Gaza through the biocognitive lens.

(If this is too long for email, check the Substack site directly).

This series of posts looks at international relations through the lens of the biocognitive model. Each post is a single essay, although they may sometimes be too long for the platform and will be published as two posts, on the same day or a week apart, depending on how energetic I feel. Each essay will build on what has gone before so it will be better to start at the beginning and work forward. The goal is to show that, if we want to make sense of the world scene, we have to look at it from the right perspective. At different times, people have suggested that the correct perspective is hedonism, that, as Orwell put it, “human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain.” A few minutes watching the evening news leaves no doubt that this can’t be true, that we enjoy nothing better than inflicting pain on each other and will happily endure agony in pursuing some cause or other.

The central idea behind Narcisso-Fascism is that humans have an innate, biological drive to try to dominate each other, and an opposite but equally powerful drive to resist domination. These violent and opposing drives, the paradox of hierarchy, are central to understanding human behaviour. At both the micro- or dyadic level and the macro- or international scale, human relations are very largely determined by this conflict. Domination is the only political force for which we have a non-circular explanation, as distinct from description. The difference between explanation and description is important and will become clearer as we progress. That does not, however, mean this is an exercise in biological reductionism. It means that, under the influence of biology, what we think are rational decisions are actually seriously biased to the point of being self-destructive. While our social organisation is very largely shaped by this biological imperative, human society has now outgrown our heritage and needs a new orientation.

Comments are welcome. If there is somebody whose work I haven’t panned, please let me know, I’d hate any of our puffed-up academics and politicians to miss out.

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We are constantly told the Israeli army is “the most moral army in the world.” On December 27^th last, Israeli aircraft bombed the Kamal Adwan Hospital, the last functioning health centre in northern Gaza, followed by raids by heavily-armed troops who, after shooting several staff members, forced all staff and patients to evacuate. There were, of course, no other facilities available to them as the nearby Indonesian Hospital has been reduced to wreckage. There is no reliable news as to their whereabouts. Troops were then seen setting fires inside the severely damaged building, including the operating theatres. In the attack on KA Hospital, the medical director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, was abducted and is believed to be held in the notorious Sde Teiman military base in southern Israel, where prisoners have reported they were tortured and raped. On October 8th, Dr Abu Safiya's 15-year-old son, Ibrahim, was murdered by a shot in the chest fired by an Israeli soldier after he had refused to leave the hospital.

On December 31^st, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) issued a report showing that between October 7^th 2023 and June 30^th 2024, Israel had conducted a pattern of systematically attacking hospitals and other health facilities. Following 17 years of blockade, these were already in a parlous state but the latest attacks have left the population of 2.2million with essentially no health services. Under the Geneva Conventions, hospitals and their occupants are protected from military action, such that deliberately attacking or occupying them constitutes a war crime.

On the face of it, these are quite grotesque contradictions. Putting aside the question of whether there can ever be a “moral army,” it is the case that the people of a nation established for the refugees of the Nazi genocide in Europe are now actively engaged in destroying all basis for life for 2.2million people, actions which are “plausibly held to amount to genocide” by the International Court of Justice. How can this be? How can people who claim to be believers in a major religion run through the streets screaming “Death to the Arabs,” or screeching in delight at the spectacle of universities being blown up? I believe there is an explanation for these matters but, in this most preliminary of preliminary investigations, it will be possible only to outline the major points.

Prior to about 1890, Europe’s Jewish population of several million was scattered across the continent, the main centres being in Eastern Europe and across into the Russian Empire. Until about the 1850s, and long after in the more remote regions, Jews were essentially self-governing. Wherever there were weak, semi-feudal central governments, such as Poland and western parts of Russia, Jews kept very much to themselves and, so long as they paid taxes and didn’t annoy the local bishop, were largely allowed to govern themselves. In many parts of Europe, Jews weren’t even regarded as citizens, which emphasised their separation and suited them very well. Since there were, of course, no government schools, the surrounding peasant populations were mostly illiterate but Jews had their religious schools and men learned to read and write. This meant they were valuable to the distant governments as, in particular, tax gatherers. Needless to say, this earned them no popularity but they were not much concerned as their religion was exclusive and, apart from financial dealings, they kept contact with the surrounding Christian population to a minimum.

