How Fear Took Over Israel
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JVL
JVL Introduction
To understand the conflict in Israel-Palestine we have to understand why Israeli Jews think as they do.
This brilliant article in Haaretz by Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz helps us begin to understand.
Israeli Jews are afraid. They are not born afraid, but they learn fear from the moment of birth, and their fear is harnessed into a collective fear-driven hate.
A similar analysis helps to explain why British diaspora Jews are so frightened of any criticism of Israel, why so many cast Israel’s critics as hate objects.
This article was originally published by Haaretz on Fri 1 Jan 2021. Read the original here.
Holocaust, Militarism and Machiavelli's Advice: How Fear Took Over Israel
Israel may be the best-defended state in the world, but its people’s existence is based on an ethos of constant fear
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Really insightful and thoughtful. Looking forward to the next emotion.
If she was at a UK university, the CAA would be doing their utmost to get her sacked.
Great article thanks
Another excellent article JVL. It confirms my view that the left inside the state of Israel face an enormous battle. It is up to us to mobilise against the forces which sustain this settler colonial regime. We need to convince people that there is nothing antisemitic about supporting the struggle for Palestinian justice.
A small point.
I read the Eulogy quotation from Moshe Dayan some time ago. And now, thought I remembered some words which the shortened quote from the Eva Illouz article left out. Here’s a Wikipedia link to what may be the complete (or at least more complete) version. Near the beginning it translates Dayan as saying of the Palestinians in Gaza :
“For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_eulogy_of_Roi_Rotberg
Moshe Dayan was a General and in 1956 his message was not a call for peace, but the opposite. He asked that generation not to be “blinded by the light in [their] heart”… and “the yearning for peace”. But instead be “prepared and armed, strong and determined”.
Wikipedia contributors added a footnote to that page referring to another Eulogy fifty years later. In 2006, by the Israeli novelist David Grossman for his son Uri. Grossman was – and perhaps still is – a member of the shrinking Peace faction in Israel.
https://www.richardsilverstein.com/2006/08/21/david-grossman-eulogizes-son-killed-in-lebanon-war/
Now fifteen years later, in Britain we’ve seen the tide of fear and hate lapping over into our politics. Cynically exploited to bring down a social democratic Labour leader who tried “to have values, … to be a humanist, [and] to be truly sensitive to the suffering of the other…”
It’s so sad to see Israel descending into the kind of fear described in this article and instilled by the security policies implemented by the State in conjunction with the army, where the young are trained into ‘fear of the other.’ I have noticed this gradual change when visiting Israel in the way Hava, the woman from the kibbutz describes it. The first time I went to the country there was some social mixing with the Palestinians which in time has almost disappeared. The building of the wall also has helped to keep the two peoples apart. At present with a US’s president that would do anything to stay in power, the situation is really worrying as he would be prepared to do anything to create chaos and confusion in the world. To destabilise his own country by turning against a foreign power like Iran, is my worst fear, and something that would help Netanyahu to reinforce his policies of fear in the Israeli consciousness.
This article clearly reinforces the arguments put forward in a book I have been reading: An Army Like No Other by Haim Bresheeth – Zabner. It is a very powerful book documenting Israel’s militaristic history, its constant use of aggression to try and assuage an ongoing need for security which it can never fulfill. This a dynamic which has created a warlike country, which will never be able to be at peace with itself, its subjects or its neighbours.