Israel was founded on lies. The lie that Palestinian land was largely unoccupied. The lie that 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and villages during their ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias in 1948 because they were told to do so by Arab leaders. The lie that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 war that saw Israel seize 78 percent of historic Palestine. The lie that Israel faced annihilation in 1967, forcing it to invade and occupy the remaining 22 percent of Palestine, as well as land belonging to Egypt and Syria.
Israel is sustained by lies. The lie that Israel wants a just and equitable peace and will support a Palestinian state. The lie that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. The lie that Israel is an “outpost of Western civilization in a sea of barbarism.” The lie that Israel respects the rule of law and human rights.
Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians are always greeted with lies. I heard them. I recorded them. I published them in my stories for The New York Times when I was the paper’s Middle East Bureau Chief.
I covered war for two decades, including seven years in the Middle East. I learned quite a bit about the size and lethality of explosive devices. There is nothing in the arsenal of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) that could have replicated the massive explosive power of the missile that killed an estimated 500 civilians in the al-Ahli Arab Christian hospital in Gaza. Nothing. If Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad had these kinds of missiles, huge buildings in Israel would be rubble with hundreds of dead. They don’t.
The whistling sound, audible on the video moments before the explosion, appears to comes from the high velocity of a missile. This sound gives it away. No Palestinian rocket makes this noise. And then there is the speed of the missile. Palestinian rockets are slow and lumbering, clearly visible as they arch in the sky and then tumble in free fall towards their targets. They do not strike with precision or travel at close to supersonic speed. They are incapable of killing hundreds of people.
The Israeli military dropped “roof knocking” rockets with no warheads on the hospital in the days leading up to the Oct. 17 strike, the familiar warning given by Israel to evacuate buildings, according to al-Ahli hospital officials. Hospital officials also said they had received calls from Israel saying “we warned you to evacuate twice.” Israel has demanded that all hospitals in northern Gaza be evacuated.
Following the strike on the hospital, Hananya Naftali, a “digital aide” to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, posted on X, formerly Twitter: “Israeli Air Force struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza.” The post was quickly deleted.
Since the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel by Palestinian resistance fighters, which reportedly left some 1,300 Israelis dead, many of them civilians, and saw some 200 kidnapped as hostages and taken to Gaza, Israel has carried out 51 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza that have killed 15 healthcare workers and injured 27, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Out of 35 hospitals in Gaza, four are not functioning due to severe damage and targeting. Only eight of the 22 UNRWA primary healthcare centers are “partially functional,” the WHO says.
The brazenness of Israeli lies stunned those of us who reported from Gaza. It did not matter if we had seen the Israeli attack, including the shooting of unarmed Palestinians. It did not matter how many witnesses we interviewed. It did not matter what photographic and forensic evidence we obtained. Israel lied. Small lies. Big lies. Huge lies. These lies came reflexively and instantly from the Israeli military, Israeli politicians and Israeli media. They were amplified by Israel’s well-oiled propaganda machine and repeated with a cloying sincerity on international news outlets.
Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic regimes. It does not deform the truth, it inverts it. It paints a picture that is diametrically opposed to reality. Those of us who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel’s Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories — required under the rules of American journalism — although we know they are untrue.
Israel has invented an Orwellian lexicon. Children killed by Israelis become children caught in crossfire. The bombing of residential districts, with dozens of dead and wounded, becomes a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory. The destruction of Palestinian homes becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists.
The Big Lie — Große Lüge — feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit — racism among its supporters and terror among its victims. The Big Lies fosters the myth of a clash of civilizations, a war between democracy, decency and honor on one side and Islamic terrorism, barbarism and medievalism on the other.
George Orwell in his novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” called the Big Lie “doublethink”. Doublethink uses “logic against logic” and “repudiate[s] morality while laying claim to it.” The Big Lie abolishes nuances, ambiguities and contradictions that can plague conscience. It is designed to create cognitive dissonance. It permits no gray zones. The world is black and white, good and evil, righteous and unrighteous. The Big Lie allows believers to take comfort — a comfort they are desperately seeking — in their own moral superiority even as they abrogate all morality. It feeds, what Edward Bernays called, the “logic-proof compartment of dogmatic adherence.” All effective propaganda, Bernays writes, targets and builds upon these irrational “psychological habits.”
