Delusion, Arrogance and the Denial of Agency to the Palestinians

...Shira’s statement contains a fundamental mistake: the belief, part of what Dr. Kenneth Levin calls the “Oslo Syndrome,” that it is in our power to change reality enough to cause the Palestinians to make peace.” A corollary, which she also enunciates, is that if we haven’t succeeded, we (our leaders) just haven’t tried hard enough. We haven’t been creative enough or we haven’t had the “courage” to make the concessions that – if we only would take the risk – would bring peace.

Etgar Keret

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
28 August '16..

Like most popular Israeli authors, Etgar Keret leans left. There are lots of reasons for this, which include the fact that the literary establishment here doesn’t exactly welcome writers that don’t fit politically. But in any event, I find him entertaining.

His memoir “The Seven Good Years” (שבע השנים הטובות) which I was reading yesterday is not an especially political book, but one passage was revealing. In it, Keret tells about a discussion he had with his wife, Shira Geffen, about whether their then 3-year old son, Lev, should serve in the army when he grows up. Keret is speaking:

“Listen to yourself.” I said. “You’re talking as if serving in the army is an extreme sport. But what can we do? We live in a part of the world where our lives depend on it. So what you’re actually saying is that you’d rather have other people’s children go into the army and sacrifice their lives while Lev enjoys his life here without taking any risks or shouldering the obligations the situation calls for.”

“No,” my wife responded. “I’m saying that we could have reached a peaceful solution a long time ago, and we still can. And that our leaders allow themselves not to do that because they know that most people are like you: they won’t hesitate to put their children’s lives into the government’s irresponsible hands.”

The chapter concludes with Keret and his wife agreeing to disagree, while they will both spend the next 15 years working for “family and regional peace.” That certainly isn’t how such a discussion would end in my house, assuming that my wife would be silly enough to offer this argument (believe me, she wouldn’t).

My guess is that Keret agrees with the position he allows his wife to articulate, but that isn’t important. What is important is that the second paragraph presents an argument that is taken seriously by the Left, and even considered a legitimate response to the first paragraph.

Shira’s statement contains a fundamental mistake: the belief, part of what Dr. Kenneth Levin calls the “Oslo Syndrome,” that it is in our power to change reality enough to cause the Palestinians to make peace.” A corollary, which she also enunciates, is that if we haven’t succeeded, we (our leaders) just haven’t tried hard enough. We haven’t been creative enough or we haven’t had the “courage” to make the concessions that – if we only would take the risk – would bring peace.

This is an arrogant position, and one that denies agency to the Palestinians. Some things aren’t only up to us. Today’s State of Israel has a great deal of power, but it does not have the power to change what is in the hearts of the Palestinians: a combination of false narratives, religious principles, shame, anger, envy and hatred.

(Continue to Full Post)

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The Oslo Delusion - Twenty Years Later With Little Variation

The foremost characteristic of the Oslo Delusion is the inability to learn anything significant from the failure of the Oslo “peace process” and thus to think that if we continue to exercise the counterproductive policies of the past that they will now yield different results.

Michael Lumish..
Israel Thrives..
11 June '13..

On Monday, June 3, Secretary of State John Kerry gave a long and rambling speech before the American Jewish Committee Global Forum. The speech was primarily hogwash, but what is most striking about it is that, with slight variation, it could have been given twenty years ago. The American administration still seems to think that Israeli Jews have the power to bring peace between the Jews and the Arabs in the Middle East. The American administration still conceives of the conflict as between a powerful Israeli "Goliath" versus an oppressed "Palestinian" minority. And the American administration still believes that if only Israel would do this, that, or the other then the "Palestinians" will be placated and peace will reign.

This is what I like to call The Oslo Delusion. The foremost characteristic of the Oslo Delusion is the inability to learn anything significant from the failure of the Oslo “peace process” and thus to think that if we continue to exercise the counterproductive policies of the past that they will now yield different results. These attempts to try the same things over and over and over again, while hoping for different results, is what Einstein famously called the very "definition of insanity." John Kerry, of course, is not insane. He merely continues to conceive of the conflict within the failed paradigm of the Clinton administration.

