- The phenomenon of Diaspora Jews embracing as truth the indictments of Jew-haters
has been so commonplace that a literature on the subject emerged under the rubric
"Jewish self-hatred." A similar predilection evolved in Israel, particularly among the
nation's cultural elites, in the context of the Arab siege.
- Segments of populations under chronic siege commonly embrace the indictments of the besiegers, however bigoted and outrageous. They hope that by doing so and reforming accordingly they can assuage the hostility of their tormenters and win relief. This has been an element of the Jewish response to anti-Semitism throughout the history of the Diaspora.
- The paradigm on the level of individual psychology is the psychodynamics of abused
children, who almost invariably blame themselves for their predicament, ascribe it to
their being "bad," and nurture fantasies that by becoming "good" they can mollify their
abusers and end their torment.
- The rhetoric of the Israeli Peace Movement, its distortions of Arab aims and actions,
and its indictments of Israel likewise reflected the psychological impact of chronic
besiegement. The Oslo process that the Peace Movement spawned entailed policies
grounded in wishful thinking and self-delusion analogous to that of abused children.
Israel's national institutions - political, educational, academic, cultural, and media-related
- need to help arm the nation against the allures of Oslo-era delusions if the
Oslo debacle is not to be repeated.
In recent centuries, the phenomenon of Diaspora Jews embracing as truth the
indictments of Jew-haters has been so commonplace that, starting about a hundred years ago, a literature on the subject emerged in Central Europe. Some of it was written by psychologists and psychoanalysts, and its theme acquired the rubric "Jewish self-hatred." A similar predilection evolved in Israel, particularly among the nation's cultural elites,
in the context of the Arab siege. Israeli novelist and essayist Aharon Megged observed
in 1994, "We have witnessed...an emotional and moral identification by the majority of
Israel's intelligentsia, and its print and electronic media, with people committed to our
annihilation."1
Oslo: Embracing the Perspectives of the Nation's Enemies
Israel's engagement in the Oslo "peace process"
likewise reflected an embrace of the perspectives of the
nation's enemies. It entailed pursuing a course that had
been advocated for some years by Israel's Peace Movement
and that echoed indictments by Israel's besiegers regarding
alleged Israeli responsibility for Arab aggression.
The Peace Movement had argued that Israel's refusal
to acknowledge previous wrongdoing and make sufficient
amends and concessions was what perpetuated the Arab-
Israeli conflict. Hence, the rationale of Oslo was that Israel
would now win peace by providing such concessions to
the PLO. Israel pursued this path even as the Palestinian
leadership continued to tell its constituency that its goal
remained Israel's destruction and continued to collude in a
terror campaign against Israel.
For example, on the night of the famous "peace"
ceremony on the White House lawn in September 1993,
Yasser Arafat appeared on Jordanian television and informed
Palestinians and the Arab world that they should understand
Oslo as the first phase of the Plan of Phases.2 This was the
strategy elaborated by the PLO in 1974 that called for
gaining whatever territory could be won by negotiations
and using that land as a base from which to pursue Israel's
destruction.
Also, from the time of Arafat's arrival in the territories
in July 1994 until May 1996 and the fall of the Labor-Meretz
government that had choreographed Oslo, over 150 people
were murdered in terror attacks targeting Israel. This rate of
losses to terror exceeded that of any previous twenty-two month
period in the nation's history. The Israeli government
knew of Arafat's support for the terror campaign, his praise
of the terrorists, and his exhorting of his people to follow
their example, yet it responded with more concessions, as
in the Oslo II agreement in the fall of 1995.
A Thesis Proved as Nonsense
Various explanations for this self-destructive course
have been offered by people who initially embraced Oslo
and were even active in promoting it. Nissim Zvilli, a Labor
MK and member of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense
Committee at the time, recalled in 2002, "I remember myself
lecturing in Paris and saying that Arafat's double-talk had
to be understood. That was our thesis, proved [later] as
nonsense. Arafat meant every word, and we were naive."3
But "naïveté" hardly captures the self-delusions that
underlay Oslo. In 1997, Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit wrote of
the course forged by Israel's political elite and passionately
embraced by its intellectual and cultural elites, including
himself: "In the early '90's...we, the enlightened Israelis,
were infected with a messianic craze.... All of a sudden,
we believed that...the end of the old Middle East was near.
The end of history, the end of wars, the end of conflict....