Israeli supporters thirst for these lies. They do not want to know the truth. The truth would force them to examine their racism, self-delusion and complicity in oppression, murder and genocide.
Most importantly, the Big Lie sends an ominous message to the Palestinians. The Big Lie states that Israel will wage a campaign of mass terror and genocide and never take responsibility for its crimes. The Big Lie obliterates the truth. It obliterates the dignity of human thought and human action. It obliterates facts. It obliterates history. It obliterates comprehension. It obliterates hope. It reduces all communication to the language of violence. When oppressors speak to the oppressed exclusively through indiscriminate violence, the oppressed answer through indiscriminate violence.
The cartoonist Joe Sacco and I watched Israeli soldiers taunt and shoot small boys in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza. We interviewed the boys and their parents afterwards in the hospital. In a few cases we attended their funerals. We had their names. We had the dates and locations of the shootings.
Israel’s response was to say that we were not in Gaza. We had made it up.
The Israeli Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, Defense Minister and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) spokesperson immediately blamed the killing of the Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, on Palestinian gunmen. Israel disseminated footage of a Palestinian fighter they said shot and killed the journalist, who was wearing a flak jacket and helmet marked “PRESS.”
Benny Gantz, who was at the time Defense Minister, stated that “no [Israeli] gunfire was directed at the journalist,” and that the Israeli army had “seen footage of indiscriminate shooting by Palestinian terrorists”.
This lie was peddled until video footage examined by B’Tselem, The Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, identified the location of the Palestinian gunman depicted in the video. The video, the human rights organization found, was taken in a different location from where Shireen was killed.
When Israel is caught lying, as it was with the murder of Shireen, it promises an investigation. But these investigations are a sham. Impartial investigations into the hundreds of killings by soldiers and Jewish settlers of Palestinians are rarely carried out. Perpetrators are almost never brought to trial or held accountable. The pattern of Israeli obfuscation is predictable. So is the collusion of nearly all of the corporate media along with Republican and Democratic politicians. U.S. politicians decried the murder of Shireen and dutifully repeated the old mantra, calling for a “thorough investigation” by the army that carried out the crime.
A few months later, Israel admitted that there was a “high possibility” that an Israeli soldier killed the journalist by accident, but by then the eruption of street protests and rage over the killing of the journalist was over and her murder largely forgotten.
By the time the conclusive proof comes out about the bombing of the hospital, it too will be a distant memory.
There is dramatic footage captured in September 2000 at the Netzarim junction in the Gaza Strip — where I saw a nineteen-year-old boy shot and killed by an Israeli sniper — by France 2 TV, of a father trying to shield his traumatized 12-year-old son, Muhammad al-Durrah, from Israeli gunfire that ultimately killed him.
The killing of the boy resulted in the typical propaganda campaign by Israel. Israeli officials spent years lying about the killing, first blaming the Palestinians for the shooting, later suggesting that the scene was faked, and finally insisting the boy was still alive.
When an Israeli soldier, in 2003, murdered the 23-year-old student and American activist Rachel Corrie, by crushing her to death with a bulldozer as she tried to prevent the illegal demolition of a Palestinian doctor’s home, the Israeli army said it was an accident for which Corrie was responsible.
The Israeli military has killed “at least” 20 journalists since 2001, with no accountability, according to a 2023 report by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. “Immediately after a journalist is killed by security forces, Israeli officials often push out a counter narrative to media reporting,” the CPJ concluded. This includes blaming the deaths on “indiscriminate fire” by Palestinians or attempts to discredit those killed as “terrorists.”
Israel blocks the work of independent human rights organizations into atrocities and war crimes it commits in Gaza and the West Bank. It refuses to cooperate with the International Criminal Court into possible war crimes in the Occupied Territories. It does not cooperate with the U.N. Human Rights Council and prohibits the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, from entering the country. Israel revoked the work permit for Omar Shakir, the Director of Human Rights Watch (Israel and Palestine), in 2018 and expelled him. In May 2018, Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy published a report calling on the European Union and European states to halt their direct and indirect financial support and funding to Palestinian and international human rights organizations that “have ties to terror and promote boycotts against Israel.”
After the bombing of the hospital, Israel first released a video that purported to show Palestinian Islamic Jihad rockets which struck the hospital. The Israelis hastily removed the video when journalists noticed that time stamps showed the images were taken 40 minutes after the strike on the hospital.