So long as American administrations continue to look at the conflict within ideological models that failed in the past then efforts will continue to fail going forward into the future. Let's look at some examples of Kerry's delusional thinking on the subject. He said this:

Security for Israel grows with the empowerment of moderates in the West Bank and Gaza and throughout the region so that extremists are isolated rather than promoted and empowered.

This sentence neatly demonstrates the schizophrenic contradiction at the heart of Obama administration foreign policy. How can Kerry speak of promoting and empowering moderates when the administration did precisely the opposite in Egypt? The United States supported the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, and thus the rise of radical Islam throughout the Middle East, and yet Kerry speaks of empowering moderates? Who are these moderates? How can we consider Mahmoud Abbas a moderate when his PhD thesis concerned itself with promoting Holocaust denial, when he encourages violence and hatred toward Jews in Palestinian Authority media, and when he refuses to negotiate unless all his demands are met prior to negotiations?

Kerry seems to think that the regional Arab society is filled with moderates who want nothing more than to raise their children in peace, but for the fact of a minority of extremists in their midst who do all that they can to harass the Jews and prevent peace. This is false. It is the regional Arab culture itself which is immoderate. Arab media, and Arab culture, more generally, throughout the Middle East is riddled with highly toxic forms of anti-Semitism in which Jews are depicted as a sublime and transcendent evil. It's not a matter of isolating extremists, but of confronting a deeply racist and imperial nation, the Arab nation, that so often teaches its children that Allah wants them to kill Jews.

Winning Approval, Minority Elites and Israel’s Jewish Defamers

Kenneth Levin..
frontpagemag.com..
27 August '12..

In a 1977 Supreme Court opinion, Thurgood Marshall, the court’s first African-American justice, observed, “Social scientists agree that members of minority groups frequently respond to discrimination and prejudice by attempting to disassociate themselves from the group, even to the point of adopting the majority’s negative attitudes towards the minority.”

Marshall further noted that “such behavior occurs with particular frequency among members of minority groups who have achieved some measure of economic or political success and thereby have gained some acceptability among the dominant group.” In fact, such behavior is particularly common within minority group elites more broadly; not only those to whom Marshall refers but also, for example, academic, artistic and journalist elites. In addition, it is more common not simply among those who have achieved elite status but also those who aspire to such status.

Of course, not all members of these elites within minorities embrace the wider society’s bigoted indictments of their own group; nor is the embrace of those indictments limited to the besieged community’s elites. But elites typically play an especially prominent role in this phenomenon.

In the context of Jewish experience, this has been a recurrent pattern throughout the history of the Diaspora and has figured in Israeli history as well. (Virtually all the psychological characteristics of minorities chronically denigrated, marginalized, and otherwise targeted by surrounding majorities are found as well within the populations of small states chronically besieged by their neighbors.)

The Oslo process of the 1990′s is illustrative. The path to Oslo was paved by journalists, academics, novelists, purveyors of other arts, and elements of the political elite who argued that the Palestinian-Israeli, and the broader Arab-Israeli, conflict remained unresolved because Israel had failed to make sufficient territorial and other concessions. If Israel would only return essentially to the pre-1967 armistice lines and were also more forthcoming in other ways, they argued, peace would be achieved. By the early 1990′s they had won about half of Israel’s population to variations of this view.

In doing so, they ignored the reality that throughout this same period, as well as in the wake of the initial Oslo accords of 1993, Yasser Arafat and his followers continued to tell their constituency that their goal was Israel’s annihilation and continued to promote terror to achieve that goal. During the years of Oslo, the editors and journalists of Israel’s three Hebrew dailies failed to report on the incessant defamation of Israel and calls for her extermination that permeated not only speeches by Arafat and his associates but broadcasts of Palestinian media more generally as well as sermons in Palestinian mosques and curriculum in Palestinian schools. The upsurge of terror that followed the initial Oslo accords was downplayed by the Israeli political leadership that had championed the Oslo process. Israeli academics, both immediately before and during the Oslo years, created a bogus “New History” that rewrote Israel’s past in a manner supporting the delusions of Oslo, the claims that Israeli missteps were perpetuating the conflict and Israeli concessions would resolve it. Israeli novelists, dramatists, film makers, as well as painters and others in the plastic arts, promoted the same delusions. A similar pattern of distortions characterized the work of many Jewish community leaders, journalists, academics, and artists in the Diaspora.

