Sunday 20 December 2020

 Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 17 

 

Israel is the only country that regularly attracts psychotic criticism

 

When I was a naive young medical student, I was sent to interview a patient on a psychiatric ward. I couldn’t find anything wrong with him. At the debriefing session, I was staggered to learn that he was a paranoid schizophrenic: he believed he was the resurrected Jesus and that they were trying to kill him. I had missed a diagnostic symptom known in the trade as a circumscribed delusion. 


My diagnosis of much of the egregious criticism that is heaped daily on Israel is not that the critics are misguided, misinformed or prejudiced, nor that they are swept up in a form of groupthink that merges at times into mass hysteria – though all of that is true up to a point. I believe that some, at least, suffer from a circumscribed delusion, and that their skewed perception of that tiny Middle Eastern democracy is so detached from the real world that it amounts to a mass psychosis.


A psychosis is a mental disturbance characterised by cognitive and/or emotional loss of contact with reality. This is an apt descriptor of the delusional suite of malevolent accusations launched against Israel on a daily basis. 


Cary Nelson [1] has documented several high-profile sufferers of this psychopathology among US academics. Judith Butler, a philosophy professor at the University of California, is a woman with a politicidal vision for Israel. Her ardent desire is for Jews to relinquish their hard-won state and return to a position of an ineradicable alterity – pretentious language for the restoration of the homeless “wandering Jew” (a phrase of medieval origin implying punishment for the supposed crime of killing Christ) or the “rootless cosmopolitan” of Soviet propagandists’ imagination.  


Butler’s unconscionable opinions are moderate compared to those of Jasbir Puar [2], professor of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University, New Jersey, who takes anti-Israel rhetoric to a higher level. As well as accusing Israel of apartheid and pinkwashing (the trumpeting of gay rights as a means of distracting attention from the state's criminality), she writes: “Through debilitating practices of maiming and stunting, Palestinians are further literalised and lateralised as surface, as bodies without souls, as sheer biology, thus rendered nonhuman.” Faced with the IDF’s efforts to minimise civilian fatalities, she opines that, for Israelis, “the Palestinians are not even human enough for death.” 


Then there is the late Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago [3] who updated and amplified the old blood libel: “What is happening in Palestine is a crime we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz,” a view enthusiastically supported by Israeli writer Yitzchak Laor [4]: “Gas chambers are not the only way to destroy a nation, it is enough to develop high rates of infant mortality.”


To describe such fulminations as irrational would be an understatement. And yet these voices have found welcoming platforms throughout the world to disseminate their crackpot theories and many occupy senior positions at prestigious universities. The UK hosts several: Ilan Pappé, of the University of Exeter, is one of those “historians” who lacks interest in historical veracity (“who knows what the facts are?”); another is his Oxford University colleague, Professor Avi Shlaim (“the job of the historian is to judge”). Many of these so-called experts, who cavalierly ignore evidence to promote their narrative of a brutal, bigoted and illegitimate Israel, receive lavish praise from peers and have become global celebrities.


Human rights organisations such as Amnesty and Oxfam have never been slow to criticise Israel but they turned poisonous in 2001 after the NGO Durban “antiracism” conference that was effectively an anti-Israel hatefest that spawned the BDS (boycotts, divestments, sanctions) movement. Many BDS supporters proclaim their devotion to universal human rights yet appear to have no problem with founder Omar Barghouti’s call to “euthanise” Israel. Demanding the destruction of a state and condemning most of its inhabitants to homelessness is both ethically despicable and patently unworkable. It is also a recipe for large-scale bloodletting as most Israelis, having nowhere else to go, would resist. 


Much of the modern discourse about Israel is infected with bizarre delusions and conspiracy theories about the way Zionists dictate US foreign policy, control the media, manipulate global finance, and plot to dominate the world. The IDF, it is alleged, is not a conventional army but an instrument of mass murder and terrorism; Israeli troops shoot Palestinian children for fun or target practice or to harvest internal organs, or because Jews are conditioned – according to award-winning British playwright Caryl Churchill [5] – to regard all non-Jews as unworthy of empathy. In this narrative, Zionism, by its nature irredeemably evil, has always sought the ethnic cleansing and ultimately genocide of the Palestinians. 

 

This is not normal criticism of the kind that is directed at other countries. It’s deranged.

