Len, some much desired Zionist education for you, that I know you will enjoy..
yahoodi.com
After 2000 years of exile, the Jewish People has emerged traumatized. The source of that trauma has been the constant insecurity and fear that characterized most of the Diaspora, in most parts of the world. It is a product of landlessness, massacres, periodic expulsion and flight, persecution by tyrants and abuse by the Church and Mosque who encouraged antisemitism to satisfy their own insecurities and political desires.
Physical security for the Jews has traditionally been improved in a number of ways: usefulness, mobility, bribery and assimilation. Psychological responses to this insecurity and trauma are well known: self-hatred and blame, identification with and appeasement of abusers, obsessive fantasy of a future paradise on earth. These solutions and responses are so integrated into the Jewish psyche that they have been passed down from generation to generation, displaying themselves even in relatively free societies, even in America and the recently liberated homeland, Israel.
Despite its significance to the Jewish Nation, the State of Israel has failed to alleviate most of this trauma, and has not reduced the levels of antisemitism - it has simply allowed antisemites to masquerade themselves under the new banner of "anti-Zionism". We cannot expect antisemitism to disappear - Jewish existence and Jewish philosophy will always be threatening to its children: Christianity, Islam and Marxism. The trauma and insecurity, on the other hand, is within our power to diminish - should we decide to do so. |
