Israelopathic Israelis

Self-Hating Jews on Steroids

One of the most curious phenomena surrounding Israel is the existence of Israelis who really, really hate it. It’s a pointless distraction to discuss whether this is exactly the same as antisemitism or not. I prefer to use the term Israelopathy, meaning a pathological and irrational obsession with, and hatred of, Israel. Often it shares the same features that Sharansky describes as characteristic of antisemitism - delegitimization, demonization, and double-standards.

I’m not talking about Jews in America who hate Israel; that is more easily understandable because often they simply don’t understand what Israel is all about. I’m talking about Israelis, people who have learned about why and how Israel came into existence, who are (or ought to be) fully aware of the threats that Israel faces, and who are fully aware of what Israel is actually about. And this phenomenon is particularly prominent among academics, even historians, people who are supposed to be more knowledgeable. What is the psychological explanation?

There’s no shortage of such people. There’s Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Omer Bartov, Irus Braverman, and Daniel Levy, to name but a few of the more prominent ones (click the links on the names to see refutations of their accusations). Shaul Maggid and Joshua Shanes are well on their way to joining this group. These people stand in sharp contrast to a historian like Benny Morris who, while being one of the first to point out that Israel’s history is not the rosy picture that it used to be taught as, nevertheless does not accept every accusation as fact, has come to acknowledge the difficult situation that Israel has to grapple with, and stresses the contrast between Israel and its opponents. See too this interview with Yoav Gelber.

Of course, any anti-Israel person reading this will say: Doesn’t it occur to you that perhaps all these Israelis criticizing Israel are correct, rather than positing the existence of some pyschological phenomenon that creates a bias?

My response to that would be to point out that even for the vast majority of anti-Israel Israelis, there are still some people that even they would acknowledge have gone too far. Miko Peled, for example, son of IDF General Matti Peled, keeps company with Holocaust deniers and supporters of suicide bombings, and recently praised the October 7th attacks as “acts of heroism.” Gilad Atzmon, a former IDF medic, has justifed the expulsion of Jews from Europe, engaged in Holocaust denial, and has described Israel as incomparibly worse than Hitler and the Nazis.

Clearly there is a pyschological phenomenon at work here. What is it?

I’ve been searching for studies of this topic, and there is some material out there, though a full-length comprehensive and accessible work is lacking. The Wokepedia entry on the Self-Hating Jew is quite helpful. There’s a book called Jews Against Themselves which I haven’t yet read. Sander Gilman’s Jewish Self-Hatred is not very readable and focuses on pre-Holocaust German Jewish literature. But he does provide this useful insight: “Jews see the dominant society seeing them and… project their anxiety about this manner of being seen on to other Jews as a means of externalizing their own status anxiety.” Jews realize that they are globally hated, and assume that the responsibility for this hatred must lie within their own kind.

Tuvia Tenenbom, the irreverent but incisive journalist, has this to say:

It's a mental problem.... For 2000 years Jews have been persecuted, for 2000 years they have been taught they are the worst.... Some people cannot handle it and you have a Stockholm syndrome, and they say: "If everyone in the world says I'm bad, that I am ugly, a thief, a murderer, horrible, shrewd person, money-grabbing, then I am. And now, what can I do to cleanse myself of it?"And what they do is catch another Jew doing wrong... that makes them feel better, makes their ugly skin look better. 

The most useful discussion I found was by Richard Landes, in Can The Whole World Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, And Global Jihad, who has a chapter on “Anti-Zionist Jews: The Pathologies of Self-Criticism.” He provides the interesting insight that Judaism itself has always had a focus on self-blame and guilt. The Torah is full of descriptions of the sins of the Jewish People. We attribute the Destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple and the subsequent exile to our sins. Landes writes:

The ultimate expression of this tendency is a kind of masochistic omnipotence syndrome in which "I" or "we" are entirely to blame for everything, and therefore, if we "fix" ourselves, we can fix everything… In the Israeli version, "if only we (or 'you,’ when uttered by diaspora Jews) had only been nicer, more forgiving, more understanding, more generous, then the Palestinians wouldn't hate us/you so much…" On the one hand this produces "self"-critics who feel kinship with the prophets (speaking truth to power), and on the other, an audience of fellow masochists who revel in Jewish self-debasement.

However, there is also another component. Blaming Israel for problems also brings the benefit of acceptance in certain circles. Landes notes:

Jews understand instinctively, that… self-critical remarks about Jews, goes down very well, even in large quantities. Self-criticism in this framework can have a therapeutic effect. The first person "man enough" to admit fault can get the positive-sum process of acknowledgment, forgiveness and reconciliation going... Many liberal Jews have come to identify themselves as "good" because of their willingness to criticize "themselves" (i.e., Israel), thus rising above the tribal morality of "my side right or wrong."

In progressive circles, and especially in contemporary academia, being critical of Israel turns one from a despised fascist Israeli into a beloved enlightened “exposer of truth.” It’s difficult to resist such temptation.

I would add a further point. After two thousand years of exile and persecution, Jews have become used to being the oppressed. Furthermore, in the modern world, to be the weaker party is to be in the right, and to be the stronger party is to be in the wrong. When Israel is the more powerful party and the oppressor - even if for perfectly legitimate reasons - this makes some Jews deeply uncomfortable.

The lethal combination of all these factors is what results in some Israelis becoming Israelopaths. In fact it would explain why Israelis become even more Israelopathic than Jews outside of Israel; as Israelis who have served in the IDF, they are even more aware of the power imbalance between Jews and Palestinians and how that is sometimes abused; and as Israelis, they feel even more isolated and hated than do Americans. Unfortunately, being Israelis that are delegitimizing Israel, they gain tremendous popularity, because they are perceived to have greater credibility. It’s important to point out the flaws in their arguments, as well as to understand the pyschological mechanism that drives it.