Freies Politikforum für Demokraten und Anarchisten

palestina libera · Beiträge: 1665

"Edward Snowden speaks of an electronic “architecture of oppression,” based on the mania of our national security state to control the communications of humankind at large. But there are other systems of control—emotional and cultural rather than digital—whose mechanisms of control are no less capable of being abused. The most effective of these are the overlapping systems of influence and control set up by the Israel Lobby. This is a generic term referring to disparate people and institutions that believe that Americans should not be allowed to publicly criticize the government of Israel, even when it does bad things; and it is with that intent in mind that they conduct extensive policing of public discussion of anything having to do with Israel."

The Lobby consists mainly of the leadership of three important organizations—the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; the Lobby’s most well-known public figures are Abraham Foxman, Director of the ADL, and Alan Dershowitz, an American attorney, professor lawyer and political commentator. They are backed up by an even larger contingent of rightwing Christian evangelicals, the largest and most active constituency in the Republican Party, many of whom believe that a religious war would bring about the Second Coming of Christ. All of the above-mentioned people have one thing in common: they attack American critics of the Israeli state, usually by calling them anti-Semites or self-hating Jews, often trying to ruin their reputations or drive them from their jobs.

In Congress the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) does pretty much the same thing, with one major difference: they have at their disposal immense amounts of money. Currently an actual majority of elected officials receive money from AIPAC to vote as the current government of Israel wants them to, at least on issues having to do with the Middle East. There’s nothing illegal about it—it’s called ‘bundling,’ and is basically a form of legal bribery. But one must say that it’s rather odd, not to mention unprecedented, that the Prime Minister of a foreign country would participate in the distribution of money through his proxies to the US Congress, so that its members vote as he wants them to. From the point of view of American sovereignty, not to mention political morality, it’s an astonishing situation."

"Some institutions, especially the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, actually encourage and seek to enhance traumatic memory associated with the Holocaust, insisting that identification with Holocaust victims should be the basis of Jewish identity, rather than identifying with those who tried to stop the Holocaust. In my book The Death of Judeo-Christianity: Religious Aggression and Systemic Evil in the Modern World, I call attention to the extreme danger of this approach: “To live in the same world in which the Holocaust occurred, the Wiesenthal Center is saying, you must accept it both as history’s biggest crime and the most important determinant of Jewish identity. But that is a mistaken strategy, because it gives too much power to the Holocaust. You cannot base identity on the Holocaust without internalizing its aggression, because you cannot take in one without the other.”[i] This creates a trauma bond, which bonds the victim not to the aggressor, but to his aggression. This is why so many victims appear to imitate and act out the kind of aggression with which they were once victimized; the abused child grows up to be an abuser."

"Acknowledging the existence of evil often leads people to realize—including a great many that are horrified by it—that evil can be more powerful than good, and usually is. This realization is by itself quite disorienting, because it goes against what enlightened people have believed for the last three centuries. It is not based on mere philosophical speculations, but arises as the result of excruciating psychological upheavals in which people discover that the world they knew before, no longer exists. This process creates an anxiety so profound that the only way some people can suppress it is to create an imaginary system in which delusions replace unpredictable realities, and the reactions of other people must be endlessly manipulated through a kind of emotional totalitarianism. (That is, the manipulation of negative emotions—especially fear, guilt, aggression and shame—can be used to make people avoid taboo subjects, and in so doing encourage them to suppress thoughts about them.)

This is a big part of the cultural system that the Israel Lobby has set up, but there is another component to it, one that is hidden. At a very deep level uncritical supporters of the Israeli state suffer from a gnawing fear that Israel is not the perfect place that the Lobby says it is; and to control their suppressed fears, they must strive to control what everybody else thinks and feels about it, often by ritually punishing unrepentant American critics of Israel in conspicuous, public and sometimes surreal ways."

"If you’re still wondering why people in the Israel Lobby behave as they do, consider also the following dynamics from the point of view of a Holocaust survivor, or someone who lost family members in the Holocaust. Where was God at the moment of greatest peril to his people, when 10,000 Jews were being murdered every day in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau? God was not there for his people when they needed him—no, God was nowhere to be found. Likewise the secular faith in liberal, social democratic and progressive ideas embraced by secular Jews since the Enlightenment: all of them made not the slightest difference once the Endloesung, the Final Solution, was in place. The result was a largely unconscious loss of faith in God, in liberal democracy, and in any solution to political problems except military force. Many survivors ended up believing—unconsciously more than consciously—that those who survive in this world do so only by hurting others.

This led to a process in which worship of the Israeli state slowly replaced a Torah-based God, not to mention a secular belief in progressive political solutions. People who increasingly saw God as little more than a ancient metaphor could now worship something far more concrete: the Israeli state’s victorious army, its active diplomatic corps, its vast propaganda initiatives, not to mention its Shin Bet interrogation centers and 200-400 nuclear weapons—all the furnishings of a successful theocratic state! And instead of feeling close to a mainly absent and intangible God, they could now experience tumultuous feelings of religious nationalism, the strongest and most dangerous force on the planet. Indeed, this constitutes the real secular religion of Israel, and many of its uncritical supporters in the US: the worship of religious nationalism in the service of state power, in the form of the Israeli state."

"But if Jews struggle with aggression that they cannot acknowledge, so do Christians wrestle with a shame that dare not speak its name. After all, it was Christians who carried out the Holocaust, which was but the final act in a thousand years of Christian anti-Semitism. If Christians thought too much about this last fact, it might occur to some of them that Christianity has been, and is, by its own standards, a failed religion. Thus the built-in incentive to declare the Israeli project a smashing success: along with enough unacknowledged guilt to cause the Christians to give the Israelis whatever they want—for along with the guilt is a generalized fear of being publicly vilified as anti-Semites, which Zionists quickly learned to do to get what they wanted. Thus anything having to do with Israel/Palestine is hedged about with elaborate taboos, for Christians as well as Jews, to the extent that people dare not talk publicly, or even think privately, about the moral and political implications of impunity for Israel’s crimes and misdemeanors."

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/19/the-israel-lobby-and-traumatic-memory/