Paranoid Benjamin
Netanyahu Prepares For His Last Stand
Netanyahu has described a suicidal Jewish
extremist as his personal hero. Will he
follow in his path?
By Max Blumenthal
March 22, 2015 "ICH"
- "Alternet"
- Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu propelled
his Likud Party to victory over the centrist
Zionist Union in national elections this
week with a vehement rejection of a
Palestinian state and warning of “buses full
of Arabs” inundating polling places. He
understands that most Jewish Israelis do not
want to live beside an independent
Palestinian state or next door to a
Palestinian. He is one of them, after all,
and he shares their sensibility. His last
minute desperate appeal to racism was an
Israeli application of Alabama Governor
George C. Wallace’s political rule: “I will
never be out-niggered again.”
By making Netanyahu the
longest serving prime minister in Israel’s
history, Jewish Israeli voters have chosen
occupation, apartheid and periodic bouts of
warfare. By signing onto Likud’s election
list, they have sent figures to the Knesset
who make Netanyahu look like Arlo Guthrie.
They include Miri Regev, an Israeli blend of
Sarah Palin and Marine Le Pen who
incited racist riots at a 2012 rally
when she called African migrants “a cancer
in the nation’s body.” Also on the list is
Avi Dichter, a hardline former Shin Bet
chief who authored a bill that would have
formally enshrined Israel’s Jewish character
as superior to its democratic charter. (The
bill may pass in diluted form in the coming
months). Then there is Ayoub Kara, a rabidly
anti-Palestinian Druze Arab legislator who
flew to Berlin in 2011 to
pal around with a neo-Nazi German
millionaire and later described
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman as
“really a leftist.” Avigdor Lieberman, for
his part, recently called for
beheading Arab citizens of Israel he
deemed disloyal—“we need to pick up an axe
and cut off his head.”
A minority of Israeli
Jewish citizens have attempted to resist
their country’s destructive path, but they
have never been more stigmatized or
marginalized. Meanwhile, millions of
Palestinians live under Israeli rule without
the right to vote or any legal rights at
all. The war that left some 2,200 residents
of the Gaza Strip dead last summer and
reduced nearly a quarter of the besieged
coastal enclave’s urban landscape to rubble
was
supported by over 90 percent of the
Jewish Israeli public, with 45 percent of
Israelis complaining that their army had not
used enough force. This was the Israel that
rewarded Netanyahu with his fourth term.
Marketed to the Western
world as a vibrant liberal democracy filled
with sexy citizen-soldier girls, gay pride
marchers and bespectacled Ashkenazi
intellectuals anguishing over Israel’s
excesses in quaint cafes, Israel today
increasingly resembles the first-century CE
desert fortress known as Masada. Now a
popular tourist destination, Masada was the
site of a mass suicide by Jewish fanatics
who rebelled against the Roman Empire, then
slaughtered and robbed a community of Jews
at the village of Ein Gedi who had attempted
to negotiate with the Romans. The Jewish
Roman historian Josephus referred to the
rebels as “Sicarii,” or terrorist bandits.
In his final address at
Masada, with the hilltop fortress surrounded
by the Roman legions, the messianic rebel
leader Elazar Ben-Yair exhorted his
followers to commit mass suicide. “Let our
wives die before they are abused, and our
children before they have tasted of
slavery,” Ben-Yair declared. “And after we
have slain them, let us bestow that glorious
benefit upon one another mutually, and
preserve ourselves in freedom.” The zealots
slaughtered one another, with the men among
some 960 rebels running swords through their
wives then butchering their children before
killing themselves. The seven survivors of
the massacre recalled to Josephus a stifling
atmosphere in which all dissent was crushed
and conformism reigned.
Instead of teaching Masada
as a cautionary tale, Israel’s founding
generation glorified the suicidal zealots.
Israeli children celebrated their bar
mitzvahs en masse at Masada, while soldiers
ascended the steep incline to take their
induction rites at the hilltop fort and
recite a line from the poet Yitzhak Lamdan:
“Never again willl Masada fall!” The Israeli
political psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal titled
his groundbreaking 1983 study of Jewish
Israeli attitudes, “Masada Syndrome,”
revealing the powerful influence of a siege
mentality “in which members of a group hold
a central belief that the rest of the world
has highly negative behavioral intentions
towards the group.” Masada was the symbolic
space where all the demons of the Israeli
psyche blended into a single phantasm of a
last stand.
Nearly all of Israel’s
leaders have demonstrated symptoms of Masada
Syndrome, but few have embraced it as
enthusiastically as Netanyahu. His world is
a dystopia filled with genocidal enemies
hellbent on the destruction of the Jewish
people. They range from what he called “the
insatiable crocodile of militant Islam” to
the “modern Hitler” in Tehran, from the
“goons in Gaza” to a Palestinian national
movement
controlled by anti-Semitic gamma rays
emitted from Hitler’s brain. Netanyahu has
identified the New York Times and
Ha’aretz as two of Israel’s greatest foes,
and once
described former Obama advisors Rahm
Emanuel and David Axelrod as “self-hating
Jews.” In the final days of his re-election
campaign, he howled against an
international conspiracy to overthrow
him, with Barack Hussein Obama as its
puppet-master. (A robo-call to voters in
Israel
warned them to vote for Netanyahu
against “Hussein Obama.”)
Given his paranoid style,
it is unsurprising that Netanyahu has
identified the leader of the suicidal Masada
bandits, Elazar Ben-Yair, as one of his
personal heroes in his ironically titled
1994 book, A Durable Peace. During
his speech to the Congress just before the
election, boycotted by 58 Democratic
lawmakers and Vice-President Joseph Biden,
Netanyahu channeled Ben-Yair’s final words:
“For the first time in 100 generations, we,
the Jewish people, can defend ourselves.
This is why—this is why, as a prime minister
of Israel, I can promise you one more thing:
Even if Israel has to stand alone, Israel
will stand.”
Few observers of his
extraordinary performance in Washington
understood his subtext. Netanyahu’s
statement can be read in the wake of his
victory as his threat to Israel’s Western
patrons. To him, the EU and US are not
allies, but Romans attempting to impose
their oppressive order on Jerusalem. If they
refuse to bend to his will, he will defy
them as his hero Ben-Yair did. Vowing to
“stand alone,” Netanyahu has set the stage
for an ultimate stand-off.