Israel is never the cause, but always the effect, always the victim. And a victim can never do evil, writes Emad Moussa [photo credit: Getty Images]
“Terror in Amsterdam,” is how Israel’s Channel 14 characterised the clashes in Amsterdam between Maccabi Tel Aviv fans and locals, mostly North Africans.
“Islamist terror attack Israelis en masse in Amsterdam,” reported Israeli TV7. And according to The Jerusalem Post, it is “another Kristallnacht …”, and “what happens when terrorists are allowed into Europe.”
Israeli-Jewish media reacted in what may be described as a righteous tantrum, unsheathing the Occam Razor to chop away any context that does not paint Israeli-Jews as victims.
Videos showing Maccabi fans chanting genocidal slogans against Palestinians and Arabs, mocking dead Gaza kids, tearing down Palestinian flags, and damaging property, did very little to sway the idea that “Muslim terrorists attacked Jews” unprovoked.
Not only that, the overwhelming evidence to the opposite, and the majority of people who did not buy into the Israeli narrative, helped substantiate the Israeli victim belief. After all, the mantra remains: “If they are all against us [Israeli-Jews], we must be right”. Suddenly, it is “Anna Frank all over again”, reversing history to 1940s Amsterdam; and a ‘pogrom’, as if it is Odessa 1905.
One would stand baffled to see genocidal incitement, when responded to, depicted as unprovoked victimisation, then reflexively decontextualised as terrorism. This ostensibly random and irrational behaviour is rather reflective of how Israeli-Jews perceive what constitutes terrorism. On most accounts, it is a reflection of ‘Israeli exceptionalism’.
Terrorism can be defined as “the use of terror, whether physically or verbally, to achieve specific objectives, be it political, ideological, or religious”. A legal framework, however, does not stop terrorism from being an emotive word that shapes the way we view the world.
Once the ‘terrorist’ label has been created, it allows the ‘labeller’ — often states — to legitimise any actions against the ‘labelled’ as counter-terrorism. What the state does is considered legitimate because the other’s actions are labelled illegitimate. Terrorism, in other words, can and is routinely interpreted to meet the interests of the labeller.
Israel theoretically defines terrorism within those legal parameters. And like other states, it perceives and interprets them to match its interests.
But unlike other states, Israel’s interpretation is more centred on what is deemed ‘legitimate’ from an exclusively Zionist perspective, with ‘security’ at its core — not necessarily what is morally permissible and politically reasonable.
Why Israel’s definition of terrorism is pathological
Israeli security is ruled by the so-called ‘vigilance of the haunted mentality’, as a result of centuries of Jewish persecution in Europe.
It stems from the idea that Jews have the right to be free from the galut (diaspora) and maintain control over their destiny. Security, therefore, is perceived, in most cases, in existential terms.
This worldview became salient during the Yishuv, the pre-state European Jewish settler communities in Palestine. European Jews came to Palestine feeling entitled to a land that did not belong to them, based on Biblical and historical mythologies. After all, they saw themselves as ‘returning to their ancestral land’ after two millennia.
Native Palestinians’ opposition to the flood of Jewish immigrants into their country, was perceived by those immigrants as ‘opposing a right’, not resisting the colonisation of their country.
Palestinians at the outset were deprived of their human and political agency, hence making their will to resist colonialism unqualified; much like how native Americans were perceived by European settlers: If you are perceived as an inferior human being lacking definable political identity — much like how Zionism falsely depicted Palestinians from day one, then you do not qualify to resist.
Any resistance is therefore seen as irrational aggression, unquestionably terrorism. It invokes extreme measures to quell it.
Think of the fact that after the Zionists expelled Palestinians from their homes in 1948, many Palestinians tried to return to their villages and towns only to be labelled ‘infiltrators’, and were dealt with in a counter-terrorism fashion. The Anti-Infiltration Law of 1954 was enacted mainly to legalise the crackdown on the Palestinian right to return.
The Yishuv security worldview defines the underlying rationale of the Israeli state and has gotten much more extreme over the past decades, especially with the rise of the far-right.
Ever since, whatever vestiges of sanity remain in the Israeli-Jewish society, be it within the academic circles or intelligence, has been diminished. Some of those once considered part of the ‘reasonable elite’ are now in bed with the maximalist rightists. Historian Benny Morris, previously a driving force behind Israel’s revisionist history movement, is one of them.
No longer are the violent opposition to Israel’s policies or targeting Israeli civilians the main criteria to define a terrorist, but everything else that does not align with Israel’s self-image as righteous.
Palestinians can commit ‘diplomatic terror’ when they try to join the UN bodies and treaties. BDS is a form of terrorism that targets Jews qua Jews, reminiscent of the boycott of Jews in 1930s Germany, and not a means to end Israel’s occupation. Writing about Palestine is incitement and qualifies as ‘literal terror’.
And when you think you’ve seen it all, a latest development saw Israel define the UNRWA, a UN humanitarian body, a ‘terrorist organisation’, accused of being a ‘Hamas extension’.
The Knesset effectively banned an organisation that somewhat stood between the Israeli army and the mass starvation of Gaza’s population.
Whatever Israel does is ostensibly a called-for reaction to all types of Palestinian terrorism. Israel is never the cause, but always the effect, always the victim. And a victim can never do evil.
Yet this victim narrative is largely what has pushed Israeli-Jewish entitlement to a pathological level; it allowed all and normalised monstrosities as a way of operating.
Subscribe Now and Listen to our Podcasts OnIn his book After Israel, Marcelo Svirsky speculates that Israeli society has successfully inoculated itself against the moral and political implications of its actions, thus owning its existence to Israel’s acts of oppression.
Similarly, former Shin Bet director Ami Ayalon said on CNN that indoctrinating Israeli soldiers with “the right to kill”, has become over time “a second nature”. Entitled to kill, not fight. And since it is second nature, it does not necessarily trigger self-reflection.
The problem with pathological entitlement is that it is a mindset that transcends context. So, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans marched across Amsterdam with the same mindset of impunity as if they were on the streets of Jabalia.
Their conviction was that since ‘we Israeli-Jews think Palestinians are terrorists and we should be allowed to murder them all, then it must be a universal viewpoint’.
The surprise happened when they came face to face with cognitive dissonance. They found out that the world does not agree. That rattled their worldview and pushed many of them into the same old ‘victim shell’, invoking Jewish history and terrorism to justify that. ‘If you see the world differently to us as Israeli-Jews, you are wrong,’ they would say, ‘you are an anti-Semite, then you must be against us. And since you are against us, you are unquestionably a mechabel, a terrorist’ — as reflexively as that.
Amsterdam has roughly 15,000 Jews, and the Netherlands comprises the world’s 15th-largest Jewish community. For the most part, very little friction between the Jewish community and other communities, certainly the North African one, has been observed.
What happened had nothing to do with Jews, and everything to do with Israel and Zionism. No amount of terrorist labelling will distract from that.
Dr Emad Moussa is a Palestinian-British researcher and writer specialising in the political psychology of intergroup and conflict dynamics, focusing on MENA with a special interest in Israel/Palestine. He has a background in human rights and journalism, and is currently a frequent contributor to multiple academic and media outlets, in addition to being a consultant for a US-based think tank.
Follow him on Twitter: @emadmoussa
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