The Bowings of a Sociopath

Triggering a flurry of pro-forma criticism from Western governments, Israel has seized 1000 acres in the West Bank in order to build a settlement in Gush Etzion, between Jerusalem and Bethlehem.  The area is close to where three Jewish teenagers were murdered in June.

Minister Naftali Bennett, head of the right-wing Jewish Home party, said the decision to build in the Etzion bloc was the Zionist answer to Arab terror.  “Hamas murders and we build.”

What kind of logic is that? 

Theft by any other name is just as foul.  Israel is not “building” it is seizing.  What one does with stolen land or property after it has been taken is a distinct issue from the taking of it.

Dishonestly switching terms, Bennett attempts to confuse others into overlooking that Israel has stolen land belonging to others. 

“We continue to build our country as we always have,”  Bennett warbled on.  For over 120 years, since the dawn of Zionism, we have built and the world did not like our building....  Aww such touching pathos.  Jews build while the whole world cavils!

 

This is truly the mental process of a sociopath in whose twisted mind his own misconduct is transformed into earnest good doing. 

But it doesn’t end there.  Bennett’s statement implicitly acknowledge that this do-good, building of a new world was actually punitive pay back for murders attributed to Hamas.

First of all there has never been any proof, not a scintilla, that Hamas was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of the three Jewish teenagers.  Hamas has denied any involvement and, given its usually candid acknowledgement of responsibility for past actions, its denial does not warrant rejection out of hand.  Moreover, Hamas is primarily a presence in Gaza, not in the West Bank where the murders occurred.  Lastly, given that Hamas was preparing for critical Palestinian elections in June, it is hard too fathom — without engaging in double reverse poker gambits — what it stood to gain by carrying out such a crime. 

But even supposing Hamas were responsible, what possible justification is there for punitively stealing land from a third parties (Palestinian farmers) who have certainly never been implicated in the crime?

This is precisely the type of psychotic reasoning which motivated Kristallnacht.   Yes, Kristallnacht.  In 1938 Herschel Feibel Grynszpan, a Polish Jewish refugee shot Ernst vom Rath,  a junior clerk in the German Embassy in Paris.    Grynzspan  committed the murder out of frustration over Germany’s anti-Jewish policies.   In response, the Nazi government unleashed mob action throughout Germany against Jewish establishments and rounded up 30,000 Jews and packed them off to concentration camps.

The reason collective punishment is primitive and barbaric is that it punishes the innocent whose only “connection” to the crime is sharing some irrelevant characteristic with the actual perpetrator - skin color, religious affiliation, ethnicity, or any other arbitrary attribute.

Howsoever the differentiation is drawn what is involved is a mental process that says: all of them  are equally bad,  guilty, worthless and undeserving of any individualized consideration.  They are, in a word, as cockroaches.

This is the mentality that reigns supreme in the councils of Israel’s government.  The seizure of the land is not simply “illegal” it is a nauseating performance of stroking the violin atop a heap of shit.

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