From Jewish to Israeli Self-Hatred: The Psychology of Populations under Chronic Siege

I have always wanted to know the connection between the behavior of some
elements of Europe's Jews in their cooperation with the Germans in forming
the Judenraten all over Nazi-occupied Europe and the seemingly connected
behavior of the Israeli leadership in giving back land such as Gaza when all
evidence
would otherwise have indicated that the Palestinians were not going to
change their jihadist anti-Jewish mindset until there were and are no more
Jews in Israel.

RS

Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism

No. 46 2 July 2006 / 6 Tammuz 5766

From Jewish to Israeli Self-Hatred:
The Psychology of Populations under Chronic Siege

Kenneth Levin

The phenomenon of Diaspora Jews embracing as truth the
indictments of Jew-haters has been so commonplace that
a literature on the subject emerged under the rubric
"Jewish self-hatred." A similar predilection evolved
in Israel, particularly among the nation's cultural
elites, in the context of the Arab siege.

Segments of populations under chronic siege commonly
embrace the indictments of the besiegers, however
bigoted and outrageous. They hope that by doing so and
reforming accordingly they can assuage the hostility
of their tormenters and win relief. This has been an
element of the Jewish response to anti-Semitism
throughout the history of the Diaspora.

The paradigm on the level of individual psychology is
the psychodynamics of abused children, who almost
invariably blame themselves for their predicament,
ascribe it to their being "bad," and nurture fantasies
that by becoming "good" they can mollify their abusers
and end their torment.

The rhetoric of the Israeli Peace Movement, its
distortions of Arab aims and actions, and its
indictments of Israel likewise reflected the
psychological impact of chronic besiegement. The Oslo
process that the Peace Movement spawned entailed
policies grounded in wishful thinking and
self-delusion analogous to that of abused children.
Israel's national institutions - political,
educational, academic, cultural, and media-related -
need to help arm the nation against the allures of
Oslo-era delusions if the Oslo debacle is not to be
repeated.

In recent centuries, the phenomenon of Diaspora Jews
embracing as truth the indictments of Jew-haters has
been so commonplace that, starting about a hundred
years ago, a literature on the subject emerged in
Central Europe. Some of it was written by
psychologists and psychoanalysts, and its theme
acquired the rubric "Jewish self-hatred." A similar
predilection evolved in Israel, particularly among the
nation's cultural elites, in the context of the Arab
siege. Israeli novelist and essayist Aharon Megged
observed in 1994, "We have witnessed...an emotional
and moral identification by the majority of Israel's
intelligentsia, and its print and electronic media,
with people committed to our annihilation."1

Oslo: Embracing the Perspectives of the Nation's
Enemies

Israel's engagement in the Oslo "peace process"
likewise reflected an embrace of the perspectives of
the nation's enemies. It entailed pursuing a course
that had been advocated for some years by Israel's
Peace Movement and that echoed indictments by Israel's
besiegers regarding alleged Israeli responsibility for
Arab aggression.

The Peace Movement had argued that Israel's refusal to
acknowledge previous wrongdoing and make sufficient
amends and concessions was what perpetuated the Arab-
Israeli conflict. Hence, the rationale of Oslo was
that Israel would now win peace by providing such
concessions to the PLO. Israel pursued this path even
as the Palestinian leadership continued to tell its
constituency that its goal remained Israel's
destruction and continued to collude in a terror
campaign against Israel.

For example, on the night of the famous "peace"
ceremony on the White House lawn in September 1993,
Yasser Arafat appeared on Jordanian television and
informed Palestinians and the Arab world that they
should understand Oslo as the first phase of the Plan
of Phases.2 This was the strategy elaborated by the
PLO in 1974 that called for gaining whatever territory
could be won by negotiations and using that land as a
base from which to pursue Israel's destruction.

Also, from the time of Arafat's arrival in the
territories in July 1994 until May 1996 and the fall
of the Labor-Meretz government that had choreographed
Oslo, over 150 people were murdered in terror attacks
targeting Israel. This rate of losses to terror
exceeded that of any previous twenty-two month period
in the nation's history. The Israeli government knew
of Arafat's support for the terror campaign, his
praise of the terrorists, and his exhorting of his
people to follow their example, yet it responded with
more concessions, as in the Oslo II agreement in the
fall of 1995.