Israeli propagandists — aware that Palestinian rockets have little explosive power — then claimed that Hamas stored munitions under the hospital. This caused the massive explosion, they said. But if this was true, it would mean there would be a secondary explosion. There was none. And now Israel has released what they say is a recording of two Hamas militants discussing the missile strike on the hospital. The militants ask each other, in a self-incriminating conversation that is too ridiculous to believe, if Hamas or PIJ carried out the strike. Please. How was Israel completely in the dark about an incursion by thousands of armed Palestinian militants from Gaza into Israel on Oct. 7 and able to capture this incriminating conversation by two supposed militants?
“Israel has a whole unit of ‘mistaravim’, Israeli Jewish undercover agents trained to pose as Palestinians and secretly operate among Palestinians,” the reporter Jonathan Cook writes. “Israel produced a highly popular TV series about such people in Gaza called Fauda. You have to be beyond credulous to think that Israel couldn’t, and wouldn’t, rig up a call like this to fool us, just as it regularly fools Palestinians in Gaza.”
Israel has also long targeted medical facilities, ambulances and medics, as Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein points out. It bombed a Palestinian children’s hospital during the 1982 war in Lebanon, killing 60 people. It also carried out missile strikes on clearly marked Lebanese ambulances during the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon. It damaged or destroyed 29 ambulances and almost half of Gaza’s health facilities, including 15 hospitals, during the 2008-2009 assault on Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead. It routinely prohibited wounded Palestinians from being picked up by ambulances during this operation, often leaving them to die. During Operation Protective Edge, the 51-day assault on Gaza in 2014, Israel destroyed or damaged 17 hospitals and 56 primary healthcare centers and damaged or destroyed 45 ambulances.
You can see my interview, released today, with Professor Finkelstein about Gaza and Israel here.
Amnesty International, which investigated the Israeli attacks on three of these hospitals in 2014, dismissed the “evidence” for the attacks offered by Israel as false. “The image tweeted by the Israeli military does not match satellite images of the al-Wafa hospital and appears to depict a different location,” the report read.
Expose Israeli lies and you are attacked by Israel and its supporters as an anti-Semite and apologist for terrorists. You are banished from mainstream media. You are denied forums to speak about the issue and, as has happened to me, disinvited from university events.
It is an old game, one I have played as a reporter many, many times. I bear the scars of the lies spewed out by Israel and its lobby. Meanwhile, Israel continues its butchery, endorsed and even lauded by Western political leaders, including Joe Biden, who accompany the torrent of lies from Israel like a Wagnerian chorus.
I am tired of reading that Netanyahu is a psychopath. He most certainly is not. I see no reason to consider him, or any other Israeli leader, as psychopaths in the psychiatric sense. They have a collective psychopathy, which is a very different thing.
The difference is the same as between a personal neurosis and a collective neurosis. According to Freud, religion (and he meant christianity) is a collective neurosis. Freud did not mean that religious people are neurotic. On the contrary, he observed that their collective neurosis tends to immunize religious people from personal neurosis.[1] I do not subscribe to Freud’s theory, I just need his backing to introduce my own theory: Zionists, even the most bloodthirsty of them, are not individual psychopaths; many of them are loving and even self-sacrificing persons within their own community. Rather, they are the vectors of a collective psychopathy, which means a special way (we may call it inhuman) by which they collectively see and interact with other human communities.
This is a crucial point, without which we can never understand Israel. Calling their leaders psychopaths is not helpful. What we need is recognize Israel as a collective psychopath, and study the origin of this unique national character. It is a matter of survival for the world, just as it is a matter of survival for any group to recognize the psychopath among them and understand his patterns of thinking and of behavior.
What Is a Psychopath?
Psychopathy is a syndrome of psychological traits classified among the personality disorders. Canadian psychologist Robert Hare, in the wake of Hervey Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity (1941), has defined its diagnostic criteria on the basis of a cognitive model that is now widely adopted, though some psychiatrists prefer the term “sociopathy” because it really has to do with the inability to socialize in a genuine way.[2] In an effort to get everyone to agree, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual on Mental Disorders has suggested “antisocial personality disorder”; but the term “psychopathy” is still the most popular, and for that reason alone, I will adopt it.
