The face of Jesus Christ in agony on his way to martyrdom. Catedral basílica de Nuestra Señora del Pilar, Zaragoza, Spain (Source: own photo).
Culture first emerged as a way to make sense of the world before science (see here). Initially, cultures evolved in different directions due to geographical isolation of small populations in very different natural environments.
As human populations grew, cultures came into contact with one another more frequently, soon leading to conflict due to a powerful interplay between culture and politics (see here). Cultural differences, it turned out, were extremely easily exploited for political purposes due to the fundamental asymmetry between people's intimate understanding of their own culture and their almost non-existent understanding of other cultures. Most dark manifestations of culture - see here - emanate from this asymmetry.
Martyrdom is yet another example of the dark side of culture. It is a time-honoured practice encouraged by politicians (or other people in positions of power such as priests) to manipulate ordinary people into supporting causes championed by the powerful.
The purpose of this short note is to explain the politics of martyrdom and to illustrate - using the current conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza as an example - how martyrdom is exploited just as much today as in the past, even in very sophisticated societies, such as Israel.
Martyrdom can arise when four ingredients are in place: A martyr, a group of people to which the martyr belongs, a external enemy, and a conflict between the martyr's group and the external enemy. The martyr is an individual (or sometimes a group of individuals), who dies - willingly or unwillingly - at the hands of the external enemy for a cause or a belief widely shared by the group.
Since these ingredients can be found in most conflicts, it is not wonder that martyrdom has occurred countless times in the history of human conflict.
Martyrs attain posthumous status as heroes by paying the ultimate price for defending or advancing the interests of the group. Posthumous heroism is maximised when the external party is superior in strength and brutish in nature. The combination of strength and brutishness confers the impression of moral and intellectual inferiority onto the external party, while the martyr - through self-sacrifice - is assigned attributes of bravery and moral and intellectual superiority.
The sharp contrast between the perception of the martyr and the external party makes martyrdom extremely useful from a political perspective, especially in the context of conflicts between different cultures. Organisations that exercise leadership within individual cultures, such as governments or churches, therefore cultivate martyrs as role models within their respective cultures. It is therefore entirely unsurprising that martyrdom mostly arises in the context of religious or political conflicts.
But how exactly does martyrdom bestow political benefits upon those in power?
Put simply, when a heroic and moral and intelligent person lays down his or her life for a cause then sacrifice elevates the cause; the cause becomes more legitimate, more true, more just, and more worth aspiring to to lesser members of the group. Martyrdom is therefore an instrument of control that operates by way of example (the martyr’s sacrifice) to strengthen support for causes that underpin the powers of governments and churches. This is why governments glorify those who die for their country ("Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”) and churches worship saints, who die for the faith (for a list of Catholic martyrs see here).
The words "The Glorious Dead" adorn the side of the Cenotaph Wall Memorial in Whitehall, London (Source: here)
Yet, not all martyrs are born equal. The effectiveness of a martyr from a political perspective depends on several factors of which the following three are probably the most important:
First, voluntary deaths are strongly preferable to involuntary ones, although martyrdom is still possible when deaths are involuntary. The most politically useful martyrs are without a doubt those who refuse to renounce their faith or political views and suffer horrible deaths. By willingly embracing their gruesome fates, these martyrs demonstrate the greatest possible conviction and achieve the greatest heroism on account of their extreme suffering. However, involuntary deaths can also be useful, especially when the victims are innocent. The victims of 9/11 clearly did not volunteer to die, but they have still become useful martyrs for an American version of freedom (and their martyrdom was immediately exploited as 'justification' for the US invasion Iraq, which killed more than 500,000 people even though Iraq was never even involved in 9/11). There are countless other examples. The unwilling victims of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in Amritsar in 1919, all of whom died at the hands of the British, became important martyrs for the cause of Indian independence. Gordon’s death in Khartoum on 26 January 1885 made him an instant martyr for the British Empire. It does not really matter whether he had any choice in the manner of his demise.
Even New Yorkers took to flag waving in the immediate aftermath of the martyrdom of 9/11 (Source: here)
Second, it is highly desirable as far as political effectiveness of martyrdom is concerned that martyrs die as harrowing deaths as possible. The worse the horror the more powerful the emotional response. Extreme violence is useful, because it induces traumas that are difficult to erase from the memory and challenging to rationalise. Hence, when left untreated such traumas can be relied upon by politicians to deliver distorted reactions to events and violent emotional upheavals when the right triggers are pulled, even long after the martyr has perished.
