[lbo-talk] the new official IDF line

Eric Beck ersatzdog at gmail.com
Fri Jun 4 15:49:03 PDT 2010


On 6/4/10, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>Israel seems like
> a country in the grip of a profound collective mental disorder.
> They're hardly alone in that - all nations are founded in some degree
> through paranoid exclusions, like a Lacanian ego, and the USA is no
> slouch in the collective paranoia department. But really, their
> perceptions are so at odds with the rest of humanity that it takes the
> breath away.

I want to put out a theory, likely bullshit, that states tend to adopt the politics and psychology of their frontier populations. If the kibbutzim of the 50s both reflected and shaped Israel's socialist aspirations at the time, the settlements are the expression of today's Israeli state?

I don't know Israeli society that well, but this document sounds like the fevered fantasies of Israeli settlers. Paranoia is the best word for it I do think, with maybe more emphasis than usual on creating a system of facts that corresponds to their delusions. I know that's part of paranoia, but something in the settler/IDF mindset is more active than persecuted, more constructive of worlds than driven by delusions.



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