 

Social media, in the words of Israeli writer Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll [6], have added a new dimension to the disease: “What we see online is a mass of misinformation…. The result is that masses of people around the world think that Israel feeds on the blood of Palestinian babies just as the Nazis – and Christians before them – believed that we fed on the blood of their babies.” 

 

“When people of sound mind display clear signs of deviation from reality it demands of us to examine the symptom and expose the defect,” wrote Barry Shaw [7] in 2016.

 

The defect is a form of collective insanity. If you think this judgement is harsh, consider the alternative – that the proponents of grotesque fabrications are liars. I suggest that, while some probably are, others may actually believe their own fantasies. In either case, the end result is the demonisation of Israel that, in turn, attracts an unsavoury following of antisemites who are all too willing to join the fray. 

 

Does antisemitism itself lie at the root of the vilification of Israel? The evidence is compelling. Antisemitism is a kind of psychosis that has never disappeared. Post-1945, the expression of Jew-hatred, while no longer acceptable in polite society, had to find an outlet; so it may have mutated not just into antiZionism but into psychotic belief systems about the Jewish state.

 

In one sense, the cause of the disease is less important than its outcome – the normalisation of falsehoods. Ben-Dror Yemini [8] puts the matter starkly: “When these statements are circulated in an atmosphere that is antagonistic to Israel, created as a result of similar lies made by other lecturers and journalists, the lies become truth.” Wider public opinion, shaped by ill-informed or malicious journalistic filtering of extreme ideas into the mass media, inevitably follows suit. That is every bit as dangerous to Jews as previous incarnations of classic antisemitism.

 

The widespread dissemination of a warped view on Israel relentlessly drags moderate opinion towards extremism that increasingly appears acceptable. What should be an unimportant lunatic fringe has wormed its way into mainstream institutions including churches, trade unions, charities and political parties.

 

In 2003, at the height of Arafat’s terrorist campaign against Israelis, a European survey found that 60% of respondents regarded Israel as the greatest threat to world peace [9]. In 2005, Clare Short [10], a UK cabinet minister, asserted that “the oppression of the Palestinian people is the major cause of bitter division and violence in the world.” There we have it – the classic Nazi trope of the Jewish threat to all of humanity has morphed into the scapegoating of Israel as the root of all evil. 

 

An especially damaging consequence of this delusional mindset is a dysfunctional international response to the Middle East. The UN condemns Israel more than any other country thereby contributing nothing to conflict resolution [11]. The UN Human Rights Council appointed the infamous Richard Falk as its special advisor; there he exploited his position to accuse Israel of genocidal intent towards the Palestinians. The same brand of obsessive, baseless attacks on Israel occurs in other branches of the UN such as UNESCO, that erases any Jewish historical connection to Judaism’s holiest sites, the Economic and Social Council, that accuses Israel of being the world’s foremost violator of women’s rights, and the World Health Assembly, that claims Israel systematically denies Palestinians basic healthcare.

 

This process is clearly pathological. Yet most consumers of world news have no idea that the phenomenon even exists. All who genuinely care for human rights have a duty to banish this ignorance and hold the facilitators of the malaise to account. 

 

I often wonder what became of the schizophrenic patient I met in the psychiatric unit all these years ago. Treating psychotic patients is challenging. Dealing with psychotic populations is even harder. That’s not an excuse for inaction as they are capable of inflicting serious harm on themselves and others. We can’t confine them to locked psychiatric wards but we can and must isolate them intellectually and politically to preserve historical accuracy, to counter their antisemitic incitement and, above all, to enhance the prospects of peace. 

 

1.        Nelson, C. Israel Denial. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2019

2.       Puar, J. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, Duke University Press, 2017

3.       Saramago, J. The militant magician. Guardian, 28 December 2002 

4.       Laor, Y. After Jenin. London Review of Books, May 2002

5.        https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/seven-jewish-children/

6.       Keats Jaskoll, S. The Whack-A-Mole model of Israel advocacy. Jewish Chronicle, 3 December 2020 

7.       https://israelseen.com/2016/02/07/barry-shaw-how-the-western-media-and-world-leaders-have-israeli-blood-on-their-hands

8.       Yemini, BD. Industry of Lies. New York, ISGA, 2017

9.       https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/nov/03/eu.israel

10.    https://weepingskies.blogspot.com/search?q=clare+short

11.     https://www.newsweek.com/un-palestinian-package-resolutions-only-fans-flames-conflict-opinion-1550821

 

 

 

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