The
Pathology Of Israeli Power
By Issa Khalaf
29 July, 2006
Countercurrents.org
As
we witness the unfolding spectacle of ferocious, indiscriminate violence,
destruction, and brutality in Gaza and Lebanon, it’s difficult
to resist the conclusion that there is something terribly wrong with
the Israeli state and society. It’s as though all moral and psychological
constraints and boundaries have been breached, deviancy normalized.
Not that state terrorism, deliberate aggression, extreme disproportionate
force, and massive violations of international humanitarian law are
new to the Israeli state: from 1948, the list is long, the evidence
widely available. And anyway, in this case, disproportionality—a
concept actually inapplicable to the evil being rained on defenseless
Lebanon or the genocide in Palestine—implies that Israel is reacting
to others’ provocations and acts of aggression, as if the Palestine
problem began with Hamas and Hizballah’s capture of Israeli soldiers,
or as if only Israel has the right to use force to defend itself while
its enemies do not, a concept apparently supported by the West, never
mind the slavish idiocy of Bush administration pronouncements.
The Israeli self-image of
rationality, self-confidence, restraint, pragmatism, and marshal moral
superiority are delusions and myths, constructed to protect the Israeli
psyche, manipulated by the state to keep alive the specter of existential
terror in the Israeli public and to disguise the state’s raison
d’etre, expansion and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, and maintain
the deeply sociologically and institutionally entrenched Israeli military,
increasingly blurring the lines between a civilian and military state.
In the past five years, one can observe and feel a qualitative change
for the worse in Israeli Jewish political psychosis, a turn to the acute.
How does one explain the copiously routine, feral, violently racist
and bigoted language of Israeli leaders, politicians, bureaucrats, settlers,
rabbis, and even academics? The profoundly disturbing disregard for
innocent “Arab” life, including children, among Israeli
soldiers and the military? The polls that consistently, bizarrely reveal
a majority of the Israeli Jewish citizens repelled at living next to
or befriending “Arabs”? The rising voices advocating “transfer”
of Israeli Arabs or expulsion of the Palestinians? The crazy, unpredictable
military rage and terrorism directed at Arab populations? The extremist,
self-destructive right-wing drift of Israeli politics?
The Zionist state of Israel
seems to be in moral, political, and psychiatric free fall. Unfortunately,
its self-imploding, overweening arrogance and terrifyingly dangerous
actions are supported by an equally militant government in Washington
and a Western world intent on accommodating its violent delusions, not
to mention the growing extremism among the organized American Jewish
community in support of Israel. This at a time when the principal Arab
states and the Palestinians are seeking peace, stability and coexistence,
the former’s feebleness and inability to defend their people leaving
the door open to Islamo-nationalist non-state actors and terrorists.
Those without power increasingly
revert to rationality while those with power increasingly rationalize
it.
Rational people assume that
Israel’s behavior, its “strategy,” can be apprehended
through reason and political analysis, though its actions in Gaza and
Lebanon, apparently meant to cause maximum death and destruction, defy
rationality, including when measured against Israel’s self-interest.
Sure, its actions can be better understood in the context of Zionism’s
grand design for a Palestinian-free Jewish state in control of maximum
territory and its attendant goal (in concert with the Bush administration)
of destroying all indigenous resistance and populist, democratic opposition
to Israeli military hegemony in the region.
In Lebanon, the apparent
objective is to directly destroy Hizballah, or turn the Lebanese against
them, or weaken and politically fragment Lebanon through civil war,
or install a collaborative Lebanese government.
The Lebanon invasion and
destruction was planned long ago. Unfortunately, Hizballah, whatever
one ascribes to its motives, gave the Israeli military its pretext.
Anyone familiar with the
region’s politics and political movements and Israeli recklessness
understands the folly of it all. Israeli actions are wildly, characteristically
disproportionate to the challenges, excluding the peaceful, rational,
measured use of instruments for resolving disputes or crises. This has
been the story since before 1948. The fury against Lebanon, as in the
reaction in Gaza, lacks sensibility, strategic coherence or even calculated
utilitarian self-interest, obvious to everyone except those who run
the state of Israel, creating the conditions for consequences that Israel
cannot control.
The fundamental Israeli goal
in laying waste to, and socially and politically fragmenting, Palestine
and Lebanon (now that Iraq has been taken care of) is to encourage Islamist
extremism in the region and thereby gain Western support in the fight
against Islamic terror. While an apparent strategic reason or rationale,
it remains fundamentally self-defeating in the long run, contrary to
a rational state’s calculations for peace, stability, and security
for its citizens. Its logic ultimately leads to continual wars and the
eventual destruction of Israel itself.
