WHEN EVIL BECOMES THE NEW NORMAL

or where the light of reason cannot shine.

evil

/ˈiːvl/

adjective

profoundly immoral and wicked.

There are some things which are evil and which cannot be ignored. Genocide is one, so is ethnic cleansing, and in this age, most would say occupation and colonisation are evil. One could argue that colonisation has been a necessary part of human evolution and that is true, but not for nearly two centuries. We have in essence outgrown colonisation just as humans outgrew such things as infanticide, which once served a necessary purpose.

Which brings us to the problem of Zionist Israel which commits evil and has done since it invented itself in 1947. Having just come out of the horrors of World War Two when millions died and we fought against invasion and occupation it is even more ironic that a State called Israel should be forced into Palestine through invasion, occupation and genocidal ethnic cleansing in the name of colonisation.

Why did the world not act for justice in 1948 and force the Zionist State to abide by the recommendation of the United Nations which promoted the idea of partitioning Palestine in the first place and demanded justice and freedom for the Palestinians in what was left of their country, a country the UN had no legal right to partition?

It was bad enough to hand over in that colonial way, most of Palestine to a group which was a tiny religious minority in the population and their backers, Zionist Europeans with a clearly stated intention of taking all of it and ridding the land of the indigenous people because they were Muslims and Christians.

Was it because they were not ‘white like us?’ Was it because they were Arab and not European? Was it because most people did not know and in the aftermath and chaos and final necessary grieving which followed the end of the war, had no energy left for what was happening in Palestine? Probably all of the above.

And here we are now, nearly 80 years later, watching a truly evil genocide being carried out by the Zionist/Israeli/Jewish occupiers and colonisers against the native people of the land they have stolen. It probably did not have to get this bad but it has and now we must pick up the pieces.

Those aware of the genocidal Zionist invasion of Palestine in 1947 mostly shrugged it off as a necessary evil to assuage the irrational and well promoted by the Zionists, ‘guilt’ over what many Jews had experienced in Europe at the hands of the Germans. As if one crime is ever balanced by another crime.

Many also believed the Zionist spin that Jews needed their own land to be safe. Since most Jews have never lived in Israel and never will and Israel is the most dangerous place a Jew could live, that theory has long ago been debunked. And since no religion gets a right to self determination or a homeland the proposal was never going to be legal.

Others believed the racist colonial spin that the Jews setting up in Palestine would bring civilization to a primitive society, totally ignoring the fact that Palestinians had long been among the most cultured, sophisticated, educated and gracious people in the Middle East. No doubt thousands of years of almost constant occupation, all of it more benign than the Israelis, will do that. The Palestinians have had to learn grace and patience and with that comes a nobility of spirit in the face of what has been and remains a sadistic and bestial military colonial occupation. The Palestinians must stand as saintly in their suffering.

But there was a strong belief, and it was held by many Jews even if not by Zionists, that those colonising Palestine were noble, good, and would create a better world. The propaganda for this belief came early and powerfully. Such noble ideals rarely come to any sort of reality because when we try to be too good, we activate the archetype for the opposite.

If you believe you are superior, good, free from evil, noble, etc. etc. the list can be very long, then you will activate the exact opposite of all those qualities unconsciously. In other words the worst that you can be will manifest to balance the best that you believe yourself to be. This is the story of Zionist Israel writ large. All evil was projected out onto others; all goodness was projected onto Israelis, or so they thought. All those who were 'other' had to be an enemy if not subhuman like the Palestinian Muslims and Christians, and no accountability could ever be demanded of those who waved a flag of perfect and eternal victimhood.

The inability or refusal to process trauma, both real and imagined and imagined is often worse, has created a Zionist Israeli Jewish culture which is incapable of relating humanely to those who are deemed to be other and incapable of recognising their own evil.

I think there are a number of reasons for this and the most powerful one is Zionism, an atheist, fascist political movement, which was founded on and functions in a belief in Jewish supremacy and victimhood.

