The pain being shared here is truly deep and sad. I can see the truth in what is being said. Strangely enough I feel better about my own conclusions when the many in my country seem so callous. Many in Israel and other places are using two “get out of gaol cards”: the Promised Land, and the horrors of the Holocaust. Never Again should include all Humanity. The majority of voters in my country rejected what I saw as a very simple proposal in our recent Referendum. The whole world needs Makaratta now as much as it ever did.
I am guessing you are in Australia? I wondered also because you mentioned it would be 4am your time when the book club starts. I am Australian too. I lived in Australia for 18 years and am an Australian citizen. I was heartbroken about the referendum results. It was so deeply shameful, but also proved that Australian society still is racist against Aboriginal Australians. Australia is a settler-colonial state. If it started to do the right thing on Israel, it would have to own up to its own past and in reality Australia never has. I left Australia and moved to Scotland permanently, and I am glad I did. I live in the Highlands, not too far from Culloden Battlefield. There is still a memory of the Highland Clearances here. It felt liberating to move here after living two lifetimes in a settler-colonial countries. Australia was very good to me, and I still have a lot of friends there. My clinical supervisor is in Australia, and she is a great activist in her own right. But I am white, more or less and most people liked me accepted me straight away when they heard I was from Israel. Australian society was very pro-Israel when I moved there in 1991. It was a big surprise to me, and made my move easier initially, but then ten years later I renounced my Israeli citizenship, started to become active for Palestinian human rights, and met many more of the ‘right’ people. My life in Australia was important on my journey in so many ways. I thought the inclusion of the Aboriginal people in the Australian constitution would have been a no brainer and was shocked when the results came in. Thank you for your comment.
Your piece, corroborates everything that we have seen with our own eyes over the past 12 months. It's also resonates with the street interviews of Abby Martin a few years back in Tel Aviv and I recall those, especially when reading your bit about "Israelis see the Palestinians as nothing more than a dangerous irritation, a nuisance. Like a home with an infestation of a dangerous life-form that bother the inhabitants. Only after they eradicate the entire infestation, could the inhabitants relax....". The two others who write with a great deal of brutal introspection, like you do, are Ori Goldberg (X) and Alon Mizrahi (here and on X) who again similar to your observations comment a lot on the echo chambers that is Israeli media "The Israeli media constantly hype up and stir the public’s fear, and sense of doom." - reinforcing a tight vicious loop their societal epistemic bubble.
"Israel teaches its people that Jews are the only victims, and the greatest victims in human history, and that Jewish victimhood is not in the past. It is right now." Shlomo Sand said something similar about Jews (in Israel) being first-among and also exclusive victims.
Your piece is articulated well. The paragraphs that begin with "I cannot stomach the way the rest of the world continues to indulge a perpetrator society like Israel. " and "To ask Israeli Jews to recognise their terrible sin, their crime of settler-colonialism is asking the impossible." seem so obvious now - - after 11 months - but really needed to be added like you did.
I wish I could say I was glad to hear, but there is nothing about this topic that makes me feel glad. The main reason I write is to encourage people to trust their instincts and what their eyes show them, so they can feel more confident and resolute in their activism. Israel and its friends have been working very hard and are doing quite well on the psychological warfare front. This includes confusing and disabling potential supporters of the Palestinians, and critics of Israel. If my essay helped validate your experience, then it did what it was meant to do. Just wanted to add that we live in a sad world indeed, and are a very weird species, if it requires courage to stand up for the oppressed, and to ask people to please not kill other people. I needed courage when I was afraid, at the start of my journey. But I do not require courage now, because I am not afraid. That fear was what Israel taught me to feel, because I was supposed to be loyal to the cult, and I decided to walk my own way. So initially I did feel afraid. It didn’t help that I also got a few death threats and some harassment for a while. I am not afraid anymore. Either way, I am not the one who should feel afraid, or guilty. I am not doing anything wrong. The perpetrators are! It is really important for people to remember this.
Thank you for reading and for your valuable comment. 🙏🏼
I salute your bravery. You are not alone in your views. See Avi Shlaim, Gideon Levy, Shlomo Sands, Norman Finkelstein, Anthony Lowenstein. Such a tragedy.
To be honest, it is not difficult. It is disgusting, but it does feel like a relief. We all need to acknowledge and hear the truth in a world rife with so much deception. I am grateful for your empathy.
Devastating analysis. Thank you for this; it must have been difficult for you. This is what many in the west need to hear and understand. It might break through some of their barriers. 🙏
"The more Israel escalates, the more heinous its behaviour, the more crimes against humanity it commits, the more fanatical its people become in their support of their cult state."
So well said. Thank you for such a deeply insightful and powerful condemnation of the perpetual atrocity culture Israel is and always has been.
Anyone who thinks Israel's concerns are limited to Palestine is in for a big surprise and not a pleasant one. You don't have to read far into zionist writings and commentary to understand that the movement of Jewish settler colonialism was developed to address what was consider a global Jewish challenge. There's little reason to believe that the genocide that works in Palestine will not work equally well in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Europe and even America. As an American, I view America's alliance with Israeli genocidal policy and realize the enemy is already here.
