Is Israel a Psychopath?

by Laurent Guyénot

Introduction

There is a lot of talk these days about the psychopaths ruling the world. A study among high executives of large companies, published under the title Snakes in Suits, shows that psychopathic traits are widespread among them.[1]This naturally reflects into collective forms of psychopathy: in The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Joel Bakan noted that “corporate behavior is very similar to that of a psychopath.”[2]

Some states also behave like psychopaths among nations. The USA is such a state, with a “pathology of power” (the title of Norman Cousins’s 1987 book) probably related to the degree of psychopathy of the men in charge. Behind the mask of sanity and morality displayed by the US on the world’s stage, there is a “deep state” moved by an insatiable thirst for power and uninhibited by any moral conscience or empathy; this pathological deep state is today in almost complete control of US foreign policy.

Israel is another psychopathic state. The relationship between the US and Israel is a peculiar one, and there are differing opinions regarding its nature. Who, of the two, is the driving force? Have US moles infiltrated and hijacked Israel’s foreign policy, or the opposite? I consider that the issue has been settled by Professors Mearsheimer and Walt in their 2008 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (and before that by Pat Buchanan in his 2003 article “Whose War?”[3]): it is Israel who has drawn the United States into wars which were not in their strategic interest, and which, in fact, jeopardize US national security. It was true about Iraq, and it is true about Syria. The Neocons, the overwhelmingly dominant force in the US deep state since 2001, are crypto-Zionists. America is not controlling Israel’s foreign and colonial policy; it has failed to do so whenever it tried, and it has now stopped trying. Instead, as Ariel Sharon famously said one month after 9/11: “We, the Jews, control America, and the Americans know it.”[4] The very fact that this outrageous statement was quickly buried makes its point self-evident: for, as Gilad Atzmon has also famously said, “Jewish power is the ability to get non-Jews to stop talking about Jewish power.”

Israel’s control of the American people’s mind and heart, based on near total control of the mainstream media alongside large-scale psychological operations such as September 11, is truly bewildering (those who doubt that Israel masterminded 9/11 with its network of super-sayanim should read my article “Inside Job or Mossad Job?”)[5]. But it becomes understandable in light of what psychiatrists call the “psychopathic bond.” I do not mean to deny that the US is pathological in its own right, even genetically so. But I will here concentrate on the one nation I believe to be the most dangerous psychopath among nations: Israel. The Israeli journalist Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz in 2010 that “Only psychiatrists can explain Israel’s behavior” toward Palestinians, suggesting “paranoia, schizophrenia and megalomania.”[6] I suggest psychopathy as a more accurate diagnosis.

Although specialists debate on the difference between psychopathy and sociopathy, I will use both terms interchangeably. The latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has opted for “antisocial personality disorder,” which has the advantage, like sociopathy, to indicate that we are dealing with a dysfunction of the capacity to socialize.

Jewishness as a tribal sociopathy

Psychopaths are narcissists with a huge appetite for power and no moral conscience. Incapable of emotional empathy, they feel no remorse for the suffering they inflict on others. The diagnostic criteria for psychopathy, as listed by Robert Hare, include pathological lying, cunning, and manipulative behavior.[7] The psychopath has no feeling for anyone, but has developed a great ability to simulate, sometimes with a tendency to histrionics. He can be charming and charismatic. Although he himself is immunized from guilt, he learns the art of inducing and exploiting others’ guilt.

Lying is so deeply embedded in his nature that the question of his sincerity is almost irrelevant. The truth has no value in his eyes, or is confused with the version of events that serves him; he can beat a lie detector. The psychopath is unable to put himself in the shoes of anyone else, and thus to view himself critically. He is never wrong, and his failures are always the fault of others. Confident in any circumstance of being right, innocent, and superior, he considers the resentment of his victims as pointless “hatred.”

