When a nation can no longer recognize universally accepted values as relevant for its own conduct,because it feels too powerful, this is a sure sign of a collective national delusion.
Mental blocks are something we all have.
We all see our world slightly biased and it takes time to realize that other points of views can be as valid as our own.
But even with these mental blocks there are still certain values of "right and wrong" which are more or less universal.
When you believe in 2 totally contradictive concepts at the same time, this is called cognitive dissonance, another form of delusion.
An article by Shulamit Aloni Indeed there is Apartheid in Israel: shows, how far this goes in Israel.
Here is an excerpt:
By now they have requisitioned further lands for the purpose of constructing “Jewish only” roads. Wonderful roads, wide roads, well-paved roads, brightly lit at night – all that on stolen land. When a Palestinian drives on such a road, his vehicle is confiscated and he is sent on his way.
On one occasion I witnessed such an encounter between a driver and a soldier who was taking down the details before confiscating the vehicle and sending its owner away. “Why?” I asked the soldier. “It’s an order – this is a Jews-only road”, he replied. I inquired as to where was the sign indicating this fact and instructing [other] drivers not to use it. His answer was nothing short of amazing. “It is his responsibility to know it, and besides, what do you want us to do, put up a sign here and let some antisemitic reporter or journalist take a photo so he that can show the world that Apartheid exists here?”
Indeed Apartheid does exist here. And our army is not “the most moral army in the world” as we are told by its commanders. Sufficient to mention that every town and every village has turned into a detention centre and that every entry and every exit has been closed, cutting it off from arterial traffic. If it were not enough that Palestinians are not allowed to travel on the roads paved ‘for Jews only’, on their land, the current GOC found it necessary to land an additional blow on the natives in their own land with an “ingenious proposal”.
Humanitarian activists cannot transport Palestinians either
Major-General Naveh, renowned for his superior patriotism, has issued a new order. Coming into affect on 19 January, it prohibits the conveyance of Palestinians without a permit. The order determines that Israelis are not allowed to transport Palestinians in an Israeli vehicle (one registered in Israel regardless of what kind of numberplate it carries) unless they have received explicit permission to do so. The permit relates to both the driver and the Palestinian passenger.
Watching the war in Lebanon and the destruction of Gaza in the news most ordinary western people looking at the pictures agreed that Israel was acting at least disproportional. More and more ordinary people even went farther and sided with the people of Lebanon and Gaza.
The only people who could not see how ethically wrong these wars were, were Zionists around the world and also the vast, vast majority of Israelis including the majority of the Israeli peace-camp:
Ran Ha Cohen, as one of the few Israeli war opponents, writes in his article: Israeli Intellectuals Love the War:
All generalizations are wrong, except this one: Israeli liberal intellectuals are against war. They have always been against it, and they even suffered greatly for their critical views, as they stress proudly. They were against the previous war, they will be against the next war, they are against all wars. There is just one minor exception, though: the present war, every present war, which they always support. Because the present war – well, that's something totally different from all those other wars! How can you even compare?! The present war is always inevitable, and necessary, and just, and worthy of support.
Then he goes on to a collection of statements by supposedly Israeli "peacenics". One of those "peacenics" is them Amos Oz, a man I have quoted myself, and just like Ran Ha Cohen I had considered him to be:
.. "the Zionist peace camp incarnate".
Having supported PM Ehud Barak long after he started the murderous crushing of the Intifada, Oz now counts on his readers' short memory when he writes, under the Orwellian title
"Why Israeli missiles strike for peace":
"Many times in the past the Israeli peace movement criticized Israeli military operations. Not this time. […] This time, Israel is not invading Lebanon. It is defending itself[…]. The Israeli peace movement should support Israel's attempt at self-defense, pure and simple, as long as this operation targets mostly Hezbollah and spares, as much as possible, the lives of Lebanese civilians." (Los Angeles Times, July 19, 2006)
There are, of course, voices in the Zionist camp,which are even far worse than that like
Writer A. B. Yehoshua, the self-designated "man of peace," says it all in his typical, more primitive manner:
"At last we've got a just war, so we shouldn't gnaw at it too much till it becomes unjust."