A Thesis Proved as Nonsense

Various explanations for this self-destructive course
have been offered by people who initially embraced
Oslo and were even active in promoting it. Nissim
Zvilli, a Labor MK and member of the Knesset's Foreign
Affairs and Defense Committee at the time, recalled in
2002, "I remember myself lecturing in Paris and saying
that Arafat's double-talk had to be understood. That
was our thesis, proved [later] as nonsense. Arafat
meant every word, and we were naive."3

But "naïveté" hardly captures the self-delusions that
underlay Oslo. In 1997, Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit
wrote of the course forged by Israel's political elite
and passionately embraced by its intellectual and
cultural elites, including himself: "In the early
'90's...we, the enlightened Israelis, were infected
with a messianic craze.... All of a sudden, we
believed that...the end of the old Middle East was
near. The end of history, the end of wars, the end of
conflict.... We fooled ourselves with illusions. We
were bedazzled into committing a collective act of
messianic drunkenness."4

But while Shavit's "messianism" gives a label to
Oslo-era thinking, it does not explain it. The
explanation lies in the psychology of chronically
besieged populations. Whether minorities enduring
persistent marginalization, defamation, and attack
from the surrounding society, or small states under
continual siege, segments of such communities almost
invariably embrace the indictments of their enemies.
They hope that by reforming themselves in a manner
consistent with those indictments they will win
relief.

The Psychology of Chronically Abused Children

On the level of individual psychology, the paradigm is
the psychology of chronically abused children. This
most typically means children subjected to parental
abuse. Almost invariably, such children blame
themselves for their predicament. They tell
themselves, "I am treated this way because I am bad,
and if I become good I will be treated better."

This phenomenon is widely recognized by psychiatrists,
psychologists, and social workers and is most often
ascribed to children's naïveté. According to this
interpretation, the abusers tell their young victims
that the abuse is punishment for their being "bad,"
and the children, in their naïveté, accept this at
face value.

But children are not that naive. The victimized child
of an alcoholic father or a chronically depressed,
withdrawn, and irritable mother knows that he or she
is being treated badly. Nevertheless, such children
almost invariably choose to repress that knowledge and
to believe that changes in their own behavior -
behaving in a more exemplary fashion, being more
attentive to the parents' needs and wishes - can
change their parents' ways and win them a better life.

To comprehend the motivation for this self-delusion,
consider the existential predicament of such children.
They can, on the one hand, acknowledge their essential
helplessness and the hopelessness of their situation.
On the other, they can delude themselves, blame
themselves for their victimization, and endure the
guilt of that self-indictment, of perceiving
themselves as "bad," but also preserve the hope that
by their own action, by becoming "good," they can win
relief. Children almost invariably choose to avoid
hopelessness at all costs, and adults do the same.

Self-Hatred: A Specifically Jewish Pathology?

On a communal level, the same dynamic is seen again
and again in populations under siege. The phenomenon
of segments of the community embracing the indictments
of the besiegers and seeking relief through
self-criticism and self-reform recurs constantly in
the history of the Jewish Diaspora.

It has been so commonplace among Jews that some have
seen it as a specifically Jewish pathology, a unique
Jewish self-hatred. But, again, it can be found in
many other populations under chronic attack. Its
particular persistence and ubiquity among Jews is
essentially a reflection of the unprecedented history
of the Jews as a people living under incessant siege.

The broader occurrence of people adopting the
perspectives of their tormenters has been popularly
recognized over the past several decades as the
"Stockholm Syndrome." The sobriquet had its origin in
an incident in the Swedish capital in 1973 in which a
bank robbery went awry and several people were held
captive by the robbers for six days in the bank's
vault. The captives emerged displaying notable empathy
for and emotional bonding with their captors.

Communities are, however, not entirely defenseless
against the psychological corrosiveness of living
under sustained attack. The major defense is communal
institutions that are strong enough to have moral sway
in their communities and that convey a countervailing
message. This is a message of the community's being
unfairly targeted, of its essential decency and
integrity, of the bigotry and injustice of its
attackers, of the community's ability to resist and
survive the onslaught and forge a better future for
itself.

In terms of the paradigm of the abused child, the
equivalent of such institutions would be another adult
in the child's life, a grandparent perhaps, who
provides the child with a different perspective. This
person gives the message that the child is not "bad."
Rather, he is being unfairly victimized and the fault
lies with his abusers, not with him; he deserves
better and will ultimately escape his predicament and
have a better future. Although such support may not
serve to defend the child against further abuse, it
can help protect him against the worst psychological
reverberations of such abuse. Those reverberations
entail continuing to pursue the tack of blaming
himself and seeking to appease his abusers through
self-reform, a tack that all too often persists into
adulthood and dooms such children to lives of ongoing
self-abasement, frustration, and misery.

