From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  And persecution is the dominant theme of Jewish history. Michael Walzer remembers: “I was taught Jewish history as a long tale of exile and persecution—Holocaust history read backwards.”785 Persecution is also the central theme of the liturgy and Jewish feasts: Passover, Hanukkah, Purim, Yom Kippur. Persecution is so essential to the Jewish identity that, when it does not exist, there is an urgent need to invent it. An obsessive fear of anti-Semitism must be maintained in the minds of the Jews, for it is the glue that holds the community together, the only thing capable of resisting the dissolving effect of assimilation. Toward the end of his life, Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg repeated that he would consider himself a Jew “as long as there was a single anti-Semite left on earth.”786 (One should take him seriously: As a Soviet propagandist during WWII, Ehrenburg’s leaflets urged Red Army soldiers to “kill! kill! kill!”: “The Germans are not human beings. […] There is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses. […] Kill the Germans—that is your grandmother’s request. Kill the German—that is your child’s prayer. Kill the German—that is your motherland’s loud request. […] Kill, Red Army men, kill! No fascist is innocent, be he alive, be he as yet unborn.”)787 When real Judeophobia is in decline, it becomes necessary to raise the specter of imaginary anti-Semitism. Even asleep, even invisible, the beast must remain a permanent threat in everyone’s mind.

  The incantatory cult of the Holocaust, developed in the 1960s, is part of the same strategy. It could be considered a sort of cannibalizing the dead, if the dead were really at the center of this cult. But that is not the case. Only their number and the power it confers are important. Recent polls indicate that being Jewish is increasingly defined as the funeral cult of the Holocaust: a 2013 Pew Research poll on the theme “A Portrait of Jewish Americans” shows that, to the question “What’s essential to being Jewish?” “Remembering the Holocaust” comes first for 73 percent of respondents. Next comes “Caring about Israel,” then “Observing Jewish laws” (not to mention those whose first reaction is to congratulate themselves by ticking “Leading an ethical and moral life”).788 The Jewish people is no longer defined as the chosen people. It is now the exterminatable people. “The Jewish religion died 200 years ago. Now there is nothing that unifies the Jews around the world apart from the Holocaust,” once remarked Yeshayahu Leibowitz, professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.789 If the Holocaust has supplanted Yahweh as the new god of Israel, it is because its primary function is the same: separate the Jews, exile them into their exceptionality, foster a new morbid form of the chosenness complex. For if the whole Western world is now “remembering the Holocaust,” not all men are equal in this cult. Just as Yahweh divided humankind into the chosen people and the rest of the nations, the Holocaust separates the victims and their tormentors. And so the Holocaust, the absolute Evil, turns out to be functionally interchangeable with Yahweh.

  The Holocaust is a jealous god: there is no museum or commemoration for the genocide of American Indians (not even a name for this unspeakable crime for which Americans are collectively responsible, while they are innocent of the Holocaust). To the Ukrainians who wished to commemorate the “Holodomor”—the death of 7 to 8 millions of them in 1932–1933 by a deliberately provoked famine against the kulaks resisting collectivization—Israeli president Shimon Peres advised, during a visit to Kiev on November 25, 2010: “Forget History.”790 The Holocaust is eternal, “It is continuing all the time,” declared Benzion Netanyahu in 2009.791 In reality, according to Israeli philosopher Gilad Atzmon, biblical Yahwism was from the start a religion of the Holocaust: “the Holocaust is actually engraved in the Jewish culture, discourse and spirit. […] To be a Jew is to see a threat in every goy, to be on constant alert.”792

  The sacralization of the Holocaust and its media liturgy fulfills two complementary functions: guilt among the Gentiles, fear among the Jews. Through guilt, the Gentiles are kept in check, and all their criticisms are neutralized by equating them to gas chambers. Through fear, the Jewish community is kept under control, and its loyalty to Israel strengthened, as Israel is depicted as an “insurance policy,” a fortress (preferably well-armed), and a refuge in the event of a new Holocaust. The quasi-miraculous power of this cult is such that “the trauma of the Holocaust is transmitted genetically” by “epigenetic heredity,” according to a study by a team of researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York under the direction of Rachel Yehuda.793

  With its many museums and incessant media liturgy, the Holocaust cult has now replaced the worship of Christ. Remembering the martyrdom of the chosen people has become the civic religion of Western Europe. It has the added advantage of stifling the cries of the Palestinian people, Gazans in particular, who are being crucified with increasingly demonic violence. According to historian Zygmunt Bauman, Israel uses the Holocaust “as the certificate of its political legitimacy, as safe-conduct pass for its past and future policies, and, above all, as advance payment for the injustices it might itself commit.”794

