Wired to Steal: Zionism and the Shaping of the Western Mind

Wired to Steal: Zionism and the Shaping of the Western Mind (Olive Branch Press, 2026) addresses a gap in analysing settler colonialism and colonial violence. The disruption of humanity through dehumanisation, which can lead to genocide as it did in Gaza, is analysed through a neurobehavioural framework. Using this framework, split in five parts, the book analyses Zionist settler colonialism to explain the cycle of domination and its possible deconstruction.

The book commences with behavioural analysis, explaining war as a “collective human cultural construct.” Drawing upon theories that explain warfare through evolutionary roots, or through more recent human evolutionary history, it is noted early on that the latter is also linked to the evolution of war: “As a relatively modern form of large-scale social aggression, war exploits specific evolved emotional and behavioural mechanisms to serve particular interests.”

Drawing upon Jewish history at the end of the 18^th century, the book traces the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) and its shift towards integration in European society, even as Jewish exclusion persisted in Western societies. Zionism was one of the movements emerging in contrast to the Haskalah, framing “colonial expansion as a modern, legitimate response to exclusion and trauma.” Adopting European political and cultural concepts, the book shows how antisemites and Zionists shared the same end goal albeit for different means. For antisemites, it was the expulsion of Jews from Europe to Palestine, while for the Zionists, the expulsion to Palestine eventually served the narrative of the demographic threat which the settlers perceived from the Indigenous Palestinians.

Zionist aggression evolved through territorial expansion and the acquisition of resources. Zionism ultimately transformed self-defence as practiced earlier by Jews into a defence of settler-colonialism in Palestine, leading to organised violence against the Palestinian people which the book describes as “an enemy to be permanently subdued” by the Zionists. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 signified another shift in Zionist defence of settler-colonialism as Palestinians resisted the eventual construction of a Jewish state on their land. The authors note, “settler-colonial projects are anchored in a culture of resources theft by colonisers, driven by an oppressive power dynamic that sustains the colonised in a perpetual defensive stance.”

Since colonialism needs to justify violence and dispossession of the Indigenous, dehumanisation is applied to alter perception. The discrepancy between colonial institutionalised violence and the reactive resistance of the colonised creates a power imbalance in favour of the coloniser. Progress, which is the context under which colonialism advances while destroying the indigenous, becomes a narrative that provides impunity for violent actions that do not only stop at land theft but also lead to genocide. The authors note that contrary to current Israeli leaders, the Zionist manipulation of defence, which allows the coloniser to plunder indigenous territory, was described as a veneer by Zionist leaders such as David Ben-Gurion, who had stated, “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves.”

The Wired to Steal (W2S) model as explained in this book explains the cycle of settler-colonial violence as departing from greed. The psychological conditioning of society, in this case the settler-colonial society, creates a hierarchy in which the colonisers are strengthened at the expense of the dispossessed and colonised population. Anti-colonial resistance is countered by propaganda and cognitive dissonance, which in turn shape the normalisation of colonialism through laws, education, the media and narratives.

The book notes that colonial propaganda uses five distinct methods that suppress human empathy: dehumanisation, threat inversion, divine mandate, historical erasure, and fear conditioning: “The ultimate result of Zionist propaganda and settler violence is occupation and bouts of land theft following either accelerated (the Nakba, the genocide post October 7^th 2023) or incremental forms of genocide and land theft, i.e., a status quo of occupation.”

October 7^th, the book notes, represents “an extension of colonial dynamics rather than a departure from them.” Instead of the previously normalised aggression backed by the US, Israel unleashed an overt genocide that had precedents in terms of reception in Israel and the international community. Giving examples such as Elor Azaria who was filmed killing a 21-year-old Palestinian man and subsequently found guilty only of manslaughter, and Shireen Abu Akleh who was killed in Jenin by Israeli forces and whose case temporarily attracted international attention, the authors note that, in terms of violence, Israeli society was “ideologically, primed, socially conditioned and politically willing.”

Colonial propaganda was also used during Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Using violent propaganda attributed to Hamas, Israel dehumanised Palestinians to enable the settler-colonial society’s support for genocide. Promoting collective punishment, biblical narratives and the media normalisation of genocide were part of Israel’s strategy. However, the authors note that “Israel needed to gauge both its readiness and the international community’s tolerance for the mass criminality required to realise the government’s goals of complete ethnic cleansing and land theft.” Israel’s expansionist plans were clearly articulated, as were the intent and action to annihilate Palestinians.

The W2S framework notes that colonialism requires the dehumanisation of the coloniser and the colonised; the former by abandoning its own humanity, and the latter by having it eliminated. Contrary to anti-colonial resistance, capitalism and colonialism are depleting the world. Anti-colonial struggle for liberation, the book notes, would require a process that is “pedagogical, cultural and neurobehavioural.” Giving several examples of what contributes to decolonisation, the authors also take a global perspective, noting the necessity not only of deradicalising settler-colonial society but also of transforming global politics. Away from the politics of false hope, the book underlines the possibility of anti-colonial struggle for liberation, while acknowledging the enormity of what the colonised are up against.