The Growing Trend Toward Fascism in Israel

[American Dream]

http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com/200 ... scism.html

The Growing Trend Toward Fascism

The chilling article below, from this weekend's (February 6th, 2009) Haaretz, appears at first to be disturbing simply for what it says about a growing segment of Israel's next generation of voters—an open, even proud, racism and an attraction to fascism, in the form of support for Avigdor Lieberman, chairman of the Israel Beitenu party, which is poised to become Israel's third largest party in Tuesday's election. The key selling point of the party in this election is a "loyalty oath" that would be a prerequisite for citizenship rights, clearly directed at Israel's Palestinian Israeli citizens.

But the article illuminates (or darkens) far more. Such as the horrifying prospect of highschoolers campaigning for Lieberman by screaming "Death to the Arabs!" in the streets and consciously explaining that this helps them prepare to enter the army. As the article quotes:

"Sergei Leibliyanich, a senior, draws a connection between the preparation for military service in school and student support for the right: "It gives us motivation against the Arabs. You want to enlist in the army so you can stick it to them. The preparation gives you the motivation to stick it to the Arabs and we want to elect someone who'll do that. I like Lieberman's thinking about the Arabs. Bibi [Benjamin Netanyahu] doesn't want to go as far."

The further you read, the clearer it is that this a phenomena that draws strength from so many of the issues facing Israeli society: not just virulent Anti-Arab racism, but a reliance on violence, the emphasis on militaristic values, the broken education system, and the crumbling of democratic principles. But perhaps, at root, the problem, as the article indicates, is this:

"The Israeli reality can no longer hide what it has kept hidden up to now - that today no sentient mother can honestly say to her child: 'Next year things will be better here.' The young people are replacing hope for a better future with a myth of a heroic end. For a heroic end, Lieberman fits the bill…. In a reality in which you can't honestly tell your children, 'Tomorrow will be better,' in which the realization has finally sunk in that no deal or accord is about to happen, not now or 10 years from now - they react in a hysterical, survivalist fashion. In such a situation, the commitment to humanist values can be viewed as a luxury that we as a society cannot afford."

--Rebecca Vilkomerson



http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1061910.html

Liebermania
By Yotam Feldman

The Yisrael Beiteinu youths gather for a final consultation as dozens of elderly party supporters slowly make their way into the white tent where the movement's conference is being held, behind the Plaza Hotel in Upper Nazareth.

The youths, ages 16-18, many of them good friends from school, had stood for a long time before the event began at the intersection near the hotel, waving Israeli flags and shouting "Death to the Arabs" and "No loyalty, no citizenship" at passing cars.

In the tent, they deliberate over what to shout when Lieberman enters: Calling out "The next prime minister" may sound a bit presumptuous with regard to the leader of what's likely to be the third-largest party in the next Knesset. But during a week when Yisrael Beiteinu won the highest level of support in mock high-school polls - the sky's the limit.

Not even the investigation of several close Lieberman aides, announced by the state prosecutor that very morning, could dampen their enthusiasm. To the sounds of kitschy Russian music, the party's candidates take their places behind a long table. The young people gather right in front of the stage and lovingly greet the new heroes of the right. Even Lieberman's rather colorless deputy, MK Uzi Landau, evokes strong, passionate cheers. But these pale in comparison to the reaction when the party chairman makes his entrance.

Now the youths are beaming, holding their flags aloft and shouting so loudly it makes them hoarse: "Here comes the next prime minister!" If not in the upcoming election, then maybe in the one after that, when these young people will vote for the first time.

The conference concluded with the singing of the national anthem, which the young attendees sang aggressively in the style of Beitar Jerusalem fans. On the bus back to the center of Upper Nazareth, one of the youths offers this explanation for his excitement about the party:

"This country has needed a dictatorship for a long time already. But I'm not talking about an extreme dictatorship. We need someone who can put things in order. Lieberman is the only one who speaks the truth." Adds Edan Ivanov, an 18 year old who describes himself as being "up on current events":

"We've had enough here with the 'leftist democracy' - and I put that term in quotes, don't get me wrong. People have put the dictator label on Lieberman because of the things he says. But the truth is that in Israel there can't be a full democracy when there are Arabs here who oppose it.

"All Lieberman's really saying is that anyone who isn't prepared to sign an oath of loyalty to the state, because of his personal views, cannot receive equal rights; he can't vote for the executive authority. People here are gradually coming to understand what needs to be done concerning a person who is not loyal."

Do these ideas fit with what you're learning in civics lessons?

Ivanov: "In my opinion, school doesn't tell it like it is. In school, you want to get a matriculation certificate, you need the grades, but you don't learn the truth there. The truth you learn from the neighborhood, from the street. I don't mean the street in a negative sense - I mean that you learn the truth from what's happening here."

What's happening here?

"We have a problem: Upper Nazareth is surrounded by minorities. There are lots of incidents with them. Women are scared to walk in the streets, and people are afraid they'll be stabbed. No one knows what to do about it at this point. There are people who live here and during a war they act as a fifth column. It will only be possible to make peace with them after we make war."

Is that why people shout "Death to the Arabs"?

"The people who shout 'Death to the Arabs' - they mean death to those who support terror. There are Druze and Bedouin, too, and we have lots of friends who are minorities and we have no problem with them. By the way, there are also a lot of Arabs who come with us to demonstrations and shout 'Death to the Arabs,' meaning 'death to everyone except me.'"

Also at universities

The young people of Upper Nazareth are not alone. As noted, Yisrael Beiteinu was victorious overall in the mock elections held in 10 high schools across the country, and organized by comedian Shabi Zaraya and Ben Ravsky of Sky Productions.

Granted, these polls weren't based on a representative sample, statistically speaking. The voting in some cases was even held while the fighting was going on in Gaza, which likely affected the results. But the preferences of the 2,877 students polled are at least indicative of a certain mood.

Yisrael Beiteinu came in first with 19.76 percent of the vote, followed closely by Likud with 19.5 percent, Labor with 15.85 percent, Kadima with 14.11 percent and Yisrael Hazaka (Strong Israel) with 9.12 percent. Meretz got the lowest percentage of votes, just 2.9 percent, and not a single vote was cast for an Arab party.

Young people's enthusiasm for Lieberman is also evident in the sample polls conducted at the universities. In one conducted on January 20 at the College of Administration, Lieberman's was the third-largest party, garnering 24 seats, after Likud (34) and Kadima (29). Even at normally left-leaning Tel Aviv University, Yisrael Beiteinu doubled its strength in relation to the sample poll conducted there ahead of the previous election, receiving 12 seats.

The party's leaders are not surprised. "Young people like to hear clear messages," Landau says. "They want a unified message. We state our positions plainly. They're fed up with the other candidates' zigzags."

Alex Miller, who is coordinating the party's activities for young people and was the youngest MK ever elected to the Knesset (at age 28), explains at the conclusion of a panel discussion with students at Ben-Gurion University:

"Loyalty is the most burning issue for the youth. They're about to go in the army and therefore national honor is important to them. They want someone whose word is good, who stands behind his principles. Avigdor Lieberman projects strength."

One group that is not quite as thrilled with Yisrael Beiteinu's meteoric rise is high-school civics teachers, who now find themselves in quite a dilemma: On the one hand, this is a legitimate political party that obtained the approval of the Central Election Committee and has representatives in the Knesset. Presumably, some of the teachers also support the party.

On the other hand, the messages expressed by party representatives in the schools contradict the most basic principles in the civics textbooks that are supposed to be used in the classroom. It's not clear how a teacher would explain to his students that linking citizens' duties with citizens' rights can run counter to democratic principles, and at the same time introduce a party representative who calls for denying civil rights to anyone who does not enlist in military or national service.

Moshe Slansky, a civics teacher at ORT Singalovsky School in Tel Aviv, did not keep quiet when confronting the discrepancy between the principles of democracy that are taught, and the messages of Yisrael Beiteinu representatives.

On "election day" at the school on January 5, MK Miller drew boisterous applause when he gave a fiery speech denouncing anyone who dared to demonstrate against the operation in Gaza, and called for "the people who support those who fight against us" not to be given equal rights.

Slansky requested a chance to speak and addressed the students: "If anyone repeats the undemocratic things said here by Miller on my exams, I will deduct points from his grade." The high-schoolers responded with a hail of boos.

"I told Miller I couldn't grasp what he meant to say, because one of the most important democratic principles that we teach is the limits of authority, and freedom of expression," Slansky said this week.

"After they booed, I realized I didn't have a chance there. It was a very unpleasant feeling, obviously. I understand that there's an issue of election propaganda, but when a candidate speaks this way to students whose critical abilities are lacking, who don't have that broader view - it just shows how much work I have left to do."

Is it upsetting?