I agree with your feelings about the relationship between the US and Israel. Israel will take anyone and everyone with it on the way down. Israel has no loyalty or respect for anyone. All Israel does is exploit. From Israeli society’s point of view, they have no friends, and they don’t trust anyone. To outsiders it appears insane, because it is. Israel feels no gratitude or appreciation for the obscene amount of help it gets. It takes it all for granted. Israel does not care how many Americans, or American soldiers die, or who else dies or is harmed in its insane Ahab-like, fanatical pursuit of an ‘ethnically pure’ Jewish state. Their sense of entitlement is so profound, nothing can penetrate it. The sooner Isreal’s allies recognise it, the better it will be for everyone. But as I say, those so-called allies cannot say they were not told. Thank you so much for reading and for commenting!
You have given us so much in your deeply personnel account on the Israel - legacy of a perpetrator society and its impacts directly on you.
So many insights, profound on so many levels. So damning, so alarming, so terrifying thinking of where the insane cult of Israel will end up.
Another Holocaust seems to be the only path they are enthralled with and trapped into recreating.
Literally everyone screaming into Sub Stack at the moment about the complete madness, the insanity of it all in Gaza, the West Bank and now all of Lebanon need to read your screed.
Again thanks. Time to go read it again and share it around. Chow.
Thank you so so much!! Yes, many are rightly screaming, or crying about it, but our leaders’ deaf ears and primitive psychology are not listening. I find myself educating people who listen to the likes of the BBC still imagining that it is a good quality news provider. It happens most in casual conversations, and I can only hope that people start looking beyond the mainstream as well. I am glad that my writings can be helpful and thank you for sharing my essays. Avigail 🙏🏼
A big thank you for this unveiling of a sad reality, experienced from the inside of a deeply sick society, and that the world persists in not recognizing as such.
Is such a society not doomed to extinction? Its living forces and citizens who remain aware, tired of living in a dystopian universe and promised endless wars, will eventually leave this "promised land", usurped and martyred.... The world will be better off then...
I strongly believe that Israeli society is doomed indeed. Like many cults, they believe ‘the end is nigh’, but not for the right reasons. Israel is imploding under the weight of its guilt, its inner contradictions, its sick psychology and the profound lack of social cohesion. Israeli society may be a cult with one hive mind but human beings cannot be held together successfully when the only thing that binds them is fear, threat and a perceived enemy. In economic terms Israel has no existence without US money.
But money is not everything. Israel’s various industries are now in a terrible state, because their armies are made out of their people, regular citizens, teacher, fire fighters, doctors, shop assistants, hair dressers, engineers, you get the point. As more people spend longer and longer in the military, there are less people to do the jobs that need to be done to enable a society to function. Since last October, we know for a fact that 500,000 Israeli Jews with dual citizenship have left Israel on a one-way ticket. This is the last number we know, but my suspicion is that in reality there are many more. I have been checking the Israeli bureau of statistics website — only available in Hebrew — and they do not include the stats on those who leave. It is bad for morale I am guessing, and for the cult psychology.
I know Israel is on a path of self-destruct. What I worry about is how many it will take with it on the way down. We cannot sit and wait for Israel to destroy itself. We have to stop its settler colonial state and dismantle the exclusively Jewish state that they have been working to create. The only possible positive solution now is one-state for all the people in the region.
It would be poetic justice and a good spit on Hertzl’s grave, if there is a huge exodus of Jews from Israel. Many there have managed to acquire another citizenship as an ‘insurance policy’ for when the ‘end times’ come for them. I hope that many more would do the right thing and leave, and I do not care what reasons they give to themselves.
My grandparents, parents, or I never had a right to be there in the first place, and I am so pleased that I was intuitive enough as a young woman to leave when I did. If my family was nice, and I was not abused at home, I might not have been so driven to get as far away from Israel as I could and emigrate to Australia. In that sense I always feel that somehow everything in my life has worked to help me on my journey.
Thank you, Avigail, for your brave,uncompromising essay. The article I post here is about my brother's death. They invited us to a Seder. Afterwards, just talking, I remembered the next day was Easter and randomly mentioned it. Eric Schiff said, "We don't celebrate pagan holidays." By October of that year, 1972, they had hurt him in the cruelest way possible. He died a month later. https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/a-most-dangerous-method/
Thank you I have read it. It was an interesting article about a psychopathic therapist. Jacquie Schiff was clearly a psychopath, and there were so many who enabled her. The story of Jacobs is interesting. He sounds in essence like a good person, but his obsession with the holocaust is worrying. It was good that he stood up to the psychopath. I am so sorry but I missed the part about your brother. Is it in this article, or did you send me a different one to the one you intended to send? Thank you for reading and engaging with my writings.
My brother was John Hartwell (as discussed in the article) whom Aaron tied up and put in a bath of water hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns over 70% if his body. He died after a month in the St. Francis Memorial Hospital Burn Unit. I know the article isn't completely about John and I only read it once. I suffer from extreme grief to this day. He was 17 and I was 19. I am now 71.
This is a most horrific experience to live with. Schiff was a psychopath without question. This was such a horrific crime committed with such impunity. I am so sorry!
I imagine you wonder why I shared this story. I hadn't attributed what happened to their being Jewish, but after seeing the terrible atrocities committed by Israel against the Palestinians, and in light of the comment made by Eric, I started to wonder if there was some connection regarding their beliefs and their treatment of non-Jews.
