Jewish trauma is making Jews weak and vulnerable.

The first step in our self-healing is to confront our denial and our mistakes.

Photo by Ben Ostrower on Unsplash

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Recently, I have seen a number of articles suggesting that antisemitism is a mental illness.

I guess that implies that antisemites (Jew-haters) are mentally ill.

Mischaracterizing hate as illness has dangerous implications. Most mentally ill people suffer from variations of self-hatred or low self-esteem. They might be violent but mostly their violence is toward themselves. And clearly most mentally ill people know the difference between right and wrong because many suffer from a punitive superego.

However, hatred is evil and leads to crime and violence. The evil person knows the difference between right and wrong. However, he inverts the two values. He believes that he is right and substantiates his view with reasoning based upon false data. In other words, most anti-Semites would pass a psychiatric mental status exam.

But I tend to think that we Jews are the neurotic ones. We respond to violence against ourselves and communities with outrage. Wow, that will restrain people from attacking Jews.

While we correctly assign blame to those who assault Jews, we deny our own moral responsibility to fight back. We should know by now that no one else will fight our battles. Yet, we seem to have learned little from our history. We still believe that the law will protect us despite the fact that a growing number in Congress are signing letters urging the Administration to cease arms sales to Israel.

Is it hard to extrapolate from weak Israel to a completely vulnerable and impotent Jewry?

Jewish leaders and intellectuals blame the far right, the Muslims and far left; leaving ourselves out of any equation. The moral indignation we utter has always fallen upon deaf ears. Further, our outrage is hardly a moral or logical response to what is happening to us. The Jew-haters are not crazy, they are evil. They do not need therapy, they deserve punishment. Indeed, everyone understands that evil must be eradicated, whether it is a tumor or a murderer.

The Jews are the ones who have a poor grasp of reality. Symptoms of this collective neurosis are obvious. As they often say, you can take the Jew out of the ghetto, but cannot take the ghetto out of the Jew.

What does this mean psychologically? It means that Jews have succeeded in incorporating their ghetto experience and even normalizing it. Jew-hatred has been “introjected.” There is hardly any clearer illustration of this than the anti-Israel rantings of Jewish Western politicians or the propaganda of Jewish political organizations like J Street, and the lineup of Jewish politicians proposing that their countries cease necessary arms sales to Israel.

Or what about those who demand that Jews surrender their rights and help establish a Palestinian state? I cannot think of a better example of passive-aggressive behavior. Jews individually and collectively show signs of Exilic trauma: the psychological impact upon our collective unconscious of the destruction of ancient Judea by the Romans. Although we have come home, we have brought our spiritual “exile” with us.

One blatant sign of this repression is our absolutely insane obsession with explaining to the world our “right” to exist. What other nation engages in “hasbara”¹ — this neurotic pattern of pleading in the guise of explaining? No other sovereign state.

Another troublesome symptom is the phenomenon of Israelis and Jews accusing the IDF of murder and genocide. Bruno Bettelheim, a psychoanalyst who lived through the Holocaust and survived a concentration camp, tried to explain the behavior of the kapos as “identification with the aggressor.” This kind of behavior was common during the Middle Ages when apostate Jews persecuted other Jews in the name of Christ. Today Jews attack other Jews in the name of political correctness.

Our own denial helps us to understand why we continue to invent rationalizations for those who abuse us. Frankly, we are unwanted. This is painful. There are reasons people do not want Jews and Judaism around. It is difficult intellectually for some Christians to admit that their faith began as a Jewish movement in Judea. Or that their savior is a Jew.

Muslims are still angry that Jews refused to accept Islam whose loftier ideals, as historian and philosopher Will Durant once wrote, are Judaic. Jealousy? Our equality and freedom have always been threatened when for almost every other individual, these rights, as Thomas Jefferson, proclaimed are self-evident and inalienable.

Being unwanted is sad, but denying it is pathological. We were welcomed and then expelled from almost every country in which we might have found a brief respite from our persecution. Today, in many countries, laws against antisemitism are legislated. Yet, for a nation well versed in the paradox of humanity, we should by now have realized that reasonable laws not backed up by sanction and punishment are useless.

