Letters to the Editor

On Self-Hatred and Terror

On the evening of Wednesday, March 27 2002, the Seder, the dinner that celebrates the first night of Passover, was held by Jews worldwide. The Seder was also celebrated in a small hotel in the city of Netanya, Israel. A Palestinian suicide bomber entered the dining hall and blew himself up. 22 children, women and men were killed. More than 150 were badly injured.

On the same day, a couple of Jewish students from Princeton University published a column titled "Celebrating Passover, freedom and peace in Israel," and suggested to "show our courage by taking the lead in calling on Princeton to divest itself from companies doing business in Israel or making loans to the Israeli government." So what feeds the malignant Palestinian Terror?

The foremost factor is Jewish self-hatred. The Jewish people have long been cursed by the inability to recognize men of implacable ill-will, whether it is Yasser Arafat or Adolf Hitler. One of the sadly ironic tragedies of the Holocaust is the participation of Jews such as Mordechai Rumkowski and Jacob Gens in the administration of the Nazi's murderous bureaucracy.

Self-hating Jews constitute a fifth column within the ranks of their people, rejecting the identity of the Jew, his culture, his tradition, his patrimony, and introduces and extols those of the outsider, of the enemy — thus working against Jewish interest. This self-hatred fuels a vicious cycle that can lead to disaster and dissolution of the Jewish people and the Jewish State.

Furthermore, self-hating Jews, by casting other Jews in negative and pejorative roles, perpetuate the excuse for hatred towards the Jew. By projecting these negative aspects on other Jews, the self-hating Jews can never really achieve their goal of acceptance. It is not only from the world's anti-Semites that the Israeli leftist has learned to reject the various subgroups of his brethren, but also from the viscous anti-Israeli Jewish-Americans, who have come to use Israel and Israeli Jews as the out-group upon which to project all their own self-hatred.

Although Israel is in the midst of a potentially deadly spiral of terrorist attacks, many American Jews use Israel as a scapegoat, thus fueling further the Israelis' own self-hatred that is manifested by the Israeli left — a self hatred that can, in fact, lead to ultimate self destruction. Unfortunately, some on the right have been affected by the incessant denigration by the left, by the continuous calumny, by the persistent delegitimization and stereotyping such that, at some point, they came to wish to dissociate themselves from the "extremists": they too, want to appear to be lovers of peace, social justice, reasonable and rational; then, they in turn point pejoratively to those they now deem extremists. Extremists, then, we see, are called those who have not given up being loyal Jews, who love their land and their heritage.

The long-standing tendency of Jews the world over — and especially in the US — to champion him whom they see as the underdog, has been here perverted to the advantage of the Arabs. Forgetting, or perhaps never really knowing history, these Jews have neglected the long and painful travail of their own people. This factor, coupled with and serving as rationalization for the projection of self-hatred, has not only fueled Palestinian terror but, moreover, has put the very existence of Israel as the Jewish state in unprecedented jeopardy. Pini Gurfil Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering