Putin – they embarked on ultimately self-destructive and failed military adventures because their power-induced narcissism made them believe they had superhuman prowess as military commanders. Success after battle success created a hubris that brought Napoleon and Hitler down. Netanyahu, as the Israeli journalist Ari Shavit has noted, sees himself as a Winston Churchill, a defender against the “forces endangering western civilisation”.

Netanyahu no doubt believes he has achieved multiple military successes against Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran. But only a person whose judgment and decision-making had been distorted by power and apparent success could convince himself that the military actions of the last year constitute real strategic progress on the way to ultimate victory. Ideas such as starving the Palestinians out of the north of Gaza or driving them out to Egypt or elsewhere circulate freely in his government. Minister for finance Bezalel Smotrich denies the existence of a Palestinian people and believes in a Greater Israel that encompasses Jordan and parts of Syria.

Netanyahu and many in his government seem to be suffering the same delusion that somehow a few million Palestinians can be magicked away to make way for this Greater Israel. A two-state solution is anathema to them, a risible impossibility. Netanyahu’s “successes”, and his power-induced narcissism, doom Israel and its neighbours to indefinite, grinding war and misery.

Prof Ian Robertson is emeritus professor of psychology at TCD and author of How Confidence Works: The new science of self-belief (Penguin, 2022)