Sicilian Saint Agatha looks to the heavens as she is martyred and has both her breasts cut off (Source: here)
Third, martyrdom is more effectively weaponised for political ends when the trauma arising from the martyr's demise is not solely experienced by an individual, but rather by the entire group. When very large numbers of people are traumatised by an episode of martyrdom the trauma becomes a collective trauma. Unlike individual traumas, collective traumas are especially susceptible to exploitation for political purposes, because they invoke powerful reactions in many people at the same time. As such, they can be used to corral people for or against certain causes.
Let me illustrate these rather abstract concepts with reference to a real life present-day example. The trauma in question is the Holocaust committed by Nazis against European Jews during World War II, while the political entity exploitating this trauma is the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu in order to manage reactions to Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza.
Let us first review the trauma. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe. Due to the extreme barbarity of the Nazis, the trauma of the Holocaust has survived long after the atrocity itself. Not only do survivors of the Holocaust still suffer from their direct exposure to the trauma, but every other Jewish person alive today does so too. In fact, the horrors of the Holocaust are so widely disseminated in schools, the media, museums, and elsewhere that millions of people who are neither Israeli citizens nor regard themselves as members of Jewish culture have also been traumatised to various degrees [1].
Institutions like the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. have done much to spread awareness about the genocide committed by Nazis against European jews during World War II (Source: See here).
Now let us consider how the trauma of the Holocaust is being exploited by the Netanyahu government for political purposes in the context of the Gaza conflict.
Netanyahu's twin objectives are to vilify Palestinians and to minimise the fallout from Israel's killing of civilians in Gaza. He seeks to achieve these two objectives by exoloiting the associations that arise in the minds of millions of people in Israel and around the world whenever Israel is attacked.
Due to the profound and widely known trauma of the Holocaust anyone who attacks Israel instantly and on a deep emotional level becomes associated with the Nazis, or, at a minimum, with some form of anti-Semitism, which, of course, in turn leads back to Nazism. In this specific case, this association casts the Palestinians as villains.
Yet, the association between Nazism/anti-Semitism and Palestinians has no basis in the real world. Not a single Palestinian had anything whatsoever to do with the Holocaust. Nazism ended in 1945 and those who were actively involved in perpetrating the Holocaust are for the most part long dead. In fact, most Palestinians in Gaza had nothing whatsoever to do with the attack on Israel on 7 October. Their only “crime” is to live in a territory that happens to contain within it an organisation (Hamas) that recently attacked and killed more than 1,200 Israelis.
Netanyahu also exploits associations with the Holocaust to lessen blame when Israeli forces commit war crimes. Netanyahu understands that by casting Israel as victim immediately strong emotional associations are formed in the minds of millions with the Jews as victims of the Holocaust. This association amplifies the sense of indignity at the Hamas attack, which is very politically useful, because it enables Netanyahu to stretch the interpretation of Israel’s “right to defend itself” far beyond what would otherwise be acceptable. Hence, the limited albeit vicious Hamas attack has readily been accepted in many quarters as a legitimate reason for Israel to attack the entire Gaza (as opposed to just Hamas) with extreme prejudice.
The association with the Holocaust therefore also allows Israel to act with near impunity. It is remarkable how the international community continues to show such tolerance of Israel's atrocities. The tolerance for Israeli attrocities is particularly strong in the United States, the most powerful nation in the world. US support has undoubtedly enabled Israel to kill and maim far more people in Gaza than any other nation would have been able to get away with. The importance of US as an ally also rests on the fact that America's allies in Europe and elsewhere are not willing to jeopardise their bilateral relations with the US over Gaza and the plight of a small marginalised people like the Palestinians.
And so the killings continue. In fact, so powerful are the subliminal associations with the Holocaust that many people fail to see the obvious parallels between Israel's treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and, say, Nazi Germany’s response to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 (see here). Numbers just do not matter very much when emotions run high.
Yet, for the record, we should remind ourselves of the facts. Hamas killed around 1,200 Israelis. In response, so far, as of early 2024, the Israeli attack on Gaza has displaced 85% of Gazas population of 2 million (for the US government's estimate of Gaza's population see here). In addition, Israeli forces have so far killed twenty times as many Palestinians as the number of Israelis murdered on 7 October. Most of dead are women and children with zero involvement in the 7 October attacks. And Israel is on record saying that the campaign against Hamas will continue for many more months (see here).
Clearly, all sense of proportionality has been lost, but so has the recognition that all proportion has been lost. And that, of course, is precisely the point of exploiting the associations with the martyrdom of the European Jews in the Holocaust.
But it does not stop there. Those who dare to publicly accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza often find themselves under attack and accused of anti-Semitism. Yet, any objective observer surely would agree that charges of genocide against Israel warrant, at a minimum, examination in the International Court of Justice due to the weight of evidence available, including public statements by Israeli officials and extremely well-documented attacks on civilian targets (see here).