Although those who have paid the price to see through his mask can judge him raving mad, the psychopath is not sick in the traditional sense. Given his social competitiveness, he cannot be regarded as maladapted from a cognitive or behavioral standpoint. However, from the point of view of depth psychology, it can be argued that the psychopath represses a deep existential angst, a fear of his own inhumanity. Feeling fundamentally unlovable, he knows that his only chance resides in lies, and that, if others could see through him, he would be confronted with his own vacuity. Because he assumes that others are as heartless as he is, he fears to be destroyed if exposed. And therefore, he must keep lying better and better. His obsession for domination is the counterpart of his deep fear of annihilation.[8]

In The Future of an Illusion (1928), Sigmund Freud described religion, particularly Christianity, as a collective neurosis. In this line of reasoning, I will argue that Judaism is rather a form of collective sociopathy. This does not mean that “the Jews” are sociopaths, but rather that they are victims of a collective sociopathic mindset. The difference between collective sociopathy and individual sociopathy is the same as between collective neurosis and individual neurosis according to Freud: participation in a collective sociopathic mentality allows members of the community to channel sociopathic tendencies toward the outside of the community, and to maintain within it a high degree of sociability.[9]

The idea is easy to illustrate: The individual who feels superior to everyone is a megalomaniac; but Maurice Samuel is simply a communitarian Jew when, in his book You Gentiles (1924), he expresses his belief

“that we Jews stand apart from you gentiles, that a primal duality breaks the humanity I know into two distinct parts; that this duality is a fundamental, and that all differences among you gentiles are trivialities compared with that which divided all of you from us.”[10]

The individual who feels constantly surrounded by enemies is a paranoiac; but Leo Pinsker is a respected forerunner of Zionism for having written that Judeophobia is a hereditary and incurable “disease transmitted for two thousand years”, “a variety of demonopathy, with the distinction that it is not peculiar to particular races but is common to the whole of mankind.”[11] Likewise, Josué Jehouda doesn’t have any mental illness, but just an ethnocentric theory of history, when he writes:

“He who plumbs the depths of universal history, to gain an overall vision, finds that from ancient times until today two opposing currents are fighting over history, penetrating and shaping it constantly: the messianic current and the anti-Semitic current.”[12]

In other words, it is only when the Jews think, speak and act as representatives of the Jews and in the name of the Jews—when they say “we Jews . . .”—that their behavior toward non-Jews and their conception of relations with non-Jews betray a sociopathic pattern.

But when someone says “we Jews,” he is generally reproducing a category elaborated by the Jewish cultural elite, the Levites of the past and present. The dominant ideology is the ideology of the dominant. And so the collective psychopathy of Jews is a cognitive paradigm imposed on them by a minority of influential Machiavellian Jews to keep them under control. “The evils of Israel are the evils of leadership,” wrote Jewish publisher Samuel Roth in Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All the Frontiers of Civilization (1934). He blamed all the suffering of the Jews on “the stupendous hypocrisy and cruelty imposed upon us by our fatal leadership.”

“Beginning with the Lord God of Israel Himself, it was the successive leaders of Israel who one by one foregathered and guided the tragic career of the Jews—tragic to the Jews and no less tragic to the neighboring nations who have suffered them. […] despite our faults, we would never have done so much damage to the world if it had not been for our genius for evil leadership.”[13]

The transgenerational complex of persecution-domination

What is Jewishness? Most Jews would agree with Jewish ethnohistorian Raphael Patai (The Jewish Mind, 1977), that it is, before anything else, “consciousness of belonging.”[14] This amounts to saying that Jewishness is a tribalistic way of thinking. Now, tribalism is not pathological in itself. But Jewish tribalism has the peculiarity of being combined with a strong claim to universalism. There is no cognitive dissonance between tribalism and universalism within Jewishness: Jews feel universalists not in spite of being Jews, but by virtue of being Jews. For example, it is emphatically “as an American Jew” that Rabbi Joachim Prinz, chairman of the American Jewish Congress (and a former supporter of the Nazi racial laws)[15], supported the Black Americans’ civil rights movement.[16] 

The Jews’ universalism is always, implicitly or explicitly, a Jewish universalism, that is, a tribal universalism—a contradiction in terms. As a self-delusion, is the expression of an irrational conviction that Judeity is the essence of humanity. As a message to non-Jews, it is a fakery of grandiose empathy: “we love you, mankind, more than anyone else does; trust us, we know what is good for you.” And what is good for mankind is always, in the last resort, what is good for the Jews.

Jewish universalism means that Jews are at the center of the universe by birthright. And so, it is, more or less subconsciously or cryptically, a fantasy and a strategy of domination. As the mask of an extremely aggressive form of ethnocentrism, Jewish universalism hides a fear of the potential dangerousness of the rest of humankind, were the fraud to be discovered. That is the second paradox of Jewishness: Jews proclaim outright their universal love, while at the same time wailing for being “the people chosen for universal hatred.”[17] This curious formula by Leo Pinsker is the credo of secular Zionism, and reflects pretty well a widespread feeling among Jews and Israelis, as documented in Yoav Shamir’s excellent film Defamation (2009). “People think that the Shoah [Holocaust] is over but it’s not. 

