Can Israel’s Catastrophe Change the Jewish Worldview?

On October 7, 2023, there was a Jewish pogrom in the Jewish state.

A Jewish pogrom in the Jewish state is an oxymoron, a nonsense.

But the sad reality has superseded the idea of the safe national existence of the Jewish people in their own country.  The revival of pogroms in the Jewish state means a return back to the tragic history of the Jewish people’s past in the Diaspora.

But the pogroms of October 7 were not only the deaths of 1,200 Israelis, but also a blow to the Western liberal thinking of Israelis: their failed experience of reconciliation with radical extremists and religious fanatics, whom part of the Jewish population of Israel considered potential neighbors and partners for peaceful coexistence. 

Israel is an oasis in the desert, surrounded by barbarians and fanatics who believe in the superiority of Muslims over non-Muslims. The conflict in this region has acquired the features of a religious war. Islamic extremists cannot accept the existence of a non-Islamic (Jewish) state. Therefore, expecting peaceful coexistence between “two states for two peoples” is as meaningless as waiting for Godot, as in the classic theater of the absurd play by Samuel Beckett.

But is it enough to change the West’s worldview?

The West’s desire to democratize the East has led to the flooding of Europe with Arab refugees. Failed attempts to establish democratic regimes in the East have created a threat to democracy in Western countries. 

The Arab and Muslim population in Europe is growing due to the tens of millions of Muslims who fled there from their countries, which are all independent states.

These people do not assimilate in Christian countries. They consider Islam the only correct religion. To them, non-Muslims in the new countries are second-class people. Muslims who fought the European colonizers and drove them out of Asia and Africa moved to Europe after the former colonizers and began to colonize European countries themselves. Democrats in Europe and the United States believe that it is possible and necessary to rationalize religious fanatics and involve Muslim populations in the building of Western civilization. They want to rationalize the irrational. 

Dreams of appeasement with terrorists are still floating around in countries that consider themselves civilized, despite the efforts of the terrorists themselves to dispel these dreams.

Unlike the Nazis, who hid their crimes, Hamas terrorists not only do not hide them, but, on the contrary, disseminate a film of their atrocities around the world: the film shows people being burned alive, children being beheaded, fetuses being cut from their mothers’ wombs, women being raped and then murdered. At the same time, the movies show the executioners having fun documenting their atrocities. The corpses are so mutilated that identification is still in progress. Therefore, the exact number of victims of the massacre in southern Israel has not yet been finalized, the counting continues and is complicated by the fact that hundreds of people have been kidnapped by terrorists. Thirty-two children have been abducted. In one case, the corpse of a twelve-year-old girl was found to be so burned that there was nothing to bury. Therefore, at the funeral, her personal belongings were placed in her grave.

Governments, organizations and individuals who do not recognize Hamas’s criminal activities thereby openly declare their anti-Semitism. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrations in support of Hamas are threatening evidence of how numerous the enemies of Western civilization are. Are hundreds of thousands of Muslim demonstrators on the streets of Western cities supporting the Hamas massacre enough to convince the populations of the democratic world that a hostile, threatening civilization has infiltrated their countries?

 The national dialogue in Israel seems to be changing.

After the complete failure of the plan for peaceful coexistence with its neighbors, the previously “obscene” word “patriot” is returning to the national lexicon and is now being pronounced with a positive connotation.

Those who continue to dialogue about peaceful coexistence, about the creation of two states for two peoples, reason in terms of yesterday’s peace and belong to the minority.

However, sharp criticism of the policies of the state of Israel by a minority of Israelis continues despite the pogrom of October 7, 2023. It is likely the devastating effect of anti-Semitism on generations of Israelis. Although Israel was created to defeat anti-Semitism, apparently the psychological task of defeating it has proven difficult. Anti-Semitism has penetrated deeply into the soul of Israelis through several generations. It has engendered a strange self-dislike for their country, just as it had earlier in the Diaspora engendered the hatred of some Jews for their own people.

