Behind many violent conflicts lurk sinister figures who exercise perverse and harmful leadership, capable of swaying large masses or smaller but loyal groups willing to kill under their command. After all, they are the ones who have the power to legitimize violence and make it acceptable and necessary, sometimes providing exclusionary and confrontational ideologies and symbols that are easily accepted by their followers, who develop emotional ties with their beloved leaders in a system of unthinking allegiance and obedience. These types of leaders are experts at channeling the emotions of others to their own interests. There is a close relationship between episodes of group hatred or collective violence and dominant and autocratic leadership, which are accompanied by social attitudes of loyalty, obedience, submission, or subordination, which may be voluntary and by seduction, not by coercion. Leaders simply activate, stimulate, and channel these more or less latent predispositions and provide them with a justifying narrative. They are what some also call "ethnic entrepreneurs," the instigators of war who, like Netanyahu and his supremacist minister Ben-Gvir, use hate speech to stigmatize and "animalize" their adversaries, in this case, the Palestinians.
Authoritarian leaders are prone to dogmatism, the promotion of hostile stereotypes, excessive self-confidence, and difficulty recognizing others. They are often narcissistic, power-hungry, arrogant, self-sufficient, lacking in empathy, prone to contempt, authoritarian, manipulative, vain, proud, with a very inflated ego, messianic, overrated, and in need of admiration and applause. These excesses obscure or nullify their ability to value the suffering of others or to be aware of the repercussions of their actions, which they always justify and know no bounds. They therefore lack a sense of responsibility and are unaware of dialogue, consensus, the mutual resolution of disputes, otherness, or mere compassion and mercy. Their obsession is power, control, and dominance. Power relations and the ability of leaders to attribute objectionable or supposedly threatening characteristics to other groups largely determine the emergence of enemy images.
A "perverse leader" in this context should not be understood solely from a psychopathological perspective, but rather from their ability to exploit identity-based resentments for the purpose of accumulating power. These leaders proclaim themselves defenders of the ethnic community, use real or fabricated historical grievances, construct narratives of collective victimhood, and channel fear, resentment, and frustration toward an external group, the Palestinians, presented as an existential threat. Through strategies of discursive polarization, these leaders create absolute social dichotomies: "us" (victims, pure, legitimate) vs. "them" (terrorists and occupationists), which allows violence to be justified as "ethnic self-defense." Social media users experience collective emotional validation, reinforce stereotypes, and generate an "echo chamber" effect that renders moderate voices invisible, just as Israeli television does.
Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir no longer hide their plan to completely "cleanse" Palestine of its inhabitants. Those who remain alive will be forced into exile in other countries so that President Trump can realize his dream of turning the Gaza Strip into a tourist paradise for the rich, at the price of a . Such are the plans of perverse leaders, who unfortunately can act with total impunity if we do not act quickly and intelligently to curb their expansionist and dehumanizing ambitions.