"Of course it's upsetting, but what should we do? Just give up? Stop teaching civics? To blame the school for the students being intolerant and non-pluralistic is to make a very dire accusation. It's the society in which we live. I can't be the last one to put on the brakes. I do my best."

Miller claims that the teacher "misunderstood my intention" and that, in any event, he is not concerned by the supposed contradiction between his party's messages and the school curriculum. In fact, Miller expects his party's success to alter the education system's messages.

"What they're learning is what there is right now," he says. "As we've said, one of the key issues for us is to regulate loyalty, and I hope that as soon as legislation is enacted, they'll study it as a basis, as law."

Why do youths accept messages that contradict what they learn in school?

Miller: "They have a home, they have a family, they have access to the media and they hear things. If there's something they don't like, they can talk about it with the teachers. There's nothing wrong with asking a teacher why she's teaching a subject like this and not like that."

The polling results at the ORT Singalovsky School show that the students were not very impressed with Slansky's remarks: Yisrael Beiteinu came in second with 34.5 percent of the vote, trailing Likud which earned 35 percent. Kadima was a distant third with just 9 percent of the student votes.

Independent thinking

A relatively calm political discussion took place this week at the Tchernichovsky School in Netanya. While party representatives, seated behind a table covered with an ugly purple tablecloth, laid out their worldviews, the female students fixed each other's hair and the male students passed notes to one another.

The Yisrael Beiteinu representative, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, did receive some cries of support when he presented his positions, most notably concerning the connection between loyalty and citizenship. When the votes were counted, civics teacher Haim Wolloch heaved a sigh of relief.

Wolloch, a short fellow wearing glasses with thick purple plastic frames, happily announced that Yisrael Beitenu had won just 16 percent of the vote, which is pretty close to its standing in national polls. On the other hand, the comments students are making don't necessarily indicate that there has been much success in inculcating democratic principles.

"Israeli Arabs don't support the state and yet they receive money and a seat in the Knesset," says 11th-grader Nicole Parnasa. "Serious measures need to be taken to make them aware of what they're doing. Someone who doesn't declare his loyalty to the state, who has no patriotism, should have his citizenship taken away. Anyone who's against the operation in Gaza, for example - that's a kind of disloyalty. Anyone who burns the flag, that's disloyalty. The military operation was for the sake of the country, after we kept quiet for eight years, so now they don't support it?"

"There was a demonstration by Israeli Arabs during Operation Cast Lead," complains Daniela Nisani, another 11th-grader. "It's such chutzpah: You live in this country and you don't support it? Let them go to Hamas."

Sergei Leibliyanich, a senior, draws a connection between the preparation for military service in school and student support for the right: "It gives us motivation against the Arabs. You want to enlist in the army so you can stick it to them. The preparation gives you the motivation to stick it to the Arabs and we want to elect someone who'll do that. I like Lieberman's thinking about the Arabs. Bibi [Benjamin Netanyahu] doesn't want to go as far."

Wolloch, the civics teacher, isn't fazed: "The children think independently and we can't limit their thinking. Yisrael Beitenu is a protest movement definitely challenging the way the country is run."

Does this challenge conform to the democratic principles you're seeking to inculcate?

Wolloch: "A lot of kids speak in slogans without really understanding their implication. We advocate loyalty to the country, and then if someone says that they're not loyal, the students react in accordance with their age. The school conveys democratic messages and each person takes whatever he takes from that. But they also take things from their homes and from other places. You can't say that we are solely responsible for shaping their outlook. We try to teach tolerance."

Miriam Darmoni-Sharvit, a former civics teacher who is overseeing the implementation of the Kremnitzer Commission's recommendations concerning democracy education (which were drawn up in 1995 and stressed the goals of the civics curriculum), believes there is a fundamental problem with the educational system: The values of some of the teachers themselves are somewhat shaky.

Darmoni-Sharvit: "In Israel, teaching democracy is not a priority for anyone, and it's clear that there's a problem with teachers' democratic values. When we teach about human rights, we teach that duties and rights are not to be linked - that a citizen has certain rights regardless of any duty he did or did not fulfill.

"Many people, including school officials, have a very firmly entrenched view, based on years of experience, that a right is dependent upon fulfillment of a duty. That someone who doesn't serve in the army, who doesn't declare loyalty to the state, shouldn't receive rights. There are teachers who may go by the book, but it doesn't convince the students, and some teachers feel the same way."

She goes on to note that part of the problem in democracy education stems from the substantial gap between the students' knowledge of the subject, as expressed in exams and in classroom discussion - and the application of these values in their everyday lives.

"On the first level, of conveying the basic principles of democracy, the teachers are quite successful ... On other levels, such as inculcating democracy as a worldview and translating these values to the classroom, we see other things. You can have discussions in civics class and study entire texts, and then suddenly a boy says to a girl, 'Shut up, you slut,' and the teacher doesn't stop everything right then and there. When that happens you lose the connection between what's being taught and what's happening. In my daughter's class, the kids told a joke that went something like: 'How long does it take an Arab woman to get rid of the trash? Nine months,' and the teacher didn't stop or say anything to them about it."

Fear at the fringes

A big part of the problem, says Darmoni-Sharvit, is the teachers' fear of addressing political issues. Fear that makes learning technical and formal, for the most part.

"They're all afraid of it, but you see it mostly at the fringes," she says. "Religious teachers and teachers in settlements think the Education Ministry's program is very leftist, so they teach it in a very technical way, just so the kids can pass the matriculation exam. There are circles that have essentially disengaged from the state and its democratic values, and the kids are definitely hearing this in school. With the Arabs it's even more complicated: They're very careful to avoid discussions because of the fear that nationalist positions will come out, which will reach the ministry inspector or the principal and endanger their jobs. So they teach the subject in an even more technical fashion than the religious Jewish teachers."

Do schools also teach messages that contradict democratic education?

"In the school system there's a discrepancy between the official curriculum and the 'unofficial' curriculum [including what's known as Shelach], Land of Israel studies that have a nationalist bent, and preparatory workshops for the army and the Gadna pre-military youth corps. The [Holocaust-related] trips to Poland could have been an occasion to teach broader humanistic understanding, but they end up being all about 'Then we were weak and now we are strong - We won't give them another chance to kill us.'

"When I talk in civics class about the Arab minority, and about its uniqueness in being a majority that became a minority, my students argue and say it's not true that they were a majority. When I go to the history teacher and ask her why the students don't know that in 1947 there was a certain number of Arabs here, and in 1948 there was a different number, she becomes evasive and says it's not part of the material."

The failure of the school system is evident not just in student's opinions, but sometimes in their actions, too. There have been a number of disturbing incidents: On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day last year, dozens of Jewish youths attacked two Arab youths after seeing a message on ICQ urging them "to put an end to all the Arabs walking around the Pisga [Pisgat Ze'ev]"; youths took part in the violence against Arabs in Acre last October; and just this week, Jewish youths from Tiberias went after a young Arab with clubs as he was walking on the city's boardwalk.

Interviewed by phone this week, Education Minister Yuli Tamir acknowledged that she herself is skeptical about the ministry's success in instilling democratic values:

"Lieberman's growing strength indicates that there is deep confusion about everything related to democratic values, and this obligates the system to conduct a profound reckoning regarding its ability to instill these values. Civics studies are very technical, the children are not internalizing the profound values because, in the Israeli context, these values are perceived as leftist. If you go on the ministry's Web sites that deal with citizenship, you'll find all of these principles, but the teachers are afraid to talk about it, because there's a labeling that occurs when one makes statements about equality or civil rights."

The schools seem to be speaking in two voices. Is there a gap between democratic education and patriotic education?

Tamir: "Israeli society is speaking in two voices: We see ourselves as a democratic society, yet we often neglect things that are very basic to democracy. These things are not at the top of the Israeli agenda. If the students see the Knesset disqualifying Arab parties, a move that I've adamantly opposed, how can we expect them to absorb democratic values?"

Prof. Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, whose specialty is the philosophy of education, argues that the political positions of Israeli youths derive in part from historical ignorance:

"It's not that they don't know what Lieberman says. It's that they don't understand the implications of what Lieberman says. They may know how to quote phrases like 'What we need is an iron fist in a silk glove.' If you think about such a metaphor - are they able to really appreciate what such a phrase means, are they aware of its connection to the fascist tradition? Are they capable of linking this phrase to the tradition in which it was originally used? They know slogans. They don't know history."

Gur-Ze'ev also offers an original explanation for young people's tendency to support Lieberman:

"The Israeli reality can no longer hide what it has kept hidden up to now - that today no sentient mother can honestly say to her child: 'Next year things will be better here.' The young people are replacing hope for a better future with a myth of a heroic end. For a heroic end, Lieberman fits the bill.

"Outwardly they may say that Lieberman will bring about a better future," the professor adds, "but have them talk with a psychologist or with a philosopher and these mantras will implode. In a reality in which you can't honestly tell your children, 'Tomorrow will be better,' in which the realization has finally sunk in that no deal or accord is about to happen, not now or 10 years from now - they react in a hysterical, survivalist fashion. In such a situation, the commitment to humanist values can be viewed as a luxury that we as a society cannot afford."


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Jewish Peace News editors:
Joel Beinin
Racheli Gai
Rela Mazali
Sarah Anne Minkin
Judith Norman
Lincoln Shlensky
Rebecca Vilkomerson
Alistair Welchman
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Jewish Peace News archive and blog: http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com

[Jeff]

It's been trending hard that way since the assassination of Rabin.

Rabin's murder is considered irrelevant by many on the left for the same reason as JFK's: both are distractions from structural critique. Kennedy was a Cold Warrior; Rabin was a Zionist. Their deaths are greeted with shrugs. But that's to confuse what promise, even false, the men might have represented to Americans or Vietnamese or Israelis or Palestinians, with what risks they came to pose to criminalized institutions.

Assassination is a tool of fascist statecraft.

[American Dream]

I am generally a bit ambivalent about these sorts of psychohistorical explanations for human events- not because they are wrong, but rather because they do not explain things as completely as they might purport to. The same holds true for dialectical materialism though, and most any other such meta-theory, even though viewing things through these various lenses may be important, too.

I therefore offer up this article as, at the very least, "food for thought"...


http://www.realitysandwich.com/israel_o ... led_trauma

Israel is Outgassing Its Unhealed Trauma
Paul Levy



As a human being of Jewish heritage, I feel deeply ashamed by what Israel is acting out in Gaza. I feel so shocked by the horror of what Israel is doing to the Palestinians that it has literally taken me a few weeks to sufficiently integrate the trauma triggered within me so that I could begin to find words. I feel as if I am sitting in the audience watching a family member who I love perform on stage, and because of my intimate connection and identification with my beloved family member, I am completely mortified by what I see them unconsciously acting out in the world theater. I am rendered numb and speechless, as my face turns pale and my breath is taken away by the extent of Israel's criminal and immoral insanity. It is like watching a dark, destructive inhuman energy making a people its instrument.

How we understand what is happening in Gaza depends upon where we start looking in time. The Israeli-influenced U. S. government/mainstream-media's propaganda starts the narrative at the missiles being shot by Hamas, who are considered the terrorists, without asking the relevant question -- why is Hamas shooting off missiles in the first place? Though Hamas shooting rockets into Israel can in no way be condoned, when we look at the situation in a broader context, we see that Hamas is terrorizing Israel in response to the terror, genocide and holocaust being perpetrated by Israel upon the Palestinians. Hamas is lobbing missiles into Israel to publicize the plight of the Palestinians, to bring international attention to the fact that they are being imprisoned and starved to death, as Israel has not been permitting sufficient food, water, fuel and medicine into the death camp which is Gaza.

There is an insidious double-bind inherent in their conflict. Both Israel and the Palestinians are afraid, and therefore unable to do themselves the very thing they need the other to do, which is to stop the violence. Israel wants security. And the Palestinians just want to be free of Israel's illegal occupation and have the right to their own self-determination. Israel wants Hamas to stop shooting its missiles into Israel. Hamas insists they will stop if Israel stops oppressing them and gives back to the Palestinians their intrinsic right to exist in freedom. Israel, in its flawless illogic, is afraid to let the Palestinians be free of their domination because it imagines that the Palestinians will then shoot rockets at it, thereby creating as well as perpetuating the very situation it doesn't want (please see my article "Delusions of Separation [1]").

To resolve the deadlock, Israel, being in the position of having infinitely more power than the Palestinians, has to be the figure which takes the first step out of the infinite regression. Those with the most power are undoubtedly in a better position to fix a problem than those with the least. Holding the power in its very hands, Israel has it within its grasp to stop abusing it. You can only let go of something if you fully possess it. The fact that Israel is wielding its overwhelming power in a way which creates the very thing it is afraid of is the signature of the traumatized soul caught in the act.



Trauma is an Entity All Its Own

Israel is a nation in trauma, which is a form of collective madness. Trauma is a form of psychological damage rooted in a kind of vital shock to the organism. When we are in trauma, we unconsciously act out the unhealed trauma both within ourselves and out in the world, traumatizing and terrorizing others as we simultaneously re-traumatize ourselves. There is a newly emerging scientific understanding of trauma that describes its underlying bio-energetic logic and illumines how unhealed trauma warps and alters the emotional and psychological lives of human beings. Understanding how trauma operates in the human psyche and exhibits itself through behavior in the outer world will help us to illumine the underlying, deeper process animating events in Gaza. As we understand the deeper process in-forming events in Gaza, we reciprocally deepen our understanding of the trauma within ourselves, for no human alive today is free from trauma and/or the effects of trauma.

Trauma is a unique phenomenon all its own, as if it is an entity in and of itself. When we are traumatized, our creative life-force becomes frozen back in time, locked in the shock of the traumatizing event. Trauma is not a noun or a thing, but a verb, in that it is a dynamic process which has a timeless dimension yet also unfolds over time. Unresolved trauma employs itself as it attempts to work itself out over the course of time, as its spirit gets passed down through multiple generations. Trauma happens when we suffer an overwhelming event which we cannot assimilate into our being in the typical way. When traumatized, our attempts to heal from our trauma tend to be dysfunctional and are themselves the very actions which animates in ourselves, extends to others and thereby re-creates the trauma we are trying to heal from in what becomes a diabolically self-perpetuating negative feedback loop which is truly crazy-making and seemingly has no end or exit strategy.

The trauma animating events in Gaza can be more deeply understood when we contemplate the nature of trauma in the context of the field dynamics inherent in family systems. In family systems, abuse is a ritual which is collectively and collaboratively enacted, which is to say that everyone in the field picks up a different inter-dependent role which weaves together the tapestry of the whole family dynamic. The Israelis and the Palestinians switch roles over time, as they both at certain moments in time have alternately played the role of the victim and/or the abuser, justifying their violence based on the abuse by the other. In this moment in time, however, in this scene of the play we are in, Israel is the one who is unconsciously playing the role of the abuser, and it is important to not pretend this isn't so.

When we have unhealed abuse, we inadvertently abuse others. When we are unconsciously acting out our trauma, we are not in the driver's seat, but rather, we ourselves are being compulsively driven by the trauma. Freud found in trauma a "daemonic force at work." The term "daemonic" refers to a transpersonal (beyond the personal) energy which irrupts from a deeper level of our being and can possess the ego (of a person or a nation), causing them to become its instruments. Encoded in the daemonic is creative power, which if not honored and constructively expressed constellates in its "demonic," and hence, destructive form. When we are in trauma, the trauma is using us as its agents of articulation, as it compels us to literally materialize and express its essential dynamic in symbolic but living form. The nature of unhealed trauma is to demand the transmission of its lineage in the outside world. Trauma is a conduit through which an atemporal, archetypal process existing deep inside the human soul becomes visible in form and manifests and extends itself in the realm of linear time, which is to say that trauma, besides being a horror, is also potentially a transformative revelation.

When we are in trauma, we of necessity traumatize others, as if we can't help ourselves. Trauma's medium of expression is not localized in one individual, but rather, trauma is a collective process which manifests "nonlocally" (not bound by the conventional laws of time and space) throughout the entire field. Because of its interactive nature with the surrounding field, trauma cannot be comprehended if we view ourselves as isolated entities separate from the field. Israel and the Palestinians don't exist in isolation from each other, but rather in intimate co-relation to each other. The violence that is being perpetrated between these two polarized agencies couldn't happen without their mutual, co-operative antagonism. The adversarial roles they are playing are reciprocally co-arising and mutually conditioning each other, as if they are contained in and an expression of a deeper unified and unifying field. The Israelis and Palestinians are in-formed by and collaboratively re-enacting a deeper archetypal process, which is revealing itself through their interactions.

Trauma is a nonlocal field phenomenon which pervades the entire field of consciousness. It is like a higher-dimensional virus, a bug in the system whose nature is to spread and propagate itself throughout the field, branding and enlisting people to be its instruments of proliferation. At the same time that trauma is a nonlocal field phenomenon, it is also an extremely localized crystallization of a higher-dimensional process which is literally bleeding through into our third dimensional world. Nonlocal in nature, trauma is simultaneously an acutely local phenomenon in that it is happening within each one of us.

