Praise for

Wired to Steal
Zionism and the Shaping of the Western Mind
by Yoav Litvin with Ilan Pappé
Foreword by Robert M. Sapolsky 

“This is the most comprehensive and timely book I know of that allows us finally to understand how the Zionist movement and the state of Israel dragged the Middle East and the world to this ghastly era of genocide, settler-colonial atrocities, Western complicities, and still expanding warfare. It required a neuroscientist and a historian—and much honesty—to unpack Zionism’s combined criminality, cruelty, and colonial-imperial collusion with world powers over the past 100 years. This book’s scientific evidence alongside the historical accounts allows us to understand how otherwise decent human beings have engaged in a non-stop rampage by Zionists, Israelis, and their global allies that peaked in the Gaza genocide with unprecedented cruelty against defenseless civilians, yet keeps expanding across the region and the world.” 
— Rami G. Khouri, American University of Beirut

“Wired to Steal goes deep to expose profound truths about Israel. Readers will learn how the vastly dehumanizing project of Zionism sold itself and why so many people bought it. This is a powerful book that undermines propaganda and elevates human possibilities.”
— Norman Solomon, author of War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine

“Finally, a clear-eyed account of how Zionist ideology has weaponized Jewish trauma to justify settler-colonial violence. Whether you’re new to the subject or have been engaged for decades, this highly original analysis reveals new layers of understanding. Crucially, it also charts a path forward. A vital read.” 
— Maha Nassar, author of Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World

“Wired to Steal approaches the study of colonial violence from a novel angle, bringing neuroscience to our understanding of power and domination. Yoav Litvin and Ilan Pappe trace the links between neural circuitry and historical acts of subjugation, showing how fear‑driven defensive aggression and greed‑driven offensive aggression are instrumentalized by leaders to secure popular support. By recasting territorial theft, occupation, and political repression as existential necessities, as with the case of Zionism, propaganda transforms these into moral acts of ‘defense’ and noble policies to ensure ‘survival.’ Through this innovative analysis of intergroup hierarchy, the authors reveal how biological impulses and national narratives intertwine to make conquest feel righteous and justified.”
— Harriet Malinowitz, author of Selling Israel: Zionism, Propaganda, and the Uses of Hasbara

“When eight decades of slow and not-so-slow genocide in Palestine continue to be embraced by the very nations boasting of their enlightened righteousness, the urgent issue becomes ‘how’ this works, not ‘what’ or ‘if’. With the combined expertise of preeminent historian Ilan Pappé and behavioral neuroscientist Yoav Litvin, Wired to Steal masterfully dissects the neurological mechanisms through which Israel’s genocide has been normalized, but the book does not stop there: it challenges the very presumption that war is an inevitable scourge of humanity. Academically rigorous yet written in clear, concise language, the authors expose how we are manipulated—‘psychologically hacked’—into the unthinkable, not as a theoretical exercise but as a hands-on tool to free us from these shackles. Nothing is taken on faith in this highly original and much-needed work.
— Thomas Suárez, author of Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea and Palestine Mapped: From the River to the Sea in Early Geographic Thought

“Litvin and Pappé write a uniquely courageous book, and explore a deeply worrying collective psychological state—worrying for its victims, of course, but also for perpetrators. They observe the origins and normalization of the genocidal rage currently pervading the Israeli body politic, follow the deliberate and systematic cultivation of a dehumanizing disposition, and make sense of a bleak and distressing reality. But there is hope: if a genocidal worldview and settler colonialism are a consequence of psychosocial conditioning, then they can be reversed.”
— Lorenzo Veracini, Professor of History and Politics, Swinburne University of Technology

“What fuels Zionism? What perpetuates systemic injustice against Palestinians? These are the questions Yoav Litvin and Ilan Pappé interrogate in their riveting new book Wired to Steal, revealing how the colonizer’s mind is trained to warp reality, dehumanize, and most importantly, how it can all be undone.”
— Joshua Frank, co-editor of CounterPunch

“In Wired to Steal, Yoav Litvin and Ilan Pappé, two anti-Zionist, Israeli thinkers, theorize the psychological genealogy of Israel as a settler colony—a colony plagued by ever-increasing militarization and genocidal enmity, as well as by a resurgence of fascist forces determined to kill. The book outlines how Zionism has resisted embracing its dark side, one based on the fears and violence that drive settler-colonialism. As a result, genocide has become its sacrament, in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating those considered to be enemies of the Jewish State.”
— Haidar Eid, author of Decolonizing the Palestinian Mind and Banging on the Walls of the Tank: Dispatches from Gaza

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. 

