"The Ultimate Enemy - Jews Against Jews" - A Post-Annapolis Perspective (Nov. 29, 2007)

Netta Kohn Dror-Shav authored a still very relevant 1998 policy paper for the Ariel Center for Policy Research titled "The Ultimate Enemy -- Jews Against Jews." In it, she explores several defense mechanisms through which Jews drift toward their enemies.

Denial, she wrote, "leads to avoidance of recognizing the actual inherent dangers, and causes a virtual cognitive distortion of reality."

Basic lack of security, she wrote, causes many Israelis and Jews to grasp at any offer for peace, disregarding the enemy's conduct in favor of its temporary rhetoric.

Anxiety, Dror-Shav wrote, propels Jews toward "a resolution -- any resolution -- that puts an end to the uncertainty and thus serves to relieve the anxiety in some way."

Lack of confidence, dependency, passivity, guilt, the "good child complex" (the need for approval from everyone), and Jewish self-hatred are also categories Dror-Shav includes in her report. But the most striking one perhaps was this: identification with the aggressor.

Identification with the aggressor is "pernicious", she wrote, because it causes us to abandon our own sense of self and identity, and instead live vicariously through our enemy's struggle because we dangerously project the righteousness of our own struggle onto our foe, as though all struggles are equal, as though passion equates to morality.

And what comes with our enemy's righteousness is the seemingly sinister character of those who still cling to the original Jewish struggle, in this case Zionism (and even patriotism).

Anything that gets in the way of our enemy's acceptance (those darned settlers!) and the subsequent security (come on, it's not like there are that many rockets falling on our heads) is considered, as Dror-Shav called it, "the ultimate 'enemy'."

All in all a uniquely Jewish problem and a uniquely self-defeating perspective, one that belongs in the European ghettos of the past where it germinated, one that contemporary Jews and Israelis should discard as a nation and country equal amongst the world of nations and countries.

*Edited from The Jewish State article November 9, 2007 by Seth Mandel, Opinion & Commentary: Muslim Choudhury Continues to Defend Zionist Views