In Gaza, a role reversal has taken place - the Jewish people, the victim of unresolved trauma that they suffered not only during the Second World War, but throughout their history, have now become the perpetrators. One of the things unique about trauma is that in the process of integrating and healing from trauma, we are compelled to unconsciously act out the role of the abuser. Israel, to the extent it hasn't dealt with its own trauma, has split-off from and at the same time internalized the abuser, while unconsciously identifying with its original aggression, which is a common characteristic of the traumatized soul. To dissociate from and be unconsciously identified with the sadistic aggressor who perpetrated the original trauma is to become possessed by this figure, to be lethally compelled to act out its violence in a terrorizing, malevolent and life-destroying way. In an appalling reversal of the golden rule, Israel is doing unto others what was done unto it. In the open-air death camp by the sea which is Gaza, the Jewish people have re-created their experience in World War II, with the Palestinians playing the roles that the Jews played in the Warsaw ghetto.

Terrorism is the re-creation and the ritual re-enactment of the original trauma, only with the roles reversed. In unconsciously "outgassing" - which is the slow release of a gas that is trapped and frozen in matter (in this case, the matter is the psyche) - their trauma, Israel unbinds itself in an orgasmic discharge of inner, frustrated destructiveness freed from all restraints in order to attain the complete reversal of its inner condition. Ironically, Israel is advertising how it is acting "with restraint," an idea which only cultivates further terror.

What we don't remember, we act out on others, as the other in ourselves acts itself out through our unconscious. When we are traumatized, we compulsively give shape to our trauma by trying to kill in others what has been seemingly killed in ourselves. When we act out our unhealed trauma upon someone, we induce in them the feeling we had when we were traumatized, as if we are reducing them to the feeling which we are not able to feel ourselves.

To the extent that Israel is allowed to get away with murder, a thermonuclear rage is generated within the collective unconscious of the Palestinians as a natural, karmic, retroactive outgrowth of the violence and injustice being perpetrated upon them by the Israelis. In their actions, the Israelis are putting the gas on, fanning the flames and kindling the fire of the never-ending cycle of retributive violence. Interestingly, the word "karma" refers to one's own doing, which is to say that what we experience as karma is the fruition of our own actions.

There is only one thing for sure about what Israel is doing - its actions are guaranteed to make it less safe, as however many members of Hamas it kills, it will give birth to ten times more people in the Muslim world who want Israel destroyed. In their insane actions, the Israelis are unwittingly creating a self-fulfilling prophecy which will ultimately destroy them if not illumined. By trying to make themselves safe, they are turning the wheel of karmic blowback and adding energy to the rotary engines of their own self-destruction.



The Origin of Trauma is the Psyche

Both the origin and resolution of the dis-ease of trauma are to be found within the human psyche. Understanding the underlying bio-energetic logic and psychological dynamics of trauma empowers us to transform it at its roots, which is the psyche itself. Shadow projection, a process in which we split-off from and project outside of ourselves our darker, inferior and disowned parts, is the deep, core psychological process which is fueling the events in Gaza (please see my article "Shadow Projection: The Fuel of War [2]"). Psychologically speaking, the Israelis and the Palestinians are bound together in an intimate dance of projecting the shadow onto each other, a process which is simultaneously the cause and effect of the collective psychosis they are enacting and which also pervades the field at large. The process of collective, mutual shadow projection insures that in and over time both Israel and the Palestinians will become possessed by the shadow they project onto the other.

Paradoxically, the Palestinians, seen symbolically as shadow reflections of Israel's psyche, represent the Israelis own despised weakness, which evokes revulsion and must be destroyed, while at the same time embodying the malevolent other, which evokes fear and therefore must also be destroyed.

The deepest trauma always has to do with the part of us that is most vulnerable. Instead of consciously feeling their pain and vulnerability, the Israelis are trying to destroy anyone who reminds them of it. What the Israelis are acting out on the world stage is a reflection of Israel's internal, psychological process of trying to exterminate its own feelings of vulnerability and weakness. Intrinsic to trauma is the double-bind of having to deny what cannot be forgotten. Psychologically speaking, Israel's actions are a frantic attempt at postponing the inevitable return of the repressed.

The feeling of powerlessness is the origin of terrorism. Israel's terrorizing behavior reduces the Palestinians to a state of utter helplessness, which only feeds future terrorism. In its misguided attempts to unconsciously compensate for its own feelings of powerlessness, what Israel is doing in trying to protect itself is a convoluted, perverse and destructive way of trying to step into its power and authority. Playing the archetypal role of the abuser to perfection, Israel abuses its power simply because it can get away with it, which is morally indefensible. When Israel misuses their greater power by reacting with orders of magnitude greater violence than their attackers, they lose any claim or pretense to a higher moral ground.

Seen symbolically, the Palestinians reflect back to the Israelis their unconscious guilt, as deep down in the depths of their souls, the Jewish people know they are breaking the law of human decency, which is to say the law of God. It is impossible for people to not feel guilty in their unconscious when they are acting out their abuse. This guilt, however, is the very feeling they split-off from consciously experiencing, which in a vicious circle is the very thing animating their guilt in the first place. The Israelis dissociating from their guilt and continuing to project it onto the Palestinians animates what they unconsciously feel guilty about, which further fuels their compulsion to eradicate the ones who remind them of their guilt in a self-reinforcing feedback loop which inevitably results in self-destruction for everyone involved. This is the nature of un-illumined trauma, as if the entity of trauma develops an autonomous life of its own and consumes its host if it is not properly metabolized. To the extent that we are unwilling and unable to consciously experience our feelings of guilt is the extent to which we are guilty of unconsciously enacting something to feel guilty about.

In dissociating from and projecting out its shadow onto the Palestinians, Israel dehumanizes the Palestinians, which feeds into its racist belief that a Jewish life is worth more than a Palestinian life. To protect itself from realizing its state of inner depravity, Israel entrances itself by its own shadow projections and starts believing its own lies, identifying with a one-sidedly self-righteous and virtuous image of itself which legitimizes its atrocities in its own deluded mind. Any reflection which threatens this self-image is demonized and kept at arm's length, as it threatens the lie inherent in its illusions, which must be protected at all costs.



We Are All Complicit

Israel, being in the role of the abuser, (arche)typically blames the Palestinians, the victims of their abuse, for causing them to act so abusively, as if they themselves have no responsibility for or control over the choices they are making. Blaming the victim is a classic pattern that gets played out in all situations of abuse. Embodying the role of the archetypical abuser, Israel imagines itself to be the innocent victim, and yet in reality it is enacting the role of the perpetrator disguised as the victim. Like any abuser in a family system, it could only get away with its crimes with the silence, and collusion of others in the family system, which in this case is the world community - US.

In its enactment of war crimes, Israel is a nation gone mad. Israel has become a rogue state that doesn't abide by international law, has weapons of mass destruction, and enacts terrorism - simply defined as coercive threats or violent acts perpetrated on innocent civilians for political ends. And like a typical family system, related figures who are in the position of not only condemning the abuse but have the power to stop it, like the United States, are instead complicit in, enabling and openly supporting the abuse. For example, the U. S. blocked a United Nations Security Council statement calling for an immediate ceasefire, blames Hamas for the conflict and continues to supply weapons for Israel to use in its war crimes.

The U. S. supports Israel because Israel's madness is a reflection of its own. The trauma which Israel is re-enacting is a reflection of the abuse which the U. S. has enacted throughout its history, starting at the birth of itself as a nation with the oppression and genocide it perpetrated on the indigenous, Native Americans. Israel's abuse of the Palestinians is also a mirror of the U. S's abuse in Iraq, so of course the U. S. would see nothing wrong with what Israel is doing. In addition, Israel's abuse upon the Palestinians is analogous to how the U. S. implicitly threatens or forcibly imposes its military dominance upon the rest of the world.

Israel and the U. S. are seeing the world through their shared blind-spot, which is the opposite of being conscious. When someone's craziness reflects and resonates with our own, we insanely see them as being sane. Not recognizing their madness helps us to hide from our own. Israel and the U. S. are co-dependently entangled in a dysfunctional relationship in which they feed into and off of each other's madness, endlessly reinforcing their mutual delusion in a collective, as compared to an individual, psychosis (please see my article "Diagnosis: Psychic Epidemic [3]").

As is typical in a family system where the culture of abuse thrives, the figures who abuse their power lie and cover-up the truth so as to protect their self-serving agenda. There is good reason Israel didn't let journalists into Gaza to see the hell-realm which was created as a result of its invasion. Israel then is able to influence the dialogue, particularly in collaboration with the mainstream American media, putting out disinformation through the "perception management" arm of its war machine, as it wages a war on our minds (please see my article "The War on Consciousness [4]."). I wonder how many Americans realize that Hamas, the democratically elected government of the Palestinians, has been calling for a two-state solution for some time.

