Israel’s Growing Insanity
(Avigail Abarbanel’s web site) -- By Avigail Abarbanel
I wrote this on 9th February 2009, the day before Israel’s election, after seeing an interview with Benjamin Netanyahu’s father on Israeli TV.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s father—described as “sharp as a razor” at the ripe old age of 99—gave a rare interview to Amit Segel of Israel’s Channel 2 to support his son’s election campaign (Channel 2 website. 7 Feb. 2009). At some point in the interview Professor Ben-Zion Netanyahu said,
“Today we are facing plain and simple, a danger of annihilation. This is not only the ongoing existential danger to Israel, but a real danger of complete annihilation. People think that the Shoah (Holocaust) is over — but it is not, it is continuing all the time” (My translation from the Hebrew).
The views of Netanyahu Senior do not represent a lunatic fringe, but the Israeli mainstream. When I was growing up in Israel, things were much the same. I and everyone I knew believed in earnest that we were always at risk of annihilation. Fear of annihilation is at the heart of Jewish, not just Israeli culture and it pre-dates the Holocaust. But the climate in Israel today is far more extreme than it was in my time, as Israel on the whole moves further and further to an irrational fanatic position.
When a person’s perception of reality is completely out of touch with reality itself, we begin to get an uneasy feeling that something might be wrong with his or her mind. Where is the evidence that the Jews, right now are facing a “real danger of complete annihilation”? Where is the evidence that the Holocaust, a systematic and deliberate plan to eliminate all Jews during the Second World War, is still being carried out? I would even argue that saying this is an insult to the victims of the real Holocaust. Israel is rumoured to have one of the most powerful military forces in the world but Israelis still believe that they are right now being annihilated. This is insanity. Someone is indeed facing a risk of cultural, economic, political and even physical annihilation, but it’s not Israel or Jews, it’s the Palestinians, and the annihilator is Israel itself.
Our politics and our economics are both a product of our psychology, not something separate. We make political and economic choices based on who we are and what we feel and believe. Many rational people search for a rational analysis—often political or economic—for what is happening in Israel-Palestine. But the only way to interpret Israel’s behaviour during the past 61 years is through understanding the psychology of its society and its leaders. To ignore Israel’s psychology is dangerous because it means that any intervention based only on political considerations, will miss the mark and risk being irrelevant. Indeed if you look at the history of diplomacy and ‘peace negotiations’ in the region, it is quite obvious that they have achieved nothing at all. Things seem to be progressing on a trajectory determined by something that to someone in my profession, looks more like a mental illness than a political plan, bearing no relation to any rational diplomatic efforts, ‘roadmaps’, peace plans or truces.
Israel’s behaviour is a direct product of its psychological struggle with the implications of Jewish identity, which in turn determines Israel’s very reason for existence. In his book Alternative to a Psychotic State Akiva Orr asks if Israel is a ‘Jewish state’ or a ‘state for the Jews’. Since it is clearly not a Jewish state—Israeli state law is different to religious law—then it must be a state for the Jews. And this begs the question of ‘who or what is a Jew’, and to that there has never been a satisfactory legal answer. Israel has no constitution precisely because it cannot resolve the question of who or what it wants to be. The de-facto, modern secular Zionist definition of a Jew is someone who would have been considered a Jew by Hitler. Effectively Jews are allowing themselves to be defined by those who hated them and sought their annihilation. In other words, this identity was formed as a reaction to a particular set of circumstances. But what happens if the circumstances change? What does that do to this identity? In other words, if the world is now safe for Jews and is no longer what Jewish people thought it was, then Jewish people no longer know who they are, in which case either Jewish identity needs to change, or you make sure that the world is back to what it was when the Jews were persecuted. That way there is no need to go through the difficult process of self-examination or live in a world that doesn’t make sense. The reason for the existence of the state of Israel is a direct result of Jewish self-perception as victims of persecution. Israel was created to offer a safe haven for Jews from persecution...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:
I would add that organized Jewry's culture of insatiable greed is playing a role in all of this as well.
Israel manifests insatiable greed: It covets the entire Levant, but doesn't want to incorporate the non-Jews who live there into its state; it covets the idea of being loved and well-regarded by the nations, but it doesn't want to materially or diplomatically sacrifice an iota of welfare or good will to gain their trust and respect; it covets its purebred, insular "choseness," (and all of the material tourist profit that can be had by maintaining that biblical identity) but it also has the ambitions of a great empire that rules over and governs many peoples, which would necessitate watering down Israel with outside blood; it covets its "victim" identity (and all of the gravy train Holocaustianity profits that have come with it) but also wants to be viewed as a psychologically stable, wise and well-grounded leader of all peoples.
In short, if Israel was a person, he would resemble one of the insane, incestuous, pompous Emperors of Rome who simultaneously regarded himself as oppressed and divine.
In this day and age, can anyone imagine providing such a person with the power of life and death over millions of defenseless others, plus a nuclear trigger to boot? Yet that's exactly what the dumbed-down, dim-witted liberal Western "Idiocracy" has provided to Israel.
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