...Perhaps it matters not a whit what the US or the Palestinians do, because the Israeli government and the bulk of Jewish Israeli voters are just too sick to move toward a just peace. At least that's one man's opinion.
The Jewish Israeli body politic is diseased, that one man writes, because it has not adjusted to the Jews' reentry into history with a state of their own. Too many Jews are still stuck in the ancient feeling of powerlessness and victimhood.
Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told Israelis that their country is militarily powerful, and neither friendless nor at risk. They should therefore stop thinking and acting like victims. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, says that the whole world is against Israel and that Israelis are at risk of another Holocaust. That message of Jewish weakness and victimhood appeals to enough voters to keep him in power.
Gripped by such unrealistic fears, Israelis refuse Obama's call to stop expanding settlements and start compromising for peace. Israel's resistance to Obama's serious peace effort has been called "nothing less than pathological."
Pathological? Who would print such scurrilous anti-Israel charges - some anti-Semitic rag? Nope. This opinion comes straight from the op-ed page of The New York Times.
But who would write such a fierce attack, calling Israelis sick with "victimhood"? Some anti-Semitic apologist for Israel's enemies? Nope. It's Henry Siegman, who spent sixteen years as executive director of the American Jewish Congress, one of the most powerful and respected mainstream organizations in the US Jewish community. With his vast experience inside the Israeli and American Jewish communities, he knows that the evidence to support his diagnosis is everywhere.
Just look at the front page of any Israeli newspaper on any given day, where a surprising percentage of the stories answer the same central question: Who is threatening / hating / vilifying Israel and the Jews today? Iran, with its supposedly terrifying nuclear threat, continues to make the front page nearly every day. And Israel remains obsessed with its fear of the Goldstone Report - written by an eminent Zionist jurist who has now been magically transformed into an "enemy of Israel" - when the rest of the world has long since forgotten it.
The most interesting piece of evidence to back up Siegman's diagnosis of "pathology" was a bitter tirade launched against him by Bradley Burston, a columnist for Israel's top newspaper, Ha'aretz. Burston is a liberal by Israeli standards. But rather than trying to rebut Siegman with thoughtful arguments, he unleashed a vicious ad hominem attack: "Siegman doesn't merely think that Israelis are mistaken. He loathes them. In his reading, they are venal, deceitful.... He belongs to the school of thought which suggests that hating Israelis is a form of working for peace."
...As Siegman pointed out in a response to Burston, Israeli Jews know this better than anyone: "The pathology I described is invoked most frequently by Israelis themselves. The term for it in Israel is a "galut [diaspora] mentality," the tendency of diaspora Jewry to see itself as friendless, isolated and always at the edge of a looming pogrom. No one has described this pathology better than - guess who? - Bradley Burston." Siegman quoted Burston's own words, from a column the Israeli journalist wrote just a few weeks ago:
"We don't need them. They'll never see things our way, no matter what. Let them go. It's a new Israeli approach which borrows from the very worst of our aging instincts. It says: We're moral, our enemies are out to exterminate us along with our state, that's all you need to know. No modifications necessary. Stay the course. Concede nothing. Ease no siege. Give no ground. Ever."
"If that is not a perfect description of a pathological mindset," Siegman concluded, "it will do until a better one comes along."
...As long as this pathology dominates Israeli political life, it's hard to see what Barack Obama or anyone else can do to move the Israelis toward a just peace, one that could be acceptable to even the most moderate Palestinians (who need no special mental condition to feel victimized; all they have to do is look out the window at the Israeli military patrols passing by).
Why should this pathology persist, even though it locks Israelis into an endless cycle of conflict? Henry Siegman has an answer, and it's the most disturbing part of his diagnosis. Most Israeli Jews forget Rabin's assurance that they are already secure, he says, because Netanyahu's fear-mongering talk of an impending Holocaust is "still a more comforting message for too many Israelis."
As Henry Siegman rightly concludes, "the conflict continues because US presidents - and to a far greater extent, members of the US Congress - have accommodated a pathology that can only be cured by its defiance."...The main thing holding Obama back now is his own fear of the political price he might pay for defying Israel. The size of that price depends on how much support he gets for showing some courage. So the White House needs to hear a clear message from the American people: We may sympathize with Israel's affliction. (Anger won't bring anyone closer to peace.) But when it comes time to make policy - and the time is now - we should ignore the pathology. We can't let it stop us from doing what must be done for the good of the US, the Middle East and the whole world. Full story
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