The Weakening of Jewish Communal Institutions

But within the Jewish Diaspora, there was a notable
weakening of communal institutions as a result of
political changes that marked the emergence of the
modern world and modern nation-states. This weakening
left Jews even more vulnerable than they had
previously been to the psychological corrosiveness of
chronic attack. Indeed, so widespread was the impact
of that corrosiveness that Max Nordau, the Austrian
Jewish writer and early Zionist, observed in 1896, "It
is the greatest triumph of anti-Semitism that it has
brought the Jews to view themselves with anti- Semitic
eyes."5

There is a profound truth to this on the level of
Jews' sense of themselves as individuals. For example,
the Jewish child subjected to constant taunts, even
physical attacks, and social exclusion in the
schoolyard will very often respond by questioning what
is wrong with him and how he can change to win
acceptance. This response is comparable to that of the
child abused at home. If the Jewish child's parents
and community fail to convey a strong-enough
countermessage, such a response becomes virtually
inevitable and will likely be carried by the child
into adulthood, with the child as adult feeling
himself tainted and flawed by virtue of his Jewish
identity.

But Nordau could have added that if Jews saw
themselves as the haters saw them, they often viewed
other Jews as fitting those stereotypes even more.
Thus, German Jews not infrequently viewed Polish Jews
as the true and deserving butt of Jew-hatred;
secularized Jews regarded religious Jews similarly;
and unionized working-class Jews held comparable
opinions of the Jewish bourgeoisie. Moreover, those
who looked at others across the various social divides
in this way, and who sought to reform those others or
to separate themselves from those others in order to
win themselves acceptance by the wider society, did
not acknowledge that their biases reflected a pleading
for gentile approval. Instead, they cast their
prejudices as representing a more progressive and
enlightened path.

Not a New Jewish Phenomenon

Again, this was not a new Jewish phenomenon. The
twelfth-century Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela
wrote of his visit to the Jews of Constantinople:

Among [them] there are craftsmen in silk and many
merchants and many wealthy men.... They dwell in a
burdensome exile. And most of the enmity comes about
because of the [Jewish] tanners who make leather and
fling their filthy water into the streets at the
entrance to their homes, polluting the street of the
Jews. And therefore the Greeks [Constantinople was at
the time, of course, still in Byzantine hands] hate
the Jews, whether good or bad, and make their yoke
heavy upon them and beat them in the streets.6

The historian H. H. Ben Sasson observes of the
passage:

This information certainly did not reach [Benjamin of
Tudela] from the tanners; it was how wealthy Jews
explained to themselves and to others the animosity of
the Greeks towards the Jews. It resulted from the
filthy habits of those who followed such a despicable
craft, and because of them, all Jews, good and bad,
suffered. In this context "good" meant the silk-maker
or physician, and "bad" meant the miserable tanner,
blamed as the source of this animosity.7

The besieged Jews chose to ignore the actual roots of
the hostility directed against them, about which they
could do little. Instead they focused their resentment
on elements within the Jewish community on the other
side of the social-occupational divide. They did so in
the service of fantasies that "reform" of those others
would radically ameliorate the community's
predicament.

But this phenomenon became particularly virulent in
the modern era, and it had an impact as well on the
Zionist movement. Herzl conceived of the future Jewish
state as a refuge for all Jews. But among the Russian
socialist Zionists who came to dominate the Zionist
movement, many chose to construe religious and
bourgeois Jews as the true targets of anti-Semitism.
They spoke and wrote of such Jews in a manner that
parroted the rhetoric of the anti-Semites, and sought
to construct a nation that would be socialist and
secular and therefore, in their wishful thinking,
immune to anti-Jewish attack.

The Practical Consequences of Bias

This bias had practical consequences. In the early
1930s, for example, David Ben-Gurion recognized the
growing dangers facing European Jews and argued for a
public relations campaign to pressure Britain to
permit large-scale immigration to the Yishuv (the
prestate Jewish community in Palestine). Many of his
socialist Zionist colleagues, however, opposed him for
fear that the arrival of religious and entrepreneurial
Jews would undermine the creation of a New Jew -
socialist and secular - and instead lead to a polity
that invited anti-Semitism.

