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The archetypal Palestinian father and child - courtesy of Israel

3rd of March. Palestine. Occupied territory. Another day of carnage and Israeli atrocities against Palestinians.

Another day of trying to keep the emotions of outrage below the neck, because judging from acquaintances' responses and comments to Gideon Levy's article in Haaretz, "self-hating Jews" like us are "the cancer of the state that weaken Israelis from within until they are finally destroyed" and should be tried for treason, found guilty and shot by a firing squad. Interesting to notice that this is a typical deviant behavior: to accuse others of what you are yourself.

It is dangerous to express sympathy toward Palestinians when the whole country is intoxicated with murderous solidarity and calling for a complete annihilation of the "devious and heartless animals who's mothers send their children to act as human shields, while Israeli children wet in the bed in fear of hearing another 'Color Red' alert". Poor Israeli babies and Ashkelon citizens, who suffer from anxiety attacks while Palestinians die like flies. Because clearly their lives cost much less than the lives of the brave and moral residents of the "only safe place for Jews".

But what are the roots of the blind hatred, complete lack of compassion and constant disproportional and bloodthirsty responses? What is the nature of this disease that causes an entire people to manifest this pathological behavior?

We find the first symptom in a revealing article "What's wrong with Israelis" by Bradley Burston.
What if it's true? What if Israelis deserve no better than Ehud Olmert, Amir Peretz, Avigdor Lieberman, Moshe Katsav, Dan Halutz?

If we are stuck with them, and they have nothing to offer us in the way of governance or personal example, perhaps they can offer us something else. At the very least, maybe they have something to teach us. About ourselves. What's wrong with us.[...]

What if the reason that we tend to get the leaders we most deserve is that we tend to vote for the leaders we most resemble?

The cabinet, the Knesset, the president, the chief rabbinate - they are their constituents in caricature. Us, in a fun house mirror.

If this is the case, it should be a fairly simple matter to divine what's wrong with Israelis. The male ones, at any rate.

First, we apply the Universal Law of Israeli Male Dynamics, which states, referring to behavior in the Gan, or Israeli pre-school:

They never left the Gan.

They can do whatever they want. They can say whatever comes to mind. There are no painful consequences, no significant punishments. They can decide that the sandbox is theirs, and woe to the kid who was there first.

They believe, and they may be right, that they will not be thrown out of the Gan, no matter what they do.

Anything goes.[...]

Finally, no overview of what's wrong with Israelis would be complete without a word on being provincial to the point of pathology.

It is one of the wonders of selective innocence. Left wing, right wing, professor or dropout, provincialism knows no barriers. It is everywhere in this tiny ghetto of a Jewish state.

Once, relatively few Israelis traveled abroad, foreign influences like television were limited, and down-on-the-farm narrowness was eminently understandable. No more. There's something about the provincialism of Israelis that has become a cultural staple, second nature. Effortless.

There's something oddly charming about it, when it's not causing someone pain.

You see it in its sub-cultural forms, in the hermetic self-satisfaction and immunity to criticism as exemplified in such groups as settlers, the ultra-Orthodox, the ultra-left.

You see it on a national level, in the conviction that a world that condemns Israel at every opportunity, and at times unjustly, actually frees it to act any way it damn pleases.

You might say there's something even childlike about it. A certain lack of perspective, that may, in fact, explain everything else."
The author presents a rather ugly picture, that the male population of Israel lacks mature perspective and has a closed/ghetto-like perception of the world. That this perspective may even be charming and infantile unless they are causing someone pain. Of course, collectively through their vocal support of the brutality of the IDF and the Israeli government, they do cause untold pain, so what is the driving mechanism behind it? What is it that is common to all Israeli/Jewish males? The first thing that springs to mind is circumcision:

From The Way of the Fool:
The first stage, or circuit, is the oral-passive-receptive, and is imprinted by what is perceived to be the mother or first mothering object. It can be conditioned by nourishment or threat, and is mostly concerned with bodily security. Trauma during this phase can cause an unconsciously motivated mechanical retreat from anything threatening to physical safety.

In recent times I have given a lot of thought to this particular circuit because of the matter of circumcision. Having come to the tentative idea that the whole Judeo-Christian monotheistic rant was a major control program, I came face to face with the question: how and why has it worked so well for so many thousands of years? More than that, how was it imposed in the first place?

