The viewpoint expressed by Meredith Tax in the May 31 Chronicle certainly is unique and demands a response.
How shall an American Jew responding to our Jewish sisters and brothers in Israel and to Holocaust survivors apply Micah 6:8: “It has been told you, O man, what is good, and what the Lord does require of you: only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God”? “Walking humbly with my God” leaves me no patience with my own angry and bewildered reactions when a Jewish writer can’t tell the difference between a pharaoh’s tomb and a Holocaust museum — our effort to cope with a traumatizing memory of hideous disaster that befell our people — or the difference between love for Am and Eretz Yisrael (the people/nation and land of Israel) and the worship of land.
I have visited Israel more than 70 times and listened hard. I have never met one Israeli who worships the state.
I have heard wise rabbinical scholars discuss whether Israel is the beginning of redemption or not, but this has no resemblance to the concept of death and resurrection described by Tax. Who are these unidentified people who belong to the new religion she describes?
What I have seen is a legitimate and continuing debate, often going on inside the mind of each participant as well as outside, in public forums and press. On each side there is a love and craving for peace.
One side seeks and finds Arabs who are prepared to enter a mutual resolution and abide by a formal treaty. King Hussein of Jordan and the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat were such people, and the treaties they signed abide.
The other side is convinced that key Islamic leaders will continue to surface who seek Israel’s destruction irrespective of what Israel does, or of international agreements. Iraqi dictator Sadam Hussein and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat have demonstrated such behavior.
‘Stockholm Syndrome’
My experience as a visiting professor in Egypt, Iran and Israel convinces me that both sides are correct. Israel’s policies, in my view, have nothing to do with pop psychology formulations about “macho” behavior as formulated by Tax.
They have everything to do with a repeated pattern of premeditated intentional murders of innocent civilians, which dates back to a time when there were no Israelis in Judea and Samaria.
These attacks reached the level of one Sept. 11 disaster every month immediately after Israel offered to abandon the bulk of settlements and give back most of the disputed territory.
The overwhelming evidence indicating Arafat’s complicity in this unprovoked violence swung the debate sharply toward the side that doubts Arab intentions and the long-term stability of key Arab regimes.
Were Tax to follow the wise counsel with which her article begins, she might express great respect for both sides as Israelis whose lives defend their boundaries, struggle for peace and security in a violent corner of the world.
Doesn’t “doing justly and loving mercy” require a more gentle understanding of what Israelis are experiencing? Doesn’t “walking humbly” demand some respect for how little we really know of the Middle East as diaspora Jews?
What is most striking in some responses to the current situation is a phenomenon called “identification with the aggressor” first described by Anna Freud as she saw children who had been Hitler’s victims goose stepping like Nazi soldiers.
This general phenomenon underlies the “Stockholm Syndrome,” a well-described victim response to acute terrorism in which members of a victim group identified with terrorist kidnappers and complained that those trying to rescue them were the causes of terrorist outrages.
Tax’s excessive language reduces Jewish memory to some death cult; denies the Jewish mystical attachment to the land of Israel as only part of some new religion; attributes terrorism to Israeli self-defense behaviors; and turns the women and men of the Israel Defense Forces into macho stereotypes. That is startlingly akin to stereotypes I have found in the propaganda of terrorist organizations.
In trying to “walk humbly with our God,” we must be cautious about writing people off or attributing motives to them. I don’t know what caused Tax to chose language so offensive to some readers. One possibility is that we may be seeing increasing chronic manifestations of Stockholm Syndrome-like conditions, in which wildly incorrect attributions are made to Israel and her supporters.
Perhaps we could ask for a more serious discussion of our role as diaspora Jews without writing off those who disagree with us as members of a non-existent new religion.
Psychiatrist and Zionist activist Dr. Herzl R. Spiro is professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Medical College of Wisconsin.
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