Dr Anjuli Pandavar is a British writer and social critic, who holds a PhD in political economy. She was born into a Muslim family in apartheid South Africa, where she left Islam in 1979. Anjuli is preparing to convert to Judaism. She is one of the staunchest defenders of Israel and a constructive critic of the Jewish state when she believes it is warranted. She owns and writes on Murtadd to Human , where she may be contacted. On 19, 25 and 30 January, and on 1 and 8 February 2025, the people of Israel were subjected to major psychological attacks in the form of the drip-feed release of captives, accompanied by maximum wearing down of Israelis both during and before the “releases”. The saddest aspect of all this is not even that the Israelis are not engaging in this psychological war, but that the people of Israel seem completely unaware that this is being done to them. Five times this has happened, each time escalating, yet every time they are surprised, every time they are horrified, at what Hamas does next, as if Hamas is engaged in some kind of hostage release deal. On October 7 2023, so many Israelis described Hamas as barbarians. What did you mean by that? Do you actually know what a barbarian is, or was that just a metaphor for how you felt? You know, I don’t expect you to take this seriously, but Ayatollah Ali Sistani once rebuked a “moderate” Muslim academic that, “Civilisation and Islam are two different things.” The Ayatollah knew what he was talking about, as do I when I tell you that these people are barbarians . They are the kind of people who need a God to instruct them on how to knock at someone’s door, how to behave in someone else’s house, and how to clean themselves after defecating, in minute detail, else each of these and everything else besides would be exercises in quotidian savagery. And they are also unkillable, because they want to die . That means that despite all your weapons, you can never win, because you are fighting the wrong war. The only way that you win a war against people who want to die, is if they lose before they die. They have to know that they have lost, and then continue to live . So if you want to win, you have only two options: one, obliterate them all; or two, break their spirit. I would imagine that for you, the first is out of the question. Good. You are not barbarians. But for the second, you think you could do that, if you don’t have to violate your principles. Well, in that case, I have news for you. While you will find the first impossible, you’ll find the second even more so, because in the entire one hundred years that your barbarian enemies have been waging psychological war against you, you have consistently found it impossible to even acknowledge that this was being done to you. And after a century of continuous, severe, psychological blows without ever striking back, you are at the point of devouring yourselves, blind to what is right before your eyes. Three male captives—to your own detriment, you insist on calling them hostages—were released today. On the Internet, three groups of friends and family waited with baited breath to see their loved ones for the first time in over 400 days, in palpable anticipation of joy, cameras rolling to capture that special moment—and there they were—jubilant outbursts… until that instant when the horror had seared through their eyes, up their optic nerves, into their visual cortex, had registered and from their deepest memories rudely tore out skeletal prisoners released from Nazi death camps and plastered them all over their loved ones. Dear people of Israel, it breaks my heart to say this, but you have it completely the wrong way round. Those men were not starved so badly that they now look like Holocaust survivors; they were meant to look like Holocaust survivors, which why they were starved so badly. You called these people barbarians, but you had no idea what you were talking about. And still you do not. You have not seen the worst of their cruelty, not by a long way, and still, you are not ready for it. If you will not fight a psychological war, how can you be expected to know how to even defend yourselves in such a war. You are sitting ducks, and Hamas is picking you off. Just this evening a woman on YouTube screamed at your Prime Minister that he is responsible for these men looking like they just survived the Holocaust. Hamas saw that video, too, as did every Palestinian Arab family, and it was sweets, smiles and Allahu-akbars all around. In their psychological war on you, they smell victory. And still, you refuse to engage.
