Airing more of Israel’s dirty laundry
or, what more does Israel have to do for people to see what Israel is?
(If you have received this by email, please click on the title to read the latest version. I often correct typos and continue to edit my essays, after publishing the first version).
The popular Israeli media are filled with typical Jewish Israeli triumphalism. Yediot Aharonot reported today (19th December 2024) on operation ‘the white city’, a new air strike on Yemen early this morning (GMT). According to the paper, the fourteen Israeli fighter-jets attacked Yemen in two waves, assisted by aircraft tankers for refuelling. Yemen is too far from Israel for a fighter-jet to make it there and back without refuelling. Both fighter-jets and tankers were made, and supplied to Israel by the US.
The first wave, at 03:15, bombed the Yemenite coast, and the second, at 04:30, the area of Sana'a, where it allegedly caused a blackout that according to the article frightened the city’s residents. The report says the Israeli airforce used sixty bombs, and attacked ports, fuel and oil tanks, and a power station. Among other things, the report indicates that Israel deliberately intended to harm civilians in order to trigger anger against the Yemenites authorities. I have not checked if this story appeared also on the BBC or the Guardian. (Do people here even know that Israel has been attacking Yemen over the past few months?)
According to another front-page story about the closure of the Israeli embassy in Dublin, Israel’s Foreign Minister said that “Israel has exposed the Irish to the world community for what they are, obsessive antisemites and anti Israelis”…
Everything Israel is doing (and always has done) is presented as justified, rational, and heroic, and always in ‘self-defence’. Israel’s media routinely portray Israel as entirely innocent and as having no other choice (אין ברירה/ ein breira), than to use its military. In the minds of its citizens, Israel can do no wrong.
The country is always, allegedly, the target of unfair, and incomprehensible military or diplomatic attacks motivated only by antisemitism, and inexplicable hatred against Israel and its Jewish citizens. Last month’s events in Amsterdam triggered by the vile and thuggish behaviour of Maccabi Tel-Aviv fans, who among other things openly incited genocide, were universally labelled a ‘pogrom’. The only debate is about whether or not the so-called ‘pogrom’ was pre-meditated. The Maccabi Tel Aviv fans are heroes in Israel.
What I have described here is only available to Hebrew speakers. The Israeli media are careful and selective about what they make available to non-Hebrew speakers. Few people outside of Israel are aware that every media report, which is not simple gossip, must clear the Israeli military censor before it can be published. The military controls not only the content of what is published, but also the tone of reports.
Alongside the usual themes of heroism, innocence, and self-sacrifice the media routinely heighten the sense of alarm and threat to Israel, and to Jews in general. The use of the highly inappropriate word ‘pogrom’ in relation to the Amsterdam incident is intended to provoke imagery of historical Jewish victimhood. Everything in Israel is saturated with relentless indoctrination and propaganda that impacts on what people feel and think, and on what they do.
When it comes to Israel’s relationship with the rest of the world, there is only one side to every story. Israel is always right, and anyone who disagrees with it, even mildly is wrong. Critics of Israel are either terrorists’, or ‘antisemites’, which is how Israeli society, its leaders and its media see and portray organisations like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. I have no doubt that Jewish Israeli schools have been hyping up the indoctrination to new levels. It is not yet illegal for (Jewish) Israeli citizens to question their government’s political and military policies, but informally no one would dare, especially not in a time of ‘war’.
In Israel there is no division between the citizenry and its government. Neither is there any division between the citizenry and its military. The military is the people, and the people are the military. With the exception of a small layer of career officers who usually retire early, there are no professional soldiers or officers in the Israeli military.
The butchery in Gaza, the colonised/occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Syria, is committed by ordinary citizens who are all members of Israel’s reserve military force. The eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-old recruits are not the real military. They represent a military force in training. When you read about Israel’s ‘reserve’ military force, be aware that this does not refer to a group of hobbyists who play soldiers for fun one weekend a month. What Israel calls the ‘reserve’ is the real, and very deadly, deal. Israel does not use mercenaries. Its military force is made up of regular people who do regular jobs. Almost everyone knows someone who is an active soldier right now, and who is committing war crimes. They are all seen as heroes.
The ever-present sense of victimhood is especially heightened right now in Israel, and is heavily bolstered everywhere in society, and in the mass media. After all, this psychologically problematic, dangerous, and profound sense of threat and perpetual victimhood is the only glue that holds Jewish Israeli society together. It enables ordinary people to commit horrendous war crimes and genocide, while at the same time believing themselves to be innocent victims acting in self-defence.
Israel and Jewish Identity
In case you wonder why I use qualifying phrases such as, ‘Jewish Israelis’, or ‘Israeli Jews’ when I write about Israel, I have two reasons for doing so. One is to highlight the fact that not all Israelis are Jews. About 20% of Israeli citizens are Muslim and Christian Palestinians. They are second-class citizens, and they are in great danger in a state that defines itself officially by a foundational law (the equivalent to a constitutional law) as a state only for Jews. To say ‘Israelis’ without qualifying it risks implicating the Palestinian citizens of Israel in Israel’s settler-colonialism, and the genocide of their own people. They obviously do not agree with what Jewish Israeli society does, and do not participate in it. It is also important that the identity of Palestinian citizens of Israel is not just subsumed under the title ‘Israelis’.
The second reason I use these qualifiers is to emphasise that Israel has its own definition of Jewishness, which is not shared by everyone who identifies as Jewish. Jewish Israelis are not ‘the Jews’. They are Jews in the unique (and disturbing) sense that Israel defines Jewishness. A Jew, to me, is someone who follows some version of Jewish religion. I observe nothing Jewish. I abandoned all Jewish traditions, festivals, everything, even before I left Israel. But no matter what I call myself, in the eyes of Israeli society and its institutions, I will always be ‘Jewish’. That is because Zionism and Israel have always defined Jewishness as a race. I have discussed all of this in detail in a previous article. I even shared my birth certificate to show people how different Israel is from other Western countries, despite Israel’s claims to be a ‘normal’ Western democracy governed by ‘progressive Western values’.