It is continuing all the time,” typically proclaimed Benzion Netanyahu, father of the Israeli Prime minister, before his son’s election in 2009.[18] Victimization has become the essence of Israeli national identity, according to Idith Zertal, professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Israel has been transformed

“into an ahistorical and apolitical twilight zone, where Auschwitz is not a past event but a threatening present and a constant option. By means of Auschwitz—which has become over the years Israel’s main reference in its relations with a world defined repeatedly as anti-Semitic and forever hostile—Israel rendered itself immune to criticism, and impervious to a rational dialogue with the world around her.”[19]

Dominate, for fear of being exterminated. And dominate ever more in order to safeguard oneself from the resentment aroused by one’s domination. Such is the psychopathic vicious circle in which Jews are entangled by the communitarian paranoia. The only choice they are offered by their cognitive elite is: Jerusalem as capital of the world, or back to Holocaust. A 2013 Pew Research poll showed that, to the question “What’s essential to being Jewish?” “Remembering the Holocaust” comes first for 73 percent of respondents. Next comes “Caring about Israel.”[20]Michael Walzer remembers:  “I was taught Jewish history as a long tale of exile and persecution—Holocaust history read backwards.”[21] 

Persecution is so essential to the Jewish identity that, when it does not exist, there is an urgent need to make it exist. An obsessional fear of anti-Semitism must be maintained in the minds of the Jews, for it is the glue that holds the community together, the only thing capable of resisting the dissolving effect of assimilation.[22]

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi has shown in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982) that the command to “remember,” and “not forget” is at the heart of Judaism. This, he says, makes the Jews a people fundamentally ahistorical: they choose myth over history.[23] The urge to remember is such that “the trauma of the Holocaust is transmitted genetically” by “epigenetic heredity,” according to a team of researchers led by Rachel Yehuda at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.[24] The phenomenon is perhaps understandable in the light of the sociological theory of memory of Maurice Halbwachs, author of On Collective Memory: “Most of the time, when I remember, it is others who spur me on; their memory comes to the aid of mine and mine relies on theirs.”[25] 

Some insight can also be drawn from transgenerational psychology, the most interesting development of psychoanalysis. Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy speaks of “invisible loyalties” that unconsciously connect us with our ancestors. Such loyalties, which shape our destiny largely unconsciously, are based on value systems that vary from one culture to another.[26] Vincent de Gaulejac believes in “the existence of a genealogical past that imposes itself on the subject and structures his psychic functioning.”[27] Such considerations help us understand the psychological tensions that seize every Jew who struggles to break away from Jewishness; no community cultivates a more powerful sense of ancestral loyalty. Ideas do not flow in the blood, but each person carries within himself his ancestors, in a mysterious and largely unconscious way.

The Holocaust paradigm, which today sustains Jewish identity, is built around an unshakable sense of innocence and self-righteousness, an incapacity for self-examination characteristic of the most severe personality disorders. In their own eyes, the Jews have no responsibility for the hostility of the Gentiles toward them. They are constantly reminded of this innocence by their representative elite.[28] To be sure, there are exceptions, such as Samuel Roth, already quoted,[29] or French journalist Bernard Lazare, in his Antisemitism, its History and Causes (1894).[30]

Today, some lucid Israelis are worried about their country’s plunge into collective pathology. Yehoshafat Harkabi, deputy director of military intelligence, wrote in 2009:

“Dazzled by its self-righteousness, Israel cannot see the case of the other side. Self-righteousness encourages nations no less than individuals to absolve themselves of every failing and shake off the guilt of every mishap. When everyone is guilty except them, the very possibility of self-criticism and self-improvement vanishes…”[31]

Psychological projection, or blame shifting, is a process by which one denies one’s own negative impulses while attributing them to others. We are all prone to do it in times of personal crisis. But only persons with a deep mental illness do it all the time. Such is the case of Israel, a country with hundreds of nuclear warheads pointed at Iran, whose leaders have always denied having any nuclear arsenal at all, while histrionically urging the world to do something about Iran’s supposed nuclear military program aimed at erasing Israel from the maps. It would be laughable if Israel were just paranoid. But Israel is the psychopath among nations, and that means a tremendous capacity to manipulate, intimidate, corrupt morally, get what they want, and leave a trail of misery behind.

1. Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, HarperCollins, 2007. The authors are interviewed in the interesting documentary I Am Fishead (2011). ↑
2. Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Free Press, 2005. Watch also the documentary of the same title. ↑
3. Pat Buchanan, “Whose War?” The American Conservative, March 24, 2003, on www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/whose-war/ ↑
4. Sharon speaking to Shimon Peres on October 3, 2001, as reported on BBC News : www.veteranstoday.com/2014/01/11/burying-sharon/. ↑
5. http://www.voltairenet.org/article179295.html ↑
6. Gideon Levy, “Only Psychiatrists Can Explain Israel’s Behavior,” Haaretz, January 10, 2010, on www.haaretz.com. ↑
7. Robert Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, Guilford Press, 1993. ↑
8. For psychoanalytic insights into psychopathy, Paul-Claude Racamier, Le Génie des origines. Psychanalyse et psychose, Payot, 1992. ↑
9. “Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one” (Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, Hogarth Press, 1928, p. 76). ↑
10. Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles, New York, 1924 (archive.org), p. 12. ↑
11. Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew (1882), on www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/pinsker.html. ↑
12. Josué Jehouda, L’Antisémitisme, miroir du monde, Éditions Synthesis, 1958, p. 185. ↑
13. Samuel Roth, Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All the Frontiers of Civilization, 1934, (archive.org). ↑
14. Raphael Patai, The Jewish Mind, Wayne State University Press, 1977, p. 25.  “Being Jewish to me,” says French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, “is to feel involved, concerned, sometimes compromised by what other Jews do. It’s a feeling of belonging, affiliation” (on YouTube, “Juif? Selon Alain Finkielkraut”). ↑
15. Quoted in Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, 1994, p. 86. ↑
16. Seth Berkman, “The Jews Who Marched on Washington with Martin Luther King,” Forward.com, August 27, 2013. Prinz’s speech is on www.joachimprinz.com/images
    /mow.mp3. ↑
17. Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew, 1882, on www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/pinsker.html. ↑
18. Quoted in Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 3: Conflict Without End?, Clarity Press, 2010, p. 364. ↑
19. Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 4. ↑
20. “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” on www.pewforum.org. ↑
21. Michael Walzer, “Toward a New Realization of Jewishness,” Congress Monthly, Vol. 61, No. 4, 1994, p. 4, quoted in Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, Praeger, 1998, kindle 2013, e. 4675–86. ↑
22. “Now there is nothing that unifies the Jews around the world apart from the Holocaust,” remarked Yeshayahu Leibowitz, professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, as reported by Uri Avnery in 2005, quoted in Gilad Atzmon, The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics, Zero Books, 2011, pp. 161–162. ↑
23. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982), University of Washington Press, 2011. ↑
24. Tori Rodrigues, “Descendants of Holocaust Survivors Have Altered Stress Hormones,” Scientific American, March 1, 2015, on www.scientificamerican.com. ↑
25. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1992, translated from Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925), Albin Michel, 1994, p. 2. ↑
26. Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, Invisible Loyalties: Reciprocity in Intergenerational Family Therapy, Harper & Row, 1973, p. 56. ↑
27. Vincent de Gaulejac, L’Histoire en héritage. Roman familial et trajectoire sociale, Payot, 2012, pp. 141–147.  ↑
28. French Jewish intellectual André Neher: “We are innocent, and we feel even more deeply that we are innocent when we are accused. […] It is this innocence that we must be aware of at present, and that we must never, ever deny, in any circumstance” (quoted in Hervé Ryssen, Les Espérances planétariennes, Éditions Baskerville, 2005, p. 319). ↑
29. Samuel Roth, Jews Must Live, 1934: “There is not a single instance when the Jews have not fully deserved the bitter fruit of the fury of their persecutors.” ↑
30. If “this race has been the object of hatred with all the nations amidst whom it ever settled, […] it must needs be that the general causes of antisemitism have always resided in Israel itself, and not in those who antagonized it” (Bernard Lazare, Antisemitism, its History and Causes (1894), on archive.org, p. 8). ↑
31. Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 2: David Becomes Goliath, Clarity Press, 2009, pp. 42–49. ↑