  The Holocaust is not only the Jews’ worst memory, it is their ever-possible future. The Israelis’ greatest fear is of another Holocaust, this time on Israelis, as Haaretz journalist Yair Sheleg explained in 2006: “It is hard to believe, but just 60 years after the Holocaust the Jewish people is again in danger of extermination.” Each anti-Semitic act, every expression of Judeophobia, is a small Holocaust, capable of prefiguring a new catastrophe. Israeli musician and philosopher Gilad Atzmon speaks of a “Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (Pre-TSS)” to characterize the fundamental mood of Jewish and Israeli culture, induced by the political and cultural elite, who, through constant reminders of the last Holocaust, keep the population under permanent expectation of the next one.795 For example, “young Israelis are brought to Auschwitz by various Zionist organizations with the aim of turning them into traumatized Jewish adults.”796 The conviction that Jew-hatred is inherent in Gentiles is so intimately linked to modern Jewish identity that the Jew who renounces Jewishness—or criticizes it too severely, like Gilad Atzmon—is treated as a self-hating Jew, that is to say, accused of having internalized the goyim’s hatred of him.

  The liturgy of the Holocaust is accompanied by a perpetually alarmist discourse on anti-Semitism. A survey conducted in 1985 indicated that one-third of the Jews in the San Francisco Bay Area believed that a Jew could not be elected to Congress, even though three of the four local representatives in Congress were Jews, as were the two Senators from California and the mayor of San Francisco. A 1990 survey shows that eight out of ten American Jews are concerned about anti-Semitism and believe it is increasing, while 90 percent of non-Jews believe that anti-Semitism is residual. The discrepancy between perception and reality suggests a form of self-deception aimed at maintaining a fantasized self-image as oppressed outsider. The need to feed the fear of anti-Semitism has led Jewish organizations to characterize as anti-Semitic attitudes such as indifference to Jewish concerns or discomfiture at the overrepresentation of Jews among cultural, intellectual, financial, and political elites.797

  Ultimately, like most traits of Jewish collective psychology, the inability to accept any responsibility for the hostility of the goyim is a lesson learned in the Bible, especially in the story of Jacob and Esau, who in the rabbinic tradition symbolize respectively Israel and the nations, or Judaism and Christianity. When Jacob usurps the birthright of Esau by deceiving his father Isaac, he gains the divine blessing. Esau’s resentment, like Cain’s for Abel, is presented without a shred of sympathy. In the short book of Obadiah, Yahweh chastises Esau: “For the violence done to your brother Jacob, shame will cover you and you will be annihilated forever!” (Obadiah 1:10); “The House of Jacob will be a fire, the House of Joseph a flame, and the House of Esau like stubble. They will set it alight and burn it up, and no one of the House of Esau will survive” (1:18), “and sovereignty will be Yahweh’s!” (1:21). Thus nations that dare protest against Israel’s below-the-belt punches, whi
ch are always automatically legitimate, deserve to be annihilated. In the words of Henry Makow, “Organized Jewry (Neocons, Zionists, B’nai Brith) has the self-consciousness of a snake devouring a mouse. It regards the death spasms of the mouse as ‘hatred.’”798

  The Sociopathic State

  Victimization has become the essence of Israeli national identity, according to Idith Zertal, professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem: “Israeli society nationalized the memory of the Holocaust.” “The Holocaust is inserted directly and metaphorically into everyday life in Israel, which is loaded, in this fashion, with meaning beyond itself, as are power and the ideology of power.” By this process, Israel has been transformed “into an ahistorical and apolitical twilight zone, where Auschwitz is not a past event but a threatening present and a constant option. By means of Auschwitz—which has become over the years Israel’s main reference in its relations with a world defined repeatedly as anti-Semitic and forever hostile—Israel rendered itself immune to criticism, and impervious to a rational dialogue with the world around her.”799

  With regard to the Palestinians, “Israeli Jews’ consciousness is characterized by a sense of victimization, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians, and insensitivity to their suffering,” in the words of journalist Akiva Eldar (writing after Operation Cast Lead against Gaza in 2008–2009).800 Many lucid Israelis are worried about their country’s plunge into collective pathology. Yehoshafat Harkabi, deputy director of military intelligence, wrote: “Dazzled by its self-righteousness, Israel cannot see the case of the other side. Self-righteousness encourages nations no less than individuals to absolve themselves of every failing and shake off the guilt of every mishap. When everyone is guilty except them, the very possibility of self-criticism and self-improvement vanishes…”801 The Israeli journalist Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz in 2010 that “Only psychiatrists can explain Israel’s behavior,” suggesting as a possible diagnosis, “paranoia, schizophrenia and megalomania.”802 Sociopathy is probably a better guess. If any nationalism is a collective egoism, Israel’s is more like a collective sociopathy.