For centuries, a dominant theme in this apparently arcadian life was the endless squabbling and fighting between groups with different interpretations of Talmudic law, but as long as trouble was kept within the village, governments left Jewish communities to their own devices. As a fragmented, theocratic society, there were no regular police but each town had its rabbinical court which administered justice. If the civil police or military somehow became involved then, as was normal in most of the world, the matter could usually be settled with bribes. Within the communities, there was no distinction between civil or religious matters, and rabbinical courts could and quite often did impose severe penalties. Anybody who seriously annoyed the local powers could be flogged to death but, as long as it stayed within the community, the civil authorities paid little attention.

The separation of indigenous and Jewish populations was severely maintained. Jews were expected to marry within their religion; unless the new spouse converted, those who married out were excommunicated. Until late in the 19^th Century, they did not serve in the military although they often held high posts in governments as they were considered independent of the ceaseless ebb and flow of rivalries between different noble families. As they were able to lend money, many of them became wealthy, which caused further animosity.

Attacks on Jewish communities, now known as pogroms, go back to early in the Christian era. They were apparently worse during Medieval times, especially during and after the bubonic plagues and the witchcraft craze, and intensified again during the 19^th Century as Jews were emancipated and thus forcibly subjected to national law. Out of this came the Zionist project, to provide a national home for Jews where they could practice their religion in isolation, with no risk of violence or of assimilation. Initially, Argentina and Uganda were considered but the movement soon settled on Palestine, which would satisfy both ambitions. An independent Jewish state in the Biblical land of Israel would mean no pogroms, and it would enlist the support of most of the religious majority.

Why couldn’t everybody live at peace in their traditional lands? In some parts of Poland and Byelarus, Jews were 90% of the population yet still they felt at risk. The Jewish answer had always been that Gentiles are constitutionally disposed to hate Jews and wanted to damage or even destroy them, so total separation was the only solution. Prior to World War II, even in the most liberal Western countries, a supercilious antisemitism had been more or less the default position of the elite. Despite their wealth and their intellectual achievements, there were various social restrictions placed in the path of Jews who wanted to move into the larger world. For example, joining social or sporting clubs, entering prestigious schools or universities, banks, and so on could be very difficult, if not impossible. Following the catastrophe of Nazism, these pettifogging restrictions have been quietly removed and Jewish people have succeeded at the highest levels in Western society.

Two questions arise. First, violence and hostility have been directed at Jews since well before the Christian era, although Christians have adopted the tradition with gusto. The Romans who crushed the Jewish rebellions were not Christians, so why do Jews attract such hostility? Israel Shahak, survivor of Bergen-Belsen, distinguished chemist and civil rights advocate, is quite clear that relations between Judaism and Islam were mostly tolerably civil [1, Ch 5 ‘Attitudes to Christianity and Islam’; see Note]. Second, bearing in mind all they have endured over the past few thousand years, why are Jewish people now inflicting such brutality on the defenceless Palestinians who have done them no wrong? As has often been asked, why are Palestinians being punished for the Shoah, the Holocaust, in which they played no part? Shahak took a very pessimistic view:

Modern racism (of which antisemitism is part) although caused by specific social conditions, becomes, when it gains strength, a force that in my opinion can only be described as demonic. After coming to power, and for its duration, I believe it defies analysis by any presently understood social theory or set of merely social observations – and in particular by any known theory invoking interests, be they class or state interests, or other than purely psychological 'interests' of any entity that can be defined in the present state of human knowledge. By this I do not mean that such forces are unknowable in principle; on the contrary, one must hope that with the growth of human knowledge they will come to be understood. But at present they are neither understood nor capable of being rationally predicted – and this applies to all racism in all societies [1, Ch. 4].

He published that in 1994. At that stage, Israel was still maintaining the pretence that relations with the indigenous Palestinian population could be, if not amicable, then civil. While all such pretence was dropped on October 7^th 2023, I believe we can now provide an answer to the questions that he saw as “beyond human knowledge.” However, in order to do so, it is necessary to step right away from the devastation of Gaza, the horror of Auschwitz, the rights or wrongs of the Balfour Memo; back from whose God is almighty, or who crucified whom and for what reason. Instead, we have to look at this question entirely without reference to who did what and to whom, when, where and why. That is, we have to ignore two thousand years of history on the basis it is a red herring. There are “forces” involved but they have nothing to do with morality, social class, state interests or capital, etc. The forces are human, universal and irrational, which is why Jews can be both victims and oppressors in the span of a single human life. Once we understand the forces, that fact is no longer contradictory – or evidence of demonic possession.