The Israeli/American propaganda implicitly defines Hamas as the "terrorist," which if unthinkingly assumed to be a given, immediately short-circuits any real dialogue due to its intrinsic one-sidedness. To concretize Hamas as being the terrorist is to fall under a form of mind-control which disables us from being able to discern who the real terrorist is. The similarity to how the U. S. frames the "Global War on Terror," as being between the good guys (the U. S.) and the "terrorists" is striking in its similarity. Who is the real terrorist? The answer goes something like this: The figure of the terrorist is a fluid and ever-shifting role in the field that is being acted out at different moments by various participants in the conflict.

It feels crazy-making when Israel claims to be peace-loving as they drop bombs on the Palestinians, killing innocent civilians in the name of peace and security. A cognitive dissonance gets constellated in our mind when we experience such contradictory double signals. Being interconnected with each other, when the unconscious manifests in the collective field through the Israelis outgassing their unhealed trauma, it nonlocally triggers everyone's unconscious trauma. Seeing Israel enacting its trauma is traumatizing, as its trauma affects all of us because we are all connected. To quote Dr. Martin Luther King, "In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly."



The Revalatory Nature of Trauma

The Israelis, by being so possessed and taken over by the unconscious, are acting out the unconscious on the world stage in such a way so as to be the unconscious' revelation in fully-embodied form. What is playing out in Gaza is a re-creation of a timeless, archetypal process which has reiterated itself over, in, and through linear time like an endlessly repeating fractal (please see my article "Archetypal Dimensions of World Events [5]"). Israel and the Palestinians are unwittingly stepping into and embodying in amplified form the deeper, archetypal pattern of trauma and abuse which has seared and imprinted itself in the collective unconscious and has played itself out throughout history. This archetypal pattern of trauma is multi-dimensional, which is to say that it plays itself out intra-personally (within ourselves) and inter-personally (between ourselves) at the same time, which is to say that the microcosm and the macrocosm are reflections of each other.

Witnessing trauma out in the world is traumatizing, in that in no time whatsoever it constellates itself within us. When we recognize that Israel is perpetrating war crimes, we allow ourselves to be shaken to the core, and something inside of us becomes ignited and set aflame. Instead of trying to destroy what made us feel this way, we then have the precious opportunity to simply feel what has gotten activated within us. Feeling into what inside of ourselves becomes triggered is the portal through which our own personal, seemingly solid, cast-in-stone and calcified trauma begins to melt, liquefy and fluidly transform itself into the revelation it has always potentially been.

We are a species in trauma. What is playing out in Gaza is a materialized reflection in symbolic form of our own self-abuse. To truly recognize the archetypal pattern of evil that Israel is playing out is to realize that this is a reflection of the potential for evil inside each one of us. Just like Israel, we are all unconsciously enacting our unhealed trauma in destructive ways through our relationship with ourselves and others. Just like a dream, our universe is a living oracle, a continually unfolding revelation which speaks by configuring events into a symbol of itself. Once we recognize what the situation in Gaza is symbolically re-presenting to us, just like when we let the deeper meaning of a symbol touch us and penetrate to the core of our being, our consciousness expands.

Seen symbolically, the madness that is being re-enacted in Gaza is a localized inflammation of a nonlocal psychic epidemic which pervades the entire field of consciousness, rendering in visible form the collective psychosis which is enfolded throughout the planetary body politic (See my article "Middle East Madness [6]"). Just as each piece of a hologram contains the whole hologram, what is happening in Gaza is an acute outbreak that reflects what is playing out both inside of each one of us as well as being the world's process. Seen as a larger-scaled iteration of the same inter-nested fractal which is incarnating itself through each one of us in our personal lives, Israel is literally and symbolically acting out its, and by extension, our trauma, writ large on the world stage.

In committing war crimes on the world stage for all to witness, Israel is revealing how it was the victim of criminal acts in the past. In acting out its abuse, it is revealing to us how horribly it has been abused. The Jewish people are understandably still reeling from the so over-the-top it's completely-unimaginable-but-true trauma of the not-so-long-ago Nazi death camps in which the world looked away and fell silent. Just like a new carpet emits, releases and outgasses the toxins trapped in it so as to become purified, the Jewish people are outgassing the most noxious vapors imaginable, dis-charging the toxins of their own horrific abuse. Because their personal trauma is at the same time archetypal in nature, which is to say it is a reflection of the spirit of unhealed trauma existing deep within the collective unconscious of humanity, the Jewish people's outgassing of their trauma allows them to let go of both their personal as well as the collective spirit of trauma which has been hermetically sealed in the cellular memory of our species.

In its outgassing and letting go of its trauma, Israel is passing on the spirit of the abuse to others in the spirit of abuse, while at the same time, the poisonous gas being released from its system is its attempt at self-empowerment and healing. Trauma is a "coincidentia oppositorum," a conjunction of opposites, which contains within its symptoms the pathology as well as its own healing. Israel is enacting its trauma in full-bodied form onto the Palestinians in an unconscious attempt to integrate the abuser within itself while potentially piecing back together its own experience of being in the role of the Palestinians. In giving life to its trauma, Israel is unconsciously trying to re-member itself, to re-connect with the dis-membered parts of its experience, as it attempts, Humpty-Dumpty like, to put itself back together again from its fragmented and shattered state.

The most insidious effects of trauma are how it dis-associates us from ourselves, as it has a dis-integrating effect upon how we experience ourselves. Due to the horrific trauma it went through in the Nazi death camps, Israel both literally embodies and symbolically re-presents being completely dis-associated from itself, which is to say "unconscious." Paradoxically, its acting out its unconscious state is potentially in the service of healing. Everything depends upon if consciousness is created through the re-experiencing of the trauma. If Israel insists on remaining unconscious of how its actions are truly criminal in the deepest sense of the word, it is simply re-traumatizing itself and others.

Trauma is a quantum phenomenon, which is to say that both its pathological as well as its medicinal aspects are holographically enfolded in potential within it (please see my article "Shadow Projection is its own Medicine [7]"). Encoded within the shell-shock of trauma are the particular, tailor-made clues for its potential resolution. Just like whether light manifests as a wave or particle depends upon how it is observed, trauma is a phenomenon which is not separate from our own consciousness. How our collective trauma manifests - in its hell-bent, pathological aspect or as evolutionary prodding from the universe catalyzing an expansion of consciousness - depends upon how we dream it (please see my article "It's All in the Psyche [8]").

Seen symbolically, Israel is a reflection of the part of us which simultaneously is the victim and perpetrator of abuse. We are all participants implicated in the trauma which Israel is suffering from, as what Israel is enacting on the world stage is our trauma, too. To the extent that we are connected with all beings throughout time and space, we are all inter-related to and complicit in each other's trauma. Trauma works through the dimension of our being where we are connected with each other.

Seen symbolically, we have all dreamed up the Israelis and Palestinians to play out in objectified form the deeper, archetypal process inspiring our self-abuse, so that we can see it and wake up to it. Recognizing this is to realize that we are not separate from the Israelis or Palestinians, or anyone else for that matter, which allows us to snap out of our delusion of imagining we exist as separate entities. Trauma not only animates the separate self, the separate self itself is the primary trauma. In addition, however, trauma is potentially the catalyst inspiring us to step out of the illusion of the separate self. Stepping out of the fiction of the separate self and recognizing we are all interconnected, interdependent parts of a greater whole who are all on the same side is the very expansion of consciousness which is simultaneously the first and last step to the re-solution of our world crisis.



A Cry for Compassion

Psychologically speaking, perpetrating inhumane war crimes on the Palestinians is Israel's extremely perverse way of crying out for help, as by its unconscionable abuses of power Israel is expressing and revealing to us in a most dramatic way how extremely sick and in need of healing it truly is. Israel is a mirror of the wounded, traumatized and mad part of ourselves. The key is how we respond to the shock of this realization.

The natural, organic expression of recognizing that Israel is a mirrored reflection of the part of ourselves which is sick, in need of healing and "knows not what it is doing" is compassion and forgiveness. Feeling compassion and forgiveness for Israel in no way precludes our also recognizing that in its enactment of its unexamined trauma, Israel is guilty of war crimes and needs to be held accountable. Compassion isn't always smiley-faced and sweet, as sometimes compassion is fierce and sets firm boundaries. Because of the corrupted state it has fallen into, Israel can literally not stop itself from acting out its abuse, which is to say that it desperately needs the world community's help to curb its ultimately suicidal behavior, as it is in no position to help itself. Because of its deadly effects, Israel's outgassing of its abuse needs to be alchemically contained so that it can do no further damage to others. In co-operatively coming together in repudiating and saying "no" to Israel's abusive actions, we are ultimately helping to save Israel from itself.

Abuse can only happen in a family system, be it a nuclear family or a nuclear-ized world community, when people don't step into their intrinsic power and speak their true voice (please see my article "Breaking the Vow of Silence [9]."). When we bear witness to someone enacting criminal acts, we instantaneously inherit a moral responsibility to do everything in our power to stop the criminal act, or else in our silence and inaction we become complicit.