Wired to Steal:
Zionism and the shaping of the Western mind

Perhaps nothing can truly explain how modern, prosperous and educated people came to wage a war of extermination on the Palestinians. After more than three years of unimaginable cruelty in Gaza, the mystery grows ever darker and more urgent. In Wired to Steal, two anti-Zionist Israeli expatriates offer a new approach: they apply brain science to open a new window or lens on the causes of the relentless aggression of Israel and the Zionists that created it.

Yoav Litvin, a neuroscientist, and Ilan Pappe, a leading historian of the Nakba, describe a pattern of “compulsive aggression,” deeply rooted in biology and “akin to addiction” that sustains and accelerates a settler-colonial system of domination and expansion. Beyond that, they analyze the specific hormonal mechanisms – or circuits — in the brain – that drive such “addictive cycles of violence.” In the case of Israel, “The result is a hardened belief that expansion, lethal aggression, and dispossession are not simply justified, but the only conceivable responses to a conflict constructed as eternal and unsolvable.”

Drawing on Pappe’s encyclopedic knowledge of the origins of Zionist ideology and its bloody rollout in Palestine, the authors present that history right through to our time: It’s the story of a group of radical intellectuals and militants united behind the goal of founding a “Jewish state” in Palestine. Over the ensuing decades, they fought to sell the idea to European Jews as the best way to protect themselves against antisemitism. At the same time, they refashioned Judaism to fit within the “romantic nationalist framework that had marginalized them” in Europe.  Trauma and grief, which Zionists portrayed as the sum of Jewish history during 1,800-years of “exile” from their Levantine homeland, would be replaced by a glorious new age of Jewish power, prosperity and prestige. All it would take was support from the imperial powers of Europe — which was accomplished by the British Balfour Declaration of 1917 — to subjugate the Arabs of Palestine, whom the Brits obligingly forced into the appointed role of uncivilized, unruly natives. In the 1940s, the Zionists drove out their benefactors – and then most Palestinians — with a terror campaign portrayed as Jewish liberation.

“The unequal, hierarchical nature of power structures makes it crucial to distinguish between the psychology of the ruling class and that of the general [Jewish] population,” who were made to fully embrace Zionist ideology and obey Zionist imperatives. This ruling class — which Litvin and Pappe say was primarily driven, not by trauma, but by “greed for power” — set about altering a people who for centuries had lived as marginalized, minorities in the belief their suffering was divinely ordained, into aggressive “New Jews” primed to “redeem” their nation by becoming a Western-style settler-colonial state.

Beneath the conscious process of adopting the tenets of Zionism and the lifestyle of settlers, a dramatic rewiring of unconscious brain functions took place. Wired to Steal breaks new ground in its detailed demonstration of how this hidden transformation operates.

The authors methodically relate how Zionist indoctrination taps “well-studied neural and endocrine systems, including fear circuitry associated with the amygdala, reward pathways mediated by dopamine, and social bonding mechanisms involving oxytocin.” Natural human empathy has been suppressed through mutually reinforcing mechanisms of “dehumanization” of Palestinians; “threat inversion,” which recasts Palestinian resistance as unprovoked aggression and Israeli attacks as self-defense; a “divine mandate” or secular manifest destiny, which sanitizes immoral behaviors; “erasure” of Palestinian history and culture; and “fear conditioning,” which bypasses reason and triggers defensive circuitry. The chronic stress and emotional trauma induced by tormenting Palestinians in endless ways causes irrational PTSD-like behaviors in the Israelis.

A key precondition of the genocidal inclinations that settled into Israeli minds from Zionism’s earliest days in Palestine has been enforced segregation, which the authors say facilitated the manufacture of disgust and fear of Palestinians that has driven hostility toward them.

A brief review of this groundbreaking text can barely convey the richness of its neuroscientific analysis of genocide and its demonstration of how Israel became a genocidal society, including a detailed account of how “incremental genocide,” punctuated  by horrific bombings of Gaza, transformed instantly on October 7 into an “overt, unapologetic mass murder of Palestinians with total imperial impunity.”

“Reforming Zionism is simply not possible,” the authors say. It’s political structures and toxic psychology must be “dismantled” via heavy international sanctions. The inescapable fact is, however, that the first victims of Zionism were the people who, in pursuit of a Jewish utopia, drank its cocktail of fear and power. Their descendants find themselves mentally trapped in a genocidal dystopia. Thus, to free Palestine will require deep healing. The book concludes with a detailed description of “collective un- and re-learning, a rewiring of the brain, and a reclamation of humanity, empathy, truth, and accountability through dialogue, solidarity, creativity, collaboration, and worldmaking.”

In the meantime, additional neuroscientific awareness is called for, including work on the history of Palestinian coping and resistance; Western complicity; and Christian Zionist and diasporic Jewish embrace of Israel’s propaganda and policies. In the end, this process should spur other societies, including Americans, to mend their own ideological ills.