The questions I want to answer are, first, why are humans so aggressive toward each other, i.e. why do we show such high levels of intraspecific aggression, and second, why are Jews so consistently the targets of that aggression? Posed that way, it is clear why it is necessary to avoid the entanglements of history and religion.

We can start with Shahak’s statement: “Modern racism … can only be described as demonic … it defies analysis.” I think it can be explained, but not in the terms he mentioned. The observation to be explained is the ceaseless, pointless hostility humans show toward each other, often on the basis of race but also within races, nations and religions, right down to the level of tribes. Any explanation must move a dimension away from the observation, it cannot be of the same nature. That is, since aggression is a social phenomenon, any social account will be descriptive, not explanatory; by default, the explanation is biological. As an empirical fact, all humans have two innate or genetically-determined drives, the tendency to fear/reject the outsider, and the drive to dominate others. We can understand why xenophobia is written in the genome; without it, early humans wouldn’t have lasted long. The drive to dominate, however, does not have the same survival value, it is not biologically necessary, but the humans who first showed it had a massive advantage over their passive neighbours. Perhaps this is why Homo sapiens survived while Neanderthals didn’t (despite their rather fearsome appearance, gorillas and orang utans are quite peaceful animals). When those two drives, i.e. xenophobia and dominance, come together and focus on a single person or group, the outcome will inevitably be “demonic.”

The drive to form dominance hierarchies has a solid biological basis as part of the testosterone system [3,4]. While the urge to dominate is universal, it adapts to the surroundings and thus takes many forms. However, domination is but half of it: the other half, equally strong, is the urge to avoid being dominated, the drive to fight to death to escape the humiliation of being crushed underfoot. None of us wants to be dominated, and we don’t want to feel dominated; we react aggressively to anybody who even acts dominant around us. Men in particular are highly sensitive to the sense of somebody trying to dominate them. As are women, of course. Yes, and children. All our social life is built around the concept of dominance hierarchies – business, politics, society and government, education, sport, religion (especially religion), everything.

This is the paradox of hierarchy, that in one and the same individual are two powerful but contradictory urges, the drive to dominate, and the need to refuse to be dominated. In human affairs, this phenomenon is inherently destabilising. This is the cause of what Shahak described as inexplicable demonic forces. In fact, the forces are biological, not social; they are perfectly explicable; and they are human. We are among the most aggressive animals on earth. It is unfortunately true that, at any time, large numbers of humans are looking for reason to hate. All too often, religion provides it, and Judaism is no exception. That answers Question 1.

Question 2: Why are Jews so consistently the targets of that aggression? As mentioned, traditional Jewish society was very largely alienated from the surrounding Christian populations, with severe restrictions on any form of intercourse or exchange between the two. In describing the transition to modern Israel for Gentile readers, Shahak issues several warnings, the first being that the image presented to the outside world is very different from life on the inside. Anything translated from Hebrew to English is deliberately sanitised, mostly by simple omission or by using subtle euphemisms, e.g. by using the historical term ‘Canaanites’ to refer to today’s non-Jews, as in “Destroy the Canaanites,” which means “Destroy the Arabs.” However, when it comes to politics, carefully-crafted lies are the basis of major, long-term and highly significant deceptions used in the pursuit of Israel’s goals. Unless a Gentile is fluent in Hebrew, which is rare, and knows all the myriad euphemisms used by the religious right, which is even rarer still, then it is almost impossible to understand what Israel does and why. For example, he says, and despite anything said in public:

Anyone who lives in Israel knows how deep and widespread these attitudes of hatred and cruelty towards all Gentiles are among the majority of Israeli Jews … Judaism is imbued with a very deep hatred towards Christianity … According to the Talmud, Jesus was executed by a proper rabbinical court for idolatry (i.e. not by the Romans) … The very name 'Jesus' was for Jews a symbol of all that is abominable, and this popular tradition still persists. The Gospels are equally detested, and they are not allowed to be quoted (let alone taught) even in modern Israeli Jewish schools…. Christianity as a religion is classed by rabbinical teaching as idolatry [1, Ch.5].

