Khalid Amayreh – Israel's collective psychosis, the Denial Syndrome
By Khalid Amayreh • Jul 20th, 2008 at 6:00 • Category: Analysis, Features, Israel, Khalid Amayreh, Newswire, Opinions and Letters, Our Authors, Palestine, Resistance, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, War, Zionism
This week, Israel sank in an avalanche of national hypocrisy and self-righteousness.
Seeking to cope with Hezbollah’s success in getting Israel to release all Lebanese prisoners, dead and living, in exchange for the remains of two Israeli soldiers, Israeli leaders, media and shapers of public opinion have been indulging in sanctimonious lethargy and self-glorification while denouncing the other side as “hateful, uncivilized and representing an inferior culture.”
This is characteristic Israeli behavior. It perfectly characterizes a society that has been living in a state of denial ever since Zionist gangs, aided by western powers, succeeded in uprooting the bulk of native Palestinians from Palestine, their ancestral homeland, and implanting thereon Israel, a state based on racism, ethnic cleansing and distortion of history.
The orgy of lying, especially the shocking amenability of Zionist Jews to take the obscene lies at face value caricatures a people that dreads knowing the truth, let alone coping with it. And when the truth eventually manages to penetrate the “iron wall” of Zionist lies, the custodians of the big lie, which is Zionism, resort to a whole set of defense mechanisms to protect the collective mental sanity of a state whose very existence constitutes a crime against humanity.
Thus, according to this depraved and psychotic mindset, Israel doesn’t murder children and innocent civilians, it is only the victims that bring death upon themselves. And Israelis don’t steal the land and property of Palestinians, since the entire world was created for the sake of the “chosen people.” And even when Jews do commit “certain mistakes” and “sins,” they are not really to blame since it is the victims that always force Jews to make these mistakes.
Hence, the proverbial Palestinian victim of Israeli savagery is always responsible for the demolition of his own home, he is also responsible for the murder of his own children by Israeli soldiers and settlers, and the destruction of his farm, grove and orchard by Israeli bulldozers.
Eventually, the entire Palestinian Nakba is a self-inflicted calamity which the Palestinians brought upon themselves because they refused to succumb to the will of the “chosen people.” More to the point, if the Palestinians don’t come to terms with the Nakba, a greater Nakba, or holocaust, would be wreaked upon them.
Interestingly, the wave of self-righteous overindulgence in Israel has been led by the establishment people, figures that know too well that Israel doesn’t really represent the culture of peace, but rather the culture of war and aggression; they know that Israel is inculcated with a criminal and murderous mentality that differs very little from the Nazi mentality.
Yes, they do know all of this, but like all murderers, thieves and liars, they dread facing the truth. This is why they always try to turn the black into white, the white into black and the big lie into a truth glorified by millions of “beneficiaries” at home and ignorant “fans” abroad.
It may be particularly difficult to convince the “beneficiaries” of their sinfulness, namely the fact that they are living in homes that belong to other people and living on land that belongs to another people.
However, for the sake of the ignorant or naïve fans in Europe and north America as well as the rest of the world, it is imperative that they know the naked truth about this sick and sickening state that claims to be the sole true inheritor of Judaism while thinking, behaving and acting very much like the Third Reich.
Let us remember some of the “glorious expressions” of Israel’s culture of love in recent years.
Chris Hedges is a prominent journalist and author specialized in American and Middle Eastern politics. He worked for a number of publications including the Christian Science Monitor, the Dallas Morning News and the New York Times where he spent 15 years.
In his recent book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, Hedges tells a chilling story from his trip to the Gaza Strip during the heydays of the Intifada, or the second Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation.
Hedges watched how ten- and eleven-year-old Palestinian children were lured to their neighborhood’s perimeter fence by taunts from a loudspeaker on the Israeli side. “Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!” The Israeli voice barked insults at the boys’ mothers. The boys responded by hurling their rocks at the jeep with the loudspeaker. The Israelis shot at them with M-16s fitted with silencers. Hedges found the victims in the hospital, children with their stomachs ripped out, and with gaping holes in their limbs.
Writing for “Harper’s Magazine” (see The Nation, March 11, 2002), Hedges wrote: “Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered. Death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights in Sarajevo, but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.”
Another “expression of love”: In November 2001, an undercover unit of the Israeli army buried a mine in the sand that flows around Abdullah Siyam Primary School in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
A few hours later, as Palestinian children headed to school, the mine exploded. Five school kids were instantly reduced to broken flesh. The youngest was six. All the victims came from the same extended family: Akram Naim Astal, 6 and his brother Mohammed, 13; Omar Idris Astal, 12 and his brother Anis, 10; and their cousin Muhamed Sultan Astal, 12. Their young bodies were mutilated beyond recognition. The limbs of one child were found 50 meters away. Some of the kids could only be identified by their school bags, brightly colored and spattered with blood, still dangling from their butchered bodies.