It is hard to know if there were such motives behind this. Who knows? The woman was a psychopath and she would have hurt people regardless of who they are. Psychopaths always look for more ways to torture and control people. The more they are enabled, the more brazen they become, because they feel they have free reign to do whatever they want. There may have been an agenda there, and I wouldn’t put it past a psychopath in a psychopathic system. What the article describe is nothing more than sadistic abuse. There was never any therapy there, or anything that benefited anyone. Just pure psychopathic abuse. I am so sorry your brother was a victim of such horrific crime. Thank you for sharing this with me. What I do not understand is why none of this was every prosecuted. With my best wishes and empathy for your grief. Avigail
Jacquie Schiff called my parents' house and I answered. She said, "We took your brother out of the bathtub and his skin was falling off. An ambulance has taken him to John Muir Hospital." She got people she knew to write letters of support. Aaron said he didn't know the water was that hot. I trusted that it would be thoroughly investigated. She was an evil Svengali. My mother, I believe, just wanted the rest of us to be able to still live the rest of our lives, so in a way we bought into their story. The doctors knew from the pattern of burns that his hands were tied behind his back. I don't know how the DA took that into account. It was an extreme miscarriage of justice. We did not attend the trial. I never knew about the other abuse until about a year ago when I did a search and found that article. Thank you for your sensitivity and understanding. ❤️🩹
It is horrible and I am so sorry that you and your family have suffered the impact of psychopathic abuse. And the loss of your brother, especially in these circumstances is unforgivable. It is good when crimes are exposed and things go to court, but it does not heal people. I have no doubt all of this would have led to complex trauma. It is time poeple start to realise how dangerous psychopaths are and stop giving them power or pandering to them. My heart is with you. A.
I found your article truly moving. Sadly, it appears that the indoctrination is not limited to Israeli society. According to Simone Zimmerman and others, it also infests American Jewish society. Her brilliant film “Israelism” documents her journey from Zionism to something more critical of Israeli society. I found her film both shocking and terrifying. After all, it is America that enables Israel to conduct its genocidal wars.
Like many other Europeans (I am Italian-Australian), I was horrified when I learned about the holocaust. I became very pro-Jewish and consequently pro-Israeli. I was shocked each time Israel committed some atrocity, but was willing to excuse it, on the basis that “it was an on-going conflict” with rights and wrongs on both sides.
Slowly I began to question this narrative. From the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, through the intifadas, and on to the periodic murderous campaigns in Gaza, I became increasingly concerned.
But this war has opened my eyes to the extraordinary nature of Israeli society. I have now read widely about Zionism, and have reached similar conclusions to yourself. The most powerful critics of Zionism for me have been the many Jewish critics, commentators, historians, social scientists, and others who have documented the history of Zionism and the establishment of the so-called Jewish state. I salute their perceptiveness and their courage. People like Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Gabor Mate, and many, many others, have been instrumental in my own “conversion”.
I now realise just how extreme Israeli society is. I have read about the “Hannibal directive”, the “Samson option” and the “Daheir doctrine”. I have seen videos of extremist settlers saying shocking things about driving out Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. I have been shocked at the things people in government like Ben Gvir and Smotrich do and say. The extremism seems to infect all levels of Israeli society from politicians, through to journalists, television presenters, the military and ordinary citizens. I’m shocked over and over again by the genocidal statements they make, often brazenly posting them on Facebook or tik tok.
I am now deeply concerned about the direction this war is taking. It is clear that Netanyahu is spoiling for a showdown with Iran. It seems clear that he has American backing. If Netanyahu attacks Iran it is more than likely they will respond. Will those extremists then refrain from resorting to the nuclear option?
It is an important journey you have been on. It demonstrates both the capacity for empathy, emotional resilience, and intellectual integrity. It is not easy to be confronted with information that challenges our pre-existing beliefs especially when those are also attached to significant emotions. Thank you for sharing all of this and I salute you for your decision to follow your own value system and intelligent assessment of the information you have been exposed to.
Netanyahu is just the latest in a long list of leaders on a spectrum of ‘badness’, that Israeli society has been deliberately choosing. It is not just the government in Israel. The entirety of society, minus a small minority, believe strongly that they will only have ‘peace’ when all the Palestinians are gone and Israel is populated only by what Israel sees as ‘Jews’. (I say this because as I explain in my essays, Israel sees Jewishness as a race). This belief has been indoctrinated into the people from the very start of the state. It is strongly pushed by the education system, the media and in many other ways through Israeli society’s informal structures.
You are right to be concerned, and I have shared the same concern for a very long time. Israel is single-minded in its desire to complete the settler-colonial project. This is why it is desperate to trigger a big war. It is much easier to commit comprehensive genocide and murder millions of people behind the smokescreen of war. It is a well known fact in the field of genocide studies (which I studied for my honours degree). Israel has only been able to commit what Ilan Pappé has called, ‘incremental genocide’. Israel seized an opportunity created by the Hamas operation last October, to try to kill more people and flatten Gaza in preparation for an Israeli takeover and re-build. Israel has always done its best to capitalise on whatever conditions and circumstances available to it, to advance its project. Israel sees a big war as the ultimate opportunity to finish it once and for all. It means exactly what it sounds like, Israel’s version of the ‘final solution’ to their Palestinian ‘problem’. So yes, concern is warranted and it should prompt all activists around the world to up the pressure on our governments.