Violence against Jews is routinely “being investigated” as a hate crime. How many were punished? Moreover, in a democratic society, we cannot punish people for their speech or their attitudes. It is futile to try to understand why someone may hate us. It is dangerous for us to remain passive.

For too long, we believed that antisemitism is about ignorance so we brought Holocaust education to our schools and universities. Of course, those same high school pupils that were required to take the course, were those demonstrating and cursing Jews on college campuses. Perhaps there was a difference, however, in their rhetoric. They may have changed the libel from “Christ killer” to “baby killer” and substituted “genocide” for “deicide.”

I do not know how one transforms hate into love.

Of course, there are the testimonies of former Jew-haters who have changed their minds. Nevertheless, in light of a long experience of abuse and Jew-hatred, do we really believe that others will defend our rights or our nation? The sign of our own mental illness is our perseveration in “educating” people about antisemitism and our continued passivity and denial.

The delusion that we can change others has been a frustrating one; as most delusions are. The first step in our self-healing is to confront our denial and our mistakes. Sadly, Jew-hatred, at times suppressed, has once again become conscious and vibrant.

Many have written about antisemitism. It is explained by authors from French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to American psychologist Gordon Allport as a psychological problem or as a prejudice. However, I tend to see it as a theological problem. It is enshrined in both the Christian and Muslim worlds. Its origins are in their theology, which is hardly objective.

The psychologist Ann Ulanov wrote that theology is a primary process discipline. Although theology is written in academic language, it is deeply informed by the writer’s unconscious, compromising its cogency. Theologians often try to present the irrational in reasoned arguments. Hence an entire genre of theology known as apologetics.

Let me be careful here to define religion in a very broad sense. Essentially the god of any religion is man’s ultimate authority whether the god is Jesus, Allah, or the ideal such as the proletariat, the nation, the Church, or economic justice. Whenever reason challenges the believer, she determines it as a threat to the dogma of her worldview.

This threat of disbelief is personified in the heretic, the infidel, the anti-Westerner, or the atheist. In the religion of communism, the heretic is a capitalist. In the Nazi religion, the heretic is the Jew who defiles the nation as he once defiled the Host. In Christianity and Islam, the heretic is the Jew who refused to agree that Jesus or Allah is a god. Among nationalists it is the Jew who is always suspected of dual loyalty. The Jew is variously both capitalist banker and communist revolutionary. The Jew was and remains always the other, the outsider. He is, in the language of the Medieval church, the Devil.

The other aspect of dogma is its invulnerability to reason and truth. Because dogma is an apparently rational statement of the irrational, any challenge to it, whether consciously or unconsciously, evokes a passionate and often violent reaction. The very existence of Israel or Jews in general constitutes such a challenge.

The current war against the Jews was instigated by devout Muslims using the best that modern technology and media savvy could offer. The devout Muslim sees the Jew always through the lenses of his basic faith or dogma. Of course, we have all read about Muslims who are kind and tolerant. And we know the statistical fact that there are a billion Muslims, but only 10 percent are Islamists. But 10 percent amounts to 100 million Muslims.

Effective propaganda is a shrewd presentation of facts. For example, the ancient fact is that Jesus was crucified by the Romans. The gospels spin that fact in a way that makes Judas the villain, leaving the Roman procurator no choice. The Muslim sees only that the Jews rejected Muhammad and his teachings, but ignores the Muslim debt to Judaism. The lie is not necessarily stated as a fact. The lie is about the way the fact is presented for the correct dogmatic interpretation.

Years ago, while doing a stint of reserve duty near Birzeit University near Ramallah in the West Bank, there was a riot, and a photographer snapped a picture of a soldier pulling the hair of a student. It made the front page of the New York Times as an illustration of Israeli brutality. Standing near the soldier who was fully armed with a M-16 rifle, I knew that — like during the incident at Kent State University — the soldier could have fired his weapon at her. She was screaming at him using various epithets designed to unnerve him. But, the soldier shoved his weapon aside and grabbed her hair; painful and effective. But not lethal.

The fact is that millions of Arabs live in what was once the British Mandate of Palestine. These Arabs decided to call themselves Palestinians and make a false claim that Palestine is theirs. Thus, the Jew who seeks to build a home on his own land becomes a “settler” and a threat to coexistence. Implied is that coexistence requires the absence of Jews.

