Customer Reviews

The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions Of A People Under Siege

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

With particular reference to the basis of the Oslo Accords, and quite disturbing at times, this book delves into the "mind-set" of Israelis which has resulted in their pursuit of "peace" with the Palestinian/Arab world.

The book outlines how in 1993, the Israeli leadership made the decision to embrace Yasser Arafat as it's "peace partner", installing him and what is cited as a "nascent Palestinian government" in Gaza and the "West Bank" (Biblical Judea & Samaria).

Israeli leaders are shown to have allowed Yasser Arafat to bring some 7,000 Palestinian gunmen along with him and provide them with the weaponry which was intended for use by his security services. Weapons which are depicted to have been subsequently used for attacks upon Israelis.

The Israeli pursuit of "peace" under what is called an "unprecedented wave of anti-Israeli terror", the subsequent effects upon Israeli society and the "peace process" itself, are all investigated in some detail.

Many pertinent questions are asked as to "why" such a path was trodden,whilst Yasser Arafat and his PLO are described as addressing Arab audiences to the effect that, any/all territory acquired from Israel is only part of the PLO's own "phased plan" to eradicate the Jewish state. Due reference being provided throughout.

Living in a country which the book describes as being "under perpetual siege", the reader is provided with an extraordinary insight into how "psychological and historical forces" have spawned such Israeli policies.

This is provided specifically in the context of how such a political process is still being allowed to proceed when the cited agendas of Arafat and the PLO are still being met with further, territorial, financial and related concessions without any reciprocity from the Arab side.

References revealing that Israel's "peace partner" was allegedly becoming accustomed to receiving Israeli concessions without giving anything in return and that unilateral withdrawals were only accelerating that phenomenon.

Further significant reference is also made to how Israelis have purportedly been confronted with what is termed "revisionist history".

Many pivotal and foundational issues cited to have been distorted to such a degree that innocent "peace-famished" Israeli civilians are described as being colluded into falsely believing that "anti-Jewish sentiment was grounded in a fair and truthful assessment of the Jews".

This giving rise to the perception that, through "submission", the Jewish community could pave the way to it's eventual "acceptance" and that it was subsequently possible to achieve peace through territorial and other concessions, irrespective of the ongoing terrorism. The delusional nature of this impression is examined in some depth.

The cover of this work carries two photographs;-

One photograph is of the late Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat and the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, shaking each other's hands under the auspices of former US President Clinton on the White House lawn during 1993.

The other photograph is that of an Israeli bus, blown apart by a Palestinian suicide bomber. The carnage is horrifying.

The reader is left to his own interpretation of these presentations but their relevance & significance are as difficult to ignore as the implications of this study upon the ongoing "mind-set" behind the current "peace process" at this time.

Whether or not the individual reader agrees with the assertions of this work, this is a book that desperately needs reading by anyone who seeks to understand the feelings of those on the ground. It's importance cannot be under-estimated.

Highly recommended.

Why would the Israelis and the Jews sacrifice everything for a shallow peace accord with a "peace partner" who increases terror attacks, indoctrinates intensely virulent anti-Semitism at all levels of education and the media, and continues to vow annihilation of the state they feign to be negotiating peace with?

Kenneth Levin's answer approaches a perspective that is different from much of the current histories of the region. Levin illuminates a delusion that is the result of the stress of five decades of being under siege, and the result of centuries of demonization in Europe. He explores the history of the responses of the Jews in Europe to the hatred that spanned centuries and the futility of the Jews who vainly sought to appease their state sponsored tormentors by trying ever harder to assimilate. Ultimately the more they tried to assimilate the more the host nations persecuted them. Thus in spite of serving heroically in the German army in WWI they were ultimately rewarded with the holocaust.

The delusion that was Oslo was just a continuation of a desire of the Jewish community to either fit in or be left in peace. But it was also a delusion that the Jews could control the will of another party by giving more and more concessions, even when nothing is given in return. It is a unique form of arrogance and is ultimately self destructive.

The siege is not likely to end soon and Levin's prescription for Israel's survival is to educate its people on the history and moral purpose underlying the existence of the nation. Under Oslo many in the Israeli educational establishment pushed a curriculum that diminished the Jewish history and culture in favor of a more universalist approach. Revisionist historians embellished this approach with an anti Zionist slant to the story of Israel's history. Levin retorts the revisionists, but draws parallels to much of the self criticism from the Jews in Europe hoping to appease their state sponsors. Meanwhile the Palestinian educational structure, in clear defiance of Oslo, taught that the Jews had no right to the land or any historical connection to it and that it was their divine moral purpose to drive the Jews from their homeland.

The results of Oslo have taught what the Jews should have learned from centuries of oppression: that while it takes two people to make peace; it only takes one to make a war.

This book is a wonderful addition to the writings and analysis of the situation in Israel and is uniquely illuminating. I highly recommend it.

