Amos Oz
Amos Ozflash90

In an article in the Guardian, published on March 12th, Israeli author David Grossman expresses his belief that the Jewish state must be saved, not from the threats posed by a nuclear Iran, but from those posed by Jewish paranoia.

He asserts, “It is Israel’s fears, not a nuclear Iran, that we must tame” and says that a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities “would be a wild bet, likely to disfigure our future in ways I dare not even imagine. No, I can imagine it, but my hand refuses to write it.” 

However, as Arutz Sheva's Giulio Meotti explains, “One should begin to suspect that the international success of Grossman and other Israeli self-lacerating writers has more to do with their talent for Israel bashing than their literary gifts. The sycophancy, abasement, and degradation of these writers’ exercise in moral equivalence are not only a repugnant insult to the truth, but an affront to all Israelis.” 

Meotti notes that an increasingly large segment of Israeli writers and academics suffer from a “psychological sickness” driving them “to toe the line with the worst emotions of global public opinion.” He notes that their desire to do so is a result of the “Stockholm Syndrome,” in which hostages come to identify with their captors.

This phenomenon seems to be increasingly prevalent among the Jewish and Israeli academic elite.

Like all too many Jews who like to distance themselves from the Holocaust, Grossman states that, “Binyamin Netanyahu likes to fire up his audiences with frequent references to the Holocaust, Jewish destiny and the fate of future generations. In light of this doomsday rhetoric, one wonders if Israel's prime minister can always distinguish between the real dangers confronting the country and shadows of past traumas. This question is crucial, because to confuse one with the other could sentence Israel to relive those echoes and shadows.”

Meotti explains that Grossman’s “desire to curry favor with the gentile world is not a new phenomenon in Jewish life. Through many centuries of exile it was an integral part of the Jews’ survival technique. But it is a humiliating trait which life in a sovereign Israel was supposed to eradicate.”

From Grossman’s accusations against the Israel Defense Forces to Amos Oz’s cozying up with Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti and from Noam Chomsky’s altogether opposition to the Jewish state, to Norman Finkelstein’s call to support BDS (boycotts, divestments and sanctions), there seems to be no lack of authors who use their Jewish roots to completely undermine the rights of the Jewish people and the legitimacy of the State of Israel.

As Meotti explains, “The so called morality of these Jewish writers is not longer in tune with Israel’s security, very existence, identity and memory. Their publications attract so much attention abroad because of the baleful influence they have on Israel’s reputation, as they promulgate the most vicious distortions about their people and state.”