Jewish morality sabotages Jewish self-defense.

This is not to say that Jews should abandon ethics. On the contrary. But when one distorts “trying to be good” into a narcissistic pathology, one is in fact no longer being ethical.

photo: Anton Mislawsky/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Francisco Gil-White, an anthropologist, historian, and journalist.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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I was raised in a Mexican Catholic family, so I am a foreigner to Jewish society: a goy, in other words.

As an outsider, and as a professional anthropologist, I have been living among Jews and studying their culture and society for over 20 years now.

My research, conducted in various countries, including Israel, but mostly with the Mexican Jewish community, is ongoing.

On the basis of my work so far, I will here make two generalizations:

1. The Jews are morally good.

2. The Jews are too morally good.

The first claim, rendered in a more complex version, says that most Jews try to be good because ethics is the center of gravity of Jewish civilization. But any virtue that is pathologically exaggerated becomes a vice, even goodness. And hence my second claim, which, in its more complex version, says that, by trying too hard to be good, Jews often make themselves fatally vulnerable.

In other words, Jewish goodness sabotages Jewish self-defense.

Of course, everything is relative. There are no absolutes. Therefore, let us make a relative comparison to get our bearings, and then you can judge whether or not I am getting carried away with my generalizations.

I will compare two states founded on different cultural philosophies. One is the State of Iran, the jihadi Shia Muslim State. The other is the State of Israel, the Jewish state.

Iran is governed by a jihadi Shia Muslim religious theocracy, atop which sits the Supreme Leader (that’s an official title, folks) Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As an example of his style, he once tweeted that “[Israel] has no cure but to be annihilated.” It’s just one example; he says that sort of thing a lot. The genocidal destruction of Israel, the extermination of the Israeli Jews, has been Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s obsession, just as it was for the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

In order to kill the Israeli Jews, Ali Khamenei is willing to sacrifice the Iranian population. We know this because his instrument of choice, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, corrupt and addicted to central planning, are so obsessed with building weapons (conventional and nuclear), and so obsessed with funding terrorist proxies to encircle Israel, that they have obliterated the welfare of ordinary Iranians.

In fact, the ayatollahs have now destroyed the Iranians. Through and by Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps mismanagement, Iran has now literally run out of water. And hence Iran has run out of everything else, too, because everything depends on water: energy, food, medical attention, etc.

Total Iranian collapse may be months away. Just a month ago — get this — the Iranian president announced that the city of Tehran, the capital, may soon have to be evacuated. Iran is about to become one of the greatest humanitarian crises in all of history. And this is now all but inevitable.

But how did this happen?

In 1948, when the State of Israel was born, Iran was blessed with all of the following: a massive territory (approximately 1.6 million square kilometers); deep aquifers; diverse climates, including extensive, snow-fed mountain ranges (Zagros, Alborz) that produced dozens of major river systems and replenished the aquifers, vast forests in the north (Caspian basin), marshlands in the south, and (yes) plenty of desert; an intelligent, inherited tradition of water-conserving qanat systems; a manageable population of 16 million (low pressure on water systems); an ancient agricultural civilization with continuity of locally adaptive farming knowledge; and no major geopolitical threat on the question of access to water.

Iran was rich in land and water, and could easily feed itself.

By contrast, Israel’s situation was a real challenge. In 1948, it had: the tiniest landmass (approximately 20,000 square kilometers, about the size of Connecticut, and only 1.26 percent the size of Iran); mostly semi-arid or arid land; only one major river, the Jordan River, which is narrow, shared, and insufficient; no deep aquifers exploited yet; highly seasonal rainfall, concentrated in the north and center; mostly uncultivated desert (the Negev desert region is 60 percent of Israel’s landmass); and great geopolitical threats to its water access, as it was surrounded by hostile, genocidal neighbors, threatening access to the Jordan and to the Sea of Galilee.

But while the ayatollahs encouraged massive population growth to recruit more soldiers for Iran’s genocidal armies, and while the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commandeered the entire Iranian economy for its own genocidal purposes (and also for theft, pure and simple), thus ruining Iranian hydrology beyond recovery, the Israelis engineered their own hydrology wisely.

The Israelis pioneered drip- and micro-irrigation. They developed a national water grid, combining desalination plants, water recycling, aquifers, reservoirs, and a dynamic network of pipelines and pumping stations to send the water where it is most needed at any given moment. They created the National Water Carrier, a massive North-South water conveyance system to make the Negev bloom agriculturally. They built the world’s leading desalination plants, with the best technology.

