Welcome to disgust
The first thing I learned while studying advertising was that nobody buys a solution before buying the problem. Before I can sell you a cream, I must persuade you that your skin is inadequate. Before I can sell you a new car, I must make the one in your driveway feel embarrassing. Before I can sell you security, I must make you afraid. The first product is not the object being advertised. The first product is the conviction that something is wrong with your life—and that you need what I am offering to correct it.
Professional communication begins long before the slogan. It begins inside the mind of the person receiving it. Each of us perceives the world through a grid of interpretation. Imagine it as if in front of our eyes there was a layer that might alter the reality in front of us. That grid is constructed from our culture, identity, education, family memories, personal experiences and passive culture: the countless assumptions we absorb without remembering when or where we learned them. We do not approach every new event as a blank page. We attach it to something already present on that grid.
When reaching out to you, a skilled communicator does not necessarily need to persuade you of an entirely new idea. It is usually more effective to locate specific spots on that grid, called anchors, which you feel as already yours and connect the desired message to them. Once that connection has been made, the message can feel true before it has been examined. Advertising works this way. Political propaganda works this way too.
And among all the emotions available to a propagandist, perhaps none is more powerful than disgust. The perfect political product.
Disgust is wired into our brains as a form of protection. We recoil from rotten food, contamination, disease and decay. It creates distance between ourselves and something our brain identifies as unbearable to a healthy existence. But disgust is not limited to physical objects. The most effective ads to stop you from driving dangerously do not show you a catastrophic car accident. Your brain would immediately reject it and you would not identify in that tragic scenario. That ad is probably for someone else. But if the ad shows you a dad or mother coming home to their children after driving home, safely, then that’s when they get you.
Unfortunately, as Nazism and other genocidal ideologies have already proven, human beings can be trained to experience other people, ideas and entire populations as forms of contamination. Something to find a solution for.
Research on what psychologists sometimes call the behavioral immune system suggests that disgust directed toward social groups can suppress empathy and encourage dehumanization. Other studies have found that people belonging to groups associated with disgust may be processed differently from ordinary social subjects—as though they were closer to objects than to individuals with minds, histories and feelings. This is what makes disgust so politically valuable.
Anger still permits an argument. You may be angry with someone and nevertheless recognize that there is another side to the story. Disgust does something more radical: it tells you that listening itself would be a form of contamination. You do not debate with something disgusting. You move away from it. You silence it. You remove it from polite society. Eventually, you may persuade yourself that whatever happens to it is not your moral responsibility.
Disgust therefore performs two operations simultaneously. It pushes the target downward, outside the boundaries of acceptable humanity. At the same time, it elevates the person experiencing the emotion.
I am disgusted; therefore, I am good.
From that moral pedestal, curiosity begins to look like complicity. Context becomes an excuse. History becomes propaganda. Asking a question becomes evidence that you are morally defective. The success of the campaign is complete when people no longer feel they need to know anything. They only need to feel. When suffering becomes an accusation the horrors of war provide almost perfect material for this machinery.
A dead child is unbearable. It should be unbearable. Tens of thousands of victims, including many children, are even more horrifying. The suffering of Palestinian civilians is real, and no serious moral argument should require us to deny it. Netanyahu’s government conduct, strategies and political decisions can and should be investigated and criticized. No country should be exempt from scrutiny merely because it has enemies. But there is a fundamental difference between mourning the victims, examining how to avoid similar future scenarios and immediately transforming the images into proof that all Israelis—or all Jews—wanted the people dead. That final step is not compassion. It is a label that wants to anchor in western society’s grid. It is also an ancient one.
For centuries, European societies accused Jews of murdering Christian children and using their blood for religious purposes. These blood libels were not eccentric misunderstandings. They were powerful political instruments that repeatedly produced expulsions, pogroms and murder. The accusation survived from medieval Europe into modern antisemitism and Nazi propaganda. The details change, but the emotional structure remains recognizable:
A child is dead. The Jew is responsible. The Jew did not kill accidentally, tragically or even recklessly. The Jew killed because killing children expresses something essential about the Jew. These lines are not describing today’s rise of antisemitism since October 7th. These lines describe the anchor present in European’s society grid of interpretation. A society where a genocide against the Jews already happened merely 80 years ago. The advertisers know your history, and they are hooking you up through your grid.