Yes terrible things happened in WWII as they do in all Wars but most people process the trauma and get over it. If you live in a culture which is both religious and social which will not let you process and get over it and put the past and trauma behind you then psychological health will never be achieved. No doubt the tens of millions of non-Jews who experienced holocaust, the Gypsies and Slavs who died in the greatest numbers, might have contained some who could not process the trauma, but most did. Why did that not happen for Jews?

Think of any victim of trauma, real or imagined, who is encouraged to hold onto the trauma, to maintain that it is real and about to happen again and that no-one but your own group (cult) can be trusted and you must be on constant alert because you are surrounded by enemies who want to hurt you and kill you. How psychologically healthy would that person be? Could they raise psychologically healthy children if they believed the children had to be taught such things from birth? The simple answer is No.

And if the individual and the group (cult) brainwashes all children from birth to believe the same things then how healthy will that group/society be? It will inevitably be unhealthy in a range from moderately dysfunctional to dangerously psychotic if not maniacal. These are all qualities the world has seen emerging from the Zionist Israelis since October 7. Well, they were there before but not seen by as many.

We know from research that imagining, remembering and experiencing trigger the same physiological responses. And this is an important distinction because those who did experience trauma in a holocaust experience in WWII, had real memories which they then handed down to their children, as imagined experiences, unconsciously as well as consciously, and those children handed down the beliefs about trauma and holocaust to their children, in an enduring imagined suffering.

Dissociation is the result of trauma, As Bessel Van Der Kolk, psychiatrist and trauma researcher says in The Body Keeps the Score:

Dissociation is the essence of trauma. The overwhelming experience is split off and fragmented, so that the emotions, sounds, images, thoughts and physical sensations related to the trauma take on a life of their own. The sensory fragments of memory intrude into the present, where they are literally relieved.

I would argue, a memory can be something handed down through family, religion, society and culture and does not have to be a literal memory for each individual. Our beliefs create what biologist Rupert Sheldrake has called, morphogenetic fields which are handed down from generation to generation, through any group mindset, whether religious, social, cultural or national. With the ‘help’ of Zionism there was no way the Israelis or many Jews were ever going to have the chance to process trauma associated with the religion and for some, their family or ancestors, in any healthy way.

As long as the trauma is not resolved, says Dr Van Der Kolk, the stress hormones that the body secretes to protect itself keep circulating, and the defensive movements and emotional responses keep getting replayed. However, many people may not be aware of the connection between their ‘crazy’ feelings and reactions and the traumatic events which are being replayed. They have no idea why they respond to some minor irritation as if they were about to be annihilated.

This is the reality of life for Israeli Jews and to a lesser degree, the reality of life for many Jews living safely around the world who had no family experience of WWII persecution. Centuries of belief in persecution and yes, sometimes real but also sometimes religious dogma and therefore imagined, from the religion of Judaism was fertile soil for the Zionist holocaust programming since World War Two.

In short, Zionism has exploited Judaic teachings of persecution and ensured that Israelis remain caught in a time-warp of trauma, real for very few and imagined for most because the Jewish experience of holocaust is now nearly a century in the past. There is a belief system which Zionism created in cult-like form which has influenced Jews for more than a century. To that end the Nazis were a gift and indeed, according to the records, one the Zionists appreciated at the time. They were working with the Nazis to get Jews out of Germany and into Palestine as colonists but, when they realised a lot of Jews were being killed they slowed things down because dead Jews were a far more powerful promotion for their colonial agenda than live ones. After all, the Zionists had been promoting the threat of 6 million Jews dying in Europe from 1900, if their plans to set up a Jewish State in Palestine were not supported. Jews in Germany might die, they no doubt reasoned, but there were millions of Jews in the world who could be co-opted as colonists in Palestine.

There was also a common attitude among the Zionists that the European Jews were to be despised because they had not fought back and their weakness would compromise the strength of their future State. This attitude also laid the foundation for a foundational Israeli myth, that the only way to be safe is to be feared and to hit your enemies hard and harder until they quake in fear and terror at your existence. It was and is all very Biblical where might is right rules.