Israel Policy Forum (IPF): Prominent American Jews who are ruled by fear

Fresnozionism.org..
16 July '12..

The Israel Policy Forum (IPF) is a left-of-center group formerly associated with Clinton Administration officials, which apparently slipped into irrelevance with the eclipse of the ‘peace process’, the violence of the Second Intifada, and the Hamas takeover of Gaza.

It’s back, reconstituted under the sponsorship of philanthropist Charles Bronfman, and with some big names in the American (and American-Israeli) world behind it.

But money and names can’t change reality.

No matter how irrational the land-for-peace paradigm proves, no matter how little support there is for it among ordinary Israelis (who will have to deal with the consequences), no matter how vicious the anti-Jewish hatred spewing from PLO media, no matter how many rockets land in southern Israel, no matter how explicit the Palestinian leadership is about its desire to replace Israel with an Arab state, no matter how often the Arabs pocket concessions and immediately escalate demands, no matter how clear it is beyond any reasonable doubt that further concessions at this point will lead to war, not peace — no matter what, some people simply cannot face the brute fact that there is no possibility of peace with the Palestinian Arabs and the larger Arab world in the foreseeable future.

Fresnozionism - Why Israel fails in public diplomacy (and strategic action)

Fresnozionism.org..
14 January '12..





Martin Sherman writes (“Comprehending the incomprehensible — Part I“),

For anyone seeking the principal reason why Israel is losing the public diplomacy war, the answer is difficult to accept, yet very easy to prove.

Israel is losing the battle because it doesn’t want to win.

Sherman’s thesis is tightly argued. I’ll summarize:

If an organization wants to achieve an objective, it will allocate resources to it. Israel’s budget for what Sherman calls ‘public diplomacy’ and I call the ‘information war’ is minuscule. The state is able to come up with large sums of money for such things as the withdrawal from Gaza or building the security barrier, but the Osem company spends two to three times as much promoting its ‘Bamba’ snack than Israel does telling its story to the world.

Since everyone admits that this is enormously important, why isn’t more funding provided?

Sherman suggests that the explanation for this criminal negligence is the same as the solution to these additional paradoxes:

• Why a country that displays such technotactical brilliance is afflicted by such strategic imbecility;

• Why hawkish candidates consistently win elections, but then immediately adopt the failed policy of their defeated dovish rivals;

• Why the doctrine of political appeasement and territorial concessions is repeatedly and consistently disproven, but somehow never discredited – and certainly never discarded;

• Why the Israeli political establishment has not embraced more appreciatively and mobilized more effectively the huge potential in the support of communities such as the Evangelical Christians across the world, and particularly in the US, as a strategic asset.

Sherman blames “the decisive role that civil society elites have in setting the direction of the country’s strategic agenda – no matter who gets elected.” And he adds that “this is a role that is not only decisive, but also in many ways detrimental, dysfunctional and at times disloyal.”

Jews on the dark side

Fresnozionism.org
28 February '11

http://fresnozionism.org/2011/02/jews-on-the-dark-side/

Why do I write so much about anti-Zionist Jews, you ask? Why so much space dedicated to the phony ‘pro-Israel’ J Street, for example? We already know that there are a few Israel-hating crazies and naive-but-well-meaning liberals out there, but aren’t there more important targets?

Well, no, I don’t think so.

I am going to recommend a book that I am reading (I’ll have a full review later) by Kenneth Levin, called The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege (Smith & Kraus, 2005). Levin is a practicing (and teaching) psychiatrist who also happens to have a degree in History, and his book describes the psychological roots of the seemingly irrational anti-Jewish (not just anti-Zionist or anti-Israel) behavior of so many Jews.

It also documents and explains Jewish behavior throughout history, from the remarkable survival of Judaism in the face of the antisemitic depredations of the Middle Ages, through the vicious hatred for the state displayed by so many Israeli academics and intellectuals, to the concrete realization of delusional ways of thinking in politics, as exemplified by Israel’s behavior during the Oslo period.