Today, we often hear debates about if all Jews are Zionists or not, or if Antisemitism (as in European hate against the Jews for their semitic origin) is the same as Anti-Zionism (the hate against the Jews because of political extremism). But when classic accusations of Jewish cruelty, bloodlust, secret power and child murder are applied to Israel and Israelis, changing the noun does not necessarily change the structure. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance specifically identifies the use of traditional antisemitic symbols and blood-libel imagery against Israel as one possible manifestation of antisemitism.
This does not mean that every accusation against Israel is antisemitic. It means that history has supplied a well-tested emotional vocabulary—and that we should notice when it is being reused.
If individuals or groups acting from extremist ideologies are found to have intentionally targeted civilians, they should be investigated, tried and punished for their actions. They should be held responsible—not an entire Israeli society that has itself endured massacre, kidnapping, displacement, fear and grief. And certainly not Jews elsewhere in the world.
The above is true also for Palestinians. They should be held responsible, those leaders, ideologies and individuals who commit violence. But Palestinian suffering is displayed continuously, often stripped of the decisions, ideologies and military strategies of their own leaders that helped produce the battlefield. Their pain is real, but transformed into a symbol. Israeli suffering is also real but minimized, contextualized away or treated as deserved. Both Israelis and Palestinians become victims of this narrative framing. Disgust shuts down conversation, erases complexity and makes diversity of thought appear morally suspect. Both peoples are deprived of their full humanity and converted into symbols serving someone else’s argument. One population becomes eternally innocent. The other becomes eternally guilty. That is not history. It is advertising.
Perhaps I recognize this mechanism because my own family history does not match the interpretive grid throughout much of the West. My father was born in Alexandria, Egypt. My grandmother’s family came from Meknes, Morocco. They were not Europeans who suddenly appeared in the Middle East as agents of a colonial empire. They were born and grew into Jewish communities rooted in the region long before the modern Arab states and the State of Israel were founded. We do not fit the advertisement, as the anchors are different.
We witnessed both tragedy and salvation in north Africa and then Europe. Salvation from the Italian fascists and German nazis in the new state of Egypt, founded in 1922, when my family moved from Corfu to Egypt. And then salvation in Europe in 1957, when anti-zionists – emboldened by Nasser’s anti-colonialist agenda and the Suez canal crisis – forced with violence, incarcerations, killings, almost 800,000 Jewish people out of their ancestral homes in North Africa and rest of the middle east.
The history of Jews in Egypt and Morocco was not identical, and it should not be simplified. Morocco’s kings at important moments protected their Jewish subjects, and the departure of Moroccan Jews resulted from a combination of Zionism, economic opportunities, political uncertainty and fear. But episodes such as the anti-Jewish riots in Oujda and Jerada in 1948 demonstrated how rapidly anger against Zionism could be transferred to Jewish neighbors. Dozens of Jews were killed, including women and children. I don’t need to argue today if anti-Zionism is or is not an anti-Jewish movement. Anti-Zionists have already proved it in the past 80 years. The difference between a Jew and a Zionist is invoked when useful and erased when convenient. Because disgust doesn’t care about history.
In Egypt, the crisis became still more direct. In 1957, Israel did not control the West Bank, East Jerusalem or Gaza. It was Jordan who occupied, controlled and ultimately annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem, while the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian military occupation. No Arab leader had a plan to build a State of Palestine. Only the destruction of the Jewish State was on the agenda. Jews across all the Arab world were arrested, expelled, stripped of property or placed under intense pressure to leave. My family did not experience these departures as an exciting act of ideological mobility. They experienced the collapse of belonging. Their presence had become conditional. Their Jewishness had become politically suspicious.
This chronology matters because propaganda depends upon amputated history. If the Arab-Israeli conflict becomes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then the David vs Goliath perception is inverted. If the conflict begins in 1967, anti-Zionism can be marketed simply as a response to Israeli occupation instead of an ideology of intolerance which instead is. If Jewish displacement from Arab and Muslim countries disappears, Israel can be presented as an entirely foreign creation, from eastern Europe or Brooklyn. If centuries of European antisemitic imagery are forgotten, accusations of Jewish child-killing can return disguised as a new form of humanitarian consciousness.
Disgust, however, is also sold in the opposite direction. Some Israelis—not all—have been persuaded to see Palestinian civilians primarily as extensions of Hamas, and therefore to treat an enormous civilian death toll as morally acceptable. A claimed ratio of approximately 20,000 civilians killed alongside 20,000 Hamas terrorists may be presented as evidence of military effectiveness, but numbers cannot relieve us of the obligation to mourn human life or to seek every possible way to preserve it.