Israel, and the Zionist movement that gave birth to it, redefined Jewishness, or Jewish identity, or rather hijacked the idea of Jewishness. As anti-Zionist Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, brilliantly explains in an interview on TRT World, Zionism sought to distance itself from the image of the ‘pathetic’, ‘weak’, ‘passive’, and physically ‘ugly’ Jew, created by (real) antisemites. The Zionists wanted to create a ‘new Jew’. I was a product of this programme, and I had to work hard to tease out and liberate my own identity and values from the mess that Israel had made of me.
What Israel’s soldiers are doing is the product of Zionism’s toxic response to historical suffering. This is not a justification for what they do. It is an indictment. Israel does not deserve sympathy for historical Jewish suffering, because Israel is not ‘the Jews’. Its image of Jewish identity is fictitious, and based entirely on the pathology of those who perpetrated crimes against Jews.
Those who genuinely hated Jews developed stereotypes to describe them, as all racists, misogynists, and ‘other-phobes’ of all kinds do in order to foment and justify their hatred of a particular group of people. The hatred of others as a group is an expression of the haters’ psychology. It says nothing about the target group. Why people hate groups of people is a big topic. But whatever the specific context may be, racism, misogyny, or any form of other-phobia is a mental health problem.
It is common for many abused people to internalise the hatred against them, to believe what the perpetrator thought or felt about them. When people recover from trauma, they realise that while the abuse they suffered felt personal, it was never directed at them because of who they are. Bullies and haters do not care about the people they hate and abuse. The narrative they develop and use is intended to justify their actions, to themselves and to others. The human mind, no matter how twisted, requires consistency. They might say that they hate a group of people because of something to do with them, they might accuse their victims of something, but it is always a lie. In reality what haters, bullies, and abusers do, they do only for their own gratification.
Racism is an expression of extremely primitive, mindless, and unethical psychology. Jewish Israeli society’s feelings about the Palestinians they are attempting to eliminate fall under this category. Despite its own arrogant perception of specialness, Israel has not invented anything new. For the past seventy-six years Israel has acted out its own version of the most primitive and deadly instincts humans are capable of.
Some readers might want to pick me up for appearing to generalise about Jewish Israeli society. So let me be clear. I am not criticising Jewish Israelis because of any real or imaginary characteristics they have. I criticise Jewish Israeli society for what it does, what it enables, and what it supports. I am not criticising the people, or what they believe. I criticise their choices and their actions.
A group of people may choose to live in a cultural, or ideological ghetto, to be insular, or hold strange beliefs. But they can still be harmless. The Flat Earth society may be strange (it is to me), but its members do not harm anyone. They just have an odd belief system that they continue to treasure despite all the evidence against it. People’s beliefs, and subjective inner experience and states are harmless, until they spur them into action that harms others. Israel’s very existence is based on crossing the line between beliefs and actions. Israeli Jews do not just hold strange and destructive beliefs about themselves and their relationship with the world. Their beliefs are making them commit genocide.
I do not blame people for expecting human beings to make sense, to be rational, and decent. I do not blame people for hoping against hope that Israeli society will come to its senses. But I am sad to tell you that what you are seeing is only the beginning. Israel will not stop its murderous settler-colonial expansion until someone from outside stops it. I wonder how far Israel has to go before people finally accept what they are seeing for what it is, and start defending Israel’s victims.
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The seeds of this Genocide were planted in the 1870s with the emergence of Zionism. The Zionists erased the Palestinians even before they started colonizing Palestine (“land without a people, for a people without the land”). They achieved a large part of their goal of ethnic cleansing and killing during the Nakba in 1948 and I n 1967. They are now finishing the job. All along, they have demonized the Palestinians for not accepting their fate as refugees and quasi-slaves.
The society is built on lies. Its schools and army indoctrinate its citizens into these lies and promote fear and hate of the “Palestinian other”. The society is deliberately kept in fear and historical trauma by its real history and by its false narratives. Is it a surprise that the Israelis have been moving steadily toward the right and more zealotry, racism, fascism? An unhealthy society such as this can only survive psychologically by taking more and more extreme positions. They may eventually even turn on each other. It is hard to see how it doesn’t eventually implode and self immolate. So sad to see the Palestinians pay the ultimate price of Israeli depravity.
Actually they do, but they see this through the lens of antisemitism. In other words, it confirms to them that people hate them and feel disgust of them because they are Jewish. They do not use external mirroring as a way to propel introspection and growth. They simply hijack it under their preexisting paradigm.
I was going to add a small paragraph to my essay about how the Israeli media do sometimes share articles from other publications, that comment on what Israel is doing in a negative way. But when they do this, they never provide a link to the actual article. What they do instead, is tell that the article said this or that about something Israel did or is doing, but then use it as a ‘strawman’ to knock down, and to support their way of thinking.
Nothing really challenges cult psychology, no evidence, no reasoning, nothing. That is because cult psychology is primarily emotive and fear-driven. It tends to be rigid and not open to learning or challenge. Israeli society and its institutios, including their media use every trick in the book to tell themselves that they are right and everyone else is wrong.
I did not add this bit to the essay, because I could not find a good way to write it without messing up the essay and distracting people. To be honest, this very tactic deserves an essay in its own right. In the past when I tried to follow the trail of breadcrumbs and find the original article the Israeli paper was reporting about, I found nothing! Really interesting. I even wrote to one or two papers in the US to tell them that Israeli media were misrepresenting them. It didn’t lead to anything.