Thus Israel’s Palestine-Lebanon
(and wider regional) goals are inherently irrational, representing a
distorted rationalization (or in the words of Israeli novelist David
Grossman, “mutation”) of power—a distortion of rationality—whose
application has become a mechanism for its own, nihilistic ends, overturning
the modern western assumption that rationality is universal and constant.
This state of affairs obscures, renders fuzzy and indistinct, the domains
between reality and fantasy.
And that’s where Zionism
resides, in states of fantasy, paranoia, denial, schizophrenia, displacement,
underlain by absolute power gone amuck. For a time it was fashionable
to delineate decades of war, continual states of emergency and existential
fear as causes of hate and violence toward Palestinians and Arabs generally.
No doubt this is so.
But the problems lie deeper,
with a “mutated” power wielded by a narcissistic people
with a keen historical sense of both specialness and victimhood, now
inheritors of a powerful, exclusionary nation-state, founded through
colonial means, predicated on eradication of another nation.
Israel is an ethnic state,
with an ethno-religious-nationalist-messianic ideology, based on group
identity, not individual rights, whose institutionalized preference
is for Jewish superiority, disallowing the possibility of equality for
a systematically and sophisticatedly excluded and discriminated against
Arab minority. This is far from the system of majority rule based on
the principle of moral individual equality, protected through minority
rights, rule of law, and civil rights generally found in Western democracies.
Michel Warschawski suggests
that these contradictions are dealt with through, one, “denial”
leading to schizophrenia (Ilan Pappe also refers to the psychological
“mechanism of denial” permeating Israeli society), manifested
by the racism and violence and ethnic cleansing and torture and collective
punishment of Palestinians and by their general invisibility within
Israeli society itself; and two, through “personalized legislation,”
that is, the malleability, in the absence of a constitution, of easily
changeable electoral and other laws in the “absence of the concept
of rights” in Israel.
Power and its corollary,
violence, both physical and psychological, are institutionalized in
Israeli state and society. The military, that is, the distorting effect
of a culture of militaristic nationalism and the cozy and symbiotic
relationship between military and political institutions and leadership
of state, has been pointed to by Uri Avnery, Ran HaCohen, Pappe, and
Warschawski, who concludes that
“The new ideology combines
four main elements: a nationalist militarism more or less associated
with religious fundamentalism; avowed racism; a die-hard spirit impregnated
with messianism; and a willingness to question every democratic norm.
Put together, these elements help shape a generalized paranoia, which
leads Israelis to view the whole world as an existential threat to Jewish
survival in the Middle East or anywhere else. This new ideology’s
first and doubtless most perverse effect is acceptance of the domestic
state of siege and normalization of death.” (Michel Warschawski,
“Israeli Democracy,”)
A state cannot have apparently
liberal minority rights while insisting on the separation of peoples
and the institutionalized inferiority of one to the other, a condition
similar to Jewish life in Russia of a century ago. Jewish schizophrenia
has been transposed onto the Palestinians. Now Israeli Jews are white
and European and civilized, keeping at bay genetically and culturally
defective and shifty and violent dark skinned Arabs.
The pathological tension
between absolute, unconstrained power, aggressiveness, defiance and
victimhood, existential fear, and insecurity, produce the violence inherent
in the Israeli state. On one level, the stubborn presence of the Palestinians
challenges the denial mechanisms and leads to the drive to extirpate
the cultural, political, and physical presence of the Other so as not
to be reminded of oneself, one’s humanity. Israelis are conscious
of the fact that their state was created at the original and continuing
expense of the Palestinians, through force, but react to this psychosis
by denial and violence. Haim Hanegbi expresses the Israeli condition
this way:
“I am not a psychologist,
but I think that everyone who lives with the contradictions of Zionism
condemns himself to protracted madness. It's impossible to live like
this. It's impossible to live with such a tremendous wrong. It's impossible
to live with such conflicting moral criteria. When I see not only the
settlements and the occupation and the suppression, but now also the
insane wall that the Israelis are trying to hide behind, I have to conclude
that there is something very deep here in our attitude to the indigenous
people of this land that drives us out of our minds.
“There is something
gigantic here that doesn't allow us truly to recognize the Palestinians,
that doesn't allow us to make peace with them. And that something has
to do with the fact that even before the return of the land and the
houses and the money, the settlers' first act of expiation toward the
natives of this land must be to restore to them their dignity, their
memory, their justness.
