“You have many things on your mind/We think only of revenge.” (Leonard Cohen, “One of These Days”)
“The fear of Judeocide is entangled with Jewish spirit and culture” (Gilad Atzmon, Wandering Who, p. 154).
Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome
“Duality is necessary for observation and comprehension . . . in short, to understand man means to have equal parts of himself and the opposite in one” (Otto Weininger, quoted by Atzmon, Wandering Who, p. 93).
It will not surprise any of my long-term readers that (as I discussed in the last Jobcast with Laurent Guyénot) the problem of Jewish ideology appears to come (back) down to trauma. In The Wandering Who, Atzmon avoids the subject of circumcision entirely, however, which makes for something like a gaping hole in his thesis.
For Atzmon, “The trauma predates the traumatic event; the trauma itself shapes the reality” (p. 130), i.e., the Jewish mind-set is forever set in anticipation of a coming trauma. Why this might be so (and whether it might relate to an original, intentional wounding, at eight days of age) is a question he doesn’t grapple with. Apparently, even an ex-Jewish agent provocateur has his limits.
The well-established Judeo-centric tendency to interpret almost any political and ideological criticism as a declaration of impending Judeocide is a severe form of collective [Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome]. Sufferers of Pre-TSS . . . actually celebrate their symptoms at others’ expense. . . . Once we raise our voices to point out that the imaginary future crime is yet to happen and actually may never happen, we immediately become part of the crime ourselves (p. 131-32).
Atzmon differentiates PTSS from ordinary paranoid delusion, which he says is usually easy enough to identify (debatable). PTSS sufferers, in contrast, appear healthy, and can be so convincing that they tend to create their own proofs.
What Atzmon ignores in his otherwise compelling analysis is that fear of a future traumatic event is, invariably in my experience, symptomatic of a repressed past event, projected forward in time. It is a knotty tangle, all right, and while Atzmon does relate PTSS to projection, it is of the more commonly understood Freudian kind.
The more pain we inflict on others the more we become familiar with evil, aggression and brutality. The more cruel we are towards others, the more horrified we are by the possibility that the subjects of our brutality may also be as nasty as we are. Freud calls it projection. . . . And yet, the more vicious the Israeli is, the more he or she is horrified by “terror.” In reality, the Israelis are actually horrified by their own cruelty. It is the terror within that horrifies the most (p. 133).
But whence cometh that original inner terror, if not from a bodily trauma, repressed since infancy?
That Jewish paranoia, projection, and persecution—both imagined and actual, when they become pre-emptively “retaliatory”—are self-fulfilling should be self-evident. The more we fear (and fantasize about) being persecuted, the more we will act in ways that (subtly or not-so-subtly) provoke aggression, the more our own aggression (being disowned) can only be recognized through projection onto the demonized other, and the more fearsome our fantasies become.
And so on, ad apocalypse.
Who Are the Jews Anyway?
In the title chapter of The Wandering Who (chapter 17), Atzmon turns to Shlomo Sand’s book The Invention of the Jewish People to answer his thesis question. The answer he offers is found in the title of Sand’s book.
But if Jewishness is an invention, then an invention of who? Atzmon writes that “Sand regards nationality as a phantasmal narrative. Anthropological and historical studies of the origins of different so-called ‘peoples’ and ‘nations’ lead, embarrassingly, to the crumbling of every ethnicity and ethnic identity” (p. 136).
Why do Jews take their ethnicity so seriously? Atzmon offers two reasons. One, citing Israeli academic Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi on Zionism, he argues that the purpose of the political Jewish identity is “to transform the Bible from a spiritual text into a ‘land registry’” (p. 137). A box every Palestinian can tick, if they still have hands to do so.
Secondly, Atzmon offers a more psychological explanation: “it is actually the lack of factuality or coherent historical narrative that leads to the emergence of such a phantasmic tale, strong will and a pragmatic agenda to follow” p. (137).
The less there is behind any given belief, in other words, the more essential it becomes to assert its reality.
Such is the eternal conundrum of identity.
The “nationalization” of the Bible would plant in the minds of young Jews the idea that they were the direct descendants of their great, ancient ancestors. Bearing in mind the fact that nationalisation was largely a secular movement, the Bible was stripped of its spiritual and religious meaning. Instead, it was viewed as a historical text describing a “real” chain of events in the past (p. 139).
Hence today we have the empty, vicious circle of a widespread, hugely disparate “group” of people self-identifying as “Jews,” who:
a) are mostly descendants of people who converted to Judaism in the past, and thus have no ethnic link to the original Hebrews of the Tanakh (whoever they were);
b) no longer practice Judaism, and so—going by the same criteria that made their ancestors Jews—should no longer be considered Jews themselves.
