The hatred that cannot (yet) declare its name:

Thank you to author Fiona Snyckers for sharing the article below by Booker prize winner Howard Jacobson....it is an unfortunate description of the largely unconscious reactive processes unfolding in many Western societies, as people find a "respectable" way to wallow in all the short-term payoffs of prejudice, resentment and hate all wrapped in the Orwellian newspeak of concern for human rights.

I think any fair-minded person who has some insight into their own dynamics will realise that a lot of the reactivity swirling around the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (and I use those terms deliberately, to "localise" it, although for obvious reasons the conflict is played out in the minds of Jews and Moslems around the world, as well as in the minds of many others for whom it has assumed symbolic value) is to do with projection, with people not owning their own "stuff" and displacing it onto the other. This would obviously include me as well, to some extent. But I am self reflective and regularly pull myself up by my shoelaces to examine what is happening internally as well as externally. But what is emerging under the broad church of anti-Israelism is an arational emotional dynamic not dissimilar to the affect cultivated by fascist groups across Europe in the 1930s, which lacks any self reflection, any ownership of its own murderous rage...it is all projected outwards onto Israel and, inevitably by association, onto Jews anywhere and everywhere, irrespective of their orientation, affiliation or degree of identification. It is a dynamic which needs to be discussed, because it significantly impacts on all the societies where it is left unattended to to manifest.


http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/howard-jacobson/howard-jacobson-letrsquos-see-the-criticism-of-israel-for-what-it-really-is-1624827.html