Hasbara doctors in Israel might seek to extenuate the gravity or even whitewash these crimes by claiming that these were “individual acts” that didn’t reflect the overall policy of the Israeli government and army.
However, this is a big lie. In 2001, the noted Israeli award-wining journalist Amira Hass interviewed an Israeli sniper in which the soldier described the commands he received from his superiors:
“Twelve and up, you are allowed to shoot. That is what they tell us,” the soldier said. “So,” responded the reporter, “according to the IDF, the appropriate minimum age group at which to shoot is 12.” The soldier replied: “this is according to what the IDF says to its soldiers. I don’t know if this is what the IDF says to the media.”
A further “expression of love and humanity of Israeli culture” manifested itself, also in Gaza, in 2004, when an Israeli occupation army soldier, dubbed Captain-R, shot a Palestinian girl, Iman al Hums, who was on her way to school. However, the soldier was not sure whether the 13-year-girl died or not. Hence, he walked to the bleeding child, and instead of trying to save her life, he shot her 25 times, emptying his entire magazine of bullets into her innocent body “ to verify the kill,” a standard Israeli army practice in such circumstances.
Now, the reader might be prompted to think that the murderer was arrested and made to stand trial for his hair-raising crime. Well, the opposite happened. The soldier not only was exonerated of any wrongdoing but was also awarded tens of thousands of dollars for being “damaged by unfavorable media coverage.”
In truth, it is not only Israeli army soldiers and officers who play the Nazi game. Zionist rabbis routinely issue religious edicts that would allow Israeli troops to murder non-Jewish children knowingly and deliberately without having to worry about any ramifications, moral or otherwise.
In May 2007, shortly before Israeli occupation soldiers murdered two Gaza children who apparently were searching for scrap metal to sell for a few cents in order help feed their impoverished families, the former Israeli Chief Rabbi, Mordechai Elyahu, petitioned the Israeli government to carry out a series of carpet bombings of Gaza cities.
Elyahu argued that a ground invasion of the world’s most crowded spot would endanger Israeli soldiers. He said, “If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand. And if they do not stop after a thousand, then we must kill ten thousand. If they still don’t stop we must kill one hundred thousand, even a million, whatever it takes to make them stop.”
Earlier, Elyahu, a prominent Talmudic sage, called on the Israeli occupation army not to refrain from killing Palestinian children if that means saving the lives of Israeli soldiers.
The above-mentioned are only sporadic examples of the barbarian spirit inculcated in Israelis, especially soldiers dispatched to the occupied Palestinian territories. It is this barbarian mindset that makes Israeli soldiers abduct Palestinian school children and take them to nearby Jewish settlements where they are used as “training objects” by Jewish youngsters. It is this barbarian mentality that makes Jewish soldiers force helpless Palestinian laborers to do certain depraved acts such as drinking soldiers’ urine and singing, individually or in unison, “wahad Hommas, wahad fool, Allah Iyhay-yee Mishmar Gvul” (one ‘dish’ hummus, one broad beans, may Allah greet the Border Police)!!!
There are of course thousands, even tens of thousands, of examples which one could easily and readily cite to underscore Israeli barbarianism.
To be sure, this disgraceful reality is known to many Israelis. In 2001, Shulamit Aloni, a former minister of education, wrote in the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv that “we have become a barbarian people.”
So, what makes a leftist, liberal woman see in Israel what the vast bulk of Israelis, including the country’s intelligentsia, wouldn’t see?
Is it Israel’s collective psychosis, the denial syndrome?
Khalid Amayreh is a journalist based in the Occupied Palestinian town of Dura.
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“In a nutshell, there is a deep schizophrenia in the Holy Land; what we see, hear and talk…Zionism is the original sin; Zionism is an untouchable icon….You can curse Mohammad, you can curse Mary, but not Zionism.”-
Professor Albert Aghazarian, July 19, 2007 in an address to nearly three dozen international and Palestinian youth and this reporter who had gathered in Jerusalem for Sabeel’s 2nd International young Adult Conference.
Your article reminded me of that day, and also of what I read on page A3 of the July 20, 2007 edition of Haaretz -because of the deep schizophrenia that was printed in black on newsprint.
The page was filled with looking back two years [now 3] prior at the ‘disengagement’ from the Gaza Strip, which in reality was a redeployment for Israel continued to maintain full control of air, water and sea borders.
The story was about the Gush Katif evacuees from the Gaza Strip-who all settled there illegally under international law.
Soldiers in the Kissufim area said some evacuees continued to come back to the roadblocks at the entrance to the Gush Katif settlement and would stare into the distance, with tears in their eyes.
Haaretz reported:
“Planting the desire to return. Rabbi Kobi Bornstein, a former resident of Neveh Dekalim and leader of the anti-disengagement struggle, says, "we are not talking about breaking through fences, but about planting the desire in the people of Israel to return there." Bornstein is sure the Jews will return.
