A culture of martyrdom

Inverting the traditional paradigm, Baruch Kimmerling investigates Israel's "culture of death" in a review essay for The Nation.

Coming on the heels of the ceremony at Auschwitz, his conclusion is particularly stark:

The obsessive commemoration of the Holocaust and of Jewish victimhood has blinded much of the Jewish community to Israel's real position in the world and to the humanity of the Palestinian people. The result has been to make ever more distant a reasonable political solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is the victory of death over life, of the past over the future. To be sure, there are periods in the history of a nation when ultimate sacrifices are necessary, and a cult of death unavoidable. The question in Israel today is whether this heroic period has come to an end or whether the prevailing ideology of the 1948 war will last another hundred years, until the entire "Land of Israel" is "liberated." To choose the former option is to grant priority to the lives of Israel's citizens, Jewish and Arab. To choose the latter is to remain a community of victims, joined in a mythical communion of Jewish sacrifice in an eternally hostile gentile world. Tragically, most of the organized American Jewish community seems to prefer the mythic option, a course that can only lead to disaster.

(via news from babylon)