We fooled ourselves with illusions. We were bedazzled into
committing a collective act of messianic drunkenness."4
But while Shavit's "messianism" gives a label to Oslo-era
thinking, it does not explain it. The explanation lies in
the psychology of chronically besieged populations. Whether
minorities enduring persistent marginalization, defamation,
and attack from the surrounding society, or small states
under continual siege, segments of such communities almost
invariably embrace the indictments of their enemies. They
hope that by reforming themselves in a manner consistent
with those indictments they will win relief.
The Psychology of Chronically Abused Children
On the level of individual psychology, the paradigm
is the psychology of chronically abused children. This most
typically means children subjected to parental abuse.
Almost invariably, such children blame themselves for their
predicament. They tell themselves, "I am treated this way
because I am bad, and if I become good I will be treated
better."
This phenomenon is widely recognized by psychiatrists,
psychologists, and social workers and is most often ascribed
to children's naïveté. According to this interpretation, the
abusers tell their young victims that the abuse is punishment
for their being "bad," and the children, in their naïveté,
accept this at face value.
But children are not that naive. The victimized child of
an alcoholic father or a chronically depressed, withdrawn,
and irritable mother knows that he or she is being treated
badly. Nevertheless, such children almost invariably choose
to repress that knowledge and to believe that changes in
their own behavior - behaving in a more exemplary fashion,
being more attentive to the parents' needs and wishes - can
change their parents' ways and win them a better life.
To comprehend the motivation for this self-delusion,
consider the existential predicament of such children.
They can, on the one hand, acknowledge their essential
helplessness and the hopelessness of their situation. On the
other, they can delude themselves, blame themselves for their
victimization, and endure the guilt of that self-indictment,
of perceiving themselves as "bad," but also preserve the
hope that by their own action, by becoming "good," they
can win relief. Children almost invariably choose to avoid
hopelessness at all costs, and adults do the same.
Self-Hatred: A Specifically Jewish Pathology?
On a communal level, the same dynamic is seen again
and again in populations under siege. The phenomenon of
segments of the community embracing the indictments
of the besiegers and seeking relief through self-criticism
and self-reform recurs constantly in the history of the
Jewish Diaspora.
It has been so commonplace among Jews that some
have seen it as a specifically Jewish pathology, a unique
Jewish self-hatred. But, again, it can be found in many other
populations under chronic attack. Its particular persistence
and ubiquity among Jews is essentially a reflection of the
unprecedented history of the Jews as a people living under
incessant siege.
The broader occurrence of people adopting the
perspectives of their tormenters has been popularly recognized
over the past several decades as the "Stockholm Syndrome."
The sobriquet had its origin in an incident in the Swedish
capital in 1973 in which a bank robbery went awry and several
people were held captive by the robbers for six days in the
bank's vault. The captives emerged displaying notable empathy
for and emotional bonding with their captors.
Communities are, however, not entirely defenseless
against the psychological corrosiveness of living under
sustained attack. The major defense is communal
institutions that are strong enough to have moral sway
in their communities and that convey a countervailing
message. This is a message of the community's being
unfairly targeted, of its essential decency and integrity, of
the bigotry and injustice of its attackers, of the community's
ability to resist and survive the onslaught and forge a better
future for itself.
In terms of the paradigm of the abused child, the
equivalent of such institutions would be another adult in
the child's life, a grandparent perhaps, who provides the child
with a different perspective. This person gives the message
that the child is not "bad." Rather, he is being unfairly
victimized and the fault lies with his abusers, not with him;
he deserves better and will ultimately escape his predicament
and have a better future. Although such support may not
serve to defend the child against further abuse, it can help
protect him against the worst psychological reverberations
of such abuse. Those reverberations entail continuing to
pursue the tack of blaming himself and seeking to appease
his abusers through self-reform, a tack that all too often
persists into adulthood and dooms such children to lives of
ongoing self-abasement, frustration, and misery.