“The willingness to return if possible comes to the fore in the video interview project that Mordi Kirshner is doing for the Settlers' Committee (the umbrella organization of the evacuees). He has filmed 160 out of 300 planned interviews. "We give the person a chance to tell his (or her) story," he says. Kirshner copied the framework from the taping of survivors' testimonies for the Steven Spielberg Holocaust Videotape Archive. He says he treats the interview as testimony.
“The interviews reveal a sense of betrayal felt toward the man seen as the patron of Gush Katif (Ariel Sharon) and disappointment with Israeli society after the disengagement. Many interviewees reported dreams of seeing their former homes and waking up in the morning with a sense of happiness. “
So, I wondered then, and still do if the settlers will ever have a clue about the truth and pain of the indigenous Palestinians who were forced to flee in 1948?
750,000 Palestinians left in droves for fear of their lives by the hands of the Zionists who came to claim their homes and property, and now, those refugees have multiplied into the millions; and all denied the inalienable right to return to their legally owned property.
The state of Israel was CONTINGENT upon upholding the UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS:
Article 13.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
IMAGINE when "tons" of people of good will rise up and demand Israel uphold that!
Okay I am about to make a very poor joke here…..
The first thought that occured to me after reading this was…..
"Shouldnt the zionists have settled in Egypt, because they appear to spend so much time in "De Nile"
Seriously to answer your question "Is it Israel’s collective psychosis, the denial syndrome?"
In my opinion the answer is an overwhelming yes.Never in the history of the world has there been a group of people who were so desperately in need of psycho analysis.
Perhaps in part the problem lies with the heritage of these people. IE the Nazi death camp surviviors. I have no statistics and I am only theorising here on the basis of an amatuer interest in psychology.To survive the "shoah" , would of meant the survival of the fittest.So perhaps this has created some kind of imabalance in the collective conscience of Israeli society.Also added to this is those who helped establish "Israel" by introducing terrorism to the Middle East as we know it today.At the tip of this iceberg the bombing of the Star of David hotel, the Stern gang, Deir Yassin to name but a few and the ethnic cleansing of hundred of towns and villages.
I will now repeat what i have said eslewhere today, nothing lasts for ever and one day Palestine will be free, what we who love palestine must insure is that we learn form the lessons of the past and we dont allow Palestine to become bogged down and suufer the same psychose as the israli suffer today.
Dang its late excuse all the typos……. sigh.Eileen its all very well demanding the uphold the Declaration of Human Rightsl, but the problem is how do you get people with no apparent concience to understand what that decaration means.??
There is hope. If nowhere else, it lies in what the Zionazis refer to as "the demographic problem". May the goyim continue to be fruitful and multiply.
Dearest Alkhansa,
GREAT QUESTION you ask!
The answer lies in a spiritual [NOT RELIGIOUS!] and political evolution revolution; and that requires we WAKE UP to The Divine within us-all others-and all of creation-and the commandment from God to the Hebrews remains:
THOU SHALL NOT KILL!
“If we want to reap the harvest of peace and justice in the future, we will have to sow seeds of nonviolence, here and now, in the present. I believe that hope for the future depends on each of us taking nonviolence into our hearts and minds and developing new and imaginative structures which are nonviolent and life-giving for all. Some people will argue that this is too idealistic. I believe it is very realistic. I am convinced that humanity is fast evolving to this higher consciousness. For those who say it cannot be done, let us remember that humanity learned to abolish slavery. Our task now is no less than the abolition of violence and war ….We can rejoice and celebrate today because we are living in a miraculous time. Everything is changing and everything is possible.”-Mairead Maguire, Noble Peace Prize Laurette
The ‘prophet’ John Lennon said and sang:
“That what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong…Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me…
“You’re just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You’ve got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate…All we are saying is give peace a chance…All you need is love…Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will be as one…Reality leaves a lot to the imagination….Number 9 Number 9 Number 9… I’m so very small.”
“Let all who are small come in here…Wisdom has built her house; come eat her food and drink her wine and walk in the ways of understanding.”-Proverbs 9
I’m so very small, so very small, already within the heart of every atom yet extend Beyond the Universe and connect every mother and child….Number 9 Number 9 Number 9…
http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=802&Itemid=197
It is the USA which has the world's biggest case of denial. Our citizens go around claiming to be peace loving and humanitarian; the actual history shows one brutal war after another, coups, assassinations and going where we are not wanted and taking whatever catches our fancy.
With Israel I think you have to totallly ignore their words and look at their actions. Their words are delaying tactics.
They (Israeli gov.) claims to want peace but their actions show no good will, only continuous land grabs, imprisonments, exile, you know the endless crimes they have committed while dragging their feet & making excuses about having no "peace partners" or a Palestinian retaliation occurs after countless provocations and the Israelis have their vindication for draconian policies all the way to murdering innocent children.
I have no choice but to believe that the truth is becoming known and that justice must ultimately prevail. Inshallah.