I believe, however, the US will not attack Iran. I doubt that the beleaguered US has an appetite for a big war just to help Israel. The oil is in Iran, not in Israel… Either way, given the impact of hurricanes in the US, there is a trend to look more inward than outward. It will mean that despite what we see, US support for Israel is likely to diminish. Israel cannot eliminate millions of people in full view of the world. It is biting more than it can chew with its invasion of Lebanon, what it is doing in Gaza, and now also escalating in the West Bank. It is spread too thin. The Israeli military is made out of regular citizens who are now not at their jobs, and the economy there is in freewill. It does not matter how much US money goes in, at the end of the day you need people to be in their jobs to keep a country going. A lot of Israeli citizens with dual citizenship are leaving Israel, and the missile attacks on Israel are much more impactful than the Western media tell us. Israel is imploding and I don’t think it can happen soon enough. But it is a ticking clock nonetheless and the Palestinians are in grave danger. Thank you for reading, and for sharing your story. In solidarity, Avigail
I completely identify as some who left Israel many years ago with this depiction of Israeli society. It was my personal experience too. Exactly as you say, it is not on a scholarly level but based on living through total madness around you for years and years. Same here.
I also believe that any other nation (group of people) who were placed under same (sick) experiment that is “Israel”, the results would have been the same for them as well. The question remains then, is Israel running an experiment on itself? I believe not. Not historically, and not now. Even though at times it may look like this is just the case.
The outcomes of this experiment were evident and clear to see many, many, years ago. The people who are running this experiment must be (mainly) from outside Israel. These are the big international financial centres, the HQ of western mafia. For them anything that brings the goods (money!) is not only worth doing but obligatory. “Greed is good”, as was put in Gordon Gekko’s mouth in the film Wall Street (1987). Extreme lust for money is in my mind the driver of this tragedy and from the other side is human weakness to social pressures, psychological manipulation, and other primitive tendencies we all have. Milgram and Zimbardo exposed what humans can become if you press the ‘right’ buttons, and greedy bastards interpret this as a legitimate resource to riches.
As long as we demonstrate hesitancy in any way to what is actually taking place this will be a license for those at the top of the mafia to carry on doing it. It is therefore important to call them by the right names.
Can this experimental state be regarded as a state (the state of Israel)? In my mind definitely not. Israel is a state in legal terms only but not in any other sense of the word. A fraudulent cult can’t be a state. Such a cult is a perversion while a state is there to serve its group members in providing them with a platform for meaningful and wholesome life. This is evidently, was never on the agenda of practical "Zionism". Somehow, they (the naïve among Zionists) believed there is something magical (mystical) in the coming together of Jews under one administrative mechanism (state) that will transform their collective destiny to 'greatness'. These were secular Jews, so notions of messianic fervour could not be attributed to them, but nevertheless cultish is was. I am 100% sure the British realised this very well but it was serving their imperial interests and the Americans too (the mafia). Today, most Zionists are actually Christians (by numbers) and not Jews. This cult demonstrated that it has ambitions that will exceeds Jews and Israel should we show any signs of readiness to go along with their twisted minds. It should be a warning to all us. If we don’t want to end up as an Israeli cult we should let those "elite" bastards know we understand their sick imperial games.
I am new to substak and it is so nice to see there are many others with open eyes.
Hello Ben, it is lovely to meet you. Thank you so much for reading, for making yourself known, for your great comment, and for your generous feedback. It is always nice to be validated by another cult leaver.
Israel is the only state that a cult could have created. I always thought that if other cults were permitted to create their own states, they would be very similar to Isreal. Existing states can also develop into cults if the wrong mindset and leaders take hold. I know Hannah Arendt did not talk about cults as such, but it is more or less what she said when she wrote about the banality of evil. All human beings can be trapped in this. It is another nail in the coffin of the idea that there is something special about Jewishness that separates human beings from the rest of humanity. You are right of course about the convergence of greed, of British and Western colonialism in the service of the Zionist settler-colonial project. Nothing exists in a vacuum and no project can be completed without help. I completely agree that it all provides a warning to all of us. We allow the wrong people to govern us and should expect exactly what these people are dishing out. I write about this in some of my other essays.
Thank you sou much once again Ben! I am very grateful to you.
Yes, there are educated people that attribute Israel's ongoing collective state-of-mind to a less-than-palatable strand of Judaism, to the extent that even secular Jews somehow, to this day, are absorbing a belligerent ancient form of the religion by some yet unclear mechanism. Well, I myself was entertaining this as a possibility and wrestled with this in my mind for a while. However, it simply didn't sit very well with me. I think 'leftist' Israelis buy into such a scenario as they very much want to keep political Zionism as a positive movement after all and it is easier to go way back into distant history and find Yohanan Ben Zakkai as the one responsible for all the troubles we see today This is so farfetched and unconvincing when you see (consistently) how professional politics & business work today.
As I said to Joy, it is not difficult. It is a relief. Thank you so much for your thoughtfulness and your empathy.
The pain being shared here is truly deep and sad. I can see the truth in what is being said. Strangely enough I feel better about my own conclusions when the many in my country seem so callous. Many in Israel and other places are using two “get out of gaol cards”: the Promised Land, and the horrors of the Holocaust. Never Again should include all Humanity. The majority of voters in my country rejected what I saw as a very simple proposal in our recent Referendum. The whole world needs Makaratta now as much as it ever did.
