Depicting the Jew Is a Dangerous Game

In their momentous struggle against Zionism, Middle Eastern mass societies sought self-actualization but descended into madness. 

A Hegelian view of history permeated and shaped Arab thought in the early 20th century, placing fateful dialectical struggle at the center of how mass societies in the Middle East could achieve self-actualization. The “historical protagonist… with a transcendent salvific mission inside history” would find the object of his struggle in the most salient threat to his preferences: Zionism, whose material goal of Jewish sovereignty in his midst jeopardized the protagonist’s conception of himself as dominant.

But there was a problem. For centuries, this protagonist’s common depiction of the Jew was of a weak, pathetic loser who merited contempt. On its own, this depiction was insufficient for the new struggle. A dialectical struggle is only meaningful if the enemy is powerful, and Jews – whose prominent role in advancing Zionism was recognized and underscored by proponents of such a struggle – had long been portrayed as the very opposite of powerful.

For the fight against Zionism to serve Arab and Muslim self-actualization, the Middle East’s attitude towards the Jew would need to expand beyond centuries-old mockery, as Yisrael Ne’eman writes in Hamas Jihad, “of a scheming coward who would never succeed in his plots.” Longstanding disdain for the Jews would be fused with a new emphasis on them being “a rising and oppressive evil.” 

It may seem contradictory to characterize an enemy as both clumsy and formidable. All the same, it hits the mark for mobilizing mass society. Defeating an ostensibly strong enemy brings redemption, and behold, as it happens, the enemy is weak (as Hassan Nasrallah said, “weaker than a spider’s web”), so success is all but guaranteed. Partaking in the struggle secures for oneself meaning and power in a single stroke.

And so societies across the region fused their own understandings of the Jew with more European varieties. From The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the Nazis’ Der Stürmer, the image of the Jew as a string-pulling oppressor became household in the Middle East. In enabling momentous struggle, the newly diversified depiction of the Jews as both object of derision and menacing persecutor became the foremost mechanism by which the region’s mass societies mobilized. 

In the decades that followed, many Arabs and non-Arabs would push forward iterations of the struggle against the Jews under the banner of Palestine. These iterations, rooted in Arab nationalism, Marxism, Islamism and post-modern neo-Marxism, kept the Palestinian national cause focused solely on eliminating Jewish sovereignty. They also plunged much of the Middle East into the backward, rage-fueled dumpster fires we see today. 

Consider what the aforementioned dual depiction does to a societal psyche when victory over the Jews proves elusive. Each humiliating setback supposedly confirms that the Jews are a terrible oppressive force. This in turn makes victory over them seem like more of a silver bullet for self-actualization. The struggle against Zionism thus becomes both more necessary and more tantalizing. “Knowing the Jews are sovereign here keeps us up at night, but oh how well we will sleep after we crush them!” The harder the struggle, the sweeter the victory.

It should come as no surprise that societies bent on waging this struggle spiral out of control. Maddened by failure but ever-convinced that victory is inevitable and even imminent, they forgo even the slightest introspection, choosing instead to blame everyone but themselves for their humiliations. Each delusion breeds dysfunction and ineptness. This leads to more delusions, which in turn exacerbate the dysfunction and ineptness. With no safety net or rock bottom, the cesspool of narcissism gets deeper and deeper, reaching ever-new depths.