I puzzled over this for weeks. I thought about several things that Friedrich Nietzsche had said that struck me like thunderbolts of truth once I was able to really step back and look at the matter:

Neitzsche wrote:
The Jews are the most remarkable nation of world history because, faced with the question of being or not being, they preferred, with a perfectly uncanny conviction, being at any price; the price they had to pay was the radical falsification of all nature, all naturalness, all reality, the entire inner world as well as the outer, They defined themselves counter to all those conditions under which a nation was previously able to live, was permitted to live; they made of themselves an antithesis of natural conditions - they inverted religion, religious worship, morality, history, psychology, one after the other, in an irreparable way into the contradiction of their natural values.[...]
The first "circuit" is concerned with what is safe and what is not safe. In our society, money is one of the primary items that is intimately tied to survival and biological security. Money represents survival. In addition to that, people who have been traumatized during the imprinting phase of the first circuit tend to view other people in an abstract way. It is "us and them." They also tend to be very easily threatened by disapproval of any sort because disapproval suggests the idea of extinction or loss of food supply. And, finally, those who have been negatively imprinted at this stage tend to have a chronic muscular armoring that prevents proper, relaxed breathing; they are "up tight."

One of the main characteristics of people who are heavily controlled by this circuit, or are "stuck" in this "oral phase", is that when they sense danger of any sort, whether actual or conceptual, all mental activity comes to a halt. Such people are chronically anxious and dependent - mostly on religion. They are not able to really understand what other people are feeling or what can happen in the future in regard to relationships, given a certain present situation. They only understand what is happening "now", and they can only feel what THEY feel. They cannot accurately grasp what others feel because they relate to others only as sensory objects."
"Us and them" world -view? Easily threatened by disapproval of any sort because disapproval suggests the idea of extinction or loss of food supply?

In this case, no wonder that the following description of schizoid personality from Political Ponerologyby Andrew Lobaczewski fits the Israeli attitude toward the rest of the World like a glove.
Literature provides us with descriptions of several varieties of this anomaly, whose existence can be attributed either to changes in the genetic factor or to differences in other individual characteristics of a non-pathological nature. Let us thus sketch these sub-species' common features.

Carriers of this anomaly are hypersensitive and distrustful, while, at the same time, pay little attention to the feelings of others. They tend to assume extreme positions, and are eager to retaliate for minor offenses. Sometimes they are eccentric and odd. Their poor sense of psychological situation and reality leads them to superimpose erroneous, pejorative interpretations upon other people's intentions.

They easily become involved in activities which are ostensibly moral, but which actually inflict damage upon themselves and others. Their impoverished psychological worldview makes them typically pessimistic regarding human nature. We frequently find expressions of their characteristic attitudes in their statements and writings: "Human nature is so bad that order in human society can only be maintained by a strong power created by highly qualified individuals in the name of some higher idea." Let us call this typical expression the "schizoid declaration".[...]

The quantitative frequency of this anomaly varies among races and nations: low among Blacks, the highest among Jews. Estimates of this frequency range from negligible up to 3 %. In Poland it may be estimated as 0.7 % of population. My observations suggest this anomaly is autosomally hereditary.

A schizoid's ponerological activity should be evaluated in two aspects. On the small scale, such people cause their families trouble, easily turn into tools of intrigue in the hands of clever and unscrupulous individuals, and generally do a poor job of raising children. Their tendency to see human reality in the doctrinaire and simplistic manner they consider "proper" - i.e. "black or white" - transforms their frequently good intentions into bad results. However, their ponerogenic role can have macrosocial implications if their attitude toward human reality and their tendency to invent great doctrines are put to paper and duplicated in large editions.
It is apparent that such people can inflict a lot of grief and suffering on their loved ones. But what happens when there is a schizoid infestation on a national scale? Or a better question is, how it is possible that such a variety of people with different psychological make-ups accepted this overtly pathological perception of reality?