The most characteristic trait of the psychopath is a complete absence of empathy and, as a result, of moral inhibition in harming others, combined with a thirst for power. Psychopathy also shares some traits with narcissism: psychopaths have a grand vision of their own importance. In their minds, everything is owed to them because they are exceptional. They are never wrong, and failures are always the fault of others.
Truth is of no value to the psychopath; truth is whatever is convenient for him at any given moment. He is a pathological liar, but he is hardly aware of it. Lying is so natural to him that the question of his “sincerity” is almost irrelevant: the psychopath beats the lie detector.
The psychopath feels only very superficial emotions and has no real feelings for anyone; but he has developed a great ability to deceive. He can be charming to the point of charismatic. He is unable to empathize, but learns to simulate it. His power is his extraordinary ability to feign, trick, trap, and capture. Although he himself is immunized against guilt, he becomes a master in making others feel guilty.
Because the psychopath is unable to put himself in the shoes of anyone else, he cannot look at himself critically. Confident in any circumstance of his right, he is genuinely surprised by the grudge of his victims—and will punish them for it. If he steals someone’s property, he will regard the resentment of the despoiled as irrational hatred.
Although the psychopath can be judged raving mad, he is not insane in the medical sense, since he does not suffer—psychopaths don’t visit psychiatrists unless forced to. In a certain sense, the psychopath is over-adjusted to social life, if the purpose of social life is to get by individually. That is why the real mystery, from a Darwinian point of view, is not the existence of psychopaths, but their low proportion in the population.
The most optimistic low-end estimate in the Western population is 1 percent. They should not be confused with the proverbial 1 percent who own half the world’s wealth, although a study among senior executives of large companies has shown that psychopathic traits are widespread among them.[3]
Israel as a Psychopathic State
The fact that Jews are today disproportionately represented among the elite (they form half of American billionaires, while representing only 2.4% of the population),[4] does not mean either that psychopathy is more prevalent among Jews. In a way, quite the opposite is the case: Jews demonstrate among themselves a high degree of empathy, or at least solidarity, often to the point of self-sacrifice. But the selective nature of this empathy suggests that it is addressed less to the humanity of others than to their Jewishness.
In fact, Jews tend to confuse Jewishness and humanity. So what is good for the Jews must necessarily be good for humanity. Conversely, a crime against the Jews is a “crime against humanity,” a concept they created in 1945. Confusing Jewishness with humanity is a sign of collective narcissism, but when it comes to regarding non-Jews as less than human, it becomes a sign of collective psychopathy.
Collectively, Jews consider themselves innocent of the charges brought against them. That is why Zionist pioneer Leo Pinsker, a medical doctor, regarded Judeophobia as “a psychic aberration. As a psychic aberration it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable.” By way of consequence, the Jews are “the people chosen for universal hatred” (even atheist Jews cannot help defining Jewishness as chosenness).[5]
Israel, the Jewish State, is the psychopath among nations. It acts towards other nations in the way a psychopath acts towards his fellow men. “Only psychiatrists can explain Israel’s behavior,” wrote Israeli journalist Gideon Levy in Haaretz in 2010. However, his diagnosis, including “paranoia, schizophrenia and megalomania,”[6] is mistaken. Considering Israel’s absolute self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians, and its extraordinary capacity to lie and manipulate, we are dealing with a psychopath.
By drawing a parallel between psychopathy and the attitude of Israel, I do not blame Israelis or Jews as individuals. They are part of this collective psychopathy only to the extent of their submission to the national ideology. We can make a comparison with another sort of collective entity. In The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Joel Bakan noted that large companies behave like psychopaths, insensitive to the suffering of those they crush in their pursuit of profit: “Corporate behavior is very similar to that of a psychopath.”[7] My analysis of Israel is based on the same reasoning. Except that Israel is much more dangerous than any giant company (even Pfizer), because the ideology that causes its personality disorder is much more insane than the liberal, social-darwinian ideology that rules the Stock Market. Israel’s ideology is biblical.
The Biblical Virus
Israel’s collective psychopathy is not genetic, it is cultural, but it was formed is very ancient times, and so it is embedded in the ancestral subconscious (whatever that is): it ultimately comes from the jealous god invented by the Levites to control the starving tribes they set out to conquer Palestine some three thousand years ago. By birth, Israel is the nation of the psychopathic god.