The Weakening of Jewish Communal Institutions
But within the Jewish Diaspora, there was a notable
weakening of communal institutions as a result of political
changes that marked the emergence of the modern world
and modern nation-states. This weakening left Jews even
more vulnerable than they had previously been to the
psychological corrosiveness of chronic attack. Indeed, so
widespread was the impact of that corrosiveness that
Max Nordau, the Austrian Jewish writer and early Zionist,
observed in 1896, "It is the greatest triumph of anti-Semitism
that it has brought the Jews to view themselves with anti-
Semitic eyes."5
There is a profound truth to this on the level of Jews'
sense of themselves as individuals. For example, the Jewish
child subjected to constant taunts, even physical attacks, and
social exclusion in the schoolyard will very often respond by
questioning what is wrong with him and how he can change
to win acceptance. This response is comparable to that of
the child abused at home. If the Jewish child's parents and
community fail to convey a strong-enough countermessage,
such a response becomes virtually inevitable and will likely
be carried by the child into adulthood, with the child as
adult feeling himself tainted and flawed by virtue of his
Jewish identity.
But Nordau could have added that if Jews saw
themselves as the haters saw them, they often viewed other
Jews as fitting those stereotypes even more. Thus, German
Jews not infrequently viewed Polish Jews as the true and
deserving butt of Jew-hatred; secularized Jews regarded
religious Jews similarly; and unionized working-class
Jews held comparable opinions of the Jewish bourgeoisie.
Moreover, those who looked at others across the various
social divides in this way, and who sought to reform those
others or to separate themselves from those others in order
to win themselves acceptance by the wider society, did not
acknowledge that their biases reflected a pleading for gentile
approval. Instead, they cast their prejudices as representing
a more progressive and enlightened path.
Not a New Jewish Phenomenon
Again, this was not a new Jewish phenomenon. The
twelfth-century Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela wrote
of his visit to the Jews of Constantinople:
Among [them] there are craftsmen in silk
and many merchants and many wealthy men....
They dwell in a burdensome exile. And most of
the enmity comes about because of the [Jewish]
tanners who make leather and fling their filthy
water into the streets at the entrance to their
homes, polluting the street of the Jews. And
therefore the Greeks [Constantinople was at
the time, of course, still in Byzantine hands]
hate the Jews, whether good or bad, and make
their yoke heavy upon them and beat them in
the streets.6
The historian H. H. Ben Sasson observes of the passage:
This information certainly did not reach
[Benjamin of Tudela] from the tanners; it was
how wealthy Jews explained to themselves and
to others the animosity of the Greeks towards the
Jews. It resulted from the filthy habits of those
who followed such a despicable craft, and because
of them, all Jews, good and bad, suffered. In this
context "good" meant the silk-maker or physician,
and "bad" meant the miserable tanner, blamed as
the source of this animosity.7
The besieged Jews chose to ignore the actual roots of
the hostility directed against them, about which they could
do little. Instead they focused their resentment on elements
within the Jewish community on the other side of the social-occupational
divide. They did so in the service of fantasies
that "reform" of those others would radically ameliorate the
community's predicament.
But this phenomenon became particularly virulent in
the modern era, and it had an impact as well on the Zionist
movement. Herzl conceived of the future Jewish state as a
refuge for all Jews. But among the Russian socialist Zionists
who came to dominate the Zionist movement, many chose
to construe religious and bourgeois Jews as the true targets
of anti-Semitism. They spoke and wrote of such Jews in a
manner that parroted the rhetoric of the anti-Semites, and
sought to construct a nation that would be socialist and
secular and therefore, in their wishful thinking, immune to
anti-Jewish attack.
The Practical Consequences of Bias
This bias had practical consequences. In the early
1930s, for example, David Ben-Gurion recognized the
growing dangers facing European Jews and argued for
a public relations campaign to pressure Britain to permit
large-scale immigration to the Yishuv (the prestate Jewish
community in Palestine). Many of his socialist Zionist
colleagues, however, opposed him for fear that the arrival
of religious and entrepreneurial Jews would undermine the
creation of a New Jew - socialist and secular - and instead
lead to a polity that invited anti-Semitism.
Another practical consequence can be seen in the
response by some elements of the socialist Zionist camp
to the Arab attacks of 1920-1921, 1929, and 1936-1939.
Some chose to construe the attacks as an understandable
reaction to the ways of traditional and bourgeois elements
in the Yishuv. They insisted that if the Yishuv were built on
purely socialist principles, the Arab working class would see
the Jews as brothers and there would be no enmity.
Various voices within the socialist camp also reacted
to Arab attacks by blaming Arab hostility on the supposedly
misguided Zionist effort to establish a Jewish state, and they
advocated Jewish abandonment of that goal. Again, those
who would blame the Jews did not acknowledge that they
were seeking to placate the Jews' attackers but rather cast
their stance as enlightened and progressive. For example,
they wrapped themselves in socialist internationalism and
insisted that Jews should be more forward-looking and
forswear nationalist aspirations.
