Psychoanalyzing Pharaoh

Today we commonly ask, “How could the Germans remain silent during the Holocaust? How could they live in denial? How could they?!” Although a few did risk their lives to reach out to those against whom Nazi violence was directed, the vast majority were patriotic citizens.

Technically, wiping out a civilization is called “genocide.” So, what is the difference between a Jewish supporter of Zionist Israel and a German supporter of Nazi Germany? The difference is that unlike in the 1930s and 40s, today there is no barrier to receiving accurate news reports. There is no Jew or Gentile who could honestly say they had no way of knowing what the Jewish homeland was doing to the Palestinians. If he does not know, it is because he does not care to know.

The Germans, by contrast, had very little access to public information except via government-controlled radio. A memorial in Munich, Germany remembers a professor and a few college students who were executed by the Nazi regime for throwing fliers out of the classroom window publicizing the war crimes of their government.

Today I see American Jews, at far less risk of peril for speaking out than what would have faced an outspoken Nazi opponent, remaining in blank-faced denial about the erasing of Palestine from the map. They want us to believe that the land simply “came to be known as Israel.”

Zionists around the world are praying and waiting for their inheritance of Biblical lands to be claimed in its entirety, without delay, in order to implement the “redemption of Israel.” Then, they believe, there can be peace on earth. Therefore, they see Palestinians as obstacles to peace.

A letter to the editor published in The Jewish State, a small New Jersey newspaper, states: “Unless and until the Palestinians stop teaching their children the virtues of jihad, martyrdom, and the destruction of Israel, the Palestinian children, cute as they are, remain my virulent enemy and I will not spend much time lamenting their demise if and when they are taken out as collateral damage.”

How can it be that this monster who seethes with hate and feels no remorse, can perceive himself as reasonable, ethical and moral? Helplessly, the world watches as many of Palestine’s best and brightest are simply ‘knocked off,’ not by a random act of terror but by the painstaking deliberations of the state military apparatus. Yet the Zionist continually feels that he is the one who has been wronged, that his violence is always and only provoked by the other. What is at the heart of all this abusive behavior?

An essay written by an American fourth grader attending Hebrew School reveals the murderers’ hidden inferiority complex: “Why do people treat Israel as if she is less important than other countries?…I cannot answer why people would treat any country as if it counts as less than another…We need to stretch out our hands to pull the Israelis from the pit into which the terrorists have thrown them. We must also show the terrorists that we will not allow them to take over our country.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence refers to “the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land.” I find it curious that the founders of the Jewish state proclaimed as sovereign over the land not the Lord God but to themselves, with their proclaimed “natural and historical right” to take possession of it. Their entire argument for rebuilding Solomon’s Temple also seems to revolve around the idea that this will show the world that the Jews are really something.

 “This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.”

Jabotinsky wrote: “To the hackneyed reproach that this point of view is unethical, I answer, ‘absolutely untrue.’ This is our ethic. There is no other ethic.” (1923).

So, is Zionism a struggle for Jewish supremacy or a struggle to be as good as other nations? On one hand, the Jews declare their absolute uniqueness, and then they declare that they want to be like everyone else. Is the only way for Jews to get beyond their imagined second-class status is by declaring themselves God, making others into second-class citizens and founding a nation over their graves?

The story of Moses and the Pharaoh tells us that God destroys civilizations for their cruelty. Pharaoh is described as one who “transgressed beyond bounds in the lands, and heaped therein mischief (on mischief). Therefore did thy Lord pour on them a scourge of diverse chastisements” (Quran 89:11).

Many Muslims consider the discovery of Pharaoh’s mummy in 1898 at Thebes to be a warning specifically to the Jews from God. This Sign is the fulfillment of a Quranic prophecy where Allah says to the Pharaoh: “This day We (have decided to) preserve your body (from destruction) so that you may become a sign to (a people) who will come after you, for most people are heedless of Our signs” (10:92-93).

No country based on a racist ideology, which imposes a tyranny of one ethnic group over the others, has any need to exist as a nation among other nations.