In anti-Semite and Jew Satre wrote that "if the Jew did not exist the anti-Semite would invent him (as a vehicle for the projection of the shadow parts of self - the meanness, aggression, stinginess, cruelty, avarice etc all get projected outward onto 'the Jew'. )
Israel now performs a similar role on university campuses in the West, in news rooms, on the blogs of talk show hosts, and amongst detribalized Jews, allowing for group bonding and group catharsis as a heady sense of lofty moral purpose settles like a mist upon chanting beserkers able to escape the ambiguities of their own existence by locating 'the bad' at some easy to access address outside themselves, where there is none of the pain of working on self, self reflectiveness and self confrontation.
The phenomenon is particularly remarkable amongst vestigial detribalized and deracinated "Jews", sometimes themselves the products of interfaith unions, who wrestle with the stain of their "Jewishness" and need to sanitize that stain and prove their moral mettle by joining in with the lynch mob and landing a few good slaps and kicks to the groin, particularly after a war or collective trauma, when Israelis and those who are for them may be more vulnerable than at other times.
It is also interesting to note that the Jewishness of these "Jewish" critics of all things Israeli is largely invisible in their lives - there is no obvious manifestation of Jewish linguistic or cultural or religious custom and practice and heritage in their daily round - they are to all extents indistinguishable from their secular Gentile neighbours. Their Jewishness is only selectively and opportunistically claimed in order to lend supposed legitimacy to their obsessive, one-sided and loveless criticism of Israel. These are the folk who populate Jewish Voices for Peace and similar misnomers. (My comments do not pertain to Naturei Karta and the anti-Zionist chareydim, which is a slightly different dynamic.)
Similar insights about the deep psychological and irrational roots of the compulsive and obsessive need to find Israel and Israelis guilty of misdemeanors and crimes at all costs are provided by Freud: The page references are all to Freud's last work, Moses and Monotheism (1939):
"....‘If one is the declared favourite of the dreaded father, one need not be surprised at the jealousy of one’s brothers and sisters, and the Jewish legend of Joseph and his brothers shows very well where this jealousy can lead’ (p.106).
For the Christians at least, this abhorrent claim might even have seemed confirmed by their own religious history; why else, if not because they were already chosen as special, would the Christian Messiah, Jesus, come from that obscure people? This fact intensified hatred of the Jews; somehow, it is always they who are selected for the starring role.
‘I venture to assert,’ writes Freud pointedly and perhaps with childish relish, ‘that jealousy of the people which declared itself the first born, favourite child of God the Father, has not yet been surmounted among other peoples even today: it is as though they had thought there was truth in the claim’ (p.91).
(Source: Frosh, S. (2004) Freud, Psychoanalysis and Anti-Semitism The Psychoanalytic Review, 91, 309-330).
What is the antidote to all of this discontent, these dis-contents??
Two quotations of Rav Kook, zatzal, come to mind:
“If we were destroyed, and the world with us, due to baseless hatred, then we shall rebuild ourselves, and the world with us, with baseless love.”
"Better by far to err by the love that is blind than by the hatred that cannot (will not) see.”