The strategy of linking criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza with anti-Semitism is entirely deliberate; it serves to cast those who criticise Israel in the same camp as those who attack Israel and those who perpetrated the genocide against Jews in the Holocaust.
Allegations of anti-Semitism also detract attention away from the obvious reality that Israel's position today in no way bears any resemblance to the vulnerability of Jews in Europe in the 1940s. Israel has by far the most effective military in the Middle East and it is strongly backed by the United States.
By contrast, the Palestinians are in fact the vulnerable party in this conflict. They are poor and poorly armed. They can only count on mostly moral support from countries like Iran and South Africa as well as Houthi rebels in Yemen and other fundamentalist Islamic groups. Seen in light of the enormous imbalance of power between the Israelis and the Palestinians, it is no wonder that many people now predict - with good reason - that Israel’s atrocities in Gaza are creating a whole new generation of Palestinian martyrs.
Governments' of all hues favour martyrdom, but their specific preferences for type of martyrdom change with levels of income and education as well as the importance of religion within their culture. For examole, Israel’s preferred martyrs all hail from the past (mainly Holocaust victims), while the martyrs of Islamic fundamentalist groups tend to be 'fresh', that is, people who sacrifice themselves in the present moment. This difference reflects the fact that it generally becomes more and more difficult to convince people to become martyrs the wealthier, more democratic, and less religious societies get [2].
Hamas fighters in Gaza - some of them will blow themselves up to become martyrs (Source: see here)
Hence, Islamic fundamentalist groups make greater use of contemporary (living) martyrs than Israel, because Islamic fundamentalist groups operate in societies that are more oppressed, less well educated, more religious, and poorer than Israel. Suicide bombings and suicide stabbings thrive among supporters of Hamas, because Gazans are oppressed, poor, and religious.
Granted, Israel has its own version of Hamas in the guise of the far-right famatical religious extremists that make up a part of Netanyahu's government coalition. Yet, since even superstitious zealots like these do not willingly agree to martyrdom Israel is forced to make use of past martyrs instead. Israel simply does not have an ample supply of people, who are not just religious fanatics (it has those), but also sufficiently poor and uneducated to want to sacrifice themselves in the name of a religious or political cause.
Orthodox Israelis with guns - none of them will blow themselves up to become martyrs (Source: see here).
In fact, the unwillingness of Israel’s soldiers to become martyrs is so strong that Israel goes a very long way to avoid that any of its soldiers ever become prisoners of war. And when this occasionally happens anyway Israel goes to extraordinary lengths to get them back, including agreeing to prisoner swaps in which hundreds of Palestinians are freed for just a single Israeli soldier.
The elevated fear of contemporary martyrdom within the Israeli population also explains why the hostages taken by Hamas pose such a huge political liability for Netanyahu and indeed why Israelis will probably never forgive Netanyahu for the huge loss of Israeli lives on 7 October.
Finally, the fear of dying for a cause among Israelis explains why Israel uses such extreme and indiscriminate methods of warfare against Hamas, even in densely built-up areas. Bombing may kill a lot of civilians, but it spares the lives of Israeli soldiers. Most Israelis would simply not accept any alternative military strategy that would require them to die in large numbers on the streets of Gaza.
The inner sleeve of a Danish passport shows a martyr being tortured to death. (Source: own photo).
To end this small note on martyrdom, it is worth remembering that it is not just Islamic fundamentalists, the Netanyahu government, and others like them who exploit martyrdom for political purposes. Martyrdom is so ubiquitous in Western culture that many of us barely notice. How many Danes, for example, realise that the image on the inner sleeve of their passports is that of a martyr being tortured to death on the cross (picture above)?
The crucifiction of Saint Peter by Caravaggio (Source: see here)
The cross is of course Christianity’s most potent symbol. Many of the finest paintings in the world were financed by churches, so they frequently depict martyrdom - such as Caravaggio's painting above. There is probably not a single church in the US or Europe, which does not display the crucifix (writhing Jesus is optional).
Perhaps you are even wearing a crucifix pendant around your neck as you read these words? If so, remember that the jewellery with which you adorn yourself is in fact an instrument of torture!
Few, if any, can claim to be truly free from the spell of martyrdom, nor indeed free from the dark sides of culture.
The End
Endnotes:
[1]: The Nazis attempted to portray Jews as a race. In fact, there is no such thing as a Jewish race. Rather, Jews are members of a specific culture, which, like all other cultures, has created myths about its own origin, including religious versions. For more information about Jewish culture see here).
[2]: The link between income/ignorance/powerlessness and proclivity towards contemporary martyrdom is entirely universal. For example, young men from poor and badly educated backgrounds in the United States and the United Kingdom are far more likely than young men from richer and educated communities to join the army and potentially sacrifice themselves martyrs on the altar of patriotism in some foreign war.