Another practical consequence can be seen in the
response by some elements of the socialist Zionist
camp to the Arab attacks of 1920-1921, 1929, and
1936-1939. Some chose to construe the attacks as an
understandable reaction to the ways of traditional and
bourgeois elements in the Yishuv. They insisted that
if the Yishuv were built on purely socialist
principles, the Arab working class would see the Jews
as brothers and there would be no enmity.

Various voices within the socialist camp also reacted
to Arab attacks by blaming Arab hostility on the
supposedly misguided Zionist effort to establish a
Jewish state, and they advocated Jewish abandonment of
that goal. Again, those who would blame the Jews did
not acknowledge that they were seeking to placate the
Jews' attackers but rather cast their stance as
enlightened and progressive. For example, they wrapped
themselves in socialist internationalism and insisted
that Jews should be more forward-looking and forswear
nationalist aspirations.

A related response to the Arab assault came from
another part of the Yishuv. Jews in Western Europe
had, since the beginning of the modern era, confronted
intense opposition to their being granted civic rights
in their respective countries. A key point made by
those opposing such rights was that the Jews were a
separate, alien nation. In response, many Jews sought
to demonstrate that they were solely a community of
faith, not a nation. German Jewish reformist movements
in the early nineteenth century even sought to change
the liturgy to delete references to longing for Eretz
Israel and Jerusalem so as to erase any suggestions of
national, and not purely religious, Jewish identity
and aspirations.

Buber: Justifying the Arab Aggressors

Elements of the German Jewish community in the Yishuv
embraced these same predilections. They defined the
proper Zionist project as the building of a Jewish
cultural center, not a state, in Eretz Israel, and
responded to Arab attacks in the same manner so many
of them had responded to anti- Jewish indictments in
Europe. They even more emphatically argued against
nation-building, justified Arab aggression as a
reasonable reaction to the misguided state-building of
the Yishuv leadership, and viciously attacked
Ben-Gurion and his pro-state associates.

Of course, they once again did not acknowledge that
they were seeking to placate the Jews' attackers but
rather wrapped their stance in moral
self-righteousness. They insisted that Judaism had
evolved beyond narrow, nationalist concerns. It was
now exclusively focused on its universal message and
mission as a moral force in the world, and
nation-building represented a regressive, atavistic,
and shameful course for the Jews.

The most prominent figure in this camp was the famous
German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. In 1929, the
Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, orchestrated
large-scale attacks against the Jews of the Yishuv
that led to, among other atrocities, the murder of
more than sixty Jews in Hebron. Buber, then still in
Germany, blamed the massacres on the Jews for not
having been accommodating enough of Arab sensibilities
and urged an amnesty for those Arabs convicted of
murdering Jews.8

Buber's response to the Arab attacks of 1936-1939 (he
immigrated to the Yishuv in 1938) was similar. He and
many of his associates on the faculty of the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem also opposed efforts to push
Britain to liberalize Jewish immigration. Even in the
face of the notorious Chamberlain White Paper of 1939
severely limiting immigration at such a desperate time
for European Jews, the circle around Buber campaigned
in support of such limits and insisted that there
should be no additional Jewish immigration without
Arab consent.

In an article in Haaretz in November 1939, two months
after the start of World War II, Buber not only argued
that the Zionist objective of a state was immoral; he
also asserted that, as all nationalisms were, in his
view, intrinsically and equally morally bankrupt and
that Zionism was "performing the acts of Hitler in the
land of Israel, for they [i.e., the Zionists] want to
serve Hitler's god [i.e., nationalism] after he has
been given a Hebrew name."9

The Impact of the Shoah

Such perspectives were largely marginalized by the war
in Europe, the Shoah, and the establishment of Israel.
The nation came together in absorbing the survivors
from Europe and the Sephardi Jews fleeing the Arab
states of North Africa and the Middle East, and
Israelis overwhelmingly dedicated themselves to the
state's survival and well-being.

But the marginalization of those perspectives
sympathetic to Arab aggression and critical of the
Zionist enterprise was not simply a consequence of the
flow of events. It also derived from an optimism that
the Arab siege would soon end and Israel would indeed
become a "normal" state. In addition, the segment of
the population most receptive to anti-state rhetoric
was the socialist Zionist camp. However, the nation's
leadership was drawn from that camp, and many more on
the Israeli Left identified with Ben- Gurion and his
successors than with the anti-state circles.

But the siege did not end. Even the peace with Egypt
was followed by Egyptian reneging on the approximately
two dozen provisions of the Camp David agreement
involving normalization of commercial and cultural
relations, and the government-controlled Egyptian
media persisted in their anti-Israeli rhetoric and
even escalated their anti- Semitic content.

