Have the Israeli people lost the will to live?

At the website ShrinkWrapped, where “A Psychoanalyst Attempts to Understand Our World,” the anonymous author says about Israel exactly what I have been feeling and saying, though not writing, for some time, that there seem to be no fight left in the Israeli people. Yes, we know that Israel’s government is led by despicable weaklings and fools who are surrendering their country, allowing it to be attacked, and planning further retreats. But how can the Israeli people be so passive about this situation? This is why I have not been writing about Israel’s plight in recent months. It is difficult to care about people unless they care about themselves and show that they have some desire to live. But lately the Israelis have shown no such desire.

The Israeli politician Arieh Eldad (also spelled Aldad) says the reason the Israeli people do nothing is that the present government is locked into place until the next election and does not need to pay any attention to them. He points out that 400,000 people (almost one tenth of the Israeli Jewish population!) demonstrated in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv protesting the Gaza pullout, and it had zero effect, it was as though it never happened. The government went ahead with the withdrawal, with exactly the disastrous results that were foreseen, and now the government plans further pullouts from the West Bank. Given this experience, it is understandable that the Israelis would conclude that demonstrations are pointless. My reply to them is that they need to go beyond legal and peaceful protests, to illegal protests, to violent protests, to national strikes. They need to exert their will to national survival against the government’s will to national surrender. But they haven’t done this. The idea doesn’t even seem to have occurred to them. They’ve given up, just as their government has given up.

The psychoanalyst writes:

… Israel is attacked in the most vicious and atrocious ways. The murder of 8 young boys, most of them children, is greeted with celebration in Gaza, given perfunctory condemnation in English by the Israeli’s so-called partner in peace, and a source of joy through much of the Arab world. At the same time, the world community and the fools in the Israeli government counsel Israelis to be quiet, not cause too much of a commotion, not to discomfort the Gazans, and to move on.

The government of Israeli is beneath contempt, but I have to ask: Have the Israeli people become resigned? Have they given up? Where is their outrage? Where is their will to live?

Despair and depression are horrible states. We feel despair when all hope seems lost. When we feel despair in the absence of a hopeless reality, we call if depression.

But what happens to a people when they are told they have no recourse?

What happens to a people when they are told they must continue to live under constant threat of being attacked and killed by Jew hating monsters solely because they are Jewish?

What happens to a people when the adults, the nations that have the ability to either stop the killing and attacks, or enable the Jews to defend themselves, are either actively supporting the genocidal murderers or passively withholding support from Israel?

What happens to a people who understand that there exists no other country in the world that would be expected and counseled to have restraint in the face of daily attacks?

What happens to a people who have a government that professes over and over again an inability to respond effectively?

What happens to a people when the world’s press maintains a constant barrage of anti-personal missives and anti-Semitism becomes increasingly mainstream and unobjectionable?

And what happens to a people when they feel like the world just wants them to disappear and go away and has no concern for the lives of Jewish men, women, and children?

Is there a threshold beyond which the entire population surrenders to despair?

I am very fearful for Israel. It is still a democracy. Yet where are the people? Why are they not marching through the streets of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv in the hundreds of thousands, demanding their government do something to stop the reign of terror that they have been told repeatedly is their inevitable lot?

Why are the Israelis not enraged with their own government’s fecklessness?

- end of initial entry -

James N. writes:

I posted this comment to Shrinkwrapped’s thread back in March:

I have been interested in this subject for quite a while. I was born in Brooklyn and lived there for a long time. I observed the Jews of Brooklyn during both the 1967 and 1973 wars, and I have a number of Israeli friends.

Here’s my diagnosis (although I’m a mere internist, not a psychoanalyst). Many Israeli and American Jews are loyal—fiercely loyal—to an imaginary Israel, an Israel of the mind, if you will. THAT Israel, unlike the real one, was created by an imaginary “international community.” It has an imaginary “right to exist,” cocooned in meaningless “UN resolutions.” Many Jews who cleave to this imaginary Israel also imagine that, if they can just repeat the magic words “Resolution 181, Resolution 242” over and over again that they will acquire meaning in the real, actual world—most importantly, of course, that they will acquire meaning to Israel’s enemies.

This, of course, is nonsense—a fantasy. The real, actually existing Israel is (by force of circumstance) a Machtstaat—a blood and soil nation, placed on the Land by force of arms and maintained there by the willingness (up until recently) to kill any enemies who were motivated by Jew hatred to act against her people.

The problem, of course, is that decreasing numbers of Jews want to live in such a real Israel. The founding generation, I’m sure, didn’t give a damn about the opinion of the “world,” especially the European part of it. But Jews who want to live in the imaginary Israel have slowly increased in number to the point that they are now probably a majority. They want their enemies, and the United States, to accept the imaginary Israel. The U.S. will do so—their enemies, never.

The reality of Israel on the Land is kill or be killed. And they haven’t done too much killing, lately. It may be too late.

It didn’t attract many responses over there, but it captures an important feature of the problem, so I wanted to pass it along.

LA replies:

I agree with your analysis entirely. This is a core reality and a contradiction. The Israelis have never resolved the contradition between being a nation, and being a liberal project.

For example, I wrote, in “The Search for Moderate Islam, Part II”:

The cultural “peace” process

Yet Daniel Pipes wrote that we must cleave to the hope of a moderate Islam because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate. He thus sidestepped the issue of the truth or falsity of his moderate-Islam theory and made an appeal based on the bad consequences of rejecting it. I think Pipes’s remark opens up a useful approach to the issue, if we apply the same analysis to both sides. I shall proceed, then, to address these questions: what are the likely consequences of our accepting the belief in moderate Islam, and what are the likely consequences of our rejecting the belief in moderate Islam?

Let us begin by noting that the practical viability of an idea cannot be separated from its underlying truth. If moderate Islam does not exist, a strategy premised on its existence would be delusional, even suicidal. An example is Israel’s decades-long quest for peace with the Arabs, fueled by the repeatedly dashed, repeatedly renewed hope that a “moderate” Arab leadership would somehow emerge that would endorse Israel’s right to exist.

There are, in fact, striking parallels between Pipes’s half-realistic, half-utopian approach toward Islam, and the Labor Zionist movement’s approach toward the Arabs, starting from before the founding of Israel and culminating in the disastrous Oslo Accords. On one hand, the Zionists were tough-minded nationalists who knew they would have to fight and defeat the Arabs in order to secure a Jewish homeland; on the other hand, the Zionists were utopian leftists who hoped (and many of them still hope today, against all the evidence) that once the Arabs had been stopped in their attempt to destroy the Jewish state, they would miraculously turn around and accept Israel’s existence, inaugurating a glorious epoch of Arab-Jewish brotherhood. As a result of this way of thinking, each time the Israelis have won a war, instead of pressing home their advantage and achieving real and permanent security for their state, they have launched yet another series of negotiations that has only weakened their position and lost the gains that had been achieved at such cost. In a parallel fashion, Pipes’s respect for Islam, his faith in its essential benignity, and his abiding hope (despite all the evidence) that we can ultimately live in complete harmony with it, contradict and undercut his realistic analysis of its dangers.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 06, 2008 12:02 AM | Send