The Stanford Prison Experiment didn’t end. It just moved to Palestine

What does it take to strip someone of their humanity? In 1971, at Stanford University, students were assigned the roles of guards and prisoners. Within days, the simulation spiralled. The guards began to humiliate. The prisoners submitted or collapsed. Authority was given without oversight, and the results were terrifying.

This was a psychological study, but it became a lens through which we can understand the violence of systems. Watching the film adaptation, I could not ignore how closely its simulated findings mirrored the lived reality of Palestine. In the lab, college students acted out domination.

In Gaza and the West Bank, that domination is enforced daily, and the cost is real lives.

In both cases, what appears at first as order conceals something more corrosive. Structures produce behaviour. The guards in the experiment did not enter as sadists. They became so because the environment rewarded them. Occupation does the same. It creates conditions in which cruelty becomes standard and compliance is mistaken for peace.

The power dynamic in Palestine controls access to water, electricity, movement, and even the timing of death. Gaza’s people live under siege. Their prison is physical, bureaucratic, and psychological. Palestinians are denied not just land, but dignity. The structure is designed to break them.

Compounding this crisis is the information blackout; Israel’s prohibition on foreign journalists entering Gaza leaves the world reliant on the accounts of those enduring the conflict firsthand. Such measures beg the question: What truths remain hidden behind these barriers?

An urgent voice that might help us answer this is Mohamed Abu Lebda, a 28-year-old poet, translator and friend in Gaza who, in his own words, has already survived five wars. “We are an ordinary family, used to living in peace, with hearts full of love, in our warm little house,” he wrote. “We lost everything—our house, our jobs. Nothing is left.”

After months of disconcerting silence, he sent me this pitiful note through WhatsApp, excusing himself and asking for help: “I wanted to message you several days ago, but the situation here wasn’t stable at all. It is the hardest time ever. Safety is nothing while we are starving. Any opportunity, or any platform, needs a writer?” 

This is the testimony of someone writing from the heart of catastrophe. When the most gifted among us are forced to ask for survival before they can speak, the silence imposed by blockade and censorship becomes even more unforgivable.

What the Stanford study revealed in six days has been playing out in Palestine for over seventy years. That comparison is not offered for dramatic effect. It is a direct reflection of what happens when one group is granted unchecked control over another. The experiment was shut down in less than a week because of what it revealed about human nature, yet the brutal occupation continues.

Palestine is not just occupied — it's observed

Systems like this do not simply harm the oppressed. They deform the oppressor. In maintaining the occupation, Israel continues to cultivate unconscionable habits of oppression and cruelty. Control becomes identity. The jailer is never free. The longer the structure holds, the more both sides are trapped by it.

The mental architecture of domination is not unique to one place or time. What happened in that simulated prison was a warning. The participants did not need ideology to become cruel. They needed only a system that encouraged it. Palestine, in turn, is not governed by chance. It is governed by policies that make suffering routine. Ethnic cleansing and genocide are the final solutions we are witnessing unfold.

America, of course, is not an innocent bystander. Its funding and political cover help sustain these crimes against humanity. Under successive administrations, the flow of weapons steadily continues, even as the world is beginning to wake up and protest Israel’s savagery. While political leaders debate language, children in Gaza are pulled from rubble. These are the direct result of a system supported by our tax dollars.

Thomas Jefferson once warned that we must guard not against who we are now, but what we might become under unfamiliar circumstances. That warning belongs here. The transformation of ordinary people into instruments of cruelty is not rare. It is a risk embedded in every structure of unaccountable power. The experiment showed it in a week. The occupation of Palestine shows it every day.

The Stanford experiment is remembered not only for its findings but for its ethical collapse. Participants were subjected to real suffering. Some were denied the right to withdraw. Researchers lost their objectivity and merged with the roles they were meant to observe. These failures matter. They reflect the danger of suspending moral clarity.

I am drawn to trials such as this one for the revelation they offer of unseen forces at work within us. The Sufis teach that the greatest struggle is inward, with the self. The prison built for others becomes a mirror of our confinement. In this light, the experiment seems less an anomaly of behaviour than a cautionary tale for the spiritually inattentive.

Psychologists refer to deindividuation, a state in which individuals lose their sense of personal responsibility when they are submerged in a group or system. The prison study laid bare this unravelling. The guards, absorbed into their roles, stopped seeing the prisoners as peers. The prisoners, stripped of names and routines, began to doubt their reality. Power distorts perception, for both the wielder and the one acted upon. When identity is flattened into function, guard or captive, compassion recedes. The human face is forgotten.

Now imagine that same system stretched out not over six days, but over six decades. In Gaza, Palestinians live under a real, not simulated, regime of control, where the occupying power determines not just borders, but access to clean water, electricity, food, and medical care. Power outages are not symbolic. They are constant. Clean water is scarce. Freedom of movement is a distant memory.

This is a sustained strategy. The long-term psychological toll is incalculable. Zimbardo’s students began to break in a week. What must that do to the spirit of a population that has known nothing but confinement?

The spiritual cost is not borne by the oppressed alone. The occupying society is transformed as well. To normalise this level of injustice requires ethical numbing, which is its form of captivity. The system entangles all who depend on it. What begins as security becomes a way of life, a lens that distorts everything it touches.

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And what about those who fund it? The United States has poured billions into the machinery of occupation. Weapons, surveillance systems, diplomatic cover. These are active partnerships. The United States is implicated, not just as an enabler, but as a participant.

This complicity must be named. Political language often conceals more than it reveals. Words like conflict or tension obscure the fundamental imbalance of power. What we are witnessing is a long, slow dismantling of a people’s right to exist with freedom and dignity.

In turn, the Stanford experiment makes clear how easily people adapt to systems that demand silence, obedience, and cruelty. The guards did not need to be trained. They simply stepped into a role, and the role shaped them. The prisoners accepted the terms of their confinement. Many forgot that they could leave.

Palestinians are not offered the choice to leave. Their confinement is not a role they volunteered for. It is a condition imposed upon them since birth. Their homes are not metaphors. Their grief is not theoretical. Their resistance is not symbolic.

And still, they endure. In a system designed to erase them, Palestinians insist on being seen and heard. They continue to marry, to raise children, to write poetry, to fight for the return of stolen land and stolen life.

This insistence is existential and moral. It speaks to a truth deeper than political strategy. Palestinians are asserting their right to exist.

What remains of a person when the scaffolding of societal norms collapses? Who do we become when granted unearned power or stripped of our autonomy? These questions echo across both the basement at Stanford and the ruined neighbourhoods of Gaza.

In both places, the soul is tested.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was meant to study human behaviour. It ended up exposing something deeper: a warning against systems designed without conscience, and people who fail to resist them. If we are to remember ourselves, we must begin with the truth. And we must say it plainly.

Palestine is not a metaphor. It is a test. And we are failing it.

Yahia Lababidi is a writer of Palestinian descent and the author of a dozen books, including Palestine Wail (Daraja Press, 2024), a love letter to Gaza and an appeal to the human family. His latest book is a collection of original aphorisms, What Remains To Be Said (Wild Goose Publications, 2025)

Follow Yahia on X: @YahiaLababidi

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.