I am guessing you are in Australia? I wondered also because you mentioned it would be 4am your time when the book club starts. I am Australian too. I lived in Australia for 18 years and am an Australian citizen. I was heartbroken about the referendum results. It was so deeply shameful, but also proved that Australian society still is racist against Aboriginal Australians. Australia is a settler-colonial state. If it started to do the right thing on Israel, it would have to own up to its own past and in reality Australia never has. I left Australia and moved to Scotland permanently, and I am glad I did. I live in the Highlands, not too far from Culloden Battlefield. There is still a memory of the Highland Clearances here. It felt liberating to move here after living two lifetimes in a settler-colonial countries. Australia was very good to me, and I still have a lot of friends there. My clinical supervisor is in Australia, and she is a great activist in her own right. But I am white, more or less and most people liked me accepted me straight away when they heard I was from Israel. Australian society was very pro-Israel when I moved there in 1991. It was a big surprise to me, and made my move easier initially, but then ten years later I renounced my Israeli citizenship, started to become active for Palestinian human rights, and met many more of the ‘right’ people. My life in Australia was important on my journey in so many ways. I thought the inclusion of the Aboriginal people in the Australian constitution would have been a no brainer and was shocked when the results came in. Thank you for your comment.
Your piece, corroborates everything that we have seen with our own eyes over the past 12 months. It's also resonates with the street interviews of Abby Martin a few years back in Tel Aviv and I recall those, especially when reading your bit about "Israelis see the Palestinians as nothing more than a dangerous irritation, a nuisance. Like a home with an infestation of a dangerous life-form that bother the inhabitants. Only after they eradicate the entire infestation, could the inhabitants relax....". The two others who write with a great deal of brutal introspection, like you do, are Ori Goldberg (X) and Alon Mizrahi (here and on X) who again similar to your observations comment a lot on the echo chambers that is Israeli media "The Israeli media constantly hype up and stir the public’s fear, and sense of doom." - reinforcing a tight vicious loop their societal epistemic bubble.
"Israel teaches its people that Jews are the only victims, and the greatest victims in human history, and that Jewish victimhood is not in the past. It is right now." Shlomo Sand said something similar about Jews (in Israel) being first-among and also exclusive victims.
Your piece is articulated well. The paragraphs that begin with "I cannot stomach the way the rest of the world continues to indulge a perpetrator society like Israel. " and "To ask Israeli Jews to recognise their terrible sin, their crime of settler-colonialism is asking the impossible." seem so obvious now - - after 11 months - but really needed to be added like you did.
Thanks.
I wish I could say I was glad to hear, but there is nothing about this topic that makes me feel glad. The main reason I write is to encourage people to trust their instincts and what their eyes show them, so they can feel more confident and resolute in their activism. Israel and its friends have been working very hard and are doing quite well on the psychological warfare front. This includes confusing and disabling potential supporters of the Palestinians, and critics of Israel. If my essay helped validate your experience, then it did what it was meant to do. Just wanted to add that we live in a sad world indeed, and are a very weird species, if it requires courage to stand up for the oppressed, and to ask people to please not kill other people. I needed courage when I was afraid, at the start of my journey. But I do not require courage now, because I am not afraid. That fear was what Israel taught me to feel, because I was supposed to be loyal to the cult, and I decided to walk my own way. So initially I did feel afraid. It didn’t help that I also got a few death threats and some harassment for a while. I am not afraid anymore. Either way, I am not the one who should feel afraid, or guilty. I am not doing anything wrong. The perpetrators are! It is really important for people to remember this.
Thank you for reading and for your valuable comment. 🙏🏼
I salute your bravery. You are not alone in your views. See Avi Shlaim, Gideon Levy, Shlomo Sands, Norman Finkelstein, Anthony Lowenstein. Such a tragedy.
Thanks Martin. I do know all of them. Yes it is a tragic society, but it is even more tragic when everyone that matters enables it.
I’m currently reading Ilan Pappe on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The hypocrisy of UK and USA media coverage is shocking.
It is eye-watering.
Avigail, thanks so much for sharing your experience of indoctrination, and of deprogramming, and what it must be like to be so indoctrinated.
I wonder how all this slaughter can be stopped, considering this.
I don’t know but it has to. Thank you for reading and commenting. I deeply appreciate it.
Thank you, Avigail. It can't have been easy sharing this, but as you know, the world has to hear the truth. Perhaps it will set us free.
To be honest, it is not difficult. It is disgusting, but it does feel like a relief. We all need to acknowledge and hear the truth in a world rife with so much deception. I am grateful for your empathy.
Devastating analysis. Thank you for this; it must have been difficult for you. This is what many in the west need to hear and understand. It might break through some of their barriers. 🙏
"The more Israel escalates, the more heinous its behaviour, the more crimes against humanity it commits, the more fanatical its people become in their support of their cult state."
So well said. Thank you for such a deeply insightful and powerful condemnation of the perpetual atrocity culture Israel is and always has been.
Anyone who thinks Israel's concerns are limited to Palestine is in for a big surprise and not a pleasant one. You don't have to read far into zionist writings and commentary to understand that the movement of Jewish settler colonialism was developed to address what was consider a global Jewish challenge. There's little reason to believe that the genocide that works in Palestine will not work equally well in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Europe and even America. As an American, I view America's alliance with Israeli genocidal policy and realize the enemy is already here.