Karl Marx’s article “To the Jewish Question” (1843) is one of the clearest manifestations of some of the  Jews’ identification with the Judeophobes.

Marx believed that the main result of the emancipation of the Jews should be the emancipation of humanity from the Jews.

In The Jewish State (1896), Theodor Herzl criticized opponents of the plan to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, calling them “disguised anti-Semites of Jewish origin.” He was the first to speak not only about the creation of a Jewish state, but also about the phenomenon of Jewish anti-Semitism. The phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred was analyzed by Theodor Lessing, a professor at the Hannover Higher Technical School, a German philosopher and publicist of Jewish origin.

In 1930, he published a book entitled Jewish Self-Hatred. Lessing argued that the “tragedy of Jewish exile” in the Diaspora had undermined national pride, dignity, and self-respect. The inwardly directed aggressiveness of the individual motivated, according to Lessing, Jewish self-hatred. The term “Jewish self-hatred,” coined by Lessing, became especially popular after the publication in 1986 of a book of the same name by American historian Sander Gilman. Gilman writes: “Jews see the way the dominant nation perceives them, and use cleavage to project their concerns onto other Jews for self-soothing.” This projection is the creation of a dichotomy: “self-hating” Jews strive to make themselves “good” and in that sense outliers, Jews who are different from the stereotypical “bad” Jews.

The self-hating Jew is copying the attitude of anti-Semites toward his people. The self-hating Jew is convinced of the inferiority of his nation’s culture and seeks to borrow other people’s language, other people’s art, and other people’s traditions. According to Gilman, the “self-hating Jew” is formed from the fusion of the images of the “mad Jew” and the “self-critical Jew.”

The American psychologist Kurt Lewin, a German Jew who fled to the United States as a result of the Nazis’ rise to power, wrote in “Self-Hatred in the Jewish Environment” (1941): “The feeling of inferiority inherent in the Jew is nothing but evidence that he looks at everything Jewish through the eyes of an unfriendly majority. Self-hatred is the result of alienation from one’s own nation and the desire to win the sympathy of non-Jews by disowning Jews. Jewish self-hatred was a neurotic reaction to the growing power of anti-Semitism.

After many generations, Jewish self-hatred has seeped into the minds of some Israelis and compels them to dislike their state as much as their ancestors disliked their people. Jews are the dominant nation in Israel, but some Israelis continue to feel themselves and their country guilty, apologetic, ashamed, in short, pariahs of the Western world. Jews born in Israel feel alienated from the values of their fathers and grandfathers and feel like “indigenous outsiders” in their country.

Gilman writes, “One of the most recent forms of Jewish self-hatred is a fierce resistance to the existence of the state of Israel.” Such “fierce resistance” takes place in both the Jewish diaspora and in Israel. Israel hinders self-loathing Israelis and Jews of the West because its actions prevent it from gaining the popularity and love of the world public for a Jewish state that looks “unseemly” and “unrespectable.”

But is the October 7, 2023 Shoah enough to drastically reduce the number of Jewish anti-Semites and supporters of Western liberal consciousness in Israel?    

The phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred is psychologically similar to the hatred of the offspring of wealthy families for their environment. The Hungarian Marxist, one of the leaders of the Hungarian Socialist Revolution of 1919, Georg Lukács (György Bernát Lőwinger), son of one of the richest bankers in Austria-Hungary, became a communist, an ideologue of the destruction of the world in which he was born and raised. Lukacs was one of the founders of the Frankfurt School, whose leader and Lukacs’ follower Herbert Marcuse set as his main goal the struggle against Western civilization. Members of the Frankfurt School, who had escaped the Nazis in the United States, criticized all elements of Western culture, especially American culture: Christianity, capitalism, the authority of the family, loyalty to tradition, and patriotism. Does it take another Bolshevik revolution to change the minds of those fighting Western civilization?

Image: David Rodrigo, via Wikimedia Commons // CC 1.0 public domain dedication