This hostility goes back to the very beginning of Christianity. The second warning is that, within Jewish society, there is an ancient and immensely powerful tradition against being an informer, i.e. anybody who reveals any damaging information to the Gentiles [2, p170]. In traditional society, informers were severely punished, even put to death, but the tradition lives on. As one of the prime religious duties of Jews is to protect Jews in all ways at all times, it is perfectly permissible, if not expected, that devout Jews will actively mislead Gentiles in any matters which could have even a remote possibility of harming Jews in however slight way.

Judaism itself is built on three closely-related beliefs: there is but one God; who anointed the Jewish race as his Chosen people; promising them the land of Israel if they followed his laws. Jewish life itself is controlled by the 613 commandments (mitzvot) in the first five books of what Christians know as the Old Testament, but they are the result of those fundamental beliefs, not the cause. If you reject one of the basic three beliefs, you’re not a Jew; if you accept them but don’t follow all mitzvot properly, you’re a naughty Jew. Knowing all 613 laws unites one’s soul with God. While there is constant debate/argument over the ramifications of the mitzvot, there can be no debate over the number of gods, or whether the Jewish God is the right one. That has to be accepted wholly as a matter of faith. People who want to fight over that issue are free to do so, as long as they don’t involve other people. However, the other two beliefs – Jews are Chosen, and thereby granted the land of Israel – differ in that they necessarily involve other people and, given the facts on the ground, will always produce friction, up to and including genocide.

Shahak and Mezvinsky spend considerable time quoting Talmudic scriptures to demonstrate that, over millennia, the belief in being “special in God’s eyes” has elaborated into possibly the supreme racial intolerance: the belief that Jews are inherently divinely inspired and/or constructed, while Gentiles are inherently satanic and evil beyond salvation:

Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, an influential member of the Habad movement and the head of a yeshiva near Nablus, for instance, opined in an April 26, 1996 Jewish Week article, reproduced in Haaretz that same day: "If every single cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, and is thus part of God, then every strand of DNA is a part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA." Rabbi Ginsburgh drew two conclusions from this statement: "If a Jew needs a liver, can he take the liver of an innocent non-Jew to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value. There is something more holy and unique about Jewish life than about non-Jewish life." It is noteworthy that Rabbi Ginsburgh is one of the authors of a book lauding Baruch Goldstein, the Patriarchs' Cave murderer (of 29 Muslim worshippers, including children, on Feb. 25^th, 1994). In that book Ginsburgh contributed a chapter in which he wrote that a Jew's killing non-Jews does not constitute murder according to the Jewish religion and that killing of innocent Arabs for reasons of revenge is a Jewish virtue. No influential Israeli rabbi has publicly opposed Ginsburgh's statements; most Israeli politicians have remained silent; some Israeli politicians have openly supported him (2, p67-8) … Tishbi further cited Vital's writings in emphasizing the Lurianic doctrine that non-Jews have satanic souls: "Souls of non-Jews come entirely from the female part of the satanic sphere. For this reason souls of non-Jews are called evil, not good, and are created without [divine] knowledge" [2, p90].

My case, outlined before the current (2024) hard right Israeli government took office, was that Israel met practically all the criteria for fascism [4]. It was then on the brink of sliding into a fascist state but the evidence now is that the country has leapt gleefully into that abyss. Part of the political structure of fascism is the belief that the nation is beset by enemies, determined to destroy it. Israelis certainly believe that. The question is why anybody would hate them. The Jewish answer is: “Well, that’s just Gentiles. They are the spawn of Satan and they’re determined to destroy us because we’re special in God’s eyes.” The native Gentiles’ answer is: “They came into our country, they cut themselves off, and they think the world rotates around them. They lie and cheat us and cannot be trusted. It doesn’t matter what they say, they despise us, so we hate them and want to get rid of them.”

Nahum Goldmann, one of the architects of the modern Israeli state, said:

…we (Jews) are at one and the same time the most separatist and the most universalist people in the world…(we are) a people invested with a special mission, chosen by God; that is why the Jews opposed proselytism. … Although he designated the Jews as ‘his people’, the Jewish God is universal, he is the God of all humanity… That is the great characteristic of our people: we are apart, and isolated from the rest, and at the same time destined to fulfil a mission which concerns the whole world, to be the servants of humanity [5, p8].