“But that is just what
we are incapable of doing. Our past won't allow us to do it…Even
if Israel surrounds itself with a fence and a moat and a wall, it won't
help. Because…Israel as a Jewish state will not be able to exist.”
(Ari Shavit interview, in Ha’aretz, with Haim Hanegbi and Meron
Benvenisti, August 28, 2003, found on Znet)
On another level, brutality
and ruthlessness against the Palestinians is the displacement of the
unconscious response to the suffering and humiliation and persecution
of Jews and their determined, God-defying, refusal to lament or mourn
their fate. It is formidable anger and rage that will not be quieted,
for to do so is to submit to meekness and impotence and sacrifice, as
in Jews proceeding orderly and sheepishly to the slaughter in Nazi Germany.
It’s as if there is
no middle ground for Zionism, no doubt, no introspection: it’s
our existence or theirs. This psychopathology is made all the more palpable
because of the intense moral contradictions: while it has accomplished
impressive things, including “Jewish democracy,” a place
for some Jews to take refuge or to find pride, survival at all odds,
and economic and technological development, Israel is a colonial settler
society in origin as much as Zionism is also a variant of Jewish nationalism;
it is both non-democratic in its exclusion of non-Jews and democratic
for its Jewish majority.
Regardless of how one sees
it, the end result is, as Israeli observers themselves have commented,
a barbarization, moral decline or debasement, of Israeli society. How
could it be otherwise, what with a Zionist ideology that, from its origin,
treated the Palestinians with cruelty, disdain, violence, and loathing,
traits common to all colonial-settler societies. And with the state
since 1948 having so thoroughly indoctrinated Israeli society, through
wars and manipulation of existential fears, occupation and relentlessly
violent oppression. And with a racist educational system—which
portrays the “Arabs” as inferior, lazy, fatalistic, dirty,
easily inflammable, violent, bloodthirsty—and socialization of
superiority and separation and alienation of Jews from non-Jews, in
cities and neighborhoods, on Jewish owned lands and public domains.
The pathological nature of
this indoctrination is illustrated by the cold-blooded October 2004
murder of the 13-year schoolgirl, Iman al-Hams, by a “Captain
R,” who was subsequently acquitted and promoted. After shooting
her twice in the head, he walked away then turned around and emptied
the entire magazine of his automatic rifle, 17 bullets, into her to
“confirm the kill.” The captain, on tape, “clarifies”
why he killed Iman: “This is commander. Anything that’s
mobile, that moves in the [security] zone, even if it’s a three-year-old,
needs to be killed.” (See Chris McGreal, Guardian, Nov. 16, 2005)
Journalists and human rights organizations have documented countless
cases of Israelis killing children, even for sports and game. Notice,
here, the captain’s language: "Anything that’s mobile…needs
to be killed." Not anyone who is mobile. Palestinian children are
like animals, like anything moving, they, it, need(s) to be killed.
Captain R turns out to be
a Druze, a powerful telling of the sick success of Israeli socialization
and indoctrination. This Druze, historically the marginal outsider in
mainstream Islamic society, internalized Israel’s ethnic/racial
pecking order—its colonially inherited psychopathology in which
the indigenous become animals—therefore violently displacing his
inferiority, as Mizrahi Jews do, onto the Palestinians. Dehumanizing,
hating and killing Palestinians is the ultimate, disturbed act of belonging
and loyalty to a society accustomed to its influential members referring
to Palestinians as beasts, two-legged animals, cockroaches and worms,
unaware of their own degradation and dehumanization in the process.
This state of acute political
and social psychosis, manifested by power’s irrational application
and self-dehumanizing behavior, betrays a deep-seated fear: while Israel
possesses unequaled, sanctimonious power and its political/military
class was historically confident of its ability to militarily prevail
against Arab armies, the country is unceasingly, silently, troubled
by the possibility of one day being abandoned by the United States.
Without its patron, its power is as nothing, not necessarily militarily,
but emotionally and psychologically.
Awesome military might and
the myth of invincibility is a tenuous psychological condition, masking
Israelis’ deepest existential fears that the millions they’ve
dispossessed, killed, and continue to torment cannot ultimately be silenced
and will come back to haunt them. But Israel’s current elites
seem unable to transcend their psychological paralysis: they resist
abandoning, even self-critically reflecting on, their worn-out ideological,
expansionist aspirations yet desire acceptance of the surrounding peoples,
to whom they relate only in the language and logic of absolute violence.
The Israeli/Zionist condition, unchanged, is a sure recipe for widespread
regional annihilation.
© Issa Khalaf. (Written on 7/17/06)