So why is Israel doing this? Is there anything in it for Israel but virtually global hate? Because it doesn’t seem like there is.
Sometime back, on my X account, I said I was going to try and provide an explanation as to why Israel has chosen to conduct itself like it has. Here it is. It’s very provocative, and it’s going to mess with your mind quite a bit.
I will also remind you that I am Jewish and I have the perfect right to my own opinion on Jewish affairs.
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Throughout these months, I am sure you have asked yourselves why Israel is acting as if its design is to maximize the amount of hate it stands to receive from a global community of shocked and terrified people.
There have been so many occasions for this, but I’ll bet that when IDF soldiers executed 3 Palestinian men in a hospital in late January, it stood out to you as outrageously, unreasonably brazen.
Maybe you felt like that because the IDF took special care to get its hit job televised. They didn’t confiscate cameras or servers, and didn’t hack or destroy files. It’s almost as if they were acting for the cameras. A worldwide audiences got the message, and everyone was talking about Fauda, the TV series meant to portray the humane face of Israel’s apartheid.
How peculiar, right? And wait, what about all those videos by soldiers of themselves joyfully blowing up stuff? And what about the naked men filmed in their humiliated hundreds?
Let me remind you, for contrast, that in two years of Russia’s war in Ukraine, not once have you seen Russian soldiers celebrating the destruction of civilian infrastructure. And you’ve never seen naked and humiliated Ukrainian soldiers loaded on trucks, or sitting on the ground, eyes covered.
There may have been things like that happening. We don’t know. But if scenes like these actually occurred, the Russian military took special care to conceal them from us. The IDF did not. Why?
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Keep this question in mind, and let’s make it even more interesting. Let’s ask: what is the justification, the reason, or the cause for the existence of organizations such as AIPAC and ADL? I mean, seriously. Are American Jews in so much danger, and face so much persecution in the US, that perpetual billion-dollar operations are required to guard them from harm?
Are Jews disproportionally jailed in the US? Designated victims of violent crime? Harassed by the authorities? Cannot be out on the street? Is American society that laser-focused on hating Jews? Aren’t there other American communities that are more exposed to danger, harassment, poverty, and crime? I mean, seriously?
And say an organization like AIPAC does have some nostalgic reason for being, what is doing pushing for wars? More specifically and currently: why are Jewish organizations in the US, alongside Israel, doing all they possibly can to place Jews at the epicenter of a possible world war?
Why are organizations that are supposed to keep Jews safe making Jewish affairs the formally declared reason for a clash and a war that could destroy civilization as we know it? Isn’t it the opposite of what they’re supposed to be doing? Say like a military that constantly broadcasts its own astonishing cruelty, and destroys its own image?
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We are getting closer. But one more hurdle needs to be removed for us to see the answer. Stay sharp.
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Two very obvious opposites in seeing the world: paranoia and basic trust. This is true for people, but it is just as valid for political societies. Some societies are more paranoid and some are more relaxed, but no society on earth is more paranoid than the super-mega-ultra Jewish part of the Jewish people, or wider society.
There is no other group on earth the world is so constantly on its feet defending. No other society, too, decided to use trauma as the center of its identity. I know many of you, especially Americans, have come to see this as just Jewish. But it is not so, and maybe you need an Arab Jew to tell you this. It is one strand of Jewish perception that derives its entire sense of identity from pogroms and the Holocaust.
Israel and IPAC act like this is natural and the only way to be Jewish. That’s nonsense. Pogroms and the Holocaust were not all the experiences of all the Jews all the time. Many Jewish communities knew long periods of safety and prosperity. Not all Jews were always victims, and Jews are definitely not the only victims humanity has even known.
Personally I always found it more than a little offsetting to hear American Jews refer to their misery and victimhood constantly, in a country where millions of natives, organized in hundreds and thousands of flourishing communities, were wiped off the face of the planet. A country and culture that operated industrial-scale slavery of black people for hundreds and hundreds of years, and fought (and in many cases is still fighting) not to recognize them as equal humans for centuries more.
I would never do that.
A country that has so much terrible, dehumanizing poverty and homelessness, so much pain. How come the most successful, heavily represented in all things power and money minority in this society is also its greatest victim? I know this is the norm and this is the description of reality I should conform to, but no. It doesn’t make sense.
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You can choose trauma and paranoia or trust and basic optimism as your guide in life. But the biggest Jewish organization in our lifetime chose one clear path: that of trauma, suspicion, and what can be called Armageddonism. Always alert. Always someone out there to get you. Everybody hates us.
