Fundamentalism and fanaticism: The ISIS-Israel connection

What can one do about a country that has gone mad? Israel has chosen the path of right-wing fanaticism, and has thus made itself the most dangerous county in the world. It is, not least, the most dangerously manipulative country in the world -- and the primary targets of this manipulation campaign are Jews living outside of Israel.

This article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic is a despicable piece of agit-prop designed to convince Jews that they are all unsafe outside of their supposed "homeland." Jews are being told that the year is still 1944. Jews are being told that all gentiles -- every last one of them -- are ruthless, mindlessly bloodthirsty Jew-haters, reared on the Protocols and anxious to break out the Zyklon B. Anyone who opposes the Israeli plan to exterminate all Palestinians must be a Jew-hater who wants to exterminate all Jews.

The people who think this way are very sick.

Compared to (say) blacks and Muslims, Jews have attained a protected and privileged position in both the United States and Europe. Even the new fascists in Europe have become pro-Israel, a non-intuitive lesson which Mr. Brevik taught the world in such a startling fashion. Israel is hardly a safe refuge: Just look at the history of the place.

Any writer who cannot acknowledge this reality is mentally ill.

Here's an even more extreme example of this same sick mentality. A leading Israeli newspaper has called for the nuclear annihilation of Iran and Germany. 

In the opinion article published Tuesday, the author claims that only through nuclear annihilation of Iran and Germany, with 20 or 30 nuclear bombs each, can Israelis prevent the state’s destruction.

“If Israel does not walk in the ways of God’s Bible,” author Chen Ben-Eliyahu wrote in Hebrew, “it will receive a heavy punishment of near complete destruction and doom and only a few will be saved.”

Psychopathology. Mental illness.

Moreover: This is precisely the same sort of mental illness which afflicts the fanatics who join ISIS.

The sickness is called fundamentalism. The sickness is called fanaticism. And there are plenty of "Christians" walking around the United States (particularly in our southern regions) who have caught the same disease.

A recent piece by one Alan Hart (a writer previously unknown to me) hits the right note:

What Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman actually said when as leader of the right-wing Yisrael Beitenu party he addressed an election rally in Herzliya on 8 March was the following:

Whoever is with us should give everything as they wish. Whoever is against us, there’s nothing else to do. We have to lift up an axe and remove his head, otherwise we won’t survive here.

The question those words provoked in my mind was this.

If Israel continues on its present course will the future see the emergence of a Zionist equivalent of the self-styled “Islamic State“ (IS)?

Precisely. The ISIS-Israel comparison does an excellent job of demonstrating why a staunch opposition to Israel does not equate to racism or anti-Semitism.

All people of common sense and good will must confess that ISIS and Al Qaeda are monstrosities. Yet one can make this claim without making the segue into hatred of all Muslims or all Arabs.

The people bearing the brunt of the struggle against ISIS are Muslims. They are the ones who are dying to defeat the fundamentalist fanatics.

So one can hate ISIS without hating Muslims. One may express a desire to see ISIS ended forever without hating Muslims as a whole.

Similarly, one can hate Israel without hating Judaism. One may express a desire to see Israel as presently constituted ended forever without hating Jews as a whole.

What do I mean by "as presently constituted"? Let's return to Hart's piece.

Because a two-state solution in the shape and form the Palestinians could accept has long been dead, killed by Israel’s colonisation of the occupied West Bank, an enterprise best described as ongoing ethnic cleansing slowly and by stealth, a binational state is the only hope for a political resolution of the conflict.

The creation of a binational state would put under one territorial roof the land of Israel prior to the 1967 war, the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.

In theory and principle, a real and true binational state would be one in which all of its citizens enjoyed equal political and all other civil and human rights.

Because the day is approaching when the Arabs of Israel-Palestine will outnumber the Jews, the creation of a binational state would therefore lead to the de-Zionisation of Palestine and, to quote Meir Dagan again, “the end of the Zionist dream”.

This is my position.

This "one state" outcome may seem unthinkable today -- but when I was young, the end of apartheid in South Africa and the reunification of Germany seemed to be impossible goals. (I'm of two minds about the latter...!)

The "one state" solution which I favor is not the position of many notable critics of Israel, such as Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky. I revere both men. But times are changing, and they are not changing with them.

If Norman Finkelstein continues to hold on to the unrealizable fantasy of a two-state solution, the time may come when we must regretfully say: "Mr. Finkelstein, we appreciate and applaud your writings and lectures. You have done the world a remarkable service. But your service is now at an end. You are dismissed."

(I have not yet heard the new Max Blumenthal lecture embedded above. But I am sure it is worth viewing.)