In psychological terms none of that is ever going to be healthy or to create mentally healthy human beings. But the Zionist goal was not about healthy human beings, in the way, ironically that a Nazi goal was. Rather it was about power and Jewish supremacy as an elite group of human beings.

What you believe is what you imagine and that has a physiological effect on the body and the brain.

Imagination is a form of self-deceit—a good portion of your brain reacts to your motor activity in the same way, whether the muscles are moving or not. https://nautil.us/just-imagining-a-workout-can-make-you-stronger-236068/

It also explains why Jews living safely far, far away have this paranoid commitment to the State of Israel. It is their irrational 'escape option.' Well it isn't, but they believe it is and such belief systems are not rational and that is why it is so hard to reason with the Israelis and their supporters. Fear is never rational. So, regardless of what horrors Zionist Israel commits, its existence unconsciously, makes many Jews feel safe.

Such programming over centuries and more intensively since World War Two, has an impact on the ability of many Jews to interpret situations rationally and to logically interpret whether a situation is dangerous or safe. This would explain the high level of visceral irrational responses from most Israelis and many Jews. We need to remember there are exceptions but they are small in number. Well, they have been until the current genocide.

It would also explain the powerful hatred Israelis have of Palestinians for every sight or sound of them would trigger a trauma response. While most Israelis do not see or hear Palestinians they are exposed to non-Jews, Palestinians, who live in what is called Israel and even more exposed to non-Jews, the enemy, in Occupied Palestine. The hysterical violence of the illegal Jewish colonists can also be explained by this dysfunction.

All that is then needed is a high level of denial to prevent any reality intruding into the fantasy. The great psychiatrist, Carl Jung could have written the story of Israel from the time the state was invented in 1947.

The more invested we are in a belief in our goodness then the less able we will be to recognise our own evil. This is why it is relatively common for religious leaders to find themselves destroyed by acts which could be deemed evil at worst and hypocritically foolish at best. While they live out the good, they believe themselves to be, the evil will be brewing quietly away in the unconscious until eventually, the pressure builds and out it all comes.

Such separation and division of mind and self means we cannot be or become whole. We are a split personality where what we think we are and what we are, have no common ground. We believe we are good; we believe we are right; we believe we are noble and yet our actions say the opposite. Actions not only speak louder than words they also have a far greater capacity for evil. The sadistic bestiality of our words is nothing compared to those qualities in action.

If you want to know who you are, look at what you do and how you act rather than what you believe or think you are.

“A human being is part of the whole, called by us the UNIVERSE,  a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely but the striving for such achievement, is in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.” Albert Einstein.

If Zionist Israel had been true to the best of Judaism, this would have been the reality of the colonial state as Einstein so well describes. But Zionism was founded by atheists as a political movement with fascist tendencies and a racist colonialist attitude. It was and is the opposite of Judaic ethos.

But, even as Zionists rejected the God of the Jews and the religion of Judaism, they embraced the belief that the God in which they did not believe, gave them Palestine. Needs must. And of course, Zionism needed money to make its colonial project become a reality and so Jews had to be brought on board. Many Orthodox Jews rejected Zionism from the beginning and a literal State of Israel, born from what was only ever religious metaphor and many still do.

But most Jews did not and do not. Without the support of Jews around the world the Zionist plan to take Palestine would never have succeeded. It was always necessary to bring the Jews along because after all, without it, there was no project and not enough money, to re-invent the ancient tribal kingdom of Israel. In the aftermath of WWII many Jews could be forgiven for believing in the fantasy of Zionist Israel and even in its necessity.

The Jews could not be co-opted into the Zionist plan without them being made to believe that a Jewish State was necessary for their survival. In other words, Fear was a key factor in the colonial project and it had to be enduring fear. There could be no processing the horrors of WWII and such persecution and suffering had to be kept alive, if Jews were to remain on board as the Zionist entity waged its campaign of permanent war in the name of power.