And yet, somehow, this is considered not just an inconvenient but an irrelevant fact. The fact is, however (at least as Atzmon sees it), that the ideology of being Jewish now has little or nothing to do with Yahweh, Moses, or the Torah (except insofar as it can use these ideas to wholly secular ends), and everything to do with worldly power.
God no longer killed in the name of the Jewish people, the Jews did. They did it with Jewish symbols decorating their planes and tanks, and followed commands issued in Hebrew, the newly restored language of their ancestors. The Zionist hijacking of the Bible was in fact a desperate Jewish answer to German Early Romanticism. However, as much as 19th century German philosophers, poets, architects and artists were ideologically and aesthetically excited about pre-Socratic Greece, they knew very well that they were not Hellenism’s (biological) sons and daughters. The Jewish nationalists took their project one step further, binding themselves into a blood chain with their mythical forefathers; Hebrew, formerly a sacred tongue, became an everyday spoken language. German Early Romantics never went that far (p. 140).
Palestinians Are the Real Jews
“Identity terms come into usage at precisely the moment in which, for some reason, one comes to feel they signify a being or entity one has to fight to defend” (Atzmon, quoting Glenn Bowman, p. 154).
Jewishness—like all good fiction—requires a back-story. Relying on Sands’ work, Atzmon references how “early Biblical narrative is soaked in Philistines, Aramaic and camels,” yet excavations suggest that “Philistines didn’t appear in the region before the twelfth century BC , Aramaic appears a century later and camels didn’t show their cheerful faces before the eighth century BC.” Similarly, excavations of the Sinai Desert haven’t turned up much evidence for the Egyptian exodus:
apparently 3 million Hebrew men, women and children marched there for forty years without leaving a single Mazza Ball behind. . . . Such scientifically verifiable facts throw Zionist researchers into confusion. The Bible is fiction, and not much in it can substantiate the glorification of the Jewish people in Palestine at any stage. It would appear, rather, to be an ideological text that is being made to serve social and political ends (p. 141-2)
Do contemporary Jews even still believe their ancestors are the Biblical Israelites? Or do they simply opt not to think about it, or to take the time to question the underlying tenets of their identification? Would they care that the ancient Israelites—with whom they probably have no real connection—“were never even sent into exile [since] the Roman exile is just another Jewish myth” (p. 142)?
One idea they would care about, at least enough about to violently refute it, is: “if the people of Israel were not expelled, then the real descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judea must be the Palestinians” (p. 143).
Talk about projection! In such a topsy-turvy world, the persecution of Palestinians by Israelis begins to make perfect sense. There can only be one chosen people.
If the Palestinians are “the real Jews,” Atzmon asks, who are those people who call themselves Jews? The answer he gives is Sand’s again, namely, that while the ancient Israelites themselves did not spread, the Jewish religion did, being, like Christianity after it, a converting religion.
Monotheistic religions, being less tolerant than polytheistic ones, have an impetus to expand. Jewish expansionism in its early days was not just similar to Christian proselytising, but it was actually Jewish expansionism that planted the zeal for conversion in early Christian thought and practice (p. 144).
And if “contemporary Jews do not have a common origin,” if “their Semitic origins are a myth,” and if they “have no origin in Palestine whatsoever,” then any “so-called ‘return’ must be realised as pretext for a tribal expansionist invasion” (p. 145).
This makes the Jewish identity purely (geo-)political , a case of people having been “hijacked by a national movement based on myths” (p. 145). Anti-Semitism, likewise, becomes “an empty signifier,” when what is being expressed is “a legitimate critique of ideology, politics and practice” (p. 145).
An empty signifier that is no less crucial to the maintenance of an empty identity.
The Holocaust Spirit & the New Jew
“Exilic to the bone, Zionism turned to antagonising the indigenous Palestinians in order to maintain its fetish of Jewish identity” (Atzmon, p. 165).
If the Jewish identity is “neither a racial nor an ethnic category,” then how exactly does Jewishness relate to any kind of a homogenous group? As already discussed, Jewish identity can no longer be viewed as a branch variation of Judaism, especially since “many of those who proudly define themselves as Jews have very little knowledge of Judaism” (p. 147).
Many Jews today are atheists or non-religious, and even overtly opposed to religion. “The opposition to Judaism obviously includes Zionism (at least the early version of it), but is also the basis of much of Jewish socialist anti-Zionism” (p. 147).
So what is the ideological glue that holds the Jewish group identity together?
You guessed it.
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