This book is problably the most detailed and researched book ever written on the history of how liberalism has infected and destroyed the State of Israel. Through the constant appeasment of its enemies who want nothing but the death of Israel, Israel has backed itself into a corner from which even the author (I infer) feels it has little chance of recovering. I truly believe Yosi Belin (along with Simon Peres and too many others) will go down in history as the architects of the destruction of Israel. This book is a must read for anyone who cares about Israel!

When I was visiting Germany some years ago I happened to stop in a bookshop in Munich, where I saw an English copy of Hitler's Willing Executioners, by Goldhagen. Bringing this, along with a Sunday NYT to the counter, I was met with ghoulish silence from the tellers. Inhabitants of the shop glanced at me, and my purcahses, with looks that had ice water in them. Reading Goldhagen's book on my trip through Germany was an unforgottable experience - I could not have asked for a better travel guide.
The soul and theme of Levin's book can be summed up in the remark made 48 hours ago by Abbas to Sharon: "You hurt me by not giving me what I need. You use terror as an excuse not to give me what I need. You only make matters worse."
A great difficult and worthy read.

This is, by far, the best written analysis of the apparently mindless descent into potential oblivion that Israel appears headed to. It begins by setting the stage of Jewish self-hatred and self-effacement as a reaction to anti-semitism, as it developed in the Diaspora during this last millenium. Specifically, there is a detailed analysis of this phenomenon in the "civilized" world of 19th and 20th century Germany, as contrasted with the more "primitive" Eastern European Jewish experience. The author shows how the constant self delusion of the Jews - in its myriad of forms and expressions - is the basis for the present day erosion from within that the Jewish State is undergoing. I believe that this book should be mandatory reading in any Middle Eastern course, or for that matter, for anyone seeking to understand this unique group psychological phenomenon. As a proud Jew and a Zionist, I wish that this book would be sent - gratis - to journalists, academics, politicians, and to other people who collectively can influence the course of history.

In this massively researched, lucidly written, and cogently argued narrative, as Edward Alexander of the University of Washington wrote, Levin tells the appalling story of what has been called the greatest self-inflicted wound of political history: Israel's embrace of Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the Oslo accords of September 1993 and its dogged adherence to its obligations under them even as its "peace partner" was blatantly flouting its own.

The book has two parts. The first recounts Jewish political failure in the Diaspora, where Jews lived with a constant burden of peril; Levin presents this as the background for the self-deluding rationales that engendered Oslo. The second part traces the same perils in the history of Israel itself. Levin shows how a tiny nation, living under constant siege by neighbors who reject its very existence, was induced by its intellectual classes to believe that its own misdeeds had incited Arab hatred and violence, and that what required reform was not Arab dictatorship and Islamist Jew-hatred but the reform of (other) Jews. Reversing cause and effect, Israeli leaders blinded themselves to the obvious fact that it was Arab hatred and aggression that repeatedly led to Israeli occupation, not occupation that caused Arab hatred and violence.

Although Levin argues strongly that Israeli leaders like Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and the ineffable Shimon Peres hallucinated moderation in a murderous enemy, his book is not a polemic that excludes all opposing points of view; on the contrary, we get the fullest possible account--and "in their own words"--of those Israelis (and their American-Jewish supporters) who deluded themselves into believing that Oslo would bring a new heaven and a new earth. When the accords were signed in 1993, Minister of Education Shulamit Aloni announced that "no more parents will go weeping after the coffins of their sons," and Israeli novelist and peace activist Amos Oz said confidently that "death shall be no more." And all this because Arafat had--not for the first time--promised to renounce terror and recognize Israel's "right to exist," that used Buick he had already flogged several times over. By autumn 2000, and as a direct (and in Levin's view entirely predictable) result of Israel's endless unreciprocated concessions to Arafat's demands, the country was faced with intifada II, "the Oslo war," in which all Israel became a battlefield and getting on a bus or going to a cafe or a disco meant risking your life.

One of Levin's most relentlessly pursued themes is the influence of Israel's cultural elites on the governments of Rabin and Barak. In Israel (as in America) many intellectuals seem to subscribe to the motto, "the other country, right or wrong." But if American leftist intellectuals are confined to universities and a few other institutions, in Israel they have come close to taking over the government. Israelis thus learned the hard way what Churchill said of England's leading appeaser: "Mr. Chamberlain was faced with a choice between surrender and war; he chose surrender, and he got war."

This book starts by relating the Oslo disaster, in which Arafat arrived in the Levant and took control over Arab schools and media there. This was already enough to accomplish his goal of precluding peace. The author continues with a fine history of Israel, emphasizing those who, by accepting arbitrary and racist complaints about Zionism as valid, refused to demand for their own people the human rights they demanded for everyone else.

Why would people do that? Lewin says that some Jews have "deluded themselves into believing they could win peace through embracing the indictments of their enemies and seeking to appease them."

I think the author is right about that. But I also feel there is more to it than this. I think that some religious Jews want to avoid taking what appear to be provincial political public stands. And that some people of Jewish descent are even more reluctant to appear Jewish at all, either religiously or politically. Meanwhile, we can see in this book that some Israelis, aware that Israel needs peace, feel they have to snap at every piece of bait marked "peace" offered by anti-Israelis.