Goldmann continued:

The Jews are the most separatist people in the world. Their belief in the notion of the chosen people is the basis of their entire religion. All down the centuries the Jews have intensified their separation from the non-Jewish world; they have rejected, and still do reject, mixed marriages; they have put up one wall after another to protect their existence as a people apart, and have built their ghettos with their own hands, from the shtetl of Eastern Europe to the mellah of Morocco (3, p8) … the ghetto is historically a Jewish invention. It is wrong to say that the goyim forced the Jews to separate themselves from other societies. When the Christians defined the ghetto limits, Jews lived there already … the Jews lived a life apart, without worrying about the laws or customs of others [5, p66].

He doesn’t explain what the “mission from God” is. While it obviously pleases the small Jewish tribe to believe theirs is “the God of all humanity,” i.e. it pleases them to walk around feeling superior, it doesn’t please the other 99.5% of the human race to feel it. The reasonable response to being put down in this way is: “When we need a new god, we’ll advertise, thanks. Meantime, can you explain what God’s gracious servants of humanity think they’re doing in Gaza?” The unreasonable response is violence.

Jews may say they don’t act on their sense of divine superiority but that can’t be taken seriously. The supremely sophisticated and worldly Nahum Goldmann put it in words:

One of the great phenomena of Jewish psychology … lies in having created a thoroughly ingenious defence mechanism against the politico-economic situation acting upon them, against persecution and exile. This mechanism can be described in a few words: the Jews saw their persecutors as an inferior race… Every Jew felt ten or a hundred times the superior of these lowly tillers of the soil: he was cultured, learned Hebrew, knew the Bible, studied the Talmud— in other words he knew that he stood head and shoulders above these illiterates… Goy politics were of no concern to them… It is through this ingenious reasoning, which is without parallel in history, that the Jews succeeded in overcoming what would have annihilated any other race… every Jew knew then that he would be going to Paradise. He did not believe: he knew! [5, p12-13].

Ten or a hundred times the superior. Head and shoulders above these illiterates. It is not a sign of superiority to walk around glaring and/or sneering at your hosts as though they should apologise for breathing the same air. This is not just drawing room speculation. It takes real form in daily life. Shahak quotes from a booklet issued by the Army Central Region Command's Chief Chaplain:

When our forces come across civilians during a war or in hot pursuit or in a raid, so long as there is no certainty that those civilians are incapable of harming our forces, then according to the Halakhah they may and even should be killed ... Under no circumstances should an Arab be trusted, even if he makes an impression of being civilized ... In war, when our forces storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah to kill even good civilians, that is, civilians who are ostensibly good [2, Ch 5; ‘ostensibly good’ means ‘but treacherous underneath’ as there are no good Arabs; if they were good, they wouldn’t be Arabs].

Behind this, and far out of sight of the goyim, are the implacable beliefs of extremist Jews. Speaking of Baruch Goldstein, the Patriarch’s Cave murderer, and his patron, the convicted terrorist Rabbi Meir Kahane, Shahak and Mezvinsky said:

Goldstein and his admirers are not interested in converting Arabs to Judaism. As their statements abundantly testify, they see the Arabs as nothing more than disease-spreading rats, lice or other loathsome creatures; this is exactly how the Nazis believed that the Aryan race alone had laudable qualities that were inheritable but that could become polluted by sheer contact with dirty and morbid Jews. Kahane, who learned nothing from the Nuremberg Laws, had exactly the same notions about the Arabs [2, p129].

In order to safeguard Jewish life, which rates infinitely higher than any other human, Jews are required to kill gentiles, especially Arabs, on the slightest suspicion of hostility: “The fact is that in all cases where Jews have, in a military or paramilitary context, murdered Arab non-combatants – including cases of mass murder such as that in Kafr Qasim in 1956 – the murderers, if not let off altogether, received extremely light sentences or won far-reaching remissions, reducing their punishment to next to nothing.” Writing in 1988, Prof. Menachim Friedman said:

The Haredi world is Judeocentric. The essence of Haredi thought is the notion of an abyss separating the Jews from the Gentiles….They assume that non-Jews and Jews are poles apart. Non-Jews want to kill and destroy the Jews; the rightful differences between Jews should only be about how they should react to the ever-present non-Jewish desire…. Rabbi Shach believes that communicating with non-Jews is not possible … They both say that there is no peace and there can never be one, because the Egyptians want to exterminate us … The Haredim and the Zionists agree about the centrally important Zionist principle that anti-Semitism is an eternal quality common to all non-Jews and is different from xenophobia and/or any hatred of other minorities [2, p30-32].