Yehoshua frankly: the old "peacenik" had indeed been yearning for war for a long time. Israeli fascist leader Affe Eitam once admitted that the one thing that thrills him is "the sight of men going to war"; for Yehoshua, purification is the desired effect. Two years ago, he was dreaming of bloody Israeli operations in Gaza; his dream has now come true, though it hardly gets to the media thanks to the events in Lebanon:
"After we take out the settlements … we would use force against an entire population, use force in a total manner. … We would cut off the electricity in Gaza. We would cut off communications in Gaza. We would stop fuel supply to Gaza…. It won't be a desirable war, but definitely a purifying one."
And then we´ve got the American Zionists likeRalph Peters. He, of course, never pretended to be a "peacenic".
Mr Peters believes, that the IDF after destroying big parts of Lebanon was still not brutal enough to win the war:
Israel tried to fight humanely. Hezbollah was out to win at any cost. The result was inevitable.
On the ground in southern Lebanon, the IDF was able to muster a ten-to-one advantage around contested villages. But its leaders lacked the guts to do what needed to be done. And Hezbollah's frontline fighters survived.
Israel's politicians turned out to be even more profoundly out of touch with their people than the pols in Washington. Israelis were willing to fight. They wanted to win. The rank and file of the IDF would have done what needed to be done. And their leaders failed them.......
There will be consequences. Iran's convinced it's on a winning course. Syria got away with murder (literally). And Hezbollah will come back more determined than ever.
And the world is going to let Iran build nuclear weapons.
Get ready for Round Two.
Mr Peters is a hardline Zionist, his newest book is called "Never Quit the Fight."
Why does this remind me so much of a similar titled book in German: "Mein Kampf"?
I don´t think this purely coincidental.
I do see close similarities between the Nazi ideology and Zionism.
They are both rooted in the 19. Century romantic Nationalism movement.
Both ideologies put an emphasis on "Blut und Boden" (blood and soil)and they are both racist.
Ralph Schoenmann quotes in his "The Hidden History of Zionism the founder of Revisionist Zionism:
Jabotinsky spelled this out in his Letter on Autonomy:
It is impossible for a man to become assimilated with people whose blood is different than his own. In order to become assimilated, he must change his body, he must become one of them, in blood. There can be no assimilation. We shall never allow such things as mixed marriage because the preservation of national integrity is impossible except by means of racial purity and for that purpose we shall have this territory where our people will constitute the racially pure inhabitants.
Both Nazism and Zionism are supremacist ideologies,emphasising physical strength:
Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who had arranged the Balfour Declaration and was to become the first president of Israel, made this Zionist policy very explicit:
The hopes of Europe’s six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked: “Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?” I replied, “No.” ... From the depths of the tragedy I want to save ... young people [for Palestine]. The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world ... Only the branch of the young shall survive. They have to accept it.
Just like Hitler was sacrificing German´s young men on the eastern front and made German children targets for allied bombing,so little did Zionist leaders care for the life and well being of their own people:
Ben Gurion informed a meeting of Labor Zionists in Great Britain in 1938: "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative."
Nazism and Zionism are both hyper-militaristic, they have both a total disregard towards the rights and the dignity of "the other",not belonging to the priviliged race, and like Hitler, the Zionist leaders of Israel believe that a people can reach its highest potential only when it is engaged in constant military battle:
Here an excerpt from Israel´s Sacred Terrorism:
We do not need (former Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Dayan said) a security pact with the U.S.: such a pact will only constitute an obstacle for us. We face no danger at all of an Arab advantage of force for the next 8-10 years. Even if they receive massive military aid from the West, we shall maintain our military superiority thanks to our infinitely greater capacity to assimilate new armaments. The security pact will only handcuff us and deny us the freedom of action which we need in the coming years. Reprisal actions which we couldn't carry out if we were tied to a security pact are our vital lymph ... they make it possible for us to maintain a high level of tension among our population and in the army. Without these actions we would have ceased to be a combative people and without the discipline of a combative people we are lost. We have to cry out that the Negev is in danger, so that young men will go there....
I do not think, that Israel’s behavior of, throwing a million cluster bomblets just before leaving Lebanon, was unprecedented as Gilad Atzmon thinks.
Instead the action of the IDF simulated the "burnt earth policies" of the German army in Eastern Europe during WWII.
The Nazi ideology like Zionism was expansionistic, trying to gain as much "Lebensraum" for the Germanic "super-race" as possible.
Like the IDF, in spicing Lebanon with cluster bombs, the German army tried, after invading and expelling their neighbours, to make it hard or impossible for the natives to come back to their lands, by burning their houses abd fields.