A related response to the Arab assault came from
another part of the Yishuv. Jews in Western Europe had,
since the beginning of the modern era, confronted intense
opposition to their being granted civic rights in their
respective countries. A key point made by those opposing
such rights was that the Jews were a separate, alien nation.
In response, many Jews sought to demonstrate that they
were solely a community of faith, not a nation. German
Jewish reformist movements in the early nineteenth century
even sought to change the liturgy to delete references to
longing for Eretz Israel and Jerusalem so as to erase any
suggestions of national, and not purely religious, Jewish
identity and aspirations.
Buber: Justifying the Arab Aggressors
Elements of the German Jewish community in the Yishuv
embraced these same predilections. They defined the proper
Zionist project as the building of a Jewish cultural center,
not a state, in Eretz Israel, and responded to Arab attacks in
the same manner so many of them had responded to anti-
Jewish indictments in Europe. They even more emphatically
argued against nation-building, justified Arab aggression as a
reasonable reaction to the misguided state-building of the
Yishuv leadership, and viciously attacked Ben-Gurion and
his pro-state associates.
Of course, they once again did not acknowledge
that they were seeking to placate the Jews' attackers but
rather wrapped their stance in moral self-righteousness.
They insisted that Judaism had evolved beyond narrow,
nationalist concerns. It was now exclusively focused on its
universal message and mission as a moral force in the world,
and nation-building represented a regressive, atavistic, and
shameful course for the Jews.
The most prominent figure in this camp was the famous
German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. In 1929, the Grand
Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, orchestrated large-scale attacks
against the Jews of the Yishuv that led to, among other
atrocities, the murder of more than sixty Jews in Hebron.
Buber, then still in Germany, blamed the massacres on the
Jews for not having been accommodating enough of Arab
sensibilities and urged an amnesty for those Arabs convicted
of murdering Jews.8
Buber's response to the Arab attacks of 1936-1939
(he immigrated to the Yishuv in 1938) was similar. He
and many of his associates on the faculty of the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem also opposed efforts to push Britain
to liberalize Jewish immigration. Even in the face of the
notorious Chamberlain White Paper of 1939 severely limiting
immigration at such a desperate time for European Jews, the
circle around Buber campaigned in support of such limits
and insisted that there should be no additional Jewish
immigration without Arab consent.
In an article in Haaretz in November 1939, two months
after the start of World War II, Buber not only argued that
the Zionist objective of a state was immoral; he also asserted
that, as all nationalisms were, in his view, intrinsically and
equally morally bankrupt and that Zionism was "performing
the acts of Hitler in the land of Israel, for they [i.e., the
Zionists] want to serve Hitler's god [i.e., nationalism] after
he has been given a Hebrew name."9
The Impact of the Shoah
Such perspectives were largely marginalized by the war
in Europe, the Shoah, and the establishment of Israel. The
nation came together in absorbing the survivors from Europe
and the Sephardi Jews fleeing the Arab states of North Africa
and the Middle East, and Israelis overwhelmingly dedicated
themselves to the state's survival and well-being.
But the marginalization of those perspectives
sympathetic to Arab aggression and critical of the Zionist
enterprise was not simply a consequence of the flow of
events. It also derived from an optimism that the Arab
siege would soon end and Israel would indeed become a
"normal" state. In addition, the segment of the population
most receptive to anti-state rhetoric was the socialist Zionist
camp. However, the nation's leadership was drawn from that
camp, and many more on the Israeli Left identified with Ben-
Gurion and his successors than with the anti-state circles.
But the siege did not end. Even the peace with Egypt
was followed by Egyptian reneging on the approximately two
dozen provisions of the Camp David agreement involving
normalization of commercial and cultural relations, and
the government-controlled Egyptian media persisted in
their anti-Israeli rhetoric and even escalated their anti-
Semitic content.
Viewing the Likud as Alien Others
No less significantly, in 1977 the socialist Zionists
lost their monopoly on national power and over the next
fifteen years Likud either led the nation or was equal or
senior partner in governments of national unity. Likud's
roots lay in a merger of the party of Zeev Jabotinsky's
Revisionist successors and Israel's Liberal Party (opposed to
the country's socialist economy). Likud's constituency was
drawn largely from the Sephardim, generally religious and
entrepreneurial, and the more religious and entrepreneurial
among the Ashkenazim.