Yahweh, “the god of Israel,” is an angry and lonely volcano god who manifests toward all other gods an implacable hatred, and ends up considering them as non-gods, him being, in fact, the only true god. This very clearly characterizes him as a psychopath among gods. By contrast, for the Egyptians, according to German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, “the gods are social beings,” and harmony between them guarantees harmony in the cosmos.[8] There was, moreover, a degree of translatability between the pantheons of various civilizations. But Yahweh taught the Hebrews contempt for the deities of their neighbors—making them, in the eyes of these neighbors, a threat to the cosmic and social order. Yahweh is essentially, says Assmann, a theoclastic god: “You must completely destroy all the places where the nations you dispossess have served their gods, on high mountains, on hills, under any spreading tree; you must tear down their altars, smash their sacred stones, burn their sacred poles, hack to bits the statues of their gods and obliterate their name from that place” (Deuteronomy 12:2-3).
Yahweh may be a character of fiction, but his hold on the Jewish mind is nevertheless real. “To appeal to a crazy, violent father, and for three thousand years, that is what it is to be a crazy Jew!”[9] said Smilesburger in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock. Jews have been taught by Yahweh to keep strictly separate from other people. Food prohibitions serve to prevent all socialization outside the tribe: “I shall set you apart from all these peoples, for you to be mine” (Leviticus 20:26).
The nature of the covenant is not moral. The sole criterion for approval by Yahweh is obedience to his arbitrary laws and commands. To slaughter treacherously hundreds of prophets of Baal is good, because it is the will of Yahweh (1Kings 18). To show mercy to the king of the Amalekites is bad, because when Yahweh says, “kill everyone,” he means “everyone” (1Samuel 15). In the biblical historiography, the fate of the Jewish people depends on them following Yahweh’s orders, no matter how insane. As well said by Kevin MacDonald:
The idea that Jewish suffering results from Jews straying from their own law occurs almost like a constant drumbeat throughout the Tanakh—a constant reminder that the persecution of Jews is not the result of their own behavior vis-à-vis Gentiles but rather the result of their behavior vis-à-vis God.[10]
If the Jews follow Yahweh’s command of alienating themselves from the rest of humankind, in return, Yahweh promises to make them rule over humankind: “follow his ways, keep his statutes, his commandments, his customs, and listen to his voice,” and Yahweh “will raise you higher than every other nation he has made”; “You will make many nations your subjects, yet you will be subject to none” (Deuteronomy 26:17-19 and 28:12). This sounds very much, actually, like the pact Satan proposed to Jesus: “the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. And he said to him, ‘I will give you all these, if you fall at my feet and do me homage.’” (Matthew 4:8-9).
If Israel follows scrupulously the Law, Yahweh promises to submit all nations to the domination of Israel, and destroy those that resist. “Kings will fall prostrate before you, faces to the ground, and lick the dust at your feet,” whereas “the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish” (Isaiah 49:23 and 60:12). Nations must either recognize Israel’s sovereignty, or be destroyed. Yahweh told Israel that he has identified “seven nations greater and stronger than yourself,” that “you must put under the curse of destruction,” and not “show them any pity.” As for their kings, “you will blot out their names under heaven” (Deuteronomy 7:1-2, 24).
The war code of Deuteronomy 20 commands to exterminate “any living thing” in the conquered cities of Canaan. In practice, the rule is extended to all people who resist the Israelites in their conquest. It was applied by Moses to the Midianites, although in this case Yahweh allowed his warriors to keep the young virgin girls (Numbers 31). It was applied by Joshua to the Canaanite city of Jericho, where the Israelites “enforced the curse of destruction on everyone in the city: men and women, young and old, including the oxen, the sheep and the donkeys, slaughtering them all” (Joshua 6:21). In the city of Ai, the inhabitants were all slaughtered, twelve thousand of them, “until not one was left alive and none to flee. … When Israel had finished killing all the inhabitants of Ai in the open ground, and in the desert where they had pursued them, and when every single one had fallen to the sword, all Israel returned to Ai and slaughtered its remaining population.” Women were not spared. “For booty, Israel took only the cattle and the spoils of this town” (Joshua 8:22-27). Then came the turns of the cities of Makkedah, Libnah, Lachish, Eglon, Hebron, Debir, and Hazor. In the whole land, Joshua “left not one survivor and put every living thing under the curse of destruction, as Yahweh, god of Israel, had commanded” (10:40).
