Psychopathy and the Pro Palestine Movement
What happens when a political movement creates a moral framework in which violence against an outgroup becomes “resistance,” victims can be stripped of civilian status, and responsibility for their deaths can be transferred back onto the people who were attacked?
Some of the most extreme rhetoric to emerge from pro-Palestinian activism since October 7, 2023 bears striking similarities to characteristics associated with psychopathy: callousness toward victims, diminished affective empathy, lack of remorse and an ability to discuss violence as morally desirable rather than emotionally disturbing.
That does not mean rhetoric can diagnose psychopathy.
But psychology gives us another question worth asking.
If psychopathic and sadistic traits exist throughout the population, and research associates those traits with greater support for political violence, what happens when an ideological environment gives aggression a morally respectable language?
Psychopathy exists outside prisons and psychiatric settings
Psychopathy is a personality construct associated with characteristics including callousness, deficient affective empathy, exploitation, manipulativeness and diminished remorse.
It is also not confined to violent criminals.
A 2021 systematic review and meta-analysis examined 15 studies involving 11,497 adults and calculated an overall psychopathy prevalence estimate of 4.5 percent.
That figure requires an important qualification. When researchers used PCL based measures, widely regarded as the gold standard for assessing psychopathy, the estimated prevalence fell to about 1.2 percent. Other measurement methods produced considerably higher estimates.
So it would be misleading to declare simply that “4 percent of people are psychopaths.”
What can reasonably be said is that psychopathic characteristics exist dimensionally throughout the population, with a smaller proportion of people meeting stricter thresholds.
That becomes politically interesting when combined with research on violence.
Dark personality traits and political violence
A 2024 study published in Personality and Individual Differences examined support for politically motivated violence in five democracies.
Its first study included 10,316 participants in Argentina, Australia, Germany, Italy and the United States. A second study involved 1,845 Americans and examined narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy more directly.
The researchers found that darker personality characteristics were associated with greater support for political violence. In the American sample, psychopathy was particularly important.
An even more relevant study published in 2026 examined attitudes toward violence in the Israel Hamas conflict.
Across two studies involving 257 and 470 participants, psychopathy and sadism were consistently associated with support for violent actions by both Israel and Hamas. The researchers found that political alignment influenced which actor's violence people supported, but psychopathy and sadism were associated with a broader willingness to endorse violence across opposing sides.
That finding matters.
It suggests that ideology and personality need not be competing explanations.
Ideology can tell someone whose violence to support.
Personality may help explain how comfortable that person is with violence in the first place.
And that leads directly to the rhetoric produced by some radical pro-Palestinian organizations after October 7.
A “historic win” on October 8
National Students for Justice in Palestine's “Day of Resistance Toolkit” provides one of the clearest examples.
The document was circulated on or about October 8, 2023, approximately one day after the Hamas led attack began and weeks before Israel's major ground operation in Gaza. It advertised an organizing call for October 9 and demonstrations for October 12.
This chronology matters.
The toolkit was not primarily a reaction to months of Israeli military operations in Gaza. It was produced while the attack itself and its immediate consequences were still unfolding.
The document declared:
“Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.”
It described the October events as a “natural and justified response” to oppression and instructed activists to “normalize the resistance.”
It went further.
The toolkit stated that settlers were not civilians “in the sense of international law” because they were supposedly “military assets.”
It declared that responsibility for “every single death” fell solely on Israel.
And in a section discussing liberation “by any means necessary,” it stated that resistance included “armed struggle, general strikes, and popular demonstrations,” before declaring all of them legitimate and necessary.
This is where psychology becomes useful.
The document does not merely support Palestinian political aspirations.
It constructs a moral framework for violence.
Violence becomes resistance.
The attack becomes a historic victory.
Civilian status becomes negotiable.
Responsibility for death is transferred completely away from the people committing violence.
Armed struggle becomes morally legitimate.
Psychologist Albert Bandura described closely related processes under the concept of moral disengagement.
When violence becomes moral
Moral disengagement describes the psychological mechanisms that allow people to participate in, endorse or excuse harmful behavior while continuing to regard themselves as moral.
One mechanism is moral justification: violence becomes acceptable because it serves a supposedly righteous objective.
Another is euphemistic labeling: troubling behavior receives language that makes it sound cleaner or more honorable.
Another is attribution of blame: responsibility moves from the perpetrator to the victim.
Another is dehumanization or moral exclusion: the victim becomes less deserving of normal moral protection.
Research has found a significant relationship between moral disengagement and aggressive behavior. A meta-analysis involving 17,776 participants found a positive association between the two.
Consider the National SJP rhetoric through that framework.
Calling the events a “historic win” supplies moral elevation.
Calling violence “resistance” provides legitimating language.
Saying the victims were not really civilians weakens their moral status.
Declaring Israel responsible for “every single death” transfers responsibility away from those committing the violence.
And explicitly telling supporters to “normalize the resistance” attempts to alter the moral norm itself.
The organization was not simply describing political violence.
It was telling activists how to think about it.
“Zionists don't deserve to live”
The psychological implications become more direct in the case of Khymani James, one of the prominent figures in Columbia University's 2024 pro-Palestinian encampment.
In a recording from January 2024, James said:
“Zionists don't deserve to live comfortably, let alone Zionists don't deserve to live.”
