What propels a political leader, in this case an Israeli prime minister like Benjamin Netanyahu, to come to the US, a country on whose largesse Israel depends for its military, diplomatic and economic survival, insult its president, excoriate its government and, in a crass interference in its internal affairs, hector it on how to conduct its foreign policy — effectively advising it on how to go about conducting its nuclear arms talks with Iran — and to do it all in a televised speech at that country’s parliament, an act that many Americans perceived as gang-up with the House Speaker against the President?
Well, at first blush one is likely to dismiss it all as merely an act of chutzpah, that Yiddish term European Jews used to connote insolence or cheek, but when later popularised in American idiom came to refer to someone who playfully oversteps the boundaries of accepted behaviour, or perhaps as Leo Rosen defined it in his The Joys of Yiddish, as “ gall, brazen nerve, presumption plus arrogance”. In short, mettle.
That, one would imagine, hits the nail on the head in describing Netanyahu’s effrontery in Washington last week. And it would equally appear that is how a great many commentators took it to mean.
The therapeutic community, however, would beg to differ. There is something darker at play here. The community’s researchers will tell you the act evinced “self-destructiveness”, a disorder that could afflict an individual as much as a community. To those of us who have observed, indeed studied, Israeli leaders all these years, it is clear that Israeli society as a whole seems to have developed self-destructive behaviour as a coping mechanism, behaviour its members have inherited from their historical archetype in the shtetls, encapsulate Jewish communities that existed in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust
People who suffer from self-destructiveness, we are told, lack a healthy ability to assess personal boundaries. According to the therapeutic literature, victims of the malady prefer to show, say, intransigence and provocation in dealing with you as a way of untangling themselves from demands — in the bargain sabotaging relationships, friendships, alliances and the rest of it — rather than reason and compromise. They will needle you, alienate you and, where necessary, hurt you, till you lash out at them.
Consider this: When Joe Biden, the US Vice-President, visited Israel in May 2012, in order to advance the peace process, he was greeted in Occupied Jerusalem with the announcement that the Israeli interior ministry had just approved, on the very day of his arrival, the construction of 1,600 new homes for Israeli colonists to be built in the occupied eastern part of the city, an act which the White House, predictably, took as an outrage and an affront. But self-destructive people will do whatever it takes to commit acts against their own interests. The phenomenon may be new to clinicians but not in literature. It goes back to the mid-19th century when the American author and critic Edgar Allan Poe published the Imp of the Perverse in 1845, which discussed, in essay-like form, the case of people who knowingly commit acts that end up harming the self, indeed destroying it. In the novel, the protagonist admits that he is “one of the many victims of the imp of the perverse, that tempts a person to do things merely because we feel we should not”.
‘Death drive’
In a way, Poe’s protagonist represented an early notion of the Freudian subconscious, theorised by the Jewish psychoanalyst in Civilization and Its Discontents, about the “death drive”, the need by certain individuals and cultures to “return to the inorganic”.
Is this a whole lot of wanton psychologising? Therapists will submit that it is not.
Why is it that every Israeli leader, from Golda Meir to Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir to Ariel Sharon, and now Benjamin Netanyahu, pushed it, and then pushed it some more? Each one of them, propelled by their pathologies, worked ever so hard to put a nail in the coffin of the Zionist experiment in Palestine, as Netanyahu did last week, thus alienating Americans against them? For have they not itched all along to be rejected, to be punished, to be, well, destroyed? And how long will the United States continue to pamper this entity that has caused it so much harm, lost it so many friends, and threatened so many of its interests? American support of Israel is not a constant in the historical equation, but rather a variable. The US is a big power, and no big power in history, regardless of its fondness for an ally, will continue to support an entity that threatens its global standing. And without American support Israel will become forgotten dust.
Ironically, the people of the Arab world, its victims, are the only ones who can help it survive. The Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 remains on the table — but remains spurned, in favour of, well, a self-destructive drive to colonise more Arab land.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