Much of the socialist Zionist camp viewed the new
leadership and its constituency as alien others. Many Labor
Zionists now became more receptive to arguments that Arab
hostility was a response to Israeli policies, that it was the
control of the government by the Old Jew - the religious and
the entrepreneurial - that perpetuated the Arab siege, and
that if the Left would only regain power and make sufficient
amends and concessions the other side would be placated
and peace would be won.
The Peace Movement's interpretation of the conflict
was no less divorced from reality than had been German
Jews blaming eastern Jews for anti-Semitism, or secular
Jews blaming the religious, or socialist Jews blaming the
European Jewish bourgeoisie.
But under the conditions of the continuing Arab siege
and the Likud ascendancy, it won more and more adherents
on the Israeli Left. Those adherents, cowed by the persistence
of the siege and wishing for its end, grasped at any seemingly
positive statement from an Arab political figure to bolster their
wishful thinking ignoring all countervailing evidence.
For example, the PLO's proxy representative in
Jerusalem, Faisal Husseini, declared to an Arab audience
in 1992, "We have not conceded and will not surrender
any of the...commitments that have existed for more than
70 years....We have within our Palestinian and united Arab
society the ability to deal with divided Israeli society.... We
must force Israeli society to cooperate...with our Arab society
and eventually to gradually dissolve the 'Zionist entity.'"10 He
made other statements in the same vein.
The Peace Camp like the Abused Child
Yet Husseini was a Peace Movement favorite. Mordechai
Bar-On was a founder of Peace Now and author of the most
definitive history of the Peace Movement. He wrote of the
period before Oslo, the time of the Husseini quote, "A new
generation of Palestinian leaders was emerging.... Younger
people like...Faisal Husseini.... Most of the peace groups on
the Israeli side maintained contacts with these new leaders
and tried to persuade Israelis that these Palestinians could
be partners in negotiations."11
Bar-On also explained the failure of some Israelis to
be persuaded as due to their benighted nature, their not
sharing the Peace Movement's open-minded and forward-looking
sophistication. He noted that the Sephardic Jewish
community in Israel tended to be more distrustful of
Arab intentions and added that this seemed, in surveys,
to be related to educational level and level of religious
traditionalism. He further observed that the less educated
and more traditional segments of the Ashkenazi community
were likewise more distrustful of the possibilities for genuine
peace than were Israel's elites.
Bar-On concluded: "Higher learning, it is believed,
exposes individuals to a wider variety of opinions, trains
them in new analytical and flexible modes of thought, and
enables them to relate to issues in a less emotional and
more self-critical way, which leads to greater tolerance and
understanding of the 'other' and of the complexity of the
issues."12 This is Bar-On's rationalization for the peace camp's
grasping, like the abused child, at wishful delusions that
sufficient self-reform, sufficient efforts to become "good,"
would win relief.
New History:
Rewriting the Past of Israel and Zionism
Also resonant of the paradigm of the abused child is
that adjunct to the Peace Movement, the so-called New
History. The practitioners of the New History have sought
to rewrite the past of Israel and the Zionist movement in a
way that revealed the supposedly unfair treatment meted
out to Palestinian Arabs and to other Arabs as well.
The implicit, and often explicitly acknowledged,
intent of its authors has been to get Israelis to perceive
Arab hostility as an understandable response to Israeli
misdeeds. They encourage Israelis to see their neighbors
less as irreconcilable foes bent on Israel's destruction than
as people like themselves who simply want - have always
simply wanted - a fair resolution of the conflict, and so to be
more forthcoming, to make painful concessions, to achieve
that fair resolution.
The New History is largely bogus history. As one critic
has noted, what is true in it is not new and what is new in it -
typically the claims most damning of Israel - is not true. One
recurrent criticism directed at it by other historians is that
its proponents offer a very simplistic, two-dimensional view
of the Arabs.13 There is little conveyance of the complexity
of decision-making by Arab leaders; rather, Arab decisions
and actions are depicted as straightforward and predictable
reactions to Israeli policies.