There is a photo of a bombed-out building which housed terrorists, but the Muslim propaganda always televises a dead child and attributes criminality to that child’s death. Hence, the Jew who defends himself is an occupier and a murderer.

Jew-hatred in the Muslim world and its supporters is what psychologists would call “ego syntonic”; hence it is not painful for him and not considered symptomatic. Unlike a neurotic and even a psychotic person who admits their illness, the evil man believes he is good. Unlike the mentally ill person, he enjoys life and functions well.

Although Jew-hatred is part of a dogmatic system it is, in itself, not unreasonable. In other words, Jew-hatred is not as many would argue a mental illness. It is a moral inversion. It is evil, not neurotic. Evil derives from character. There is no inner conflict, whereas neurosis is a personality disorder whose cause is inner conflict.

The response to evil is sanctions and punishment. Edmund Burke famously remarked, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” Evil is everyone’s problem; neither the courts nor the legislature alone can defeat it. Decent people can and must respond to violence appropriately and vigorously pursue the evil that has infected society by every means of self-defense possible — recalling that the best defense is an offense.

I am not suggesting roving bands of Jews beating up on Muslims and their fellow travelers. Offensive action begins in realizing that we cannot change others, only ourselves. We can mobilize our communities. During the early years of the modern State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion once proclaimed that for every fallen soldier we shall build another settlement. For every vile word, we can plant a tree and invest in Israeli technology and science.

Defense demands unity among Jews. Israel has a great deal of intellectual and financial resources, especially when a united Jewish world community stands at her side. Sadly, we are still buying the essentials for our defense from America, England, and Germany. Is it rational for a nation that knows very well history has set Israel apart from other nations.

What is it that the Bible observed about us? We are destined “to dwell alone.” Being alone together is our strength and our deterrence. If the school yard bully knows that if he attacks one Jewish kid, another dozen will rally to the Jewish kid’s defense, the bully might hesitate. Antisemites are bullies reared upon nonsense but taught to believe that it is true.

The war against Hamas is righteous and even in righteous wars innocent people die. The allied commanders who ordered the carpet bombing of Germany knew that many children would be killed and to the Germans they were murderers. Yet, these allied commanders understood that to defeat Nazism they had to kill Germans.

During World War Two, the allies were careful not to fool themselves or to engage in what the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a “category error” by confusing bad ideas and bad people. There is a place for a discussion about bad ideas such as Nazism and Islamism. But, the moral objective 80 years ago was to defeat the Germans and thereby for some short time, Nazism. And our objective today must be to defeat the Arabs who believe in jihad and Islamism.

Winston Churchill understood and argued his case to Roosevelt that any negotiation would undermine the moral objective of the allies. Nothing less than unconditional surrender was the conclusion of the Casablanca Conference in 1943. The result was that many innocent Germans were killed. I imagine the innocent Germans were those not yet in pre-school within which Nazi doctrine was taught. And too many innocent (i.e. unindoctrinated) Arabs are being killed today. Their deaths, however, as sad as it is to witness, is the fruit of their own hateful dogma. For Jews to feel responsible is nothing less than moral hubris.

Violent language always leads to violent deeds. The enemy never read our learned essays on antisemitism. Words fail. What is left? The irony is that the Nazi or the Islamist is not the irrational one. Logic informed their beliefs and reasoned arguments rationalized their crimes.

Of course, their reasoning seems fallacious to us. But a logical fallacy is not the same thing as a delusion. A fallacious statement is ignorant; a delusional statement is crazy. The irrational one is the Jew who remains unwilling to accept and adapt to the facts. Sometimes the pen is not mightier than the sword. One cannot fully explain neither the Holocaust nor the present war against the Jews or defend against it without appreciating our own complicity in the form of denial and projection.

Sadly, we are heading for a fall. The sages, who refused to blame only the Romans, made us understand that the Second Commonwealth fell because of Jewish self-hatred (sinat hinam). When I look at the mobs in Tel Aviv who abuse the hostages in emotional blackmail, I realize how wise and prescient our ancient sages really were.

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1. A Hebrew term for Israel’s unconventional public diplomacy