They have achieved around 85 percent of wastewater recycling, the world’s highest rate. They’ve developed intelligent water pricing structures to incentivize conservation. They deployed, via public education, a cultural focus on proper water stewardship. And they designed their agricultural sector around what the available water can sustain for the long term, not what is profitable in the short term.

It is quite the contrast. Even though it was Israel that started out with very little water, very poor soils, and intense security constraints, Israel is water secure and blooming, whereas Iran is on the verge of a self-created national disaster.

This impending and tremendous Iranian catastrophe could have been averted if not for the fanatical Jew-hatred of the Iranian ayatollahs. Because, in 2018, seven-and-a-half years ago, with Iran’s self-annihilation already on the horizon, Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, offered to save Iran. This is what he said:

“Today, I’m going to make an unprecedented offer to Iran. It relates to water. The Iranian people are victims of a cruel and tyrannical regime that denies them vital water. Israel stands with the people of Iran. And that is why I want to help save countless Iranian lives. Here’s how.”

“Israel has the know-how to prevent environmental catastrophe in Iran. I want to share this information with the people of Iran. Sadly, Iran bans Israelis from visiting, so we’ll have to get creative. We will launch a Farsi website with detailed plans on how Iranians can recycle their wastewater. We will show how Iranian farmers can save their crops and feed their families.”

“The Iranian regime shouts ‘Death to Israel!’ In response, Israel shouts: ‘Life to the Iranian people!’”

“The people of Iran are good and decent. They shouldn’t have to face such a cruel regime alone. We are with you. We will help, so that millions of Iranians don’t have to suffer. The hatred of Iran’s regime will not stop the respect and the friendship between our two peoples.”

The entire contrast is expressed in this line: “The Iranian regime shouts ‘Death to Israel!’ In response, Israel shouts: ‘Life to the Iranian people!’”

Netanyahu did this not because he is a saint. He did this because this sort of move is grammatically expected in Jewish culture. It makes Jews proud. And Netanyahu is a Jewish politician.

There is a difference, here.

Israel, because it is a Jewish state, invested in life: in making more water available to more people. And it generously offers to save Iran with its water solutions. Whereas Iran, as a Muslim jihadi State, invested in death — ruining millions of Iranian lives in its quest to exterminate the Jews.

Now, I am not saying that every single Jew is a good person. I am making an anthropological generalization. What I mean is that there is a clear difference between these two cultures, and that Jewish culture is infinitely better.

To say that the Jews are morally good is like saying that Mexicans speak Spanish. No, not all Mexicans speak Spanish. But nobody complains when somebody says, “The Mexicans speak Spanish,” because that is a perfectly reasonable generalization. The statistics show that the overwhelming majority of Mexicans can at least speak some Spanish, the official language of Mexico, and a very strong majority speak Spanish quite fluently.

My own generalization that the Jews are morally good can also be defended with population-level statistics. For example, the rate of homicides committed by Jews in Israel is among the lowest known for any major ethnic group in the world. In other words, the generalization that the Jews are morally good can be supported with an empirical measurement, expressed in this other generalization: The Jews do not murder. And just as Spanish is the official language of Mexico, ethics is the official religion of the Jews.

The obvious hypothesis is that Jews are morally good precisely because their civilization is founded on the exploration of ethics. Famously, the ancient pharisee Rabbi Hillel the Elder (Founding Father of rabbinical jurisprudence, and hence the most influential rabbi of all-time) elevated the biblical commandment, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) into the fundamental commandment, the Alpha and Omega of Jewish law, with which all Jewish ethical and legal reasoning should be made consistent.

This Great Moral Teacher, a treasure of our human species, a man but with a handful of peers in all of our history, such as Siddhartha Gautama and Martin Luther King, Jr., lived in the century before Jesus of Nazareth, another influential rabbi and Great Moral Teacher, himself strongly influenced by the teachings of Hillel.

But now, I shall argue that this basic orientation can be taken too far and create great problems for the Jews. I will now speak as an evolutionary anthropologist, which I can do because I also wear that hat.

We evolutionary anthropologists seek to understand how the structure of human social interactions, formally called “games” that are “played” in particular contexts, determines which strategies produce, over repeated interactions, the largest expected payoffs, and how such strategies may be embodied in certain adaptive insights, hunches, prejudices, and biases that help us navigate those social games. Some of these strategic psychological tools are baked into our genes; others result from adaptive socializations selected for within stable cultural equilibria.

