In the wake of Israel's attack on Gaza, eager voices are telling us that
In most Jewish circles, if you pause to question this narrative and suggest that it might be exaggerated, that it unrealistically implies a level of dreadfulness and victimhood unique to Jews, you'll attract hostility and disbelief in equal measure, and precious little public sympathy. But in the work of Professor Salo Baron, probably the greatest Jewish historian of the 20th century, we find powerful justification for just such a questioning.
...Have we Jews succumbed psychologically to a sense of eternal Jewish victimhood, a wholly negative Jewish exceptionalism, or is paranoia justified?
Some pioneering research, published as Israel's bombing of Gaza began, throws some light on this. It reveals just how much the feeling that no matter what we do, we are perpetually at the mercy of others applies to Jewish Israelis. A team led by Professor Daniel Bar Tal of Tel Aviv University, one of the world's leading political psychologists, questioned Israeli Jews about their memory of the conflict with the Arabs, from its inception to the present, and found that their "consciousness is characterised by a sense of victimisation, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanisation of the Palestinians and insensitivity to their suffering". The researchers found a close connection between that collective memory and the memory of "past persecutions of Jews" and the Holocaust, the feeling that "the whole world is against us". If such a study were to be conducted among Jews in Britain, I suspect the results would be very similar.
For Jews to see themselves in this way is understandable, but it's a distortion and deeply damaging. As Professor Bar Tal says, this view relies primarily on prolonged indoctrination that is based on ignorance and even nurtures it. The Jewish public does not want to be confused with the facts. If we are defined by past persecutions, by our victimhood, will we ever think clearly about the problem of Israel-Palestine and the problem of anti-Semitism?
But the popular Israeli phrase
Early in January this year, Israel's former Mossad chief and former national security adviser, Efraim Halevy, said: "If Israel's goal were to remove the threat of rockets from the residents of southern Israel, opening the border crossings would have ensured such quiet for a generation." Daniel Levy, former adviser in the office of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, shows clearly where the wrong choices were made: withdrawing from Gaza without co-ordinating the "what next" with the Palestinians; hermetically sealing off Hamas and besieging Gaza after the 2006 elections instead of testing Hamas's capacity to govern responsibly; instead of building on the ceasefire, Israel was the first to break it on 4 November. In short, there were other alternatives.
The current flurry of diplomatic activity only confirms this. ...
It's not a political judgement to feel compassion for Israelis terrorised by Hamas rockets, and it's just the same for Palestinians living in a virtual prison in Gaza. But the objective predicaments of the two populations are not the same. To convince yourself that a turkey shoot is an act of great heroism, you need the "self-righteousness" and "blind patriotism" Professor Bar Tal found in his study. You see yourself as David against the Islamist Goliath. The world sees a powerful elephant and an aggressive, rogue mouse that draws blood. The elephant hands the mouse the power of veto over the entire Middle East peace process by demanding that the mouse recognise the elephant's existence before any meaningful negotiations with Palestinians can take place. All this does is send a message of weakness: "We genuinely believe that our existence is threatened by this mouse."
Professor Baron argued that you cannot understand the history of the Jews outside of the histories of the societies in which Jews lived. Yet this narrative of victimhood is sustainable only on the basis of a negative Jewish exceptionalism which severs the Jewish experience from the historical mainstream.
The hope and optimism which accompanied the collapse of communism and the Jewish revival in Europe in 1989 have certainly been eclipsed by a defensive, fearful, ethnocentric mindset, which makes a just resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict ever harder to achieve and casts a pall over Jewish life everywhere. So why are we reading our own times through the prism of a lachrymose view of Jewish history?
ClipMarks
No comments:
Post a Comment