- Oct 20, 2022
- 5,042
Sorry but I take some exception to this and it is a little offensive that you would even suggest such a thing …. It is rather offensive too, especially for a non-Jewish person to be making generalised assumptions about a ‘Jewish psyche’ being responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. (I know you are not deliberately trying to insult Jews btw!)Revenge is a powerful motivator. And how much of Israel's over-reaction is due to the wounds lying deep in the psyche from the Holocaust and centuries of persecution? Netanyahu's own father was born in Poland in 1910 and was a hawkish Zionist who believed in the expulsion of the Arabs from the new Jewish homeland. He lived to be 102. It is not surprising Bibi is as tenacious and zealous as he is.
There is nothing in the Jewish psych as you put it, to make Jewish people have a propensity to become war criminals or carry out the abhorrent treatment of Palestinians that we are seeing in Gaza. That is all Netanyahu’s political and religious extremism that has a very specific and geo-political agenda and also designed to keep him personally in power. Holocaust memories may make Israelis and Jews elsewhere more concerned for their security and after extreme and brutal extermination of over 5 million Jews in Nazi occupied Europe, this is understandable, but it doesn’t turn us into a heartless race of people bent on reaping revenge on helpless women and children in their thousands.
If you knew anything about the Jewish religion/character, you would know it has at it’s heart, as codified by the Torah, the welcoming of strangers and the highest form of charitable consciousness (which is to create a world where no one needed to rely on charity) . The spirit of generosity not ‘revenge’ is integral to Torah consciousness.
What is happening in Gaza, the Israeli government’s overreaction, is all to do with one man and his extremist minions’ pursuit of a Greater Israel, his obsession with avoiding corruption charges if he was voted out of power, and his own willingness to get into bed with far-right fascists to further his political and personal agenda.
Do not judge or think you can psychoanalyse the Jewish faith or being a Jew based on what you see unfolding in the news about Netanyahu’s war on the Gazan people.
’Israelis’ want Netanyahu out of power. The majority have absolutely NO desire for the destruction of Gaza nor desire mass civilian casualties - they see Netanyahu’s security forces as a failure and his war on Hamas, to get the hostages released, also failing.
TLDR? - it is not ‘ being Jewish’ that makes people revengeful monsters and war criminals but land grabbing greed, a desire for military power over others and political extremism.