I agree with your feelings about the relationship between the US and Israel. Israel will take anyone and everyone with it on the way down. Israel has no loyalty or respect for anyone. All Israel does is exploit. From Israeli society’s point of view, they have no friends, and they don’t trust anyone. To outsiders it appears insane, because it is. Israel feels no gratitude or appreciation for the obscene amount of help it gets. It takes it all for granted. Israel does not care how many Americans, or American soldiers die, or who else dies or is harmed in its insane Ahab-like, fanatical pursuit of an ‘ethnically pure’ Jewish state. Their sense of entitlement is so profound, nothing can penetrate it. The sooner Isreal’s allies recognise it, the better it will be for everyone. But as I say, those so-called allies cannot say they were not told. Thank you so much for reading and for commenting!
Fascinating narcissistic, racist, Xenophobic sociopathy
Wow!
Avigail, thank you
thank you
thank you.
You have given us so much in your deeply personnel account on the Israel - legacy of a perpetrator society and its impacts directly on you.
So many insights, profound on so many levels. So damning, so alarming, so terrifying thinking of where the insane cult of Israel will end up.
Another Holocaust seems to be the only path they are enthralled with and trapped into recreating.
Literally everyone screaming into Sub Stack at the moment about the complete madness, the insanity of it all in Gaza, the West Bank and now all of Lebanon need to read your screed.
Again thanks. Time to go read it again and share it around. Chow.
Thank you so so much!! Yes, many are rightly screaming, or crying about it, but our leaders’ deaf ears and primitive psychology are not listening. I find myself educating people who listen to the likes of the BBC still imagining that it is a good quality news provider. It happens most in casual conversations, and I can only hope that people start looking beyond the mainstream as well. I am glad that my writings can be helpful and thank you for sharing my essays. Avigail 🙏🏼
A big thank you for this unveiling of a sad reality, experienced from the inside of a deeply sick society, and that the world persists in not recognizing as such.
Is such a society not doomed to extinction? Its living forces and citizens who remain aware, tired of living in a dystopian universe and promised endless wars, will eventually leave this "promised land", usurped and martyred.... The world will be better off then...
I strongly believe that Israeli society is doomed indeed. Like many cults, they believe ‘the end is nigh’, but not for the right reasons. Israel is imploding under the weight of its guilt, its inner contradictions, its sick psychology and the profound lack of social cohesion. Israeli society may be a cult with one hive mind but human beings cannot be held together successfully when the only thing that binds them is fear, threat and a perceived enemy. In economic terms Israel has no existence without US money.
But money is not everything. Israel’s various industries are now in a terrible state, because their armies are made out of their people, regular citizens, teacher, fire fighters, doctors, shop assistants, hair dressers, engineers, you get the point. As more people spend longer and longer in the military, there are less people to do the jobs that need to be done to enable a society to function. Since last October, we know for a fact that 500,000 Israeli Jews with dual citizenship have left Israel on a one-way ticket. This is the last number we know, but my suspicion is that in reality there are many more. I have been checking the Israeli bureau of statistics website — only available in Hebrew — and they do not include the stats on those who leave. It is bad for morale I am guessing, and for the cult psychology.
I know Israel is on a path of self-destruct. What I worry about is how many it will take with it on the way down. We cannot sit and wait for Israel to destroy itself. We have to stop its settler colonial state and dismantle the exclusively Jewish state that they have been working to create. The only possible positive solution now is one-state for all the people in the region.
It would be poetic justice and a good spit on Hertzl’s grave, if there is a huge exodus of Jews from Israel. Many there have managed to acquire another citizenship as an ‘insurance policy’ for when the ‘end times’ come for them. I hope that many more would do the right thing and leave, and I do not care what reasons they give to themselves.
My grandparents, parents, or I never had a right to be there in the first place, and I am so pleased that I was intuitive enough as a young woman to leave when I did. If my family was nice, and I was not abused at home, I might not have been so driven to get as far away from Israel as I could and emigrate to Australia. In that sense I always feel that somehow everything in my life has worked to help me on my journey.
I have nothing to add beyond agreeing with you, but a like wasn’t strong enough.
Thank you! I would have loved to be wrong…
Thank you, Avigail, for your brave,uncompromising essay. The article I post here is about my brother's death. They invited us to a Seder. Afterwards, just talking, I remembered the next day was Easter and randomly mentioned it. Eric Schiff said, "We don't celebrate pagan holidays." By October of that year, 1972, they had hurt him in the cruelest way possible. He died a month later. https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/a-most-dangerous-method/
Thank you I have read it. It was an interesting article about a psychopathic therapist. Jacquie Schiff was clearly a psychopath, and there were so many who enabled her. The story of Jacobs is interesting. He sounds in essence like a good person, but his obsession with the holocaust is worrying. It was good that he stood up to the psychopath. I am so sorry but I missed the part about your brother. Is it in this article, or did you send me a different one to the one you intended to send? Thank you for reading and engaging with my writings.
My brother was John Hartwell (as discussed in the article) whom Aaron tied up and put in a bath of water hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns over 70% if his body. He died after a month in the St. Francis Memorial Hospital Burn Unit. I know the article isn't completely about John and I only read it once. I suffer from extreme grief to this day. He was 17 and I was 19. I am now 71.
This is a most horrific experience to live with. Schiff was a psychopath without question. This was such a horrific crime committed with such impunity. I am so sorry!