In choosing trauma and paranoia, both Israel and AIPAC found an unexpected source of false power. Because existential fear can bring a society of people together, but it’s not going to be a society many people would want to live in. So you keep people afraid all the time, and you make sure they are feeling, or actually are, hated all the time.
This is how you maintain your power over them. And as Jewish trauma has become such a huge international political thing (I wouldn’t do that either), the incentive was always there to keep this mentality alive. To organize around it. To make sure it remains the formal doctrine of Jewish institutions. Such as AIPAC and Israel.
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So Israel and American Jewish organizations took it upon themselves to keep Jews afraid and isolated. This strategy of intentional paranoia has been working for a while, but it gradually eroded. It especially eroded in the US, as younger Jews became increasingly aware that the stories they had been told were lies, and that no one cares about their ethnicity.
That erosion in the power of instilled exceptionalism, isolationism, and existential fear poses a very serious problem for Jewish organizations built around paranoia: they have to have a way to keep it going. They have to maintain it for the survival of their paranoid identity and all the benefits it brings with it.
The Palestinians and Arabs were a wonderful solution for this problem for a while: by keeping Palestinians oppressed and thus hostile, the old myth of antisemitism as a huge international force could be kept on life support.
This, too, began to fade, as younger American Jews started getting more familiar with Palestinian perspectives, and started having serious, transformative doubts as to eternal Jewish victimhood everywhere, always. Visiting the West Bank, or listening to Palestinians will do this to you.
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And then October 7th hit. And the right-wing, nationalistic, paranoid section of the Jewish political spectrum, realized it could be translated into political gold. This could be used to revive the old sentiments. The ghetto, the pogroms, the trains to the east. All of it.
This is why Nazis were invoked so early on. Jews were once again the persecuted minority AIPAC and Netanyahu always told you they were. How wonderful for them.
But even October 7th was not enough, because people would immediately put it in the context of the occupation. They would ask the eternal human questions: why did this happen? What happened before?
If you’re Netanyahu or AIPAC, letting Jews be viewed in the context of normal human behavior is the last thing you want to do. What you want is boiling rage and fear to be extensively covered in all the media and all the briefings.
Need I say I would not do that, either?
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And this is where my final point arrives. It doesn’t seem like Israel is trying to be hated globally. It is actually what it’s doing. It is intentionally airing its cruelty and barbarity so that it will remain closed up to the world, thus guaranteeing the continued rule of the paranoia camp.
They are doing it on purpose, for cynical political gains, out of a twisted reading of history and human nature. Palestinians are just crash-test dummies in this regard. They count for nothing. Their deaths are used to get people angry and Israel hated, so it becomes even more paranoid.
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For the same reason, AIPAC is putting the Jewish issue at the epicenter of the lead-up to WW3. They can not know that Jews will be called responsible, or at least a major factor in it. Can you imagine millions of dead Americans, destroyed cities, populations stressed into panic and despair – all because of a war Jewish organizations pushed for?
How does anyone who purports to represent Jews and care for them not recoil from this scenario? Do these people have any idea at all of what they’re doing?
I am sorry for sounding this impolite and not nice: we are on the eve of a potential world war. As a Jew I am terrified. The last thing I want is to be blamed for a world war. But the Jewish paranoia camp seems to relish the opportunity. Maybe they are sure this is how the messiah comes. I have my reservations.
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Finally, Jewish organizations centered around trauma found a very welcoming and happy-to-help friend in American imperialists. It is so wonderful when you can market Middle East invasions as battling antisemitism. Who could argue with that? In the name of defending Israel, the US can do whatever it wants in wide stretches of land and sea where it would otherwise be seen as what it is: a foreign, colonial power drunk on its own power and propaganda.
Defending Israel gives American hawks (read: Washington) perfect moral cover. It will support an actual genocide. It will go completely insane.
What they – both AIPAC and US establishments – are not including in their calculations is that a big war in the Middle East can have very crushing, irreversible results for both the US and Israel. In their quest for creating a Jewish psyche and a world beneficial to their paranoid vision (which America shares as a colonial power), they don’t take into account that reality is a whole different business from propaganda.
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But this is why they do it and televise and broadcast it. So that we are hated, isolated, fearful, and controlled by Bibi and AIPAC forever (and America has a legitimate reason to dominate the Middle East and kill as many Rabs as Muslims as it pleases). There’s nothing that reassures those people as hate for Israel and Jews, and they will do all they can to provoke as much of it as they can (the blatant lies, the threats, the live-streamed horror, it’s all part of it).
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Don’t fight people who thrive on hate with hate. Fight them with clarity and resolve.