Even supporters of Israel can find themselves questioning their own beliefs when confronted by provocative imagery, such as a photo of a dead or suffering child. “Did the Israeli army actually do all it could to prevent such tragedies?” we may ask ourselves (even if we understand full well the difference between Israel trying to prevent civilian casualties while fighting a defensive war vs. Hamas trying to maximize civilian causalities – their own and Israel’s – in the course of waging an offensive one).

Under normal circumstances, an overreliance on pathos by one side in a debate has a corrective: the equivalent use of pathos by the other side. After all, if we’re meant to respond to words or imagery of suffering Palestinian children in the way the BDSers insist we must, why can’t we show them photos of dead Israeli children, or their suffering families, or dead Syrians, or dead Palestinians killed by Hamas for that matter (with all the requisite blood and surviving family members with faces contorted in pain) and insist the BDSers must respond to our accusations and challenges?

If you’ve ever tried such an approach (or watched someone else attempt this tactic), it immediately becomes clear that “pathos jui jitsu” simply does not work on the Israel haters. Which makes sense once you realize that much of the anti-Israel activism we experience exists outside the realm of what could be called “normal politics.”

For the first reaction of a BDSer to stories or photos of dead Israelis (or dead Palestinians they cannot blame directly on Israel), is to ignore them. And if that doesn’t work, they create an elaborate fallacy-laden argument to explain why those deaths are also Israel’s fault (“they wouldn’t have died if it wasn’t for ‘The Occupation!’). And if that doesn’t work, they fly into a rage and drag out 100 more pictures of dead Arabs to trump whatever you present to them. And if none of that works, they simply walk away, only to return to make the same pathos-laced arguments that didn’t work on you to another audience two days later.

In other words, their arguments leverage the empathy of their target audience, but their imperviousness to the same type of arguments directed towards them relies on their own total lack of empathy for others.

I’ve recently been reading a book entitled The Science of Evil written by Simon Baron Cohen (brother of Sacha Baron Cohen of Borat and The Dictator fame, as it turns out) which tries to explain all human evil in the context of empathy (or lack thereof). And while I’m not that convinced by his overall argument, he does bring up an important reminder of where we can find the combination of emotional manipulative behavior coupled with the lack of susceptibility to emotional manipulation I describe above with regard to BDS behavior: in the psychological makeup of the sociopath.