Primitive? We may dismiss that phrase despite the appeal. Animals? Also too easy. Subhuman? Another pejorative. All these terms remove human agency, willfulness, glee, obedience, structure, intent.

Headhunters. Anthropological descriptions of headhunting are clinical and nonjudgmental, which is useful, at least initially, in understanding what is before us.

Headhunting globally had many purposes or meanings centered around ancestors and enemies. In Borneo decapitation was the beginning of a long relationship between the perpetrator and the deceased, who became a kind of venerated guest. In Iron Age Europe there was a relationship between the taking of human heads and natural fertility, as their bones are sometimes commingled in deposits with those of animals. But this is complemented by a more base militarism connected to emerging structures of authority that encouraged dehumanization and brutality. I think this is how it worked in the Neolithic era of the Near East.

And of course it happens in war (Japanese officers loved their swords). And to prisoners (think William Wallace and Cromwell). Nineteenth-century Montenegrins going into battle would have a pact to take each other’s head so as not to be buried by the enemy. And then there’s anthropology and archaeology (grave-robbing for science!). There is always a system. But what drives the system?

As practiced in Gaza, headhunting as ritual violence entails enacting, preferably for the camera, multiple deaths, one of the living Jew and another of the dead Jew. Humiliating the individual and, by broadcasting those deaths at home and to others as part of continuing celebrations, targeting the Jewish collective; by holding, torturing and finally killing hostages, and hiding their bodies for the possibility of later exchange, prolonging death.

Death is a continuing, unfolding, unending process. The object of headhunting is not, as in some anthropologically attested cultures, to steal the power of the defeated enemy, or to hold the head as a trophy of a battle glorious. It is to enact and reenact deaths, to steal life from the living who learn of the acts. It is the pinnacle act of torture that underpins their own society, which also trumpets its own welcoming of death, as if there is a death competition which they must win, some calculus of killing and dying/dying and killing. In that sense headhunting is cosmological; it is punishment and sacrifice that sustains a universe. So is it religion? Then what about the ritual defacement of hostage posters, the Upper West Side’s kinder, gentler form of beheading?

Stealing dead bodies which are gleefully abused by civilians—a term that makes too much of a moral distinction, especially as they film themselves stomping and cursing dead bodies—or hidden as currency, transports death into the heart of their society. It provides sustenance, while the quantum uncertainty of death/not death tortures the living.

Are headhunters like us? Neolithic headhunters, were there indeed any, were people in the act of becoming fully human. Separating themselves from the animal world through self-awareness and action was accomplished by growing food, creating villages, and enacting horrific violence upon one another for no particular reason except that they could. All things that animals cannot do. Well, except hunt together. So perhaps a link to the animal world.

Certainly ethnographically attested headhunters saw this specific act of violence, as well as murder and torture generally, as natural means to maintain the sense of difference from one another. You capture others for fun and profit and to make a point, then torture, enslave and murder them. This is part, although not all, of maintaining the self. Sometimes you eat them just to make a point, or if you’re hungry (see under, man corn, the Nahuatl word tlacatlaolli). They were fully human in the sense of being bipeds with cultures, stories, looking to the skies for clues or instructions. The people they killed were too, but that commonality meant little to nothing. Like us but not like us.

How then do we categorize Hamas headhunters? Religion has been stressed, as has the absolute centrality of death. This is not a mere ideology, an argument that can be replaced by a better argument—more complete, more logical, more parsimonious; it is essential, constitutive. We love death, they always say, we raise our children to be martyrs, the mothers proudly announce. Indeed they do, the flip side being the willingness to saw off people’s heads and steal them. So, culture?

Violence, blood, feuds, abuse of women, children and animals, these have always been present in Palestinian society, as they are in most patriarchal, theocratic, and authoritarian societies. But something is different: the glee, not of the id temporarily unleashed (who remembers My Lai, or necklaces of ears, raise your hand), but the id triumphant, the superego gone who knows where.

That’s still not it. The entire superstructure services the id, looting, murder, rape, in this life and the next, those are the supreme goals.

You see a person beheaded and nothing makes much sense after that, unless it makes a certain kind of terrible sense. As a system.

Well, they’re all dead. All the faces of all the Hamasniks, laughing, yelling, talking, shooting, they percolate through databases that lead only to their deaths, now or later, on the battlefield or below, from a 5.56 mm round or a munition of greater or lesser power, or merely over time, in a cell, alas. Stamping out the headhunters and their cults is how the world was won, and rightly so.

The headhunting instinct, however, is intrinsic to orthodoxy, and erupts periodically worldwide. Falling upon the neck is increasingly popular as an orthodox solution, for example in France (look up Samuel Paty, or just ask Salman Rushdie). After the video I tried to explain this to a state attorney general, that it’s not “hate” or extremism; that orthodoxy is here, in this country and his state. He said he was still educating himself.

Headhunting and its discontents, something I never thought I would have to think about except as a contrarian prehistorian, from a safe remove of 10,000 years, now collapsing in on me, much less try to explain something that took place 20 miles from my sister’s house. Headhunters are not like us. Scratch away the present and it looks a lot like the past, but there are different paths to us and them.