That about says it all.
Levin:
I agree with David Gutmann that the Palestinians’ pursuit of their terror war against Israel, and election of Hamas, are less suicidal than genocidal. I also agree with his comments on the psychodynamics underlying the Palestinians’, and broader Arab world’s, genocidal agenda, except that I would emphasize the role of Arab leaders in cultivating and channeling individuals’ psychodynamic predilections into murderous hatred toward perceived external enemies, most notably Jews.
On the recent Palestinian election, there has been much debate as to whether votes for Hamas were votes against PA/PLO corruption or for Hamas’s exterminationist platform. But the distinction is based on a false premise in that – as David Keyes notes – the PA/PLO likewise promoted an exterminationist platform, using its media, mosques and schools over the past decade to further indoctrinate Palestinians into embracing Jew-hatred and believing in the illegitimacy of Israel, the necessity of its annihilation, and its ripeness for destruction.
Israelis and Western Jews who ignore the other side’s explicit agenda and replace it with fantasies of what they want the other side’s agenda to be – fantasies that the Palestinians are simply asking for redress of supposed Israeli misbehavior and that sufficient concessions will end the conflict – are the truly suicidal party, willing to risk their own lives and those of their children, their co-religionists and their countrymen for the sake of promoting their delusions….
As I argue in my book, The Oslo Syndrome, embracing the perspectives of one’s enemies is a common phenomenon within chronically besieged populations, whether minorities marginalized, denigrated and attacked by the surrounding society or small nations under chronic siege by their neighbors. It has been a recurrent theme in Jewish Diaspora history as well as in Israel.
A major counterweight to the psychological corrosiveness of besiegement must be leaders who convey to the community its true choices and bolster its will to resist. The Israeli-Arab conflict is ultimately a test of wills in that Israel has and will retain the military capacity to defend itself – despite its small population, its lack of strategic depth, and the rabidness of its enemies. It is self-delusion and loss of heart to defend itself that is likely to remain its greatest threat.
Gutmann:
Guilty by nature, convinced of their own sins against the victimized multitude of third-world innocents, the Jewish doves make the gestures of surrender. Turning the bared throat towards the knife they invite the Palestinians to punish them and their guilty nation for their sins.
I grew up among Jews like these, and agree with Dr. Levin that they are the truly “suicidal” party. While I’m surprised to see them roliferate in Israel, I can understand them. What I don’t understand is the passive response of so many European Christians, citizens of advanced democracies, to the increasingly arrogant, murderous challenge that they face from the Eurabian Jihadists.
Like their grandfathers who appeased Hitler, the European doves find all kinds of reasons to spin and minimize the Jihadist fury that now openly mocks and threatens their comfortable lifeways.