As wrote Avigail Abarbanel in “Why I left the Cult,” the Zionist conquerors of Palestine “have been following quite closely the biblical dictate to Joshua to just walk in and take everything. … For a supposedly non-religious movement it’s extraordinary how closely Zionism … has followed the Bible.”[11] Kim Chernin, another Israeli dissident, wrote in “The Seven Pillars of Jewish Denial”: “I can’t count the number of times I read the story of Joshua as a tale of our people coming into their rightful possession of their promised land without stopping to say to myself, ‘but this is a history of rape, plunder, slaughter, invasion, and destruction of other peoples.’”[12]
Yahweh offers only two possible paths to Israel: domination of other nations, if Israel keeps Yahweh’s covenant of separateness, or annihilation by these same nations, if Israel breaks the covenant:
“if you make friends with the remnant of these nations still living beside you, if you intermarry with them, if you mix with them and they with you, then know for certain that Yahweh your god will stop dispossessing these nations before you, and for you they will be a snare, a pitfall, thorns in your sides and thistles in your eyes, until you vanish from this fine country given you by Yahweh your god.” (Joshua 23:12-14)
Dispossess others or be dispossessed, dominate or be exterminated: Israel cannot think beyond that alternative.
Zionism is Biblical
What has it got to do with Zionism, you ask? Isn’t Zionism a secular ideology? I think it is high time to dispel this misunderstanding. Zionism is a product of Jewishness, and Jewishness is rooted in the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh. Whether he has read it or not, whether he judges it historical or mythical, every Jew ultimately bases his Jewishness on the Bible—or whatever he knows about the Bible. Jewishness is the internalization of the psychopathic god. It makes little difference whether Jews define their Jewishness in religious terms or in ethnic terms. From a religious viewpoint, the Bible preserves the memory and the essence of the Covenant with God, whereas from a secular viewpoint, the Bible is the foundational narrative of the Jewish people, and the pattern by which Jews interpret their whole subsequent history (the Dispersion, the Holocaust, the rebirth of Israel, and so on).
It is true that Theodor Herzl, the prophet of political Zionism, did not draw his inspiration from the Bible. Yet he termed his ideology Zionism, using a biblical name of Jerusalem. As for post-Herzl Zionists, and for the actual founders of the modern State of Israel, they were steeped in the Bible. “The Bible is our mandate,” declared Chaim Weizmann in 1919, and in 1948 he offered Truman a Torah scroll for his recognition of Israel. Thus begins the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel:
ERETZ-ISRAEL [(Hebrew) – the Land of Israel, Palestine] was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.
There is no question that the State of Israel was founded on the biblical claim.
David Ben-Gurion, the author of this document and the father of the nation, had a biblical vision of the Jewish people. To him, according to his biographer Dan Kurzman, the rebirth of Israel in 1948 “paralleled the Exodus from Egypt, the conquest of the land by Joshua, the Maccabean revolt.” Ben-Gurion had never been to a synagogue, and ate pork for breakfast, yet he was steeped in biblical history. “There can be no worthwhile political or military education about Israel without profound knowledge of the Bible,” he used to say.[13] Tom Segev writes in his more recent biography:
He sponsored a Bible study class in his home and promoted two concepts to characterize the State of Israel’s moral character and its destiny and duty to itself and the world: the first was “chosen people,” a term coming from the covenant between God and the people of Israel (Exodus 19:5-6); the second was the Jewish people’s commitment to the principles of justice and peace that make it a “light to the nations,” in the spirit of the prophets (Isaiah 49:6). He frequently spoke and wrote about these concepts.[14]
Ben-Gurion’s biblical mindset became more and more apparent as he grew older. Consider for example the fact that, while he was begging Kennedy to let his people have the Bomb because the Egyptians wanted to exterminate them (as they had under Moses), he prophesied in the magazine Look (January 16, 1962) that within twenty-five years, Jerusalem “will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.”[15] Ben-Gurion was not crazy, he was simply thinking biblically.