Thank you very much, Abigail. I truly appreciate your empathy.
I imagine you wonder why I shared this story. I hadn't attributed what happened to their being Jewish, but after seeing the terrible atrocities committed by Israel against the Palestinians, and in light of the comment made by Eric, I started to wonder if there was some connection regarding their beliefs and their treatment of non-Jews.
It is hard to know if there were such motives behind this. Who knows? The woman was a psychopath and she would have hurt people regardless of who they are. Psychopaths always look for more ways to torture and control people. The more they are enabled, the more brazen they become, because they feel they have free reign to do whatever they want. There may have been an agenda there, and I wouldn’t put it past a psychopath in a psychopathic system. What the article describe is nothing more than sadistic abuse. There was never any therapy there, or anything that benefited anyone. Just pure psychopathic abuse. I am so sorry your brother was a victim of such horrific crime. Thank you for sharing this with me. What I do not understand is why none of this was every prosecuted. With my best wishes and empathy for your grief. Avigail
Jacquie Schiff called my parents' house and I answered. She said, "We took your brother out of the bathtub and his skin was falling off. An ambulance has taken him to John Muir Hospital." She got people she knew to write letters of support. Aaron said he didn't know the water was that hot. I trusted that it would be thoroughly investigated. She was an evil Svengali. My mother, I believe, just wanted the rest of us to be able to still live the rest of our lives, so in a way we bought into their story. The doctors knew from the pattern of burns that his hands were tied behind his back. I don't know how the DA took that into account. It was an extreme miscarriage of justice. We did not attend the trial. I never knew about the other abuse until about a year ago when I did a search and found that article. Thank you for your sensitivity and understanding. ❤️🩹
It is horrible and I am so sorry that you and your family have suffered the impact of psychopathic abuse. And the loss of your brother, especially in these circumstances is unforgivable. It is good when crimes are exposed and things go to court, but it does not heal people. I have no doubt all of this would have led to complex trauma. It is time poeple start to realise how dangerous psychopaths are and stop giving them power or pandering to them. My heart is with you. A.
Avigail, you are a dear person with a great big heart and a sharp mind. Thank you. ❤️🔥
I found your article truly moving. Sadly, it appears that the indoctrination is not limited to Israeli society. According to Simone Zimmerman and others, it also infests American Jewish society. Her brilliant film “Israelism” documents her journey from Zionism to something more critical of Israeli society. I found her film both shocking and terrifying. After all, it is America that enables Israel to conduct its genocidal wars.
Like many other Europeans (I am Italian-Australian), I was horrified when I learned about the holocaust. I became very pro-Jewish and consequently pro-Israeli. I was shocked each time Israel committed some atrocity, but was willing to excuse it, on the basis that “it was an on-going conflict” with rights and wrongs on both sides.
Slowly I began to question this narrative. From the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, through the intifadas, and on to the periodic murderous campaigns in Gaza, I became increasingly concerned.
But this war has opened my eyes to the extraordinary nature of Israeli society. I have now read widely about Zionism, and have reached similar conclusions to yourself. The most powerful critics of Zionism for me have been the many Jewish critics, commentators, historians, social scientists, and others who have documented the history of Zionism and the establishment of the so-called Jewish state. I salute their perceptiveness and their courage. People like Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Gabor Mate, and many, many others, have been instrumental in my own “conversion”.
I now realise just how extreme Israeli society is. I have read about the “Hannibal directive”, the “Samson option” and the “Daheir doctrine”. I have seen videos of extremist settlers saying shocking things about driving out Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. I have been shocked at the things people in government like Ben Gvir and Smotrich do and say. The extremism seems to infect all levels of Israeli society from politicians, through to journalists, television presenters, the military and ordinary citizens. I’m shocked over and over again by the genocidal statements they make, often brazenly posting them on Facebook or tik tok.
I am now deeply concerned about the direction this war is taking. It is clear that Netanyahu is spoiling for a showdown with Iran. It seems clear that he has American backing. If Netanyahu attacks Iran it is more than likely they will respond. Will those extremists then refrain from resorting to the nuclear option?
It is an important journey you have been on. It demonstrates both the capacity for empathy, emotional resilience, and intellectual integrity. It is not easy to be confronted with information that challenges our pre-existing beliefs especially when those are also attached to significant emotions. Thank you for sharing all of this and I salute you for your decision to follow your own value system and intelligent assessment of the information you have been exposed to.
Netanyahu is just the latest in a long list of leaders on a spectrum of ‘badness’, that Israeli society has been deliberately choosing. It is not just the government in Israel. The entirety of society, minus a small minority, believe strongly that they will only have ‘peace’ when all the Palestinians are gone and Israel is populated only by what Israel sees as ‘Jews’. (I say this because as I explain in my essays, Israel sees Jewishness as a race). This belief has been indoctrinated into the people from the very start of the state. It is strongly pushed by the education system, the media and in many other ways through Israeli society’s informal structures.