People, Jews or non-Jews, who unquestioningly support Israel are simply being complicit in war crimes. They are playing the same roles as family members who are in a position to stop the abuse in the family system and choose instead to support it by siding with the abuser.

What Israel is doing - killing innocent men, women and children who are captive in a prison of Israel's own making - is a crime against humanity as a whole, which is to say it is a crime against each and every one of us. When innocent people are being slaughtered like they are in Gaza, we are all suffering the tragedy of losing family members. It is not just a Palestinian tragedy, or an Israeli tragedy, but a universal, human tragedy.

[hava1]

http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com/2009/02/growing-trend-toward-fascism.html

The Growing Trend Toward Fascism
Miriam Darmoni-Sharvit, a former civics teacher who is overseeing the implementation of the Kremnitzer Commission's recommendations concerning democracy education (which were drawn up in 1995 and stressed the goals of the civics curriculum), believes there is a fundamental problem with the educational system: The values of some of the teachers themselves are somewhat shaky.

Darmoni-Sharvit: "In Israel, teaching democracy is not a priority for anyone, and it's clear that there's a problem with teachers' democratic values. When we teach about human rights, we teach that duties and rights are not to be linked - that a citizen has certain rights regardless of any duty he did or did not fulfill.

"Many people, including school officials, have a very firmly entrenched view, based on years of experience, that a right is dependent upon fulfillment of a duty. That someone who doesn't serve in the army, who doesn't declare loyalty to the state, shouldn't receive rights. There are teachers who may go by the book, but it doesn't convince the students, and some teachers feel the same way."

She goes on to note that part of the problem in democracy education stems from the substantial gap between the students' knowledge of the subject, as expressed in exams and in classroom discussion - and the application of these values in their everyday lives.

"On the first level, of conveying the basic principles of democracy, the teachers are quite successful ... On other levels, such as inculcating democracy as a worldview and translating these values to the classroom, we see other things. You can have discussions in civics class and study entire texts, and then suddenly a boy says to a girl, 'Shut up, you slut,' and the teacher doesn't stop everything right then and there. When that happens you lose the connection between what's being taught and what's happening. In my daughter's class, the kids told a joke that went something like: 'How long does it take an Arab woman to get rid of the trash? Nine months,' and the teacher didn't stop or say anything to them about it."

Fear at the fringes

A big part of the problem, says Darmoni-Sharvit, is the teachers' fear of addressing political issues. Fear that makes learning technical and formal, for the most part.

"They're all afraid of it, but you see it mostly at the fringes," she says. "Religious teachers and teachers in settlements think the Education Ministry's program is very leftist, so they teach it in a very technical way, just so the kids can pass the matriculation exam. There are circles that have essentially disengaged from the state and its democratic values, and the kids are definitely hearing this in school. With the Arabs it's even more complicated: They're very careful to avoid discussions because of the fear that nationalist positions will come out, which will reach the ministry inspector or the principal and endanger their jobs. So they teach the subject in an even more technical fashion than the religious Jewish teachers."

Do schools also teach messages that contradict democratic education?

"In the school system there's a discrepancy between the official curriculum and the 'unofficial' curriculum [including what's known as Shelach], Land of Israel studies that have a nationalist bent, and preparatory workshops for the army and the Gadna pre-military youth corps. The [Holocaust-related] trips to Poland could have been an occasion to teach broader humanistic understanding, but they end up being all about 'Then we were weak and now we are strong - We won't give them another chance to kill us.'

"When I talk in civics class about the Arab minority, and about its uniqueness in being a majority that became a minority, my students argue and say it's not true that they were a majority. When I go to the history teacher and ask her why the students don't know that in 1947 there was a certain number of Arabs here, and in 1948 there was a different number, she becomes evasive and says it's not part of the material."

The failure of the school system is evident not just in student's opinions, but sometimes in their actions, too. There have been a number of disturbing incidents: On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day last year, dozens of Jewish youths attacked two Arab youths after seeing a message on ICQ urging them "to put an end to all the Arabs walking around the Pisga [Pisgat Ze'ev]"; youths took part in the violence against Arabs in Acre last October; and just this week, Jewish youths from Tiberias went after a young Arab with clubs as he was walking on the city's boardwalk.

Interviewed by phone this week, Education Minister Yuli Tamir acknowledged that she herself is skeptical about the ministry's success in instilling democratic values:
http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com

ONly small "parapolitical" commentary, re this paragraph. I worked in the "civic studies-democratic values" project, under Darmoni Sharvit (for 6 years, in fact till 2002). The presentation is somewhat misleading, and the dichotomy bn "the fascist" and "the enlightened" ...
Darmoni Sharvit landed in the "civic-democracy" scene from...professional military service (was mid career officer in some spooky arms command program in the central command of the IDF). She claimed to have "converted" from military service into realizing blah blah. I doubt that, and one of the main problems of the Israseli education system is the direct and indirect involvement of the military, mainly by using this bureau as "retirement perk" for officers (they usually get to be school directors, without any prior knowledge, experience or education in..edcucation). Moreover, the structure of the Ministry is so complex, it enables a lot of sub-contracting to IDF affiliates. Which is the usual "old boys network" in ISrael, but more insidious than that, perhaps in "civic studies" programs that CAN pose a threat to the IDF interests in recruiting the youth etc.
The project I worked for was sub contracted to a professional educational association (Darmoni was chief there) AND to....the Satelite R%D unit, which I still don't understand how it is related. There was a lot of weird stuff, some of it the usual corruption and bizarre money trails, but there could be more. That's a common situation in Israel, all those "nice names" for progressive projects (a lot of PR involved and budgets, and donations from Americans), end up in dark alleys.

So, presenting Lieberman as a demon in contrast to the "nice people" out there...is somewhat misleading, or at leads needs some clarifications on how the monster came to be.

[AlicetheKurious]

"The Israeli reality can no longer hide what it has kept hidden up to now - that today no sentient mother can honestly say to her child: 'Next year things will be better here.' The young people are replacing hope for a better future with a myth of a heroic end. For a heroic end, Lieberman fits the bill.

From AD's article:

Psychologically speaking, perpetrating inhumane war crimes on the Palestinians is Israel's extremely perverse way of crying out for help, as by its unconscionable abuses of power Israel is expressing and revealing to us in a most dramatic way how extremely sick and in need of healing it truly is. Israel is a mirror of the wounded, traumatized and mad part of ourselves. The key is how we respond to the shock of this realization.

The natural, organic expression of recognizing that Israel is a mirrored reflection of the part of ourselves which is sick, in need of healing and "knows not what it is doing" is compassion and forgiveness.

Amazing. Even as they're deliberately indoctrinating children to demand the final extermination of their victims, somehow they must be portrayed as victims, as well. So. When it's Arabs who are (falsely) accused of 'teaching their children to hate', they get bombed and imprisoned in concentration camps. When it turns out it's Israel that is the real version of 'al qaeda', when the outrageous Israeli crimes can no longer be denied, out come the gentler, kinder voices calling for "tough love".

"Outwardly they may say that Lieberman will bring about a better future," the professor adds, "but have them talk with a psychologist or with a philosopher and these mantras will implode. In a reality in which you can't honestly tell your children, 'Tomorrow will be better,' in which the realization has finally sunk in that no deal or accord is about to happen, not now or 10 years from now - they react in a hysterical, survivalist fashion. In such a situation, the commitment to humanist values can be viewed as a luxury that we as a society cannot afford."

This is just bizarre. An entire article about genocidal kids, soldiers-in-training for a genocidal army of ethnic-cleansing, seething with hate for the people from whom everything was taken so it could be given to their Masters, and not one word about the nature of the genocidal state in which these children are growing up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH0o_07BBk0&NR=1

Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate -- healthy, virile hate--for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead."
- Elie Wiesel

Hmmm..