This type of attitude is totally inconsistent with the notion that the God of the Jews has a message of love and concern for Gentiles. It is, however, entirely consistent with what Sigmund Freud called the unconscious ego defence mechanism of projection. This means attributing one’s forbidden or terrifying impulses to another person. The classic psychoanalytic formulation relates to homosexuality (which was totally forbidden in traditional Judaism). In Freudian terms, when a young man says “That man is looking at me sexually,” he is actually saying “When I look at him, I feel sexually aroused.” Similarly, when Jews say “The goyim want to destroy us,” it is actually the Jews who want to destroy their neighbours, as their Biblical mythology recounts, for example:

Deuteronomy 7.1: When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you— 2. And when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.

Deuteronomy 20.16: However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17 Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you.

1 Samuel 15.3: Now go and attack the Amalekites and completely destroy everything they have. Do not spare them. Kill men and women, infants and nursing babies, oxen and sheep, camels and donkeys.

As Freud showed, every accusation is a confession. This explicit message is repeated time and time again throughout the Pentateuch. If you are brought up on this sort of stuff, instead of “Turn the other cheek, forgive them that sin against you, love your enemies, etc.”, then eventually you must start to believe it. If you believe it, then one day you will want to act on it. In his Devil’s Dictionary from 1911, the eccentric essayist, Ambrose Bierce, defined manna as “A food miraculously given to the Israelites in the wilderness. When it was no longer supplied to them, they settled down and tilled the soil, fertilizing it, as a rule, with the bodies of the original inhabitants.” That was only half a joke because, as we see, they’re still doing it. The insensate rage with which Israel is smashing Gaza to smithereens, killing hundreds of civilians for each possible Hamas activist, says their hatred for “The Other” is innate, not defensive. It was there all along, simply waiting for a chance to explode.

I submit that the Jewish belief in being “chosen,” “special,” “part of God,” etc. is nothing other than a ploy to feel superior. Without it, they dissolve into the rest of humanity without leaving a trace. This is why they won’t give it up. That’s fine, that’s their choice, but they need to know that the overwhelming majority of goyim don’t see any reason to play the game. The Jewish attitude of divinely-sanctioned superiority breeds resentment in their neighbours; resentment builds up and up, and every now and then, it explodes. In the past, when Jews lived in their isolated villages or their urban ghettoes, surrounded by uneducated peasants living hand to mouth and bitterly resentful of their poverty, it exploded as pogroms – with a bit of government encouragement, of course. When the resentment is combined with an equally strong sense of racial superiority among a very much bigger, better armed, deeply humiliated and immensely resentful population whipped up by gifted rabblerousers, such as Germany in the 1930s, it explodes as a Holocaust.

As for the Land of Israel, the Jews say their God promised it to them but, for various reasons, they moved out for a couple of thousand years. Now they say they want it back. Manifestly, they are prepared to stop at nothing to get it back, the reason being they believe they own it. In their view, the Palestinian population are usurpers and thieves, Amalekites, as their prime minister said, and it is every Jew’s divinely-appointed mission and duty and pleasure to “redeem” the territory of Greater Israel, to expel or exterminate all unbelievers in order to fulfill God’s plan. While there is some disagreement over the extent of the territory, it seems to include practically the whole of Syria and Jordan, across to Iraq west of the Euphrates and downstream to Kuwait, taking in the northern part of Saudi Arabia, the Sinai and Egypt east of the Nile, with a chunk of southern Turkey for good measure. The reasons for this wild grab aren’t worth the effort; suffice it to say that 150million people, whose ancestors have been there for five thousand years and left pyramids to prove it, are unlikely to agree. They are the immovable object standing in the way of the avowedly irresistible Jewish force trying to occupy the land to satisfy their religious mythology. This is a recipe for unending disaster although I expect the Zionists will lose interest long before the Arabs do.