The sanctity of life cannot depend on nationality, religion or which side of a border a child was born on. It must be universal, or it is not a moral principle at all. Israel is fighting not only a military war but also a cultural one: a struggle over whether a Jewish state can defend itself without surrendering the value of human life at the center of Jewish and Western civilization. If an Israeli government begins to regard Palestinian civilian deaths with indifference—or encourages its society to do so—it may achieve military objectives while already losing the cultural war. Once again, the product being sold is distance from another human being.
Once your grid has been compromised, the emotional anchors are waiting. All what remains is to push them. But who profits from all of this? Certainly not the people, Palestinians, Israelis or Jews.
When I titled this post ‘Welcome to disgust‘, I did not mean that one secret committee sits in a room directing every university professor, activist, journalist and social-media account. Propaganda does not require a single mastermind. It requires aligned interests.
Political regimes need enemies. Activist organizations need mobilization. Media companies need attention. Social platforms need engagement. Academic departments need relevance and funding. Politicians need votes. Individuals need public demonstrations of their virtue. Disgust serves all of them.
Emotionally charged advertising can influence people even when it receives relatively little conscious attention. Social media has industrialized this process. Repetition becomes truth. Quantity proof. The image reaches us before the investigation. The accusation arrives before the correction. By the time context appears, the emotional verdict has already been rendered.
There are also legitimate questions about foreign money entering Western universities, inducing a one-sided perspective (mostly anti-Western) on history. American law requires institutions receiving federal assistance to disclose qualifying foreign gifts and contracts, precisely because transparency about potential foreign influence and academic integrity matters. Recent disclosures continue to include billions of dollars from foreign sources, including substantial reported transactions connected to Qatar. Foreign funding by itself does not prove that a professor, department or curriculum has been purchased. It would be intellectually dishonest to make that leap without evidence. But it is equally dishonest to argue that money never influences institutions simply because the institutions are academic. Universities should welcome transparency rather than treat questions about funding as attacks on knowledge.
The deeper problem is not merely who paid for a particular program. It is that part of Western culture has absorbed a story in which the West is uniquely corrupt, power is always illegitimate, Jewish national sovereignty is uniquely offensive and societies opposing the West are presumed authentic regardless of their treatment of women, religious minorities, dissidents or the LGBTQ+ community.
This impact on our grids is particularly visible within parts of the Western left—movements that once warned us against dehumanizing entire peoples, but now speak of “Zionists” as though millions of human beings shared a single malevolent consciousness. The Jew has once again become an explanation rather than a person.
How do we speak again? How can we go back from disgust to anger, which at least provided a conversation opportunity among the best of us? The way out cannot be to answer disgust with disgust. That would merely create two populations standing on competing moral pedestals, each convinced that the other is contaminated beyond redemption.
We must also recover chronology. Students should learn what occurred before 1967, before 1948 and before modern Zionism. They should learn about Jewish indigeneity in the Land of Israel, Palestinian displacement, Jewish displacement from Arab and Muslim countries, European antisemitism, Arab nationalism, Islamist movements, imperialism and the repeated failures of diplomacy. And about the political landscape in Israel which has a secular and a religious driven political pulse. A history lesson containing only one people’s suffering is not history. It is recruitment material.
We must demand symmetrical moral standards. Deliberately targeting civilians is a crime whether the perpetrator is Israeli, Palestinian, Western or non-Western. Dictatorship does not become liberation because its leaders use anti-colonial or anti-zionist vocabulary. Terrorism does not become resistance because its victims belong to a group labeled as privileged. Civilian suffering does not become irrelevant because acknowledging it would complicate our preferred narrative. Most importantly, we must recover the ability to encounter people as individuals rather than symbols.
An Israeli is not a military operation. A Palestinian is not Hamas. A Jew is not a theory about power or supremacy. A Muslim is not an ideology. Disgust dissolves these distinctions because distinctions interfere with political mobilization. Human beings are difficult to hate consistently. Symbols are much easier.
The conversation can begin again when we recognize that our interpretive grid has been manipulated—and that feeling morally certain is not the same as being morally serious. The person selling disgust does not want peace. Peace requires recognizing the humanity, history and fears of people we may dislike. Disgust requires only distance. It is easier to sell. It is more addictive. And it allows the customer to experience obedience as virtue.
Welcome to the business of disgust. The product is not Palestine. The product is not Israel. The product is not even justice. The product is your nervous system. The profit is your surrender of judgment. And the final sales pitch is that being controlled has made you a better person. Don’t buy it. Free yourself.