One could argue that Zionism has had a cult-like effect on Jews and the brainwashing, while more potent for Israelis, has been profoundly powerful for Jews around the world. Zionism seduced Jews living safely and happily in countries around the world into the fantasy that Jews needed a ‘safe house,’ their own State, to which they could flee if needed. Some Jews have divested themselves from Zionist Israel along the way and some never invested in it, but most did and most have supported, by omission and commission, the atrocities committed by Zionist Israel for nearly 80 years. Denial is not a river in Egypt.

Such a belief system is sourced in fear and again, largely unconscious. Most Jews supporting Israel would talk about the dream of the State with little knowledge or understanding of the hideous reality of the colonial occupation regime. The fact is, they did not want to know. Those who did know were horrified as one dear Jewish friend, then in her Seventies, once said to me, 20 years ago. She despised what Israel was and its betrayal of all it was meant to be. All it claimed to be and all it should have been.

But Zionism ensured that any trauma Jews suffered, whether real or imagined, would not be processed in healthy ways but would become a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

A person with PTSD has four main types of difficulties:

•        Re-living the traumatic event through unwanted and recurring memories, flashbacks, or vivid nightmares. Or in the case of Israelis and Jews, re-living the trauma whether real or imagined through recurring stories, statements, and social conditioning.

•        They may feel numb, empty, or detached.

•        Negative changes in feelings and thoughts, such as feeling angry, afraid, guilty, flat, or numb, developing beliefs such as “The world’s unsafe,” and feeling cut off from others. In the case of the Israelis in particular being cut off from the native people whose land they have stolen and whom they must maintain as an enemy.

Being overly alert or ‘wound up’ indicated by sleeping difficulties, irritability, lack of concentration, becoming easily startled and constantly being on the lookout for signs of danger.

The Zionist State was founded in a belief that it was necessary to be constantly on the lookout for signs of danger and that Israelis would never be safe until all Palestinians were either exterminated or expelled.

Some might ask why, if this was the case, more effort did not go into exterminating or expelling the Palestinians? Since WWII exterminating millions of people is a bad look and even the Israelis could not get away with it so they worked on expelling by making life so unbearable that Palestinians would leave. Many did, on top of the 800,000 driven out in 1947/48 but many did not, having learned in the Nakba that once you left you would never be allowed to return.

So, while the Israelis worked hard at occupying and continuing to colonise all of Palestine, they also worked hard at keeping their sadistic treatment of the Palestinians quiet. What the world did not know, assuming the world cared, would only hurt the Palestinians and Israelis and their supporters did not care about them.

But why have so many Jews gone along with these atrocities given how many of them make pilgrimages to what is called Israel and even into Palestine? Most do very well- organised tours and quickly learn that you do not ask questions or challenge the Israelis in any way. And in truth, most want the Disneyland holiday in an Israel which appears to fit neatly into their fantasy. We humans have a great capacity to find that for which we seek. If you go to Israel and avoid the Palestinians, you too can find the dream which your unconscious tells you must exist.

We are also nothing if not self-serving and if a group, religion, culture teaches members they are forever at risk because clearly the rest of the world hates Jews and look what the Nazis did and it could happen again, and therefore, one safe place for Jews in the world is a must, then who is going to look too closely or ask too many questions about that so-called safe place? And if the people who suffer to make your safe place a reality, that can be dismissed as collateral damage involving inferiors who, according to your religion, have no right to be there in the first place.

It is the idea of it which has seeped into the mind of many Jews. They like the idea of an Israel to which they can flee if they need, regardless of the atrocities the State commits, and commits in their name, because it makes them feel safer.

Yes, it is a pity about the Palestinians but, they argue, after all, God gave them the land and the Palestinians are interlopers who should not be there. No doubt there are variations on this theme but, in essence, most Jews who support Israel do so because of their own selfish and irrational self-interest. The fact they are betraying the best of their religion and core principles of humanity are buried deep in the unconscious where the light of reason is not going to shine.

And so we see, Jews around the world, most of them, supporting a truly sadistic and bestial genocide in Palestine because they are incapable of completing the task as Einstein advised:

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

A wide circle of compassion would see the occupation ended, all Palestinians made citizens of one State where the European colonists who call themselves Israelis share Palestine with the native people in a democracy where religion is secondary to citizenship.