Political Ponerology again offers an explanation:
"A prepared ideology will be able to cloak the essential qualities from the minds of scientists, politicians, and common people. In such a state of affairs, we will never elaborate any causatively active methods which could stifle the phenomenon's pathological self-reproduction or its expansionist external influences."
But apparently it can't be concealed completely if you know how to read the clues. So lets take a glimpse into an ideology or a world-view of several Israeli scholars or leaders.
The war game, The Guardian, September 21, 2003

Iran can never be threatened in its very existence. Israel can. Indeed, such a threat could even grow out of the current intifada. That, at least, is the pessimistic opinion of Martin van Creveld, professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. 'If it went on much longer,' he said, 'the Israeli government [would] lose control of the people. In campaigns like this, the anti-terror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing. I regard a total Israeli defeat as unavoidable. That will mean the collapse of the Israeli state and society. We'll destroy ourselves.'

In this situation, he went on, more and more Israelis were coming to regard the 'transfer' of the Palestinians as the only salvation; resort to it was growing 'more probable' with each passing day. Sharon 'wants to escalate the conflict and knows that nothing else will succeed'.

But would the world permit such ethnic cleansing? 'That depends on who does it and how quickly it happens. We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother." I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.'
Samson Blinded: a Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict

Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict, by Obadiah Shoher, abandons moralizing and ideological hubris to view Israeli-Muslim struggle in terms of raw realpolitik. Terrorism is historically normal mode of war. Israel must respect terrorists as efficient warriors - and kill them. Nuclear terrorism is unavoidable, and it will hit America before Israel. We must learn to tolerate and mitigate its damages. Shoher makes the case that only by shedding liberal idealism the West can win against Islamists. Espousing political rationalism, he deplores both Jewish and Muslim myths, and argues for efficiency and separating politics from moralism.
Netanyahu Calls for 'Disproportionate Force'

Opposition leader and former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu advocated the use of "disproportionate force" against the terror from Gaza in his speech before the 5th annual Jerusalem Conference Wednesday. Netanyahu called the 2005 Disengagement from Gaza and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's statement that it had been a success, "a kind of total disengagement from reality."[...]

Deterrence and disproportional response

"What is being done now is a war of attrition," Netanyahu explained. "They attack us - we attack them. They rocket us, we send a helicopter that (...) kills two, three, five of their operatives. What we are doing is gradually habituating the other side to the ability that they will engage in the daily bloodletting and terrorizing of our cities, and they will suffer a certain price. That cannot continue.

"The very nature of deterrence is the disproportional response," he said. "You up the ante. Israel has an enormous amount of ability and force that it can use to up the ante in various ways. But the main thing is to understand that you have to get out from a pattern of attrition to a policy of deterrence. That's what I would change in Sderot overnight."
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Israel never obeyed the so called "Doctrine of Proportionality".
From Israel and the Doctrine of Proportionality - Council on Foreign Relations

Has Israel historically obeyed the doctrine of proportionality?
A number of experts say it has not. "Israel tends toward disproportional responses, which just fuel further anger [in the region]," Syracuse University's Crane says. In 1993, Israel's seven-day bombing campaign of Lebanon in retaliation for Hezbollah rocket attacks in northern Israel was condemned by the international community for violating the rules of proportionality. In 1981, Israel struck Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor without provocation, a preemptive action experts say violated international law. Israel contends it is merely acting in self-defense (or in the case of Osirak, anticipatory self-defense) and, given the security threats of its neighbors, who have called for the elimination of Israel, is within its rights as a sovereign state.
Each response was brutal, bloodthirsty and disproportional, and justified by the well known Israeli excuse - that the country was facing a "threat to its existence" and acted in "self defense".
FromPolitical Ponerology:

"It is a common phenomenon for a ponerogenic association or group to
contain a particular ideology which always justifies its activities and
furnishes motivational propaganda. Even a small-time gang of hoodlums has its own melodramatic ideology and pathological romanticism. Human nature demands that vile matters be haloed by an over-compensatory mystique in order to silence one's conscience and to deceive consciousness and critical faculties, whether one's own or those of others."
So it seems that Zionist leaders invented the perfect ideology which activates behavioral circuits of the Israeli population and causes them to see the world as a dangerous place that can be maintained only by a strong power created by highly qualified individuals in the name of some higher idea - a belief that God promised Israel to his beloved and chosen sons, for example. And those sons are making sure that they are the ones who are going to rule and survive, even if it means suffering and destruction to the rest the world's population.

General Moshe Dayan said: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother." Perhaps it is time that the rest of the world sits up and takes notice of the stark danger that this unleashed rabid dog poses to the rest of the world.