Israel exists because the British White Paper of 1939 convinced a large majority of Jews, both in the Levant and outside it, that Jewish rights to life, liberty, property in the British Mandate (and immigration to it) could not be protected unless a Jewish state were declared there. We see the reactions of many folks to those who want to undo all this by having Israel renounce the Law of Return, or by giving non-Jews the right to revoke human rights for Jews in the country. If the need for Israel to ever be a refuge for Jews no longer existed, and if the threat to Jewish rights were no longer present, there could be a good reason to consider such steps. But it seems to me, as well as to the author, that these threats are as strong as ever.

Levin makes an interesting point about the Camp David talks of 2000. My view had been that the peace with Arafat was doomed from the start, and I thought that Israel was lucky that Arafat had not agreed to it, signed some documents, broken all his promises, and then blamed Israel. I winced when Israel made big offers to someone who clearly was not a potential peace partner. But Levin says that these offers were not entirely counterproductive. Arafat had hoped that Israel would display the intransigence I had wanted to see. After that, he would have unilaterally declared a state, and probably obtained recognition from Europe (and possibly from the United States as well). Instead, as the author explains, Clinton and most of Europe blamed Arafat for the failure of the talks.

Levin mentions the Kineret Declaration, which appears to reflect a broad response to anti-Zionist attacks. It affirms that Israel has the responsibility of being the national home of the Jewish people, that Israel is both a democracy and a Jewish state, that Israel is home to many communities and respects the rights of all its citizens, and that Israel is committed to the pursuit of peace and justice. I think that is something most Zionists ought to be able to agree on.

This is the most highly recommended book on politics I have heard of in some time. Three of the most respected commentators on Israeli affairs I know , one a communal leader and writer, Manfred Gerstenfeld, another, a historian Joel Fishman, and a third one of the finest writers on political affairs working today, David Hornik have told me that this book is not simply the best analysis of the Oslo process they have seen but the deepest look into the psychology of ' peace- famished Israelis'. They say that its power of insight and understanding is unmatched.

This is a seminal book, that should be must reading for anyone interested in the Israel-Arab conflict. The author is a psychiatrist with a Ph.D in History from Princeton. It is a very thoroughly researched, carefully documented review of the long history of Jewish wishful thinking responses to oppression and aggression directed against them, starting long ago in Europe and brought up to date in the Middle East. The lessons for the current situation in the Middle East are clearly drawn, and demand thoughful consideration by the reader.
Dr. Levin uses the psychodynamic concept of "identification with the aggressor" [Anna Freud]to try to explain the mental mechanism so often resorted to in justifying appeasement of implacable enemies, despite its history of self-defeating and often lethal ineffectiveness. This mechanism is used to explain the failure of appeasers to take any accurate measure of their enemy, since they are serving an internal need that becomes self-delusional.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

This is the only book of which I'm aware that comprehensively analyzes the well-known Jewish pathology of irrational, often destructive self-abnegation, which in extreme cases becomes self-hatred, in the face of anti-Jewish hostility.

Like a virus that mutates and adapts to its environment, ideological Jew-hatred has proven to be compatible with any overall worldview, any underlying ideology. Throughout history, many Jews uncritically accepted the antisemitic slanders of the time, whether accused of backwardness, or disloyalty, or of being Capitalist exploiters, or Communists, or even accusations of racial inferiority. If Jews were accused by the surrounding society of X, then however baseless the accusation, many Jews would take it to heart. They reasoned that, if only those Jews who are guilty of doing (or being) X would stop, the hostility toward the Jews would go away. Of course, it has never worked out that way, even after tremendous Jewish reforms to appease the accusers (such as the Haskalah).

Today's most dominant antisemitic slanders center on the alleged wickedness of the state of Israel. Correspondingly, many Jews and many Israelis have adopted factually and morally insupportable criticisms of Israel, advocating Israeli withdrawal to indefensible borders (the Armistice Lines of 1949), even in the absence of tangible Arab concessions, and, lately, "learning to live" with a nuclear-armed Iran. Through it all, the overwhelming evidence of genocidal Arab/Muslim intentions, and of the worthlessness of Arab promises, is entirely ignored in liu of wishful thinking.

These self-destructive Jews go out of their way to abet the Jews' enemies and attack fellow Jews. Witness routine, hostile New York Times editorials on the subject of Israel by Jewish authors. Witness the Jews who are "sick and tired" of their fellow Jews' bringing up the Holocaust. Witness the Jews who "deplore Jewish nationalism and ethnocentrism" and who regard themselves as citizens of the world. Etcetera, Etcetera.

Such a phenomenon has no parallel, at least on the same scale, among any other ethnic or religious group. Kenneth Levin argues, persuasively, that this Jewish mental sickness is a product of centuries of abuse at the hands of more powerful groups, and likens it to the psychology of an abused child who comes to believe that he is to blame for his own predicament. This is an extremely valuable book for those who seek to understand the psychology and the politics of both Israeli and diaspora Jewry.