Viewing the Likud as Alien Others

No less significantly, in 1977 the socialist Zionists
lost their monopoly on national power and over the
next fifteen years Likud either led the nation or was
equal or senior partner in governments of national
unity. Likud's roots lay in a merger of the party of
Zeev Jabotinsky's Revisionist successors and Israel's
Liberal Party (opposed to the country's socialist
economy). Likud's constituency was drawn largely from
the Sephardim, generally religious and
entrepreneurial, and the more religious and
entrepreneurial among the Ashkenazim.

Much of the socialist Zionist camp viewed the new
leadership and its constituency as alien others. Many
Labor Zionists now became more receptive to arguments
that Arab hostility was a response to Israeli
policies, that it was the control of the government by
the Old Jew - the religious and the entrepreneurial -
that perpetuated the Arab siege, and that if the Left
would only regain power and make sufficient amends and
concessions the other side would be placated and peace
would be won.

The Peace Movement's interpretation of the conflict
was no less divorced from reality than had been German
Jews blaming eastern Jews for anti-Semitism, or
secular Jews blaming the religious, or socialist Jews
blaming the European Jewish bourgeoisie.

But under the conditions of the continuing Arab siege
and the Likud ascendancy, it won more and more
adherents on the Israeli Left. Those adherents, cowed
by the persistence of the siege and wishing for its
end, grasped at any seemingly positive statement from
an Arab political figure to bolster their wishful
thinking ignoring all countervailing evidence.

For example, the PLO's proxy representative in
Jerusalem, Faisal Husseini, declared to an Arab
audience in 1992, "We have not conceded and will not
surrender any of the...commitments that have existed
for more than 70 years....We have within our
Palestinian and united Arab society the ability to
deal with divided Israeli society.... We must force
Israeli society to cooperate...with our Arab society
and eventually to gradually dissolve the 'Zionist
entity.'"10 He made other statements in the same vein.

The Peace Camp like the Abused Child

Yet Husseini was a Peace Movement favorite. Mordechai
Bar-On was a founder of Peace Now and author of the
most definitive history of the Peace Movement. He
wrote of the period before Oslo, the time of the
Husseini quote, "A new generation of Palestinian
leaders was emerging.... Younger people like...Faisal
Husseini.... Most of the peace groups on the Israeli
side maintained contacts with these new leaders and
tried to persuade Israelis that these Palestinians
could be partners in negotiations."11

Bar-On also explained the failure of some Israelis to
be persuaded as due to their benighted nature, their
not sharing the Peace Movement's open-minded and
forward-looking sophistication. He noted that the
Sephardic Jewish community in Israel tended to be more
distrustful of Arab intentions and added that this
seemed, in surveys, to be related to educational level
and level of religious traditionalism. He further
observed that the less educated and more traditional
segments of the Ashkenazi community were likewise more
distrustful of the possibilities for genuine peace
than were Israel's elites.

Bar-On concluded: "Higher learning, it is believed,
exposes individuals to a wider variety of opinions,
trains them in new analytical and flexible modes of
thought, and enables them to relate to issues in a
less emotional and more self-critical way, which leads
to greater tolerance and understanding of the 'other'
and of the complexity of the issues."12 This is
Bar-On's rationalization for the peace camp's
grasping, like the abused child, at wishful delusions
that sufficient self-reform, sufficient efforts to
become "good," would win relief.

New History:
Rewriting the Past of Israel and Zionism

Also resonant of the paradigm of the abused child is
that adjunct to the Peace Movement, the so-called New
History. The practitioners of the New History have
sought to rewrite the past of Israel and the Zionist
movement in a way that revealed the supposedly unfair
treatment meted out to Palestinian Arabs and to other
Arabs as well.

The implicit, and often explicitly acknowledged,
intent of its authors has been to get Israelis to
perceive Arab hostility as an understandable response
to Israeli misdeeds. They encourage Israelis to see
their neighbors less as irreconcilable foes bent on
Israel's destruction than as people like themselves
who simply want - have always simply wanted - a fair
resolution of the conflict, and so to be more
forthcoming, to make painful concessions, to achieve
that fair resolution.

The New History is largely bogus history. As one
critic has noted, what is true in it is not new and
what is new in it - typically the claims most damning
of Israel - is not true. One recurrent criticism
directed at it by other historians is that its
proponents offer a very simplistic, two-dimensional
view of the Arabs.13 There is little conveyance of the
complexity of decision-making by Arab leaders; rather,
Arab decisions and actions are depicted as
straightforward and predictable reactions to Israeli
policies.