To get our conceptual and analytical bearings on these matters, we evolutionary anthropologists make use of a marvelous and fun tool called evolutionary game theory, which, by way of a repertoire of recursive mathematical models and computer simulations, explores how social strategy (the sequence of choices that we tend to make in specific interactions with other human beings) evolves adaptively over time in particular social ecologies.

This body of theory has shown that when the proportion of cooperators in a population is relatively high, being too suspicious of others can be maladaptive. You’ll miss out on too many opportunities for mutually beneficial ventures. In such an environment, it pays to begin with trust as your opening move. In other words, to begin any new interaction-string with trust is adaptive within a mostly cooperative society — for example, in Jewish society.

But the same models also show that when the proportion of cooperators falls below a certain critical threshold, trust becomes a dangerously maladaptive opening move, because the odds of exploitation are too high. The math behind this is robust; it’s a famous result. So the optimal opening move is conditional:

1. Trust your neighbor when cooperators abound, and

2. Distrust when cooperators are too few, and the risk of being victimized is too great.

But, even when trust is adaptive as an opening move, it is always adaptive to recalibrate your strategy in later moves based on the history of earlier interactions, adjusting as you acquire information about how others have treated you.

So, that’s what’s adaptive. And what is maladaptive? Why, to do the opposite: to trust unconditionally, instead of paying attention to context.

What becomes especially dangerous, then, is when “trust in others” is integrated (and with pride) into one’s Jewish identity as a mechanism of personal redemption, a way of proving to yourself that you are good: “I’m proud to believe in the goodness of people because that is how I prove that I am a good Jew.” This stance locks a Jew into a trusting strategy independently of context.

In other words, when one’s own identity as a Jew and one’s redemption as a good person both depend on maintaining a stubborn belief in the goodness of others, you cannot properly process the evidence of experience.

And you must, because humans are clay: malleable, responsive to their environment, their formation, their incentives, and so forth. And they can also grow in different social and psychological directions by exploring their own consciousness (or failing to). All of this can make us better, or it can make us worse. It all depends. We are neither good nor bad fundamentally. We are whatever we become. So it is always maladaptive to ignore the context.

But this truth, which ought to be obvious, becomes invisible to those who think they redeem their own selves when they blindly trust in others, as if some karma will bless them in return for seeing no evil. This is called innocence. Innocence can become frankly suicidal because the wicked always devour the innocent first.

And herein lies the deep problem of Jewish self-defense.

Think of the human body. A Western doctor pays great attention to the organism that attacks the body, but he would never claim the immune system is irrelevant to the final outcome. The health of a people is no different. Yes, granted, there is antisemitism. Lots of it. But the immune system of the Jewish People also leaves much to be desired. Why? Because many Jews embrace their innocence as a redeeming virtue.

Case in point, from Anne Frank’s famous diary: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

Anne Frank wrote this knowing full well that the Nazis, assisted by much of Europe, were hunting her down, a child, to torture her to death for the “crime” of being Jewish. It is clear that her dogged optimism about the fundamental goodness of humans, even of Nazis, is, for her, a redemptive belief that raises (in her own Jewish eyes) her own personal moral value. It makes her, she believes, the kind of person that, in her own ethical Jewish society, she yearns to be: someone who stubbornly believes and trusts that “people are really good at heart” because otherwise “I simply can’t build up my hopes.”

photo: Kelly Sikkema/Unsplash

This has nothing to do with the world as such and everything to do with Anne Frank’s Jewish psychology.

I venerate the memory of Anne Frank, but, in all frankness, I must point out that she suffered from a pronounced form of madness, for she imagined she could discover something good even in the Nazis who wished to rape her, torture her to death, burn her, and turn her into fertilizer. And she imagined this while hiding in an attic because, if those monsters found her, she was done for.

And they found her.

She is one individual example. But I am an anthropologist making general, cultural, population-level claims. So consider, from the same war, other Jews, many Jews, similarly afflicted, who decided to believe from the Nazis that they were going to “labor camps,” and who, with remarkable docility, boarded the trains to Auschwitz.

Don’t think this is a modern phenomenon; it is old. Let us turn to Antiquity. The Seleucid emperor Antiochus Epiphanes, whose monstrous crimes and later miraculous defeat are commemorated in Hanukkah, had already visited death and destruction upon the Jews of Judah. Nevertheless, as the First Book of the Maccabees explains:

“Two years later, the king [Antiochus Epiphanes] sent to the cities of Judah a chief collector of tribute, and he came to Jerusalem with a large army. With deception he spoke peaceable words to them, and they believed him; but he fell suddenly upon the city, struck it with great force, and killed many of the people of Israel. He plundered the city, burned it with fire, and tore down its houses and walls. They took captive the women and children, and seized the livestock.”