James compared Zionists with Nazis and fascists and said:
“Be grateful that I'm not just going out and murdering Zionists.”
James also said, according to the recording:
“I feel very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for those people to die.”
The central remarks were documented on video and independently reported by major news organizations. Columbia subsequently barred James from campus.
James initially apologized.
Months later, James publicly stated that the apology had not actually been written by James.
Again, the psychologically interesting element is not merely that the statement was offensive.
It is the moral reasoning contained within it.
James grouped Zionists together with Nazis, fascists and white supremacists. Once that equivalence was established, death became morally acceptable.
The category itself became sufficient to remove normal protection for the person inside it.
That is moral exclusion in unusually explicit form.
From individual rhetoric to organizational permission
The story did not end with James.
In October 2024, Columbia University Apartheid Divest said the earlier apology did not represent its political line.
The organization separately declared:
“We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance.”
It also argued that, after peaceful options had supposedly been exhausted:
“Violence is the only path forward.”
The available evidence does not establish that CUAD endorsed every statement James had made.
But it does establish something narrower and important: the organization itself publicly legitimized political violence.
That changes the social environment surrounding aggressive rhetoric.
An individual who advocates violence does not necessarily encounter a movement telling that person to become less extreme.
In some radical factions, the ideological structure may instead provide the justification.
“Normalize the resistance”
This may be the most important phrase in the National SJP document.
“Normalize the resistance.”
Political movements do not merely express ideas. They establish social norms.
They tell participants which behavior deserves praise, which victims deserve sympathy, which words are acceptable and which acts can be morally justified.
National SJP explicitly instructed supporters to normalize and popularize its framing of resistance.
Within Our Lifetime's own publicly available rally toolkit provides additional evidence of militant rhetoric circulating within parts of the movement.
Among the chants it recommends are:
“There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”
“Resistance is justified! When people are occupied!”
“Say it loud say it clear, we don't want zionists here.”
“From New York to Gaza! Globalize the intifada!”
“We don't want two states! We want '48!”
And:
“5 6 7 8 smash the settler zionist state!”
Not every one of these slogans constitutes a threat of physical violence, and slogans must be interpreted in context.
Taken together, however, they demonstrate an activist environment in which revolutionary struggle, exclusion of Zionists and “intifada” are actively incorporated into movement messaging.
That matters when considering what kinds of rhetoric a political environment rewards and amplifies.
So where do psychopaths enter the picture?
This is where the evidence becomes suggestive rather than conclusive.
Psychopathic traits exist in the population.
Research associates psychopathy and sadism with greater willingness to endorse political violence.
We also have documented political environments in which armed resistance is described as legitimate, violence is described as necessary, victims can be deprived of civilian status and activists are instructed to normalize the ideological framing surrounding violence.
Put those facts together and an obvious question emerges.
What happens to people already high in callousness, sadism, aggression or psychopathic traits when they enter an environment that provides moral permission for hostility toward a designated enemy?
For someone who already has unusually little emotional resistance to cruelty, an ideology can potentially provide something extremely useful: justification.
Aggression no longer has to be experienced as aggression.
It can become liberation.
Hatred can become justice.
Violence can become resistance.
Callousness toward victims can become political sophistication.
And the death of an ideological enemy can be discussed without remorse because the enemy has first been placed outside the normal circle of moral concern.
The research does not currently establish that people with psychopathic traits disproportionately join pro-Palestinian organizations. No representative personality study of pro-Palestinian activists was identified in the research conducted for this article.
But that does not make the psychological question irrelevant.
It makes it a question awaiting direct study.
The movement does not have to create psychopathy
Perhaps the more interesting possibility is that political extremism does not have to create psychopathic personalities at all.
It only has to create an environment in which some behaviors associated with extreme callousness become morally acceptable.
A person does not need to lack empathy toward everyone.
The person only needs to stop applying empathy to one group.
A person does not need to believe murder is generally acceptable.
The person only needs a framework explaining why killing a particular enemy is justified.
A person does not need to reject morality.
The person can instead redefine morality so that aggression becomes a moral duty.
This is why moral disengagement and psychopathy intersect so provocatively.
Psychopathy can involve diminished affective concern and callousness as personality characteristics.
Moral disengagement can produce remarkably similar outward behavior by teaching people when compassion should be suspended.
And political movements capable of normalizing violent rhetoric may provide an environment in which both mechanisms point in the same direction.
An uncomfortable question
The evidence does not permit a diagnosis of the pro-Palestinian movement.
It does permit a much harder question.
If a measurable portion of the population possesses elevated psychopathic, sadistic or otherwise callous traits, and psychological research associates those traits with greater support for political violence, what happens when radical political factions tell participants that their enemies are not legitimate civilians, that violence is justified, that armed struggle is necessary and that the movement should actively “normalize” this worldview?
Some of the rhetoric documented since October 7 provides a disturbing case study.
Perhaps the most unsettling conclusion is not that everyone producing such rhetoric is a psychopath.
It is that they do not have to be.
A political ideology capable of transforming cruelty into virtue can allow ordinary moral restraints to erode.
And for the smaller number of people who may already possess unusually callous or aggressive dispositions, such an environment may offer something even more powerful:
a moral vocabulary through which the darkest impulses can be described as righteousness.