This recurrent weakness in the New History has at
times been ascribed to authors' limited grasp of
Arabic and, hence, limited access to the literature
that would give them a fuller, more nuanced and
realistic understanding of the shaping of Arab
policies. But the truer explanation for the
two-dimensionality of Arab decision-making in the New
History is its authors' wish to see Arab behavior as
simply reactions to Israeli behavior. They want, in
effect, to see Israeli behavior controlling Arab
behavior, just as the abused child wants to see his
own behavior as controlling that of his abusive
parent. Such a distortion of reality is essential to
the child's fantasy that the abuse has been a response
to his misbehavior and that his becoming good will
inevitably elicit better parental treatment.

Not Prepared to Live in a World without Solutions

Perhaps the single example of Oslo rationalizations
most resonant of the psychodynamics of the abused
child is a statement by Oslo's chief architect, Yossi
Beilin, in 1997. Defending his Oslo endeavors, Beilin
declared, "I want to live in a world where the
solution to an existential problem is possible.... I
am simply not prepared to live in a world where
[problems] are unsolvable."14

Confronted with the reality that Israel faces problems
it cannot resolve by its own actions, Beilin wished
not to believe that reality and simply closed his eyes
to it. He embraced the delusion that, despite all the
evidence to the contrary, the other side desires what
he desires and the world can be rendered what he wants
it to be if only Israel is sufficiently forthcoming.
In the same way the abused child, faced with a painful
and insoluble existential problem, chooses to believe
that he truly can solve it, that his behaving better
will make his world right.

Haaretz's Ari Shavit wrote in 2001 of the consequences
of Beilin's "solution to an existential problem."
Shavit pointed out that the nation was enduring "a
profound existential crisis" brought about by a
decision "produced and directed by...Yossi
Beilin...who had Israel sign an illusory document [the
Oslo accords] which undermines the foundations of its
existence."

Addressing Institutional Failures

Throughout the history of the Diaspora, Jewish
communities likewise suffered difficult situations
becoming even worse, losses being piled on losses,
because of the psychological corrosiveness of their
predicament and the allure of delusional
comprehensions that misread dangers, set Jew against
Jew, and grievously compromised communal defenses.

As noted, in some cases the abused child is spared all
the devastating consequences of his self-blame by an
adult who conveys to him a different message. Strong
communal institutions can at times do the same for
populations under siege.

Oslo was ultimately a failure of Israel's
institutions, political, educational, academic,
cultural, and media-related. The Arab siege is going
to continue, and if those institutional failures are
not addressed the nation will inexorably once again
risk its existence by chasing mirages of peace.

* * *

Notes

1. Aharon Megged, "One-Way Trip on the Highway of
Self- Destruction," Jerusalem Post, 17 June 1994.

2. Foreign Broadcast Service, "Near East and South
Asia, Daily Report Supplement, Israel-PLO Agreement,"
14 September 1993, 4-5.

3. Haaretz, 27 July 2002.

4. Haaretz, 26 December 1997.

5. Cited in Meir Ben-Horin, Max Nordau: Philosopher of
Human Solidarity (New York: Conference of Jewish
Social Studies, 1956), 180.

6. Cited in H. H. Ben-Sasson, "The Middle Ages," in H.
H. Ben-Sasson, ed., A History of the Jewish People
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 385-723,
469.

7. Ibid., 469.

8. Martin Buber, "The National Home and National
Policy in Palestine" and "The Wailing Wall," in A Land
for Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs, ed.
Paul R. Mendes-Flohr (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1983), 82-91, 93-95.

9. Haaretz, 16 November 1939; cited in Yoram Hazony,
The Jewish State (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 244.

10. Al-Ra'y (Jordan), 12 November 1992; cited in Ze'ev
Benyamin Begin, "Years of Hope," Haaretz Magazine, 6
September 2002.

11. Mordechai Bar-On, In Pursuit of Peace (Washington,
DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1996),
217.

12. Ibid., 165.

13. See, e.g., Robert B. Satloff, review of Benny
Morris's Israel's Borders Wars, 1949-1956, in Middle
Eastern Studies, October 1995, 953-57.

14. Cited in Haaretz Magazine, 7 March 1997.

* * *

Dr. Kenneth Levin is a clinical instructor of
psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a
Princeton-trained historian. He is the author of The
Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege
(Hanover, NH: Smith & Kraus, 2005).