[The first part of this article can be read at http://www.israelnn.com/article.php3?id=4104.]

Fear puts Jews at greater risk of being victims. Withdrawal from Gaza and Samaria incubates our fear and signals others to attack us. It is no coincidence that the United States so viciously attacked Israel over the Maaleh Adumim housing project right after disengagement was set in motion. It is no surprise that Israel's retreat from Lebanon emboldened the so-called Palestinians and contributed to the nightmare of the last three years. No one kicks the growling dog, only the one that shirks away guiltily. After the Six Day War, a Jew could freely visit Jenin, Shechem, Hebron with no fear of attack. The bald-faced truth is that if we would not be afraid of them, they would be afraid of us. Just look at their casualty rates.(4)

The primary goal of terrorism is to terrify. The primary goal is not killing or injuring as many Jews as the terrorists can, but to instill pathetic hopelessness. Once the Jews are running scared, the anti-Semites of the world predictably come out of the woodwork. It is specifically their obsequious, self-demeaning, frantic attempt to curry favor with the anti-Semites that triggers their loathing. Anti-Semites are generally authoritarian personalities that are either submissive or they dominate and persecute. Like most anti-Semites, the Palestinian authoritarian personality will dominate, unless dominated.

The Jews will not just be victims of more people, but of more vicious attacks. These will not just be sporadic attacks in expected locations like France or Argentina, but will sprout up across the globe. Those who until now were safe in their gated communities in United States suburbia will find an intifada in their own back yard, while still sneering at the gated communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

The demented disengagement plan is nothing less than another barbaric medieval expulsion of the Jews that reflects the gentiles' not-so-latent anti-Semitism. While doing the anti-Semites' bidding, Jews ignore the chronology of terrorism in their own backyard since 1948.(5) They never learn that painful concessions for peace or any other purpose provides the same entertainment to these anti-Semites as the Jews being fed to the lions or slaughtered by the gladiators in front of cheering crowds in the Roman coliseum. They never learn that the wave of terrorist attacks was always elicited by one-sided gestures and painful concessions on the part of Israel.

Jews have been traumatized for millennia by anti-Semitic gentiles and the only way to overcome the trauma, the irrational fear, the victimization and depression is by confrontation. The only way to stop being the professional victim is by overcoming the fear and the only way of overcoming fear is by confrontation. In fact, all successful therapies share one element. They all lead the patient to confront the fear whether in gradual doses or talking about it rather than visualizing it or physically reenacting the triggering trauma. Often, the original trauma seems so blase or insignificant that it may take years of psychoanalysis to even find it. But knowing about it does not eliminate it. It has to be faced over and over again until it is no longer frightening.

As a child of Holocaust survivors, I acquired a healthy, adaptive fear of the anti-Semites. Since moving to Israel, I have changed. I now delight in upsetting the anti-Semites. I derive particular pleasure from the anti-Semites' displeasure that I chose to make my home in the sparsely occupied territory. I feel liberated and freed to some measure of the irrational fear of the anti-Semitic gentile. I derive particular pleasure in upsetting the anti-Semite Moslems that categorically prohibit any Jew from setting foot not only in Mecca, but in the entire Saudi Arabia. I refuse to honor their racism. I will defiantly set foot on the Temple Mount.

I enjoy defying Yasser Arafat despite his backing by the United States, European Union and the United Nations, who insist upon yet another barbaric expulsion of the Jews. The Roadmap requires that every last Jew, even non-Israelis, be forcibly removed from homes and farms that they legally purchased. This patently immoral racism drives me to not only insist upon my right as an American to be permitted to stay in my home, but to insist that if evicted, America demand that all American Moslems and Christians be forcibly evicted as well.

The irony is that those Jews who fearlessly stand up to the rabid anti-Semites are deemed insane. There is an assumption that you have to be crazy to live in the settlements. In fact, the Israeli government requires everyone that wants to take out a government mortgage on property in Judea, Samaria and Gaza to produce certification that they are free of mental illness. The truth is that those that live in Jewish settlements are neither retarded nor mentally ill. Those that refuse to even visit one are to some extent both. Their partial mental retardation is restricted to distortions of reality that feed their irrational fear. Their mental illness is the pervasive fear that derives from their loss of contact from reality, ingenuously ignoring the facts, maintaining the false illusion that the major cities in Israel or the United States are safe while settlements are dangerous.

As I drive home to my villa in the new suburbia that anti-Semites like to call the West Bank settlement, I deliberate. Am I insane? Am I stupid?

Not me. Not anymore.

The next time you visit Sbarro's, Cafe Hillel, Moment Cafe, or take a bus ride in Jerusalem, ask yourself: who is the idiot and who is insane?

Not you.

Until we take steps to confront our irrational fear of settlements and of Arabs, we will continue in perpetuity to be world-class hopeless victims.

By conquering terror, we defeat terrorism.

Footnotes:

(4) http://perpetual.homestead.com/danger.html