Another chapter from this book tells the same story, explaining that the murderers waited for the Sabbath, when the Jews were maximally vulnerable. These Greco-Macedonian soldiers had already massacred tens of thousands of Jews (80,000 in three days, according to the book). And yet, when the leader of those Greco-Macedonians “spoke peaceable words to them … they believed him.”

Could the ancient Jews really have been that innocent? Yes, of course. And they still are. We’ve recently seen a close parallel with Palestine Liberation Organization (now better known as the “Palestinian Authority”). The PLO was already famous as a terrorist, antisemitic, genocidal group with a long résumé of murdering innocent Jews. But one day the leader of that group, Yasser Arafat, “spoke peaceable words to the Jews, and they believed him.”

Why did they believe him? Because otherwise they couldn’t “build up their hopes” — and they stubbornly hoped for peace. And thus, a promise of peace was enough for the PLO to enter the Jewish state and seize control over the Arabs, whom the PLO then poisoned with their genocidal ideology. Immediately, terrorism against innocent Jews in Israel quintupled.

Granted: There was a global propaganda offensive to whitewash the PLO. Granted: Western media and academia, and the governments of the West, all collaborated. Granted: Many Israelis and Diaspora Jews also collaborated.

So, yes, many powerful forces conspired to dupe the Jews. Granted.

But the ruse worked, also, because many Jews wanted “to believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” They wanted to believe that antisemitic terrorists, if the Jews made an effort, could be made to want peace. And many Jews didn’t want to believe — couldn’t believe — that their own leaders might betray them, because they likely thought something along the lines of: “Well, they’re Jews like us. They want to be good.” The frank possibility of treason never even crossed their minds. It was utterly and literally unthinkable.

And yet the simple logic of game theory dictates that, adaptively, the context must always be evaluated. The relevant context is this: Power always corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is true for the goyim, and it is also true for the Jews.

And now? Yes, the same thing is happening again now. It happens every single generation.

We have seen, in our generation, the unfortunate Jewish Israelis from the communities bordering Gaza who tragically refused properly to process the context: that Gaza is ruled by a genocidal antisemitic group, Hamas, which indoctrinates into Jew-hatred the Arabs chafing under Hamas’ totalitarian control, until they desire, more than life itself, the genocidal destruction of the Jewish state.

What’s more, these Israelis failed to distrust their own Jewish leaders, who allowed these terrorists into the Jewish state to work, but these Israelis went further — straight into the pathological extreme. They imagined that if they smothered the Gaza Arabs with love, they would get love in return. This is narcissism: to imagine that the sheer power of your own goodness can transform another and make him good. It is the most dangerous pathology that can overcome those who try to be good.

Possessed in this manner, these Israelis organized “peace programs” with Arab families from Gaza and hired Gaza Arabs to work in their farms. And then those Arab employees, whom the Israelis had smothered with love, provided key intelligence to the October 7th butchers of those innocent Israelis.

More suspicion is urgently needed; this kind of innocence is lethal.

I am not saying that Jews should abandon ethics. Quite to the contrary. What I am saying is that when one distorts “trying to be good” into a narcissistic pathology, one is in fact no longer ethical (though one will proudly believe themselves to be, possessed as one is by this pathology). And, so, one is not ethical — not in this condition. Since one’s primary ethical obligation is to themselves, to their family, and to their own people, and one cannot protect themselves or others when they behave like this.

It was Rabbi Hillel the Elder, once again, who said: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” He was not arguing for selfishness, of course; this is the rabbi who enjoined us to love our neighbor. He was merely pointing out that you have a primary ethical obligation first to love yourself. Honoring this primary ethical obligation to yourself, in some contexts, will require you to deploy suspicion of others, not blind trust, and much less stubborn blind trust.

And if you already know that your neighbor is evil and preparing your destruction, then you are commanded to fight for yourself — preemptively. This is stated with perfect clarity in the Talmudic tradition that Hillel the Elder launched: “If someone comes to kill you, rise early to kill him first.”

It is unethical to let your enemy kill you. Unconditional blind trust is therefore unethical, for it gives too great an advantage to your enemy. And a narcissistic belief in the transformative power of one’s own goodness makes them maximally vulnerable; hence, it is maximally unethical.

For the good of the Jews, and for all of us in the West.

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