March 17, 2005
A true believer is a master of self-delusion. Without it, the highly selective moral universe that sustains him cannot survive. Real-world counterarguments and honest criticism must be denigrated and rationalized away because they explode the perversity of the dogmatic verities that give the true believer his sense of moral superiority and peace of mind.
For Israel’s media Jews, defending the zionist faith while remaining deaf, dumb and blind to Israel’s holocaust against Palestinians leads them to commit contortions of logic and cognitive dissonance. Shira Herzog’s March 2 Globe and Mail column “Israel’s settlers are beyond democracy’s frontiers” illustrates just how far a true believer will go to prop up a belief system when it’s under attack.
Herzog takes aim at the “settlers” who are assailing the Sharon government’s plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and Northern West Bank. In her view, Sharon is the champion of peace, and the “settlers” are messianic lunatics. Well, she’s half right. The population of the zionist colonies in Occupied Palestine has undergone a demographic shift as political zionists have returned to North America or moved to the relative security of Israel, and religiously sociopathic Slavs took their place.
The significance of Herzog’s column is in its timing: only after these zealots vilified the Israeli government did she see the need to condemn them:
“When the editor of Nativ, a policy review published in the large West Bank settlement of Ariel…describes the government’s plan as ‘ethnic cleansing,’ Mr. Sharon as head of the Judenrat (the Jewish police force in Nazi occupied lands, viewed by many as collaborators), and Israel’s defence minister as collaborating in ‘the final solution’…one can only gasp in shock. There has to be zero tolerance for such analogies. Any Jew who publicly compares the elected government of Israel to Hitler’s Nazis simply forfeits the right to empathy or dialogue.”
The overheated rhetoric of the colonists is, of course, ludicrous, but it is no more ludicrous than the whines of “anti-Semitism” and “holocaust denial” one regularly hears from Israel’s sock puppets at B’nai Brith Canada or the Canadian Jewish Congress. What bothered Herzog, I suspect, is that the zealots upset the foundation of her moral universe: they equated Israel with Nazi Germany.
Fact is, the parallel applies not only to the government but also to the zealots —especially the zealots. Where was she last fall, I wonder, when reports came out of zealots attacking Palestinian schoolchildren? “We are not talking verbal abuse, taunts and pushes—we are talking punctured lungs, broken arms, fractured ribs and whipping with chains, but Israeli police are not investigating,” said Kim Lamberty of Christian Peacemaker Team.
How different is this picture from 1930s Germany when SA stormtroopers beat up or killed Jews with impunity?
Just this past February, Talmudic zealots in the illegal colony of Yitzhar poisoned the sole water supply for the village of Madama for the seventh poisoning in three years. Of course, poisoning water is an established zionist tactic. In May 1948, Jewish forces contaminated the water supply of Acre with typhoid. They tried to poison the water in the Gaza Strip but were caught.
Journalist Sara Leibovitz-Dar investigated and published her findings on the poisonings in Hadasahot on Aug. 13, 1993, under the title “Microbes in State Service.” Her last line was: “What was done then with deep conviction and zealotry is now concealed with shame.”
Herzog goes on about the “law of the state,” “the rule of law” and the idea of Israel as a democracy with a Jewish majority as if these things really existed. It doesn’t dawn on her that “Israel” exists only because European (mostly Slavic) Jews murdered and dispossessed hundreds of thousands of Semitic Arabs. Governmentally, Israel has nothing to distinguish it as a democracy—no equal citizenship, no bill of rights, no constitution. If elections were all that were needed for a democracy, Soviet Russia would qualify.
The whole world knows that the zealots are the cause of much of the violence, and now that they have set their hatred against the Sharon government, they are fair game. Give Herzog credit for acknowledging that Israel must give back the lands it seized in 1967, but she would be more convincing if she also acknowledged that this return is 38 years overdue.
For the true believer, though, it is easier to consign shame to the past and to pretend that everything is new again.
A second media Jew facing a personal crisis of sorts is Vancouver Sun columnist Paula Brook. In her profile of British-born Israeli comic Robbie Gingras, she waxes nostalgic about her days in Hebrew school:
“I used to…gaze dreamily at the posters of happy kibbutzniks picking Jaffa oranges—all those tanned, beautiful Israelis working together in the sun-drenched orchards to make the desert bloom.”
This highly romanticized, fictitious scenario says a lot about Brook’s grasp of reality. First of all, Jaffa was an Arab city with sun-drenched Arab orchards. The canard about the Jews “making the desert bloom” has been royally debunked as zionist propaganda. Virtually every area of arable land in Palestine was under cultivation before the zionists invaded and started this whole violence thing.
Two paragraphs later Brook makes this admission: “That I, who remain a committed Jew and supporter of Israel, feel uncomfortable even using the “Z” word today says a lot about what has happened to the dream since then.”
Did “Israel” ever exist anywhere except in the dreams of true believers? Only the delusional can look at the history of Palestine over the past century and not feel unbridled anguish at the suffering inflicted by zealous Jews. Brook’s dream is every Palestinian’s living nightmare—a nightmare that is finally affecting North American Jewry.
Sooner rather than later, Israel will disintegrate because the will to kill is not as strong among the new generations of Jews. Even soldiers and airmen are refusing to murder Palestinian civilians. When the illusion finally explodes, and the full story of Israel’s atrocities is published, what will these true believers think then?
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