Almost every Israeli leader of Ben-Gurion’s generation and the next shared share the same biblical mindset. Moshe Dayan, the military hero of the 1967 Six-Day War, justified his annexation of new territory in a book titled Living with the Bible (1978). Naftali Bennett, while Israeli minister of Education, has also justified the annexation of the West Bank by the Bible.[16] Zionists can find in the Bible all the justifications they need: for Gaza, they have Judges 1:18-19: “And Judah took Gaza with its territory … Now Yahweh was with Judah, and they took possession of the hill country.” There are now overt Bible freaks in the Israeli government, like the Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, who shoot Bible quotes every day. “God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people” is the alpha and the omega of Zionism, not just for Israelis, but for the Christians who, since 1917, have supported the Jewish claim and support Israel today.
Even more than Ben-Gurion, Benjamin Netanyahu thinks biblically, and it is also getting clearer and clearer as he gets older. He also knows Christians cannot seriously argue against the biblical claim. On March 3, 2015, he dramatized in front of the American Congress his phobia of Iran by referring to the biblical book of Esther:
We’re an ancient people. In our nearly 4,000 years of history, many have tried repeatedly to destroy the Jewish people. Tomorrow night, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, we’ll read the book of Esther. We’ll read of a powerful Persian viceroy named Haman, who plotted to destroy the Jewish people some 2,500 years ago. But a courageous Jewish woman, Queen Esther, exposed the plot and gave the Jewish people the right to defend themselves against their enemies. The plot was foiled. Our people were saved. Today the Jewish people face another attempt by yet another Persian potentate to destroy us.[17]
Netanyahu scheduled his address on the eve of Purim, which celebrates the happy end of the Book of Esther—the slaughter of 75,000 Persian men, women and children. In 2019, Netanyahu’s pronounced these words during a tour of the West Bank, “I believe in the book of books and I read it as a call to action that every generation must do what it can to ensure the eternity of Israel.” The Bible occupies such a large part of his brain that he wants to put a Bible on the Moon!
So please stop calling Netanyahu a psychopath. Or at least, call him a biblical psychopath, a worshipper of the psychopathic god. And while you are there, learn see the Hebrew Bible for what it is: “a conspiracy against the rest of the world,” as said H. G. Wells. In the books of the Bible, “you have the conspiracy plain and clear, … an aggressive and vindictive conspiracy. … It is not tolerance but stupidity to shut our eyes to their quality.”[18]
Notes
[1] Freud developed this theory in three books: Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents and The Future of an Illusion.
[2] Robert Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, The Guilford Press, 1993.
[3] Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, HarperCollins, 2007.
[4] Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, University of Chicago Press, 1993; J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, Basic Books , 1997.
[5] Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew, 1882 , on www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/pinsker.html
[6] Gideon Levy, “Only psychiatrists can explain Israel’s behavior,” Haaretz, January 10, 2010, www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/only-psychiatrists-can-explain-israel-s-behavior-1.261115
[7] Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Free Press, 2005. Watch also the documentary of the same title.
[8] Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism, University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, p. 47.
[9] Philip Roth, Operation Shylock: A Confession, Simon & Schuster, 1993, p. 110.
[10] Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, Praeger, 1998, kindle 2013, kindle l. 6187–89.
Subscribe to New Columns [12] Kim Chernin, “The Seven Pillars of Jewish Denial,” Tikkun, Sept. 2002, quoted in Kevin MacDonald, Cultural Insurrections: Essays on Western Civilization, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism, Occidental Press, 2007, pp. 27-28.
[13] Dan Kurzman, Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, Touchstone, 1983, pp. 17–18, 22, 26–28.
[14] Tom Segev, A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion, Apollo, 2019, kindle l. 286.
[15] David Ben-Gurion and Amram Ducovny, David Ben-Gurion, In His Own Words, Fleet Press Corp., 1969, p. 116.
[16] “Israeli minister: The Bible says West Bank is ours” on www.youtube.com/watch?v=Png17wB_omA
[17] “The Complete Transcript of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress,” on www.washing tonpost.com.
[18] Herbert George Wells, The Fate of Homo Sapiens, 1939 (archive.org), p. 128.
"In fact, Jews tend to confuse Jewishness and humanity. So what is good for the Jews must necessarily be good for humanity. Conversely, a crime against the Jews is a “crime against humanity,” a concept they created in 1945. Confusing Jewishness with humanity is a sign of collective narcissism, but when it comes to regarding non-Jews as less than human, it becomes a sign of collective psychopathy."
-Yup.
Exactly what we were discussing a few weeks back when I said there was "a problem with Judaism":