This recurrent weakness in the New History has at
times been ascribed to authors' limited grasp of Arabic
and, hence, limited access to the literature that would give
them a fuller, more nuanced and realistic understanding of
the shaping of Arab policies. But the truer explanation for
the two-dimensionality of Arab decision-making in the New
History is its authors' wish to see Arab behavior as simply
reactions to Israeli behavior. They want, in effect, to see
Israeli behavior controlling Arab behavior, just as the abused
child wants to see his own behavior as controlling that of
his abusive parent. Such a distortion of reality is essential
to the child's fantasy that the abuse has been a response to
his misbehavior and that his becoming good will inevitably
elicit better parental treatment.
Not Prepared to Live in a World without Solutions
Perhaps the single example of Oslo rationalizations
most resonant of the psychodynamics of the abused child is
a statement by Oslo's chief architect, Yossi Beilin, in 1997.
Defending his Oslo endeavors, Beilin declared, "I want to live
in a world where the solution to an existential problem is
possible.... I am simply not prepared to live in a world where
[problems] are unsolvable."14
Confronted with the reality that Israel faces problems
it cannot resolve by its own actions, Beilin wished not to
believe that reality and simply closed his eyes to it. He
embraced the delusion that, despite all the evidence to the
contrary, the other side desires what he desires and the
world can be rendered what he wants it to be if only Israel
is sufficiently forthcoming. In the same way the abused
child, faced with a painful and insoluble existential problem,
chooses to believe that he truly can solve it, that his behaving
better will make his world right.
Haaretz's Ari Shavit wrote in 2001 of the consequences
of Beilin's "solution to an existential problem." Shavit pointed
out that the nation was enduring "a profound existential
crisis" brought about by a decision "produced and directed
by...Yossi Beilin...who had Israel sign an illusory document
[the Oslo accords] which undermines the foundations of its
existence."
Addressing Institutional Failures
Throughout the history of the Diaspora, Jewish
communities likewise suffered difficult situations
becoming even worse, losses being piled on losses, because
of the psychological corrosiveness of their predicament
and the allure of delusional comprehensions that misread
dangers, set Jew against Jew, and grievously compromised
communal defenses.
As noted, in some cases the abused child is spared
all the devastating consequences of his self-blame by an
adult who conveys to him a different message. Strong
communal institutions can at times do the same for
populations under siege.
Oslo was ultimately a failure of Israel's institutions,
political, educational, academic, cultural, and media-related.
The Arab siege is going to continue, and if those institutional
failures are not addressed the nation will inexorably once
again risk its existence by chasing mirages of peace.
* * *
Notes
1. Aharon Megged, "One-Way Trip on the Highway of Self-
Destruction," Jerusalem Post, 17 June 1994.
2. Foreign Broadcast Service, "Near East and South Asia, Daily Report
Supplement, Israel-PLO Agreement," 14 September 1993, 4-5.
3. Haaretz, 27 July 2002.
4. Haaretz, 26 December 1997.
5. Cited in Meir Ben-Horin, Max Nordau: Philosopher of Human
Solidarity (New York: Conference of Jewish Social Studies,
1956), 180.
6. Cited in H. H. Ben-Sasson, "The Middle Ages," in H. H. Ben-Sasson,
ed., A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1976), 385-723, 469.
7. Ibid., 469.
8. Martin Buber, "The National Home and National Policy in Palestine"
and "The Wailing Wall," in A Land for Two Peoples: Martin Buber
on Jews and Arabs, ed. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1983), 82-91, 93-95.
9. Haaretz, 16 November 1939; cited in Yoram Hazony, The Jewish
State (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 244.
10. Al-Ra'y (Jordan), 12 November 1992; cited in Ze'ev Benyamin
Begin, "Years of Hope," Haaretz Magazine, 6 September 2002.
11. Mordechai Bar-On, In Pursuit of Peace (Washington, DC: United
States Institute of Peace Press, 1996), 217.
12. Ibid., 165.
13. See, e.g., Robert B. Satloff, review of Benny Morris's Israel's
Borders Wars, 1949-1956, in Middle Eastern Studies, October
1995, 953-57.
14. Cited in Haaretz Magazine, 7 March 1997.
* * *
Dr. Kenneth Levin is a clinical instructor of psychiatry at Harvard
Medical School and a Princeton-trained historian. He is the author
of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege (Hanover,
NH: Smith & Kraus, 2005).
Dore Gold and Manfred Gerstenfeld, Co-Publishers. Joel Fishman, Editor. Chaya Herskovic, Associate Editor. Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 13 Tel-Hai St.,
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[email protected]. In U.S.A.: Center for Jewish Community Studies, 1616
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The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect
those of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.