In the looking-glass world of the media, it's the Palestinian children who are "taught to hate"; for decades, this specific accusation was used to justify their dehumanization and any crimes committed against them:

Palestinians have been accused, unjustly, of all sorts of incitement, whether through textbooks or media. These accusations were based on the lies and fabrications of the Israeli and US governments with the help of Centers and Organizations producing false documents and propaganda-style studies. An example is the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP), which launched a war against the Palestinian textbooks. CMIP is a “Jewish organization with links to extremist and racist Israeli groups that advocate settlement activities in the Palestinian territories, expulsion (transfer) of Palestinians from their homeland, and claims that Palestinians are all "terrorists" and that peace with them is not possible.”(2) The European Union, whose members funded the new textbooks, asserted that "While many of the quotations attributed to the new textbooks by the most recent CMIP report of November 2001 could be confirmed, these have been found to be often badly translated or quoted out of context, thus suggesting an anti-Jewish incitement that the books do not contain… Therefore, allegations against the new textbooks funded by EU members have proven unfounded."(3)

Education experts, Dr. Roger Avenstrup and Dr Patti Swarts concluded in "A Study of the Impact of the Palestinian Curriculum": " What is of great concern to students, teachers and parents alike is that although they wish it, students find it difficult to accept peace and conflict resolution as a solution to the conflict, and teachers find it difficult to teach, while soldiers and settlers are shooting in the streets and in schools and checkpoints have to be braved every day. It would seem that the occupation is the biggest constraint to the realization of these values in the Palestinian curriculum." (4)

Targeting Palestinian children is not new to the IOF. As a child, the first time I comprehended the meaning of occupation was when during clashes between the armed IOF and unarmed school children who were only chanting slogans against the occupation and throwing stones, a Palestinian school boy was shot in the back. During the First Intifada (1987-1993) 241 Palestinian children under the age of 17 were killed by the IOF, in addition to 13 other killed by Israeli civilians (5). In addition to thousands injured, disabled for life, imprisoned and not to forget those who got their bones broken for throwing stones.

“In 1989, a bulletin from the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, entitled 'Deliberate Murder’, reported the targeting of Palestinian children in leadership roles. Israeli army and snipers from "special units" had "carefully chosen" the children who were shot in the head or heart and died instantaneously. Other evidence, from Israeli human rights groups and the Israeli press, point to extensive use of torture, such as severe beating and electric shocks, against detainees including children .“(6) According to a study done by “Save the Children“: “The average age of the victims was ten years old; the majority of those shot were not even participating in stone throwing. In 80% of the cases where children were shot, the Israeli army prevented the victims from receiving medical attention. The report concluded that more than 50,000 children required medical attention for injuries including gunshot wounds, tear gas inhalation and multiple fractures.“(7)

While Palestinian textbooks are often under fire and wrongly accused of this and that, only few bothered to look into Israeli textbooks and investigate their contents as to their attitude towards Arabs and Palestinians. The Israeli culture of hate is to be found in school textbooks, children’s books and in Israeli literature. This culture is state-approved and state-funded. It is not an issue of one political party or one organization airing a program or printing a book with disputable content. These are school textbooks that are part of the Jewish school curricula, adopted by the Israeli government, as guidelines for Israeli children.

Racism, hate and lies are policy when it comes to describing Arabs and Palestinians. Journalist Maureen Meehan says in a report titled "Israeli Textbooks and Children's Literature Promote Racism and Hatred toward Palestinians and Arabs" that "Israeli school textbooks as well as children's storybooks, portray Palestinians and Arabs as 'murderers,' 'rioters,' 'suspicious', and generally backward and unproductive. Direct delegitimization and negative stereotyping of Palestinians and Arabs are the rule rather than the exception in Israeli schoolbooks.”(8 )

In another study, Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University, who reviewed 124 Israeli textbooks, concluded that "the majority of [Israeli school] books stereotype Arabs negatively."(9) … “by the use of blatant negative stereotyping which featured Arabs as: `unenlightened, inferior, fatalistic, unproductive and apathetic.` Further, according to the textbooks, the Arabs were `tribal, vengeful, exotic, poor, sick, dirty, noisy, colored` and `they burn, murder, destroy, and are easily inflamed.`“(10) According to Egyptian researcher Safa Abdel-Aal, “Israel's educational curricula incite the new generation for war and racism against the Arabs”. In her book “Racist Education in the Israeli Curricula” Abdel-Aal “thought that these books deliberately paint distorted pictures of the Arabs, giving them such derogatory descriptions as "Arab thieves" or "embezzlers", and referring to Arabs as "bastards, thirsty for Jewish blood" or that they are "underdeveloped Bedouins" and "vagrant highway robbers," and using phrases like "house of Arab reptiles".(11)

This culture of hate, distortion of facts and racism extends also to children’s extracurricular activities. In an educational event for second-grade students at an Israeli local elementary school in 2001 “The performance began; the children went up on stage as a group … representing the different nations, recreating the legend of how Israel received the Torah. The student who played the angel held a Torah and walked among the various nations, offering each one the Torah and the Ten Commandments. The only two groups of people wearing representative costumes were the group of Arabs, who were wearing keffiyehs, and the Jews, who were wearing yarmulkes. During the performance, the "angel" met the "Arab people" who asked, like all the other peoples: "What is written in the Torah?" The angel replied: "Thou shalt not kill." The children answered in a chorus: "No, we don't want it because we are used to killing," and they made way for the next group, the "Jewish people." The "Jewish people" asked no questions; they simply answered [with a verse from the bible], "We will do, and we will listen”.(12)

In addition to that, Palestinians either don’t exist in Israeli textbook or they are delegitimized, they are ‘robbers’ and the land isn’t theirs. History and geography are presented from the viewpoint of Zionism, where there is no place for a “Palestine“ or “Palestinians“ in the “Land of Israel“. Dr. Nurit Elhanan of the Hebrew University, revealed in a study entitled "The attitude towards Palestinians in Israeli textbooks" that "the Palestinians are absent from all textbooks, The Occupation is never mentioned, and the area where Palestinians live is presented in the maps either as an empty space referred to as 'an area without data' (Man and Space maps) or it is incorporated into the state of Israel (The Geography of the land of Israel maps). In both cases use of the term 'occupation' is out of the question, since you cannot occupy illegally what is yours anyway and you cannot occupy illegally an empty space."…. “In Israel today there is already a second generation of children who don't know there are occupation, illegal domination and illegal settlements."(13) “Generally speaking, the land itself has no history of its own, and the history of the land is presented as the history of the Jewish myth about it. The whole period, between the second temple and the Zionist settlement is not taught at all.

But more precisely, the Israeli student has no idea whatsoever about the settlement of the country before '48, that is to say, has no idea about the history of the expelled themselves and of their lives before the expulsion. And so the mythical image of the country was created as 'the Promised Land of the Jews' and not as a cultural-geographical entity in which the [Jewish] colonization took place.”(14) Nothing is mentioned in these textbooks about the suffering and the dispossession of the Palestinians “and instead attributed the motivating forces for Arab violence to their 'anti-Semitism' and hatred of Jews”(15).

Oren Ben-Dor, a former-Israeli academic, described his education as “one sided, treating the other as the enemy, the murderers, the rioters, the terrorists … without alluding, in any way, to their pains and longings. For my teachers and, as a result, for me also, for many years, Zionism was beyond reproach; it was a return to the promised land as a result of persecution, it was draining the swamps, it was building a state based on Jewish genius.”(16) Daniel Banvolegyi, a 17-year-old Israeli pupil comments: “Our books basically tell us that everything the Jews do is fine and legitimate and Arabs are wrong and violent and are trying to exterminate us,” then adding that “One kid told me he was angry because of something he read or discussed in school and that he felt like punching the first Arab he saw.“(17)

In his book “An Ugly Face in the Mirror“, Israeli writer Adir Cohen investigated the results of a survey taken of a group of 4th to 6th grade Jewish students at a school in Haifa. “The pupils were asked five questions about their attitude toward Arabs, how they recognize them and how they relate to them“. The results being that “75% of the children described the `Arab` as a murderer, one who kidnaps children, a criminal, and a terrorist. 80% said they saw the Arab as someone dirty with a terrifying face. 90% of the students stated they believe that Palestinians have no rights whatsoever to the land in Israel or Palestine.“(18 )

Israeli education is not only racist and full of hate, but encourages militarism. According to an Israeli report entitled “Child Recruitment” Israeli textbooks “reflect the militaristic attitudes inherent in the Israeli educational system, all the way from kindergarten to the last years of high school, where there is a mandatory programme for all Jewish state-run schools called "preparation for the IDF” that in most cases includes actual military training. Glorification of the military and military conquest, and negative or skewed representation of Palestinians, are to be found in many Israeli textbooks." …

"In a country where various kinds of weaponry are permanently displayed in public places and the status of the military is used to promote anything from cheese to political candidates, militarised education comes natural. One absorbs militarism at home and on the street. The military is physically present in schools and school activities. Soldiers in uniform are stationed in schools, many of them are actually teaching classes. Other teachers, and especially principals, are recently retired career officers, without proper teacher training”.(19)

The Israeli culture of hate and racism is also visible in Israeli literature, including children’s books, media and exhibitions. Israelis protest when Palestinians carry photos of their dead children, saying that Palestinians use their children as forms of propaganda. But brainwashing Israeli children, filling their heads with racist ideas and feeding them on hate is acceptable by Israeli standards. There are many examples, such the photos of Israeli children happily writing `greetings` on artillery shells fired into Lebanon, e.g. `May You Die`, `I`ve Waited So Long For This`.(20) More recent examples are a number of photos of Israeli children holding guns with the title: ‘Israelis take their children to an arms fair in Rishon leZion, Israel’. One photo shows a child examining a sniper rifle.(21) During the Israeli Invasion of the West Bank in 2002, Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronot published a letter by Israeli school children titled "Dear Soldiers, Please Kill a Lot of Arabs", adding that dozens of such letters were sent to Israeli soldiers serving in the Tulkarm area. “The letters encouraged soldiers to disregard rules and regulations and to kill as many Arabs as possible.”(22)

