Jews' victim complex

Editorial

Persecution complex. There can hardly be two words more dismissive of a people's historical experience than this term, which is overwhelmingly employed in a Jewish context. While the term is no longer prevalent in polite company, it is accepted so fundamentally by the world community that it does not need to be vocalized.

It has been said, during Operation Cast Lead and in nearly every conflagration since 1967, that Israel overreacts to threats, real or perceived, because every minor hazard is a potential Holocaust.

This is why the core issue of the Israeli-Arab conflict is distorted and misunderstood. The only thing Israel wants is to live in peace and the policies it has undertaken since 1948 seek that end. But for a world that sees Israel's "legitimate security needs" as founded on unwarranted paranoia, no security needs are legitimate. Every military response is disproportionate.

We cannot understand the world's reaction, or lack of response, to Israel's isolation, vilification and vulnerability unless we acknowledge that the world, partly consciously, partly not, views all Jewish unease as a psychological pathology, not as a legitimate, clear-eyed or justified response to external events, historical or contemporary.

"Everyone knows" that Jews holler "Holocaust" every time anyone criticizes Israel or spray-paints a synagogue. Therefore, the story goes, the concerns of Jews can be discounted, as they are influenced by a pathologically distorted view of the world and their place in it. For adherents to this line, the same goes for Israel, too, whose history of incessant invasion, terrorism, global condemnation, demonization and threats of obliteration are discounted as legitimate factors in that country's reaction to events. For some people, everything comes back to the Jewish obsession with our own bad history; contemporary events are playing out in a vacuum and Jews should not invoke their past in confronting the realities of the current world.

This dismissiveness is rampant in European discourse today and is so innate in the public mind that it is almost unconscious in much of the writing we see on the Middle East today. Antony Lerman, writing recently in Britain's Independent, invokes the immortal "but" that has delegitimized Jewish concern for centuries.

"Any anti-Semitism must be taken seriously, even at the best of times," he wrote, and you can anticipate the next word: "but our appetite for the apocalyptic assessment of the anti-Semitic threat seems to know no bounds. When [a British Labor MP] writes that 'neo-anti-Semitism is a developed, coherent and organized system of modern politics that has huge influence on the minds of millions' and that it 'impacts on world politics today like no other ideology,' can we really take such hyperbole seriously?"

Well, the question is moot. Hyperbole is never to be taken seriously, is it? And Jewish concerns are always hyperbolic.

Lerman continued, citing the work of psychology Prof. Daniel Bar Tal of Tel Aviv University, who contends that the Israeli consciousness is "characterized by a sense of victimization, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians and insensitivity to their suffering," a situation caused by the collective memory of "past persecutions of Jews" and a feeling that "the whole world is against us."

Let's look at the facts. A mere 64 years after the remnants of European Jewry were liberated from the archipelago of death camps, history repeats itself with a man, this time Iranian, who promises, in no uncertain language, the destruction of the Jews, in this case Israelis, and who is building the infrastructure, in this case nuclear weaponry, to do just that. Moreover, the global community does not come to the defence of the Jews, of Israel, but in the very forum created in the aftermath of the events that ended in 1945, Israel is singled out for special and almost exclusive denunciation. A United Nations-sponsored world forum against racism becomes Exhibit A of the very racism it is ostensibly created to confront.

And what would the world's reaction be if, God forbid, an Iranian nuclear attack killed six or seven million Israelis? We already have the evidence: a shrug. The killing of six million Jews may buy a couple of decades of awkward sympathy, but soon enough there would be denial of the genocide's magnitude, complaints that the remnants dwell too much on the past and new reasons for finding fault with those who have survived. And, inevitably, the most dismissive assertion of all: that anxieties of another such genocidal apocalypse are false fears seeded by a neurotic obsession with long-past events; a persecution complex at once unconsciously held and consciously exploited for political ends. A persecution complex.

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