How terrorists acquire, deploy and weaponise Western empathy against Israel

As Syrian rebels captured Damascus this past weekend, CNN showcased their leader Mohamed al-Jolani, one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, as a "blazer-wearing ‘revolutionary’.” ABC described his “rebranding” with values of "tolerance" and "pluralism”. In the US, the Council on American-Islamic Relations cast his win as a victory for “justice and freedom”.

Earlier this year, in a video released by the Israeli military, Tarek Abu Shaluf, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad spokesman captured by Israeli forces, openly described how his militant group tailors propaganda to Western audiences, manipulating false narratives about the Gaza war to align with Western humanitarian values. “The international media differs from the Arab ones; they focus on humanitarian issues. We don’t speak to them in the language of violence, destruction and revenge,” he said.

From Gaza to Syria, militant groups like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Syrian rebels orchestrate calculated psychological operations, employing exceptional skills in cognitive empathy to manipulate Westerner’s emotional empathy. Cognitive empathy is the ability to accurately understand and model the thoughts, feelings and values of others. It’s like hacking into someone’s algorithm for how they think and feel, enabling you to predict their reactions to your actions. On the other hand, emotional empathy – what the West excessively values – is the ability to feel what you believe the other person is experiencing.

Cognitive empathy takes effort to construct, whereas emotional empathy is involuntary and instantaneous. Anti-Israel militants have been able to turbo-charge their propaganda campaigns by using their cognitive empathy to manipulate Westerner’s emotional empathy.

Using cognitive empathy, militants have learned to present their cause as aligned with Western humanitarian values, carefully curating their image as champions of freedom and justice. This dynamic is rooted in asymmetrical power relationships, where weaker groups often develop a detailed understanding of powerful parties, using cognitive empathy to identify and press the psychological buttons that influence those in power. Like a gardener who knows his employer’s thoughts and moods better than the employer knows him, these terrorists often possess a stronger cognitive grasp of Western psychology than Westerners understand jihadi psychology.

This imbalance often creates a vague, incomplete and distorted understanding of militants by Westerners, functioning like a political inkblot on the Rorschach test, where individuals with a weaker understanding project their values and experiences onto the weaker group, rather than forming an accurate cognitive model of their motivations. Many Westerners, particularly those who live free from war or violence – like many of the students protesting on college campuses – attribute benevolence to militants, sympathizing with the militants as victims who only want a good life.

For example, Shaluf, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad spokesman, admitted that when a militant rocket struck the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza in mid-October 2023, after the brutal murder of Israelis by Hamas, militant group propagandists knew their own misfired rocket was responsible for the killing of civilian casualties. Yet, to “erase” this fact, he said, they portrayed the deaths as a humanitarian disaster perpetuated by “the occupation.” Indeed, BBC described the deaths in the hospital strike as part of a wider “humanitarian crisis” fomented by Israeli “strikes on Gaza.”

After the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas, I saw this psychological warfare have an impact on recovery from trauma and have been crisscrossing Israel to try to stop its negative effects. As a neuro and clinical psychologist with over 30 years of treating trauma internationally, I founded the Israeli Healing Initiative last year and have been bringing high-tech treatments to survivors of trauma from Druze community centers in the north to the Adi Negev Nahalat Eran Rehabilitation Hospital in the south, helping survivors smile again, as British combat veteran Andrew Fox recently wrote.

This week, I met Ateret Violet Shmuel, founder of a nonprofit, Indigenous Bridges, that helps indigenous communities heal from trauma. She noted a serious psychological effect the propaganda has had among Jews: “shame,” she said, as alleged “occupiers” instead of the indigenous people that they are in Israel.

Young adults are susceptible. In March, a Pew survey revealed that respondents 29 and under are more likely to sympathize with Hamas. One poll concluded that TikTok videos may contribute to greater sympathy for Hamas among college students. Research shows that cognitive empathy develops with age, making older adults more resistant to propagandists who exploit emotional triggers.

These militants exploit Western values by weaponizing emotional empathy. Through graphic imagery and tales of victimhood, they provoke "pain empathy" – the visceral emotional reaction to witnessing suffering. Our brains are wired to respond more deeply to the image of a single suffering child than to statistics about millions of people, a phenomenon known as the “identifiable victim effect.” Studies reveal that less effective charities often out-raise more impactful ones simply by showcasing such poignant imagery. These insidious images infiltrate our brains and involuntarily affect our brain functioning. With simple exposure to these images, we respond with emotional empathy. The more emotionally empathic we already are, the more vulnerable we are to its weaponization

Hamas and its sympathizers skilfully exploit pain-empathy circuits in the brain, flooding the media with real or manipulated images of dead children, often misrepresenting gruesome scenes from other wars, including the Holocaust in the case of “Holocaust inversion,” as Palestinian casualties of Israel. Palestinian leaders have openly stated that higher death tolls benefit their cause. They actively work to increase civilian casualties by broadcasting messages in mosques and on social media, instructing Gazans to ignore Israeli evacuation warnings, and by physically blocking evacuations through roadblocks or even shooting those attempting to flee. In a blatant display of their antihumanitarian values, Hamas increases civilian casualties in order to weaponize Western pain-empathy to gain support for their agenda.

But while the militants center their narrative around victimhood to promote pain-empathy in Western audiences, they simultaneously promote a narrative as victor to excite their base. For example, militant propagandists sent the Western media images of Gazan suffering, while Hamas broadcast GoPro videos of torture and murder to their supporters to invigorate them. They highlighted their victimhood and suffering under the “occupation” of the “colonizers.” They played it brilliantly.

During the 2008 war in Gaza, the international media focused on gruesome and graphic coverage of casualties, sometimes called “war porn,” and transformed a complex conflict into a global emotional spectacle. CNN amplified sympathy for Hamas, illustrating the devastating effectiveness of such psychological strategies.

While emotional empathy fosters connectedness, it can also have negative consequences, such as lying to benefit our group, prioritizing our group’s interests over principles of justice and connecting so much to another group’s priorities that our empathy is self-destructive, something that Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad calls “suicidal empathy.”

The ability to truly empathize – combining emotional resonance with cognitive understanding – requires a nuanced, fact-based model of others’ motivations. Without this balance, our empathy becomes a tool for manipulation.

What can we do? We must refine our cognitive frameworks to resist propaganda, anchoring our emotional responses in accurate understanding. While individual stories of suffering evoke deep empathy, they must be rescaled to reflect the true scope of the issue.

Similarly, the compelling imagery of “blazer-waving” revolutionaries for peace must be critically examined within the broader context of extremist violence and manipulation, from Gaza to Syria and beyond.

Dr Orli Peter is a neuropsychologist who established the Israel Healing Initiative.