The oft-repeated Zionist justification for violence is that Gentiles, especially Arabs, hate Jews just because of their Jewishness. Their loathing is innate and can never be eradicated so Jews must find a way to live without it affecting them, hence Israel. This sort of statement is no different from the Nazis saying that Jews are genetically inferior and want only to destroy the Germanic nation so they can establish their international Bolshevik empire. It is false and it is wholly a psychological projection, as Shahak makes abundantly clear:

For example, in addition to a series of scurrilous sexual allegations against Jesus, the Talmud states that his punishment in hell is to be immersed in boiling excrement … Jewish children are actually taught – passages such as that which commands every Jew, whenever passing near a cemetery, to utter a blessing if the cemetery is Jewish, but to curse the mothers of the dead if it is non-Jewish… [1,Ch 2]…Judaism is imbued with a very deep hatred towards Christianity, combined with ignorance about it. This attitude was clearly aggravated by the Christian persecutions of Jews, but is largely independent of them … According to the Talmud, Jesus was executed by a proper rabbinical court for idolatry… The very name 'Jesus' was for Jews a symbol of all that is abominable, and this popular tradition still persists. The Gospels are equally detested, and they are not allowed to be quoted (let alone taught) even in modern Israeli Jewish schools…. Christianity as a religion is classed by rabbinical teaching as idolatry [1,Ch 5].

While it can be managed in the short term, it is impossible to conceal a projection permanently. Accusing their opponents of “antisemitism” or “blaming the victim” stops working after a while. Antisemitism means hostility to Jews just because of their religion/race. True antisemitism is real, unfortunately widespread, and dangerous, but is it antisemitic to criticise the Israeli government for selectively destroying hospitals in Gaza? Since attacking hospitals is a designated war crime, I do not believe it is. Conflating genuine criticism of war crimes with malignant antisemitism benefits only the antisemites. If the price of criticising the Israeli government for its actions in Gaza is to wear that label, then so be it. I criticise the Australian government all the time (they deserve all of it and more for being a bunch of insipid American dupes and sell-outs).

Similarly, is setting out a case that Jewish behaviour and attitudes contribute to the behaviour and attitudes they experience directed at them a matter of “blaming the victim”? I don’t believe it is. Human relationships are a constant turmoil of back and forth trying to establish or avoid dominance. A small upset is repaid with interest, which leads to a further angry incident, and then more and more until bodies are hitting the ground and nobody knows or cares who did what first. Both sides want vindication but, of course, they can’t have it and neither side wants to be first to stop brawling. One thing is clear: the early Christian movement was persecuted by Jews, and by pagan Romans and practically everybody else, until they were big enough to turn the tables, and it has never stopped since. In my view, it has to stop otherwise the horror of nuclear war becomes more and more likely. Similarly, while all the fighting is going on, nobody is paying attention to the ultimate threat of global warming.

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It could be said that my choice of quotes is simply cherry-picking the evidence to compose a false case against the Zionist-Fascists who now control Israel’s government and military. First response: Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they because, as Shahak, Mezvinsky and Goldmann all show, that’s the Zionist modus operandi. Another projection, except this one is fully conscious.

As stated, this is a very preliminary investigation, framed in an entirely new model derived from the biocognitive theory of mind. It needs to be proposed just because, as Shahak lamented, all the other models failed. In my opinion, the biocognitive analysis is vastly superior to the available, social/political models but, as the author, I would say that, wouldn’t I. As for reading more Jewish history and theology, no thanks, I’ve had enough. Other people can study the biocognitive approach and decide, not whether it applies, but how well.

References:

Note: I am using ebooks downloaded some time ago which are not paginated. For Shahak [1], I can only give the chapter numbers. To find the exact quote, copy a few words from my text and then search for them in the electronic copy. For Shahak and Mezvinsky, I give the page count from the beginning of the file, which includes the cover, title page etc.

1. Shahak, Israel (1994). Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years. Pluto Press: London.

2. Shahak I, Mezvinsky N (1999). Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. Pluto Press: London.

3. McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. Amazon.

4. McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon.

5. Goldmann N. (1976/78). The Jewish Paradox. Weidenfeld & Nicholson: London.