Zionism’s mass psychosis is not Israel’s private affair

in World — by Tom Suarez — January 22, 2020

    psy·cho·sis (/sīˈkōsəs) a mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.

Fear is the most primal defensive instinct, but fear can also be exploited as a tool of control, leading people to act with thought and emotion so impaired that, to borrow from the above definition of psychosis, contact with external reality is lost. Colonial Salem had witches; Spanish Inquisitors had heretics; McCarthyism had communists; and Zionism has antisemites.

Unlike witches, antisemitism is real, making it all the more tragic that Zionism’s ‘high priests’ manipulate it to keep the ‘flock’ dependent. On behalf of the Israeli state, self-appointed ‘representatives’, such as the UK’s Board of Deputies, manufacture threats from the very people who pose none, and support many who do — an especially dangerous game when actual violence against Jews and other targeted groups is on the rise.

Despite strong Western support dating from World War I, Zionism might have gone the way of all other European settler projects had it not been for ethnic-nationalism’s consummate evil, the Holocaust. To be sure, not even Zionism’s most cynical champions could have wanted this singular boost to their cause; but with the news of the death camps, the movement began claiming the moral inheritance of Hitler’s victims in the name of its own ethnic-nationalist settler project.

As the passage of time fades Zionism’s veneer, its propagandists resort to increasingly extreme Narrative. When in 2019 the US-based Wiesenthal Center considered who posed the greatest risk to Jews today, this “human rights organization researching the Holocaust” had a sorry litany of threats world-wide to choose from. But it bypassed these entirely and chose the antithesis, the public sphere’s most time-proven anti-racist, Jeremy Corbyn. The sentiment was unanimously mirrored by other Zionist spokes-groups, with good reason: not even Corbyn’s pathetic attempts to please them after winning Labour leadership could erase his record as a proactive supporter of human rights. They manipulated such a surreal ‘loss of contact with external reality’ that major media published predictions that Jews would have to flee Britain if he were elected.

Zionism thrives only as long as antisemitism, the disease it allegedly was created to fight, thrives. It claims to be the antidote to European racial-nationalism and ethnic cleansing, but its singular goal is a state founded on ethnic nationalism, cleansing, and subjugation. It claims ancient self-identity, yet expropriates iconic cultural aspects of the very people it seeks to erase, as its own. It markets itself as ‘Jewish self-determination’ by doing the opposite — by usurping Jewish self-identity and individual self-determination.

This hijacking of Jewish identity was formalized with the so-called International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) re-definition of antisemitism, the name itself an undisguised exploitation of the Holocaust to empower new ethnic crimes.

IHRA balances a dizzying mix of logic schisms. The Israeli state is the self-determination of Jews as Jews, but it is antisemitic to say that Jews favor Israel over their own nation, and it is also antisemitic to call Israel’s ethnic nationalism a racist endeavor; but then it is antisemitic to deny Israel as an ethnic nationalist state, yet it is also antisemitic to note any comparison between Israel and Nazism, no matter what Israel may ever do. Israeli citizenship offers further immunity under IHRA, but then it is antisemitic to hold Jews as a people responsible for what the Israeli state does — well, except for Zionism, which explicitly makes Jews the doers of what the Israeli state does — but then it is antisemitic to point this out.

Untangling IHRA’s contradictions, one is left with a crime flaunted in a public confessional so that we, the witness, are forbidden from speaking it — much less from doing anything about it. And so countries and institutions that adopt IHRA must fudge its meaning: not once did mainstream media in the UK or US pay attention to the content of what their governments were using as de facto or official law on behalf of the Israeli state and against their own citizens, nor allow any commentary that violated the controlled spectrum of permissible debate. One could argue that it was flawed; but one could not state the reality, that the ‘definition’ itself was antisemitic.

Only President Trump failed the ‘fudge’ test. Over-zealous to please his benefactors, he signed an executive order that redefined Jews as a global, tribal nationality bound to the Israeli state. This unadorned antisemitism won him virtual prophet status in Israel, while embarrassing the mainstream ‘liberal’ Zionists, whose difference lies not with ideology but with decor.

The word ‘antisemitism’ itself has become part of the psychosis’ toolbox. A dedicated word for bigotry against Jews alone segregates them from the rest of humanity and reinforces the narrative that racism against Jews is qualitatively distinct from all other bigotry. And the misnomer ‘Semite’ infers a Middle East origin for all Jews, making Jews the world over, no matter their ethnic, cultural, or geographic origins, or their language group, ‘Semitic’ natives who therefore ‘return home’ to historic Palestine.

This further embellishes Zionism’s grandest schism with reality: that the nation-state self-declared in 1948 by European settlers, deliberately named ‘Israel’ for messianic effect (to get Jews to go there, as Ben-Gurion cynically put it in private), is the ‘same country’ as the realm of that name in the Old Testament.

This messianic construct resonates in the Judeo-Christian collective subconscious. The ‘Land of Israel’ and ‘the Jewish people’ seem to blur back in time through the holy book’s pages virtually to Creation itself. As Ben-Gurion insisted before Israel’s establishment, the Bible, not the Balfour Declaration, not the UN, was his Mandate. With deed from God in hand, linear reasoning is suspended: His new state, he told the UN, could not be bound by norms applied to other states. When evangelical Christians in the United States declare that Donald Trump was sent by God to save Israel, the ‘Israeli state’ in their minds began in Genesis 32:29.

In our allegedly post-tribal world, nations treat nationalism and citizenship independent of ethnicity. A state’s demand for ‘patriotism’ is rooted strictly in ‘membership’ in that country — citizenship — and so the ruling elite can frame dissent as traitorous only to the state. The opposite — that a particular ideology and nation-state are part of one’s DNA — should strike us as grotesque. It was no good when Germany tried it. It was no good when the US used it to force citizens into internment camps because of their Japanese heritage. But Israel has instead turned it into a virtue not to be questioned: it is ‘the Jewish state’, the phrase itself wielded as a warning against criticism. By holding Jewish identity hostage, Israel spins opposition to it crimes as against ‘the Jews’, making criticism ‘antisemitic’ by definition.

Zionism’s appeal to antisemites and apocalyptic Christians is logical. But its success in influencing large numbers of Jews was the result of its militant campaign to make Jews “yield to Zionist totalitarianism”, as Hebrew University president Judah Magnes put it in 1945, “which seeks to subject to its discipline the entire Jewish people.” This was the essential warning of people with close knowledge of the Zionist experiment in Palestine in the years leading to the Israeli state, including British and American intelligence, and Jews who had fled the Nazis.

Zionism’s goals are irredeemably counter to the right of Jews to live in security, equality, and dignity. Zionism’s security requires Jewish insecurity; its political objectives demand Jewish tribalism; and Israel’s claim to act in the name of Jews is an affront to Jewish dignity. Since our governments, media, and many institutions have allowed themselves to be corrupted in Zionism’s service, the psychosis it has nurtured is not Israel’s private affair. Ending our governments’ and institutions’ complicity is our right and obligation.

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Thomas Suárez’s book State of Terror was described by Ilan Pappé as “the first comprehensive and structured analysis of the violence and terror employed by the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel against the people of Palestine.” A Juilliard-trained violinist who has performed around the world, he is a former faculty member of Palestine’s National Conservatory of Music.

https://countercurrents.org/2020/01/zionisms-mass-psychosis-is-not-israels-private-affair