You are right to be concerned, and I have shared the same concern for a very long time. Israel is single-minded in its desire to complete the settler-colonial project. This is why it is desperate to trigger a big war. It is much easier to commit comprehensive genocide and murder millions of people behind the smokescreen of war. It is a well known fact in the field of genocide studies (which I studied for my honours degree). Israel has only been able to commit what Ilan Pappé has called, ‘incremental genocide’. Israel seized an opportunity created by the Hamas operation last October, to try to kill more people and flatten Gaza in preparation for an Israeli takeover and re-build. Israel has always done its best to capitalise on whatever conditions and circumstances available to it, to advance its project. Israel sees a big war as the ultimate opportunity to finish it once and for all. It means exactly what it sounds like, Israel’s version of the ‘final solution’ to their Palestinian ‘problem’. So yes, concern is warranted and it should prompt all activists around the world to up the pressure on our governments.
I believe, however, the US will not attack Iran. I doubt that the beleaguered US has an appetite for a big war just to help Israel. The oil is in Iran, not in Israel… Either way, given the impact of hurricanes in the US, there is a trend to look more inward than outward. It will mean that despite what we see, US support for Israel is likely to diminish. Israel cannot eliminate millions of people in full view of the world. It is biting more than it can chew with its invasion of Lebanon, what it is doing in Gaza, and now also escalating in the West Bank. It is spread too thin. The Israeli military is made out of regular citizens who are now not at their jobs, and the economy there is in freewill. It does not matter how much US money goes in, at the end of the day you need people to be in their jobs to keep a country going. A lot of Israeli citizens with dual citizenship are leaving Israel, and the missile attacks on Israel are much more impactful than the Western media tell us. Israel is imploding and I don’t think it can happen soon enough. But it is a ticking clock nonetheless and the Palestinians are in grave danger. Thank you for reading, and for sharing your story. In solidarity, Avigail
I completely identify as some who left Israel many years ago with this depiction of Israeli society. It was my personal experience too. Exactly as you say, it is not on a scholarly level but based on living through total madness around you for years and years. Same here.
I also believe that any other nation (group of people) who were placed under same (sick) experiment that is “Israel”, the results would have been the same for them as well. The question remains then, is Israel running an experiment on itself? I believe not. Not historically, and not now. Even though at times it may look like this is just the case.
The outcomes of this experiment were evident and clear to see many, many, years ago. The people who are running this experiment must be (mainly) from outside Israel. These are the big international financial centres, the HQ of western mafia. For them anything that brings the goods (money!) is not only worth doing but obligatory. “Greed is good”, as was put in Gordon Gekko’s mouth in the film Wall Street (1987). Extreme lust for money is in my mind the driver of this tragedy and from the other side is human weakness to social pressures, psychological manipulation, and other primitive tendencies we all have. Milgram and Zimbardo exposed what humans can become if you press the ‘right’ buttons, and greedy bastards interpret this as a legitimate resource to riches.
As long as we demonstrate hesitancy in any way to what is actually taking place this will be a license for those at the top of the mafia to carry on doing it. It is therefore important to call them by the right names.
Can this experimental state be regarded as a state (the state of Israel)? In my mind definitely not. Israel is a state in legal terms only but not in any other sense of the word. A fraudulent cult can’t be a state. Such a cult is a perversion while a state is there to serve its group members in providing them with a platform for meaningful and wholesome life. This is evidently, was never on the agenda of practical "Zionism". Somehow, they (the naïve among Zionists) believed there is something magical (mystical) in the coming together of Jews under one administrative mechanism (state) that will transform their collective destiny to 'greatness'. These were secular Jews, so notions of messianic fervour could not be attributed to them, but nevertheless cultish is was. I am 100% sure the British realised this very well but it was serving their imperial interests and the Americans too (the mafia). Today, most Zionists are actually Christians (by numbers) and not Jews. This cult demonstrated that it has ambitions that will exceeds Jews and Israel should we show any signs of readiness to go along with their twisted minds. It should be a warning to all us. If we don’t want to end up as an Israeli cult we should let those "elite" bastards know we understand their sick imperial games.
I am new to substak and it is so nice to see there are many others with open eyes.
Inspiring work, Avigail.
Hello Ben, it is lovely to meet you. Thank you so much for reading, for making yourself known, for your great comment, and for your generous feedback. It is always nice to be validated by another cult leaver.
Israel is the only state that a cult could have created. I always thought that if other cults were permitted to create their own states, they would be very similar to Isreal. Existing states can also develop into cults if the wrong mindset and leaders take hold. I know Hannah Arendt did not talk about cults as such, but it is more or less what she said when she wrote about the banality of evil. All human beings can be trapped in this. It is another nail in the coffin of the idea that there is something special about Jewishness that separates human beings from the rest of humanity. You are right of course about the convergence of greed, of British and Western colonialism in the service of the Zionist settler-colonial project. Nothing exists in a vacuum and no project can be completed without help. I completely agree that it all provides a warning to all of us. We allow the wrong people to govern us and should expect exactly what these people are dishing out. I write about this in some of my other essays.
Thank you sou much once again Ben! I am very grateful to you.
Yes, there are educated people that attribute Israel's ongoing collective state-of-mind to a less-than-palatable strand of Judaism, to the extent that even secular Jews somehow, to this day, are absorbing a belligerent ancient form of the religion by some yet unclear mechanism. Well, I myself was entertaining this as a possibility and wrestled with this in my mind for a while. However, it simply didn't sit very well with me. I think 'leftist' Israelis buy into such a scenario as they very much want to keep political Zionism as a positive movement after all and it is easier to go way back into distant history and find Yohanan Ben Zakkai as the one responsible for all the troubles we see today This is so farfetched and unconvincing when you see (consistently) how professional politics & business work today.