To educate its children to believe that a cause is worth more than a human life.
The Incubators of Hatred
Preface
These pages are not merely about Hamas.
Nor are they simply about Israel or Palestine.
They are an inquiry into something far older and far more universal: how a society can come to educate its children to believe that a cause is worth more than a human life.
Answering that question requires far more than recounting a war or assigning blame. It requires understanding the mechanisms through which hatred is transmitted, organized, and ultimately woven into the identity of a community.
That is why this essay is divided into seven chapters, each examining a different layer of the process: the construction of collective identity, the architecture of hatred, the conquest of childhood, the political use of suffering, Hamas as a case study, the tension between ideology and parental love, and finally, the conditions necessary to dismantle an incubator of hatred.
Although Hamas serves as one of the central case studies, the phenomenon itself is by no means unique to the Middle East. History offers countless examples of ideologies, religions, and political movements that have employed remarkably similar methods to shape entire generations.
This essay does not claim to offer definitive answers.
Its purpose is to invite the reader to confront what may be the most important question of all:
What must a society do to ensure that no child ever grows up believing that an idea is worth more than his or her own life?
Chapter I
When an Ideology Becomes More Valuable Than a Child
For years, one question has haunted me.
It did not arise while reading a history book or watching a documentary about the Middle East.
It began with a photograph.
In it, a mother was holding the portrait of her dead son.
She was not crying.
She was smiling with pride.
My first reaction was bewilderment.
How can a mother smile in the face of her child’s death?
Over time, I came to realize that I had been asking the wrong question.
The question was never about that mother.
It was about the kind of society in which publicly expressing grief becomes less acceptable than publicly expressing pride.
That is the real question.
Because no child is born hating.
And no mother gives birth dreaming that one day her son will become a martyr.
If such an outcome is possible, it cannot be explained by human nature alone. There must be a process capable of transforming emotions, memories, and beliefs until the unthinkable becomes honorable.
I call that process the incubator of hatred.
It is not a building.
It is not a school.
It is not a mosque.
It is not an organization.
It is an ecosystem.
A system in which the family, education, religion, propaganda, social expectations, and the lived experience of war all reinforce the same narrative.
History suggests that no society is completely immune to this phenomenon.
The Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany, China’s Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Islamic State, and many other extremist movements all reveal strikingly similar patterns.
The flags change.
The symbols change.
The gods change.
But the underlying psychological mechanism remains remarkably constant.
Everything begins with selective memory.
Every injustice suffered by one’s own community is carefully preserved, while the suffering inflicted upon others is forgotten, minimized, or justified.
Then comes the second stage.
The adversary ceases to be a community of individuals and becomes a moral category.
No longer families.
No longer children.
No longer human beings.
Only the enemy.
Once that transformation is complete, violence no longer appears as a tragedy.
It begins to look like an obligation.
Yet even that is not enough.
An organization may teach people to hate.
It may teach them to fight.
But it still must persuade society that death itself has meaning.
This is the decisive moment.
The ultimate victory of an ideology is not convincing a young man to die.
It is convincing an entire community to admire his death.
Once sacrifice becomes a source of social prestige, the cycle begins to sustain itself.
Every new death confirms the narrative.
Every funeral strengthens collective identity.
Every child grows up hearing the same stories, celebrating the same heroes, and learning whose suffering deserves compassion—and whose does not.
That is the true power of an incubator of hatred.
It does not manufacture terrorists in a single lesson.
It shapes generations.
Which is why destroying an armed organization may prove far easier than dismantling the culture that made its emergence possible.
That is the question this series seeks to answer.
Not how a terrorist is born.
But how a society can gradually come to regard as admirable what any father or mother should consider life’s greatest tragedy.
Author’s Note
This essay was originally written in Spanish, my native language.
The English edition you are about to read is not a literal translation. Rather, it is a literary adaptation intended to preserve the ideas, structure, tone, and voice of the original while allowing the text to read naturally for an English-speaking audience.
I am deeply grateful for the editorial collaboration that made this adaptation possible. It has been far more than a translation; it has been an effort to bridge two languages, two literary traditions, and two ways of engaging with complex ideas.
Any errors, omissions, or shortcomings that remain are, of course, entirely my own.