If you read articles by Peters or other ultra-Zionist, or if you read those above mentioned quotes from the Israeli "peace-camp", you can feel that the mentality of Zionists is totally out of touch with both reality and with the ethical principles, which most of the world accepts, even while those principles are not allways acted upon.
While other aggressors try to hide their most immoral acts from their populations, Zionists seem to be proud to have killed a thousand people in retaliation for a few killed and captured soldiers.
They use cluster bombs with a million bomblets, so the dying would not stop after the war. And when there is criticism to this heinous act of war-crimes, they call the critic anti-semite, not even realizing hat by this they are make "anti-semitism" into a moral act.
And they create unmarked "Jews only" roads and areas with non-existent signs Palestinians have to respect, while Israelis have to pretend they don´t exist and the rest of the world has to pretend not to notice.
To be incapapable of reality checking and or even recognizing other viewpoints as possible is a kind of insanity. And it is a progressing illness.
All opinion polls say that Israeli Jews are becoming more aggressively racist every year.
More and more Israelis support ever more violent measure against and finally transfer of all Palestinians from Palestine. They support wars of destruction against neighbouring countries, even the use of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. And they feel a ever more hatred towards those they victimize.
Something like:
"Since I mistreat you, you must have deserved it. And since you are so evil that you deserve this kind of treatment, I hate you."
This is crazy of course, but then ethics are so central to human sanity, that loosing them will drive you insane.
The leaders get effected worse by this mental illness.
Look what happened in Germany:
As disaster came closer, Hitler buried himself in the unreal world of the Fuhrerbunker in Berlin, clutching at fantastic hopes that his 'secret weapons', the V-1 and V-2 rockets, would yet turn the tide of war. He gestured wildly over maps, planned and directed attacks with non-existent armies and indulged in endless, night- long monologues which reflected his growing senility, misanthropy and contempt for the 'cowardly failure' of the German people.
As the Red Army approached Berlin and the Anglo-Americans reached the Elbe, on 19 March 1945 Hitler ordered the destruction of what remained of German industry, communications and transport systems. He was resolved that, if he did not survive, Germany too should be destroyed.
Like Hitler, Zionists have many times turned on the people they supposedly loved so much.
They have sacrificed them for political purposes and endangered them unnecessarily to make them into what the Zionist perceived as a perfect people.
And the Jewish people in Israel and big parts of the Diaspora are still following suit.
However, there again we can compare Nazism in its last phase with Zionism.
In spite of all the suffering the Nazis had brought on the German people, many ordinary Germans became more crazy, ideological and deluded in the last years of the war.
Part of the reason for this was the constant barrage of propaganda, and part of it, was psychological: it was just too hard to accept that all the suffering had been in vain and for a totally false cause. So many Germans desperately held on to something, which many others already deep down recognized as being a straw.
While I don’t think it’s helpful to compete in what ideology produced the greater villains, the comparison, however, might still be good in realizing that there is no culture beyond hope of change.
German culture overcame the Nazi ideology, recognizing guilt and feeling deep shame, the Jewish people need to do the same with Zionism.
And actually, I do see a few signs of hope and change.
Recently I have read articles in German written by some people who are still rooted in the Jewish communities,people, who before had fully supported Israel. In those articles they totally and strongly condemn Israel in its aggression against Lebanon and against the Palestinians. All the facts anti-Zionists have publicized, you now can find in the accusations of former pro-Zionist Jews of the Diaspora.
And the interesting thing about it is, that those writers explain, that their attitude is rather typical for their community. However, the other members do not yet dare to speak up out of fear to be targeted for ridicule by the self-proclaimed leaders of the Jewish people.
Sure their is a difference between the attitude of Diaspora Jews in Europe and Israeli or American Jews. But like in Europe, in America and Israel there are also campaigns of Jewish people who have become more and more opposed to Zionism and Israel, a sign of growing sanity.
Of course, you never know, how long it takes for sanity to be strengthened enough to reign in the insanity.
The Israeli political class still does not want to give up its expansionist politics, is still not ready to negotiate with her Islamic neighbours, seeing itself as above them.
Most Israelis are therefore still paranoidly scared of their neighbours, but do not really trust anybody else either.
And mainly for those reasons preperations for WWIII are still on track and that is definitely scary for all of us.
