Father and son, Benzion Netanyahu and Benjamin NetanyahuThis article is ideally read in conjunction with the previous piece, SURVIVAL INSTINCT OR JEWISH PARANOIA.
By Avigail Abarbanel
reposted January 28, 2010
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 Jews are more subject to diseases of the nervous system than the other races and peoples among which they dwell. Hysteria and neurasthenia appear to be most frequent. Some physicians of large experience among the Jews have even gone so far as to state that most of them are neurasthenic and hysterical." (The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. IX, (1905), p. 225).
And then you have great Jews such as Avraham Burg, once considered for leadership of Israel, writing books with titles such as "The Holocaust is Over. It is Time to Rise up From the Ashes". This man speaks great sense.
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.
One of the ways that the Rabbis and the darker Jews have controlled the populace is through fear tactics. The outer world hates them so it is best to remain together in the ghettos for example. They feared that they would lose adherents to reality should they find out the truth. It is common knowledge that many of the desecrations and hate crimes against Jews were instigated by Jews.
Go here to watch a short YouTube of an American Jewess who was caught victimizing herself in her university.
That they have many Jews believing that they are the 'chosen' people.'
Jews were chosen for destruction after their leaders caused Jesus to be executed.
All Jews have suffered since.
A large part of the so-called persecution is artificially created to keep Jews scared and to stimulate cash contributions.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been extracted from them in the past 25 years."
~ Henry H. Kelin, Jewish Leaders Are Crazy for Power.
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?
The author seems to not be aware of the policy of fear mentioned above.
"The Israelite nation is today no longer anything but a shapeless mass of corruption, of oppression, and of injustice. It has become probable that ours will be the last Zionist generation. There will remain a Jewish State ~ but an unrecognizable, detestable state. After our two thousand years of fighting for survival, our reality is a colonialist state under the yoke of a corrupt clique, a state that makes a mockery of legality and of civic morality. A state run in contempt of justice loses the strength to survive. The countdown for Israeli society is underway." ~ Former Israeli Cabinet Minister Avraham Burg, 2002
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.
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 whom 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. I could be wrong, I might be naïve, but I don’t believe that Israeli leaders are conscious that they are now hyping up more traditional forms of anti-Semitism ~ that is to say, I don’t think that they are consciously plotting to do it.
"The Jews are more subject to diseases of the nervous system than the other races and peoples among which they dwell. Hysteria and neurasthenia appear to be most frequent. Some physicians of large experience among the Jews have even gone so far as to state that most of them are neurasthenic and hysterical."
~ The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. IX, (1905), p. 225).
They are operating without awareness and they probably believe in their own explanations for what they are doing, for example that they attacked Gaza to weaken Hamas. But we must look at the real consequences of Israel’s actions in Gaza and three years ago in Lebanon for example, to understand Israel’s real motivation.
If Israel’s actions lead to an increase in fanaticism
and in anti-Jewish sentiment,
this is because this is what
Israel wants to achieve, albeit unconsciously.
But why does Israel need more fanaticism and antisemitism? An increase in real anti-Semitism and attacks on Jews would bring current reality into line with the outdated imaginary reality, and would help keep Jewish identity unchanged. The reality is that Jews have not been victims, certainly not of a genocidal regime for over sixty years ~ the Holocaust is not happening now and there is no attempt by anyone to annihilate the Jews.
The fact that Jews live in safety everywhere and are not persecuted makes Israel uncomfortable. If the Jews are doing well everywhere, then Jewish identity is being put to question, and so is the very reason for the existence of Israel.
The very state that was created to save the Jews from persecution now needs them to be persecuted again so that it can continue to exist.
Escalating the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is one of the means to achieving this end.
The Palestinians, who are desperately trying to understand what has been happening to them, are caught in this madness and are the victims of it.
It’s not because of whom they are or something they did, that they are suffering. It’s because they had the misfortune of living on the land that a neurotic Zionist movement was determined to take for itself regardless of cost.
I think many Palestinians are beginning to recognize this but the world leaders still believe Israel’s racist propaganda, which says that there is something inherent in the Palestinian people that mean that they deserve what they get.
This is why it is essential that the world intervene decisively.
I do not trust Israel to suddenly develop sufficient self-awareness to understand what it’s doing and put a stop to it.
Israel’s growing delinquency demonstrates the exact opposite.
The Palestinians do not have any more time to spare.
These are not just the ramblings of one man. This echoes the feelings of the majority of Israeli Jews and most Zionist Jews. Even very educated people feel this way. ‘Because we were victims of anti-Semitism we can never relax and must always be vigilant in case a new enemy of the Jews will come to destroy us.’
Source: WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE
Avigail AbarbanelShe studied two years at Bar Ilan University in the combined program in the social sciences. This program combined majors in sociology, political science and economics. She chose Bar Ilan because it required students to take units in Jewish studies in addition to their major subjects.
She wanted to know and understand more about her culture and history. Growing up in a secular family meant that she knew very little about Jewish religion and law. She has a Bachelor of Arts (Honours), Macquarie University, Sydney, 1995, Graduate Diploma in Individual Psychotherapy and Relationship Therapy, Jansen-Newman Institute, Sydney, 1999. Certificate in Gestalt Counseling, Illawarra Gestalt Centre, Wollongong, 2000.
Since July 1999 Abigail has her own private practice in Fully Human Psychotherapy and Counseling Services which has been running successfully ever since. She is Canberra director of Deir Yassin Remembered.
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