  What can be said of a state that, having received from the community of nations, by an exceptional privilege, a land whose indigenous inhabitants were thus dispossessed, bases its foreign policy on the following principle, expressed by its leader (Ben-Gurion) ten years later: “We must wean ourselves from the preposterous and totally unfounded and baseless illusion that there is outside the State of Israel a force and a will that would protect the life of our citizens. Our own capacity for self-defense is our only security”?803 What is to be said of a country that, having made the Holocaust the universal, eternal, and ultimate crime, and seeing only potential and interchangeable enemies around it, behaves as if it wanted to punish the Palestinians for the crimes committed by Europeans (as Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi often remarks)?

  Our diagnosis should take into account Israel’s extraordinary manipulative capacity on the world stage via corruption and propaganda—the bank and the press. The relationship between Israel and the United States is akin to the bond between a typical psychopath and the impressionable bully he has decided to manipulate. Israel’s control of the American mind is achieved on the mass level through the press and the entertainment industry, on the governmental level through the irresistible influence of the neocons and AIPAC, and on a still deeper level through wide-scale spying and the infiltration and hijacking of intelligence and secret services. As Haaretz recently revealed, two Israeli high-tech firms (Verint and Narus) with ties to Mossad, have provided the spy software for the NSA, thus securing for Israel access to all collected data. Other Israeli software “front companies” have likewise infiltrated the US administration and military-industrial sector. And, as James Petras comments, “because of the power and influence of the Conference of Presidents of the 52 Major American Jewish Organizations, Justice Department officials have ordered dozens of Israeli espionage cases to be dropped. The tight Israeli ties to the US spy apparatus serves to prevent deeper scrutiny into Israel’s operations and political goals—at a very high price in terms of the security of US citizens.”804

  The golden rule of manipulation formulated by Colonel Mandell House (who was the intermediary between the Zionist network and President Woodrow Wilson) applies generally to Israel’s manipulation of the United States: “With the President [. . .] it was invariably my intention to always to make him believe that ideas he derived from me were his own.”805 Such is also the essence of Israel’s strategy with the US; behind the mask of American patriotism, the neocons have managed to lead America into a Middle East policy that only serves Israeli interests, by pretending to the American people that it serves their interests. The psychopath tries to interfere in all the human relationships of his prey, so as to prevent any alliance that could allow him to be unmasked. Isolate and divide-and-rule are the essence of this strategy. This is precisely what Israel and its neoconservative moles have done, by trying to split the United States from its historic allies in the Middle East, with the aim of one day remaining the only ally of the United States in the area. The demonization of all heads of state in the Arab world is part of this strategy. One of Israel’s great successes has been to ensure that its own enemies, the Arab peoples, today have a fierce hatred for the United States.

  The power of the Zionist manipulation of the United States, based on quasi-total control of the mainstream media alongside large-scale psychological operations such as September 11, is truly bewildering. But it becomes understandable in light of what Robert Hare names the “psychopathic bond.” It even becomes predictable to some extent, if we keep in mind that the psychopath has no ability to question, no limits to his appetite for power, and no remorse about leading humanity into ruin to save his skin. Nothing better illustrates the psychopathic nature of Zionism than the apocalyptic nuclear blackmail Israel perpetually exercises over the West, with its policy of the “Samson Option,” which Golda Meir summed up in 1974 as “Israel’s willingness in a doomsday situation to take the region down with it.”806 Using this threat, Meir blackmailed Kissinger and Nixon into coming to Israel’s rescue during the Yom Kippur War.

  By drawing a parallel between psychopathy as a personality disorder and the attitude of Israel, I do not mean, of course, the Jews in general. They are the first to be manipulated by their elites, and they are part of this collective psychopathy only to the extent of their submission to those elites. Jewishness, we must not forget, is whatever idea the Jews make of it; and the idea the Jews make of it is, almost entirely, the one imposed on them by their elites. What is at issue is the prevailing ideology of Israel, and (more discreetly) of international Jewry. Dominant discourse is always shaped by the elite. Sometimes a strong current of popular thought emerges to challenge the dominant way of thinking, but nothing of this kind is yet observable in the Jewish community; it is overwhelmingly docile to its elite, which currently dominates the media and the entertainment industry and therefore enjoys considerable mind-control powers. Their ruse is to maintain in the Jews an absolute conviction of the immaculate innocence of their people, and simultaneously to inculcate a paranoid fear of anti-Semitism, this “disease transmitted for two thousand years, incurable” (Leon Pinsker).

  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.”807 Yet a company’s culture, while involving every employee to one degree or another, is driven by its ruling elite. The Enron scandal has shown the world the tremendous damage that can be done by a company run by people of high intelligence and perverse ideology.808 My analysis here of the Jewish community is based on exactly the same reasoning. Like it or not, the character of a nation is exemplified and largely determined by its leaders, whe
ther legitimate or illegitimate.