Cohen and El-Asmar investigated 1,700 Israeli children`s books. There was a similar pattern found in almost all of the stories: “the violent, dirty, cruel, and ignorant Arabs wanting to harm the Jews.”(23) 520 of the books contained humiliating and negative descriptions of the Palestinians and there was widespread delegitimization and dehumanization of Arabs. Arabs were “thieves, murderers, robbers, spies, arsonists, violent mobsters, terrorists, kidnappers, and the "cruel enemy". They were also “characterized with labels related to violence, primitivism, inferiority and backwardness”. “66% of the 520 books refer to Arabs as violent; 52% as evil; 37% as liars; 31% as greedy; 28% as two-faced; 27% as traitors.“ … “Cohen points out that the authors of these children`s books effectively instill hatred toward Arabs by means of stripping them of their human nature and classifying them in another category. In a sampling of 86 books, Cohen counted the following descriptions used to dehumanize Arabs: Murderer was used 21 times; snake, 6 times; dirty, 9 times; vicious animal, 17 times; bloodthirsty, 21 times; warmonger, 17 times; killer, 13 times; believer in myths, 9 times; and a camel`s hump, 2 times.“ Other de-legitimizing labels included “inhuman, war lovers, monsters, dogs, wolves of prey, and vipers.”(24)

While the international community is busy listening to Israeli propaganda and accusing Palestinians of teaching their children hate, Palestinian children continue to be targeted by the IOF. The Palestinian Council for Human Rights (PCHR) in its report entitled “Blood on their Hands, Child killings by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in the Gaza Strip“ states that between June 2007 and June 2008 80 Palestinian children have been killed by the IOF, 68 in the Gaza Strip and 12 in the West Bank.

According to the same report, the IOF have killed 859 Palestinian children in the period from September 2000 until 30 June 2008. The causes of death being either shot dead by the IOF, or killed by tank shells, missiles, or other IOF infliced injuries. According to the report, Israel has "consistently bombed either inside or extremely close to densely populated residential areas, including schools and areas in close proximity to schools." And that its investigations have shown that the IOF "deliberately target unarmed civilians, including children, as part of their policy of collective punishment of the entire Palestinian civilian population."(25)

We Palestinians are a generous, peaceful and loving people. We welcome those whom we know and those whom we don’t know into our homes, we share with them our food and shelter and protect them as we protect our families. But above all, we are a people with dignity, and we cherish our land and our freedom, so don’t expect us to sit still while our land and our freedom is taken away from us, and don’t expect us to love our murderers.

http://palestinethinktank.com/2008/11/2 ... nian-hate/

[Jeff]

Amazing. Even as they're deliberately indoctrinating children to demand the final extermination of their victims, somehow they must be portrayed as victims, as well.

The use of "they" is part of the problem, or maybe another problem, because it doesn't have the same referents.

[American Dream]

Alice, I grow weary of having an essentially similar conversation with you again and again. As I suggested previously in this thread, the "Psychohistory" model definitely falls short for explaining all the causes and solutions for the Israel/Palestine situation. "Structural analysis" also suggests some important aspects of the problem, as well as possible ways to solve them, but is lacking as well. However, that said, I must say that the "Zionist Conspiracy" model, as expressed by you, is much worse, and indeed is essentially bankrupt in a number of ways.

Case in point, the way you have been "standing strong" for "your man" Israel Shamir. That ought to be a sign that something is seriously wrong with your position. If you aren't able to even begin to figure out what that might be, then I don't think there's much point in us having a conversation.

[AlicetheKurious]

Huh?

[AlicetheKurious]

From Lenin's Tomb:

Friday, February 06, 2009

Those Israeli elections

posted by lenin

A quick point. Just bear in mind, for all the talk of how terrifying Benyamin Netanyahu is, that Labour, Likud and Kadima all stand for racism and militarism. They all supported the attack on Gaza, and they will undoubtedly unite behind the next one. They all defend the annexation of West Bank land. (Olmert may talk about limiting their growth, but their expansion has been far more dramatic and speedy under his rule than ever before.) They all supported the attempt to ban Arab parties from the elections. They have all expressed a willingness to form a coalition with far rightist Avigdor Lieberman and his Ysrael Beiteinu party. Lieberman talks about 'transfer' (ie, the expulsion of Israeli Arabs), but then Livni has no problem with that idea. A major talking point in the elections at the moment is Lieberman's plan to introduce a law to remove citizenship from Arabs who don't display loyalty. This has already gained support from Likud, and one can all too easily see the other two parties giving it a friendly nod. Actually, that proposal would have far-reaching ramifications for Israelis as well: leftists and peaceniks would surely be deemed disloyal and thus be potential internees. As Jamie points out, these ideas are not necessarily unpopular. Polls have found staggering levels of support for driving Palestinians out of the occupied territories (46%), and 76% of Jewish Israelis say they would support expelling the Israeli Arab population. And that is what is going to be expressed at the ballot box.

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2009/02/ ... tions.html

[AlicetheKurious]

Left-wing television and media personality Yaron London surprised many of his colleagues during the recent war against Hamas by calling for a no-holds-barred military response against the civilian population of Gaza.

London first outlined his views in an article in Yediot Acharonot, and then elaborated upon them for clearly-shocked interviewer Razi Barkai on Army Radio.

“It appears that we have exhausted the options of moderating Hamas fanaticism with measured responses,” London wrote, “and the time has come to shock the Gaza population with actions that until now have nauseated us - [such as] killing the political leadership, causing hunger and thirst in Gaza, blocking off energy sources, causing widespread destruction, and being less discriminating in the killing of civilians. There is no other choice.”

...“Experience in past wars shows me that if we are tough enough, then at a certain stage, their standing-power will break… I am referring to both the population and their leadership; they are the same, because the population voted for Hamas. I can’t separate between one who voted for Hamas and a Hamas leader.”

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/129703

[GM Citizen]

Alice, I grow weary of having an essentially similar conversation with you again and again.

Of course you tire of having to defend your agenda, which is essentially bankrupt in a number of ways.

Regardless of the subject, I find Alice's work to be thoughtful, sincere, and just plain old rings true.

You, on the other hand, just keep throwing new lipstick on the same pig, and keep throwing it out there, hoping that someone, anyone, will believe it.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Alice, when a person who was physically or sexually abused as a child perpetuates similar abuse as an adult that doesn't justify their crime.

It does provide potential pathways for rehabilitation tho.

When my friend who has PTSD from serving as a peacekeeper in rawanda goes ballistic in town and smashes up the pub, or someone who looks at him funny, that doesn't justify his violence. Far from it.

It certainly doesn't make him the victim (unless he picks the wrong person of course,) and his suffering doesn't justify his actions, tho it may explain them.

In 50 years time, when there is one state where Israel is now, peaceful, secular and fair to all its citizens there will be Palestinians committing horrible acts as a result of survivng this attempted genocide. What happened this year won't justify those acts either.

In the same way the past doesn't justify this series of crimes against humanity that have happened now.

It might explain it a bit, but it will never justify it or make it OK.

[AlicetheKurious]

Alice, when a person who was physically or sexually abused as a child perpetuates similar abuse as an adult that doesn't justify their crime.

It is very dangerous and wrong to confuse people with states. They are very different. A state is not human: it's a mechanism that people invent and set up, to regulate their interactions and to accomplish certain objectives.

In 50 years time, when there is one state where Israel is now, peaceful, secular and fair to all its citizens there will be Palestinians committing horrible acts as a result of survivng this attempted genocide.

God forbid. Though some individuals may suffer permanent mental illness, there's no excuse for a state to enable, still less reward and glorify, any crimes they commit against other people. If that is how a state functions, it needs to either be modified if possible, or dissolved and replaced with something better.

[American Dream]

GM Citizen wrote:

Of course you tire of having to defend your agenda, which is essentially bankrupt in a number of ways.

Regardless of the subject, I find Alice's work to be thoughtful, sincere, and just plain old rings true.

You, on the other hand, just keep throwing new lipstick on the same pig, and keep throwing it out there, hoping that someone, anyone, will believe it.



Reply from American Dream:

[slimmouse]

It is very dangerous and wrong to confuse people with states. They are very different. A state is not human: it's a mechanism that people invent and set up, to regulate their interactions and to accomplish certain objectives.

Not wishing to throw this thread completely off topic, Alice, but how about provably Bullshit religions ?