This is a big book (more than 500 pages) and there is a lot of detail. It’s not exactly bedtime reading. But it is an essential book.

Levin’s thesis, somewhat oversimplified, is that anti-Jewish attitudes in oppressed Jews result from a) internalizing and coming to believe the antisemitic canards of their oppressors, and b) an unrealistic delusion that they have the power to change the behavior of the antisemites by self-reform — by ‘improving’ themselves so as to no longer deserve antisemitic hatred.

These mechanisms have led to an attenuation of Judaism itself, in which the focus on God, the Jewish People and the Land of Israel in traditional Judaism has been replaced with a universalist doctrine which minimizes national, ethnic and cultural divisions and espouses abstract ‘justice’ for all humankind as its highest goal — and which sees a transnational utopia as the ultimate Jewish goal.

Proponents of this universalist ethic see it as an evolution in Jewish ethical principles, a progressive improvement from a particularist and parochial past to a more modern, ‘higher’ form of ethics. But often — as when Jewish left-wing activists call for ‘justice for Palestinian Arabs’ while ignoring the context of the intermittent war being prosecuted against the Jewish state by the entire Arab world and Iran — universalist ethics provide a cover for anti-Israel positions.

Levin goes into detail about the failure of the Jewish community in America and the yishuv in Palestine to rescue more European Jews during the Holocaust. Of course, the primary responsibility for the lack of action must fall on the US State Department, President Roosevelt and the despicable British Foreign Office, which actually opposed any actions to save European Jews after the mass murders became known, because they might want to go to Palestine after the war. Levin quotes a memo which refers to “the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued.” Really.

What may not be generally known is the degree to which attempts to rescue Jews — which could have been accomplished with very little effort and without damage to the overall war effort — were often stymied by resistance from irrational or delusional Jews.

For example, Levin notes that the New York Times, under direct orders from its (Jewish) publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, published only one story during the war relating to the Holocaust on page one above the fold: one which reported as true a State Department claim in the Fall of 1943 that 580,000 Jewish refugees had entered the country (the true number was about 21,000). The story had the immediate effect of short-circuiting support for a Rescue Resolution in Congress, at least until other sources revealed that the State Department numbers were false.

Perhaps even worse, the swinish philosopher Martin Buber, whose own butt was safely in Jerusalem (he escaped from Germany in 1938), published an article in 1944 which called for a binational state and said that levels of Jewish immigration must be determined in agreement with Palestinian Arabs (who of course wanted it to be zero and whose leadership collaborated with the Nazis). So although he professed admiration for the spirituality of the Jews of Eastern Europe, Buber preferred to leave their bodies in the hands of Hitler!

Indeed, all through the 1930′s, as David Ben Gurion frantically tried to create a united front to maximize Jewish immigration to Palestine from Europe — where he clearly saw that there was no future — he was fought tooth and nail by Jews like Buber, Felix Warburg and Judah Magnes, all of whom felt that a Jewish majority would be disastrous (it would lead to antisemitism, be unjust, etc.).

How many Jews could have been saved but for the obstructions placed by Jewish anti-Zionists? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? We don’t know, of course.

Today it seems to me that the degree to which the Jewish people has become infected with the delusional irrationality that Levin describes is greater even than in the past. While Israel faces a physical/military danger that is no less threatening than that which loomed over European Jewry in the 1930′s, the very leadership, the vangaurd of the movement to delegitimize Israel, to prevent it from defending itself and to deter others from coming to its aid, is Jewish.

Not only is the Jewish contingent ubiquitous in the ranks of the information war against Israel — for every Ali Abunimah there are several Jeremy Ben-Amis — but they are highly effective, both because they are remarkably inventive and enthusiastic, and because of the psychological force of the ‘as a Jew’ argument.

In addition there is the simple fact that every Jew who goes to the Dark Side is one less who might support Israel politically or materially. Such support has to start with Jews, even if there are plenty of non-Jews who are prepared to help. But without the Jews most of them have little reason to do so.

The struggle against Jewish anti-Zionists isn’t a sideshow. In my opinion the information war will be won or lost depending on its outcome. The enemy understands this. We need to as well.

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