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Israel Suffering Shoah Shock Syndrome

07/18/10

Israel Suffering Shoah Shock Syndrome

Permalink 01:38:46 pm by misblog, Categories: Books, Middle East, Israel, Palestinians

Originally Published December 29, 2008; Last Updated July 18, 2010; Last Republished July 18, 2010:

Israel, suffering under the weight of Shoah Shock Syndrome launches another round of attacks on Gaza—instead of seeking treatment for its mental illness, Israel is infecting future generations with the mental illness.

In between Gaza rocket fire and reciprocating bombings1, Israel's leadership and Israelis might want to read Avraham Burg's new book The Holocaust Is Over We Must Rise From Its Ashes, Palgrave MacMillan, 2008.

Book Cover Image

“Israel arms itself to the teeth like the weak boy who comes to class equipped with bat, a knife and a slingshot to overcome his real and imagined bullies. In our eyes, we are still partisan fighters, ghetto rebels, shadows in the camps, no matter the nation, state, armed forces, gross domestic product, or international standing. The Shoah is our life, and we will not forget it and will not let anyone forget us. We have pulled the Shoah out of its historic context and turned it into a plea and a generator for every deed. All is compared to the Shoah, dwarfed by the Shoah, and therefore all is allowed…”--Avraham Burg3, The Holocaust Is Over--

YouTube:

  • Middle East Special Envoy George Mitchell:

    "...Everyone has a responsibility to make clear their participation in and their support for a process that will produce the comprehensive peace we seek..."--George Mitchell, July 2009--

    Mitchell's public request is encouraging.

Web:

Res:

  • UPDATED 12/29/2008 NPR Transcript, Avraham Burg and Omer Bartov Interview

  • UPDATED 12/29/2008 SSI2, HAMAS and Israel: Conflicting Strategies of Group-Based Politics (Dec 2008) makes some interesting observations and timely recommendations (see above paper for complete list of recommendations):

    1. Let HAMAS fulfill its electoral promise to the Palestinians. The International Crisis Group recommended in the summer of 2006 that HAMAS be allowed to govern and should cease hostilities against Israel. Further, the boycott should end as it has caused terrible hardship for Palestinians.
    2. Israel and the United States need to abandon their policies of non-negotiation and non-communication with HAMAS. A new American President should initiate a much more vigorous and dedicated program in which parties will agree to a sustained process which may take several years to complete, but which is decidedly preferable to the enormous social and economic cost of militaristic group politics that have burdened the Middle East for 6 decades.
    3. U.S. policymakers and senior DoD leaders should heed certain lessons in the Palestinian-Israeli example as well as analytical failures of Israeli and Palestinian leadership. It is wrong to summarily replicate the Israeli strategy of seizing territories and enclaves and defending perimeters in other contexts, namely Iraq. Such “clear and hold” policies may appear to work in the short term, but will never produce the true security needed for nation-building. Just so Israel has asserted its authority over, and oppressed a people whose will to resist could not be quelled, no matter what military, counterterrorist, or collaborator-buying actions were pursued, as their effort lacked legitimacy. Chaim Herzog characterized Israel as having a “civilian army” with inspired leadership in its first two wars (David Ben Gurion, Moshe Dayan), which “outgeneraled” the Arabs, utilizing the indirect approach, improvisation and flexibility. He acknowledges the IDF’s resulting overconfidence, and Egypt’s brilliant use of deception in the 1973 War. But Herzog completely underestimates the Palestinian people in his summary of the insubstantial threat posed by the PLO in this same work, The Arab-Israeli Wars, missing the very lesson that was oblivious to the French in Algeria, and which another Israeli leader, Ariel Sharon, vowed to get right. Characterizing popular resistance merely as terrorism, or the “long war,” and facing it down with counterterrorist and barrier-based measures will not succeed in the long run. Locking up the Palestinians in their enclaves will only lead to another outburst of popular resistance, and has not protected the Israeli enclaves, just as no Green Zone, no cordon sanitaire can expect to be indefinitely secure.
    4. Thus, the EU, the United States, Russia, and the UN should aid the conflicting parties in devising a new approach to negotiations. This is important, for rather than standing shoulder-to-shoulder to the United States in postponing negotiations, the world’s diplomatic practice needs ample revision, so that the third Intifadha and the seventh Arab-Israeli War need never be fought. The benefits of abandoning silence, boycotts, and secret coups would extend beyond the Arab-Israeli conflict to the issue of nuclear weapons and Iran and other rapprochements necessary to win the war on terror.
    5. The parties could consider an internationalization of Jerusalem with specific reference to the holy places there. The Palestinian and Israeli positions are far apart on the issue, but it is worth noting that in terms of international law, East Jerusalem was a part of the West Bank until its conquest and occupation in June 1967 under the Regulations of the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907, Articles 42 and 43; the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, Articles 1 and 2 (which Israel ratified in 1951); the First Protocol of 1977, Part 1; and UN Resolutions 2253 and 2254 and Security Council Resolution 252, which treats Israel’s unification of Jerusalem as an illegal act. This is the reason that other nations do not recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and locate their embassies in Tel Aviv.
    6. Jerusalem may be a more emotional issue than the matter of Palestinian refugees—except to the Palestinians, their refugees, and their descendents. HAMAS’ position is that they must be considered and offered rights of return because those are the rights possessed by all Jews in the world today. HAMAS’ officials have added, as do others, that it is very likely that not many would return, and that a staged process granting a set number per year could be established, thereby alleviating certain other longstanding situations in Lebanon and Syria, for example. A related solution is reparations for refugees, or both. These issues cannot be dealt with immediately, but should not be put off as in the Oslo process, or ignored or denigrated by Israelis to the extent that Palestinians lose trust in the other side.
    7. Dismantling the settlements in the West Bank, and the corporate seizures and Israeli usage of land in the Jordan Valley which actually carves off a huge section of the West Bank, is essential to a resolution of the crisis.

-----notes-----

1. America must cease all non-humanitarian support for Israel and insist it seek treatment for its national mental illness.

Seeking treatment for Shoah Shock Syndrome in no way minimizes the tragedy of the Holocaust.

2. Strategic Studies Institute United States Army War College; Author Sherifa D. Zuhur.

3. The Holocaust Is Over is partially biographical and autobiographical. Burg is not examining the Holocaust as an academic exercise, but as part of a passionate plea for Israel to restructure its national identity and what it means to be Jewish, today.

Burg is not subtle, but when you're urging a national identity restructure or change, most, if not all subtlety would be missed anyways. What Burg lacks in subtlety he more than offsets with prescience.

4. In somewhat bizarre logic some monotheistic religions fanatically support Jews as "God's chosen people", but only so they can be destroyed at the "Second Coming"!

You have to wonder why the Jews accept support from those who in effect believe they are "fattening them for slaughter"? Of course you also have to wonder about those holding a belief that they are supporting the Jews long enough to get them to the slaughterhouse!

But then religions are nothing if not bizarre—the more fanatic a religion is the more bizarre it's beliefs!

And our tax-code does not effectively differentiate the bizarre from the more bizarre religions.

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