Israel's Collective Psychosis:
The Denial Syndrome
by Khaled Amayreh
www.dissidentvoice.org/, July
21st, 2008
This week, Israel sank in an avalanche
of national lethargy, 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 self-glorification
while denouncing the other side as "hateful, uncivilized
and representing an inferior culture." This is a 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 therein
Israel, a state based on racism, terror, ethnic cleansing and
falsification of history.
The orgy of lying, especially the shocking
amenability of most 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 "abominable
sins," they are not really to blame for that 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, the murder of his own children and the destruction
of his own farm, grove and orchard by Israeli bulldozer!! 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 and the occupation, a greater Nakba, or holocaust, would
be inflicted 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. The truth would simply make
them lose their raison d'etre. 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 be delivered from
the grip of Zionist lies. Yes, westerners must be allowed to know
the naked truth about this sick and sickening state that deceptively
claims to be the sole true inheritor of Judaism while its ideology,
behavior and actions are antithetical to all religious and moral
values that stress universal justice and human equality.
Let us remember some of the "glorious
expressions" of the Zionist culture of love and self-abnegation
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
in the heydays of the intifada, or the second Palestinian uprising
against the Israeli occupation. Hedges watched, ten- and eleven-year-old
Palestinian children being 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."
Here is another "expression of love:"
In November 2001, an undercover unit of the Israeli army buried
a landmine 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 Muhamemd 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 spin 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 here 25 times, emptying his entire
magazine of bullets into her tender body. He did what he did in
order "to verify the kill," a standard Israeli army
practice in such circumstances. Now, the reader might be prompted
to think that the bloodthirsty murderer was arrested and made
to stand trial for his hair-raising crime. Well, the opposite
happened. The soldier not only was innocent of any wrongdoing
but was also awarded tens of thousands of dollars for being "hurt
and libeled by unfavorable media coverage."
In truth, it is not only Israeli army
soldiers and officers who willfully indulge in such Nazi behavior.
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 bombing
of Gaza population centers. 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 1,000, then we
must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop we must kill 100,000,
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 to
guard the occupation and enforce apartheid. 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 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, or more
correctly, wouldn't want to see.
Well, it is Israel's collective psychosis,
the denial syndrome?
Khalid Amayreh is a journalist living
in Palestine.
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