The Masada-Complex (2)

Part 1 of this essay can be found here.

Many scholars in public health and medicine in Israel also rejected the government policies in Israel during Corona, including Anat Gesser-Edelsburg and her team from Haifa University.

In July 2021, some 60 percent of the Israeli population did not trust the Netanyahu government and their relation to BioNtech and Pfizer. Already a year before, in September of 2020, a group of Israeli scholars warned against lockdowns. In January 2022, Israeli immunologist and professor Ehud Qimron attacked the Corona regime:

A leading Israeli immunologist has penned a scathing open letter slamming the government for its “failed” coronavirus response.

Writing for N12 News, Professor Ehud Qimron, head of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Tel Aviv University, accused the Israeli Ministry of Health of pursuing “destructive policies” for the past two years out of a “lust for power, budgets and control”.

In the wide-ranging opinion piece, Prof Qimron attacked the government over lockdowns, restrictions and vaccine mandates, alleging health authorities had ignored established epidemiological science and pandemic plans at the outset – and then refused to adjust policies in the face of real-world data.

In Germany, most activists in the pro-Israel camp ignored all these findings. They followed the irrational COVID policies and defamed all scholars, intellectuals and activists and some 10 million people in Germany alone, who were not vaccinated against that virus (but almost all of these people are vaccinated against other viruses, with real vaccines, and not treated with a “gene-therapy,” a word by the pharma industry and the big player Bayer from Germany itself, by the way).

But most people in that German pro-Israel camp were already before unwilling to criticize nationalism, racism and annexation policies in Israel. Many of them even supported Trump already in 2016/17.

Already then, they did not focus on the threat for Zionism deriving from irrationality, nationalism and racism.

Arieh Saposnik, Professor at the Ben-Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, wrote in 2022 in his book „Zionism’s Redemptions“:

From the Standpoint of the early twenty-first century, it appears to me that the greatest challenge faced by Zionism today, if it is to have any worthy meaning in the new century, is to transcend those – detractors and would-be supporters and leaders alike – who would make of Zionism little more than a xenophobic, exclusionary, militant chauvinism and rediscover within itself the humanistic liberationist movement and idea that it sought to be in so many of its historical manifestations and articulations.
(p. 208)

In my view, that is exactly what Michael Schiffer also has in mind in his TOI Blog.

However, when it comes to losing friends and allies, after Corona, the war in Ukraine was the next event which was huge and shocking.

Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, which violated international law, was a trigger for racism against all of Russia and Russians in Germany and Europe.

Instead of discussing the peace offers made by the autocratic ruler Putin in December 2021 and committing to at least not allowing Ukraine to become a NATO member, after the West had already broken its promise of February 1990 that NATO would not expand “not one inch” to the east if the GDR and the FRG were to unite (however that might happen) by allowing almost all other Eastern European states to join, the Germans in particular celebrated the agitation against Russia.

27 million Soviet citizens and Russians killed in World War II by Nazi Germany?

Historical responsibility of the Germans towards Russia? Ridiculous!

Peanuts compared to the beautiful monuments to Holocaust perpetrators that exist in Ukraine—smaller, but even more beautiful than the monument to “our” nationalist and ethnic patron Hermann the Cheruscan in Detmold/Bielefeld.

This is how the German political elites and politicians acted and agitated. Almost 100 percent of the pro-Israeli camp was staunchly in favor of poor Ukraine, using Selenskyii’s image as their profile picture on Facebook or X and decorating themselves on Instagram, TikTok, or on the windows of their shared apartments or chic old apartments with roof terraces with a small Ukrainian flag, no longer wanting to hear about political science, diplomatic history, or ideology-critical seminars. Weapons for Ukraine. “Turning point.” “Special fund” for the Bundeswehr, 100 billion and in the future up to 30 percent of the federal budget for the war ministry!

Yes, Germany will become a huge militaristic power in the near future. That is what they want. Germany has not even a border with Russia or the Russian Federation, but these maniacs truly fear Russia might attack Germany. That is completely insane and a conspiracy ideology, to say the least.

This is militarism as we have not heard it shouted in parliament, barracks, and talk shows since 1945, when they were still called something else. Everything for our Ukrainian friends. And above all for the tormented German soul since 1945. Only now can we truly be free and take revenge on “the” Russians. Finally. What a time!

Then, remember the diplomatic activism by then Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. He even took a plane on Shabbat – as a religious Jew – in order to reach a solution in Moscow or in Ukraine. He almost succeeded, as he has good contacts to both Putin and Selenskyii, taken the big Russian and Ukrainian communities in Israel, too.

And if Ukraine had listened to its critics and supporters alike – like Bennett -, it would have had hundreds of thousands fewer deaths and almost no loss of territory (except for Crimea), since, as is well known, such a peace agreement was on the table in April 2022 and everyone was in favor of it: Putin, Selenskyii, only the anti-communist capitalist agitator Boris Johnson from England, Panzer-Toni, and above all, almost the entire political elite in Germany—but at no point a majority of the population—did not want this, and so the war continues to this day.

But at least the pro-Israel scene continued to support Israel, which is something. At least.

After all, criticism of antisemitism also puts a stop sign in front of the nationalist noses of those proud Germans who are now once again brashly demanding that criticizing Israel would make “us Germans” truly free, even freer than shooting Russians – because the six million dead Jews still prevented “us” from criticizing Jews as well.

But the reverse conclusion is fatal: just because antisemites feel liberated when Germany voices criticism of its true friend Israel – and no rational person would really accuse the current or any of the last few federal governments of hating Israel – that does not mean that loud criticism should finally be voiced from a Zionist perspective.

And that is what Michael Schiffer is concerned with. He criticizes Israel from the perspective of an American Zionist Jew.

So what is the Masada complex? Michael Schiffer analyzes it:

The war in Gaza has revealed something deeply disturbing about what Israel has become under Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership – and about what American Jews like myself have enabled through decades of reflexive support and willful blindness. What we are witnessing is not just a military campaign gone awry, but the triumph of a destructive mythology, the Masada Complex: a siege mentality that glorifies victimhood, sanctifies self-destruction as heroism, and transforms every challenge into an existential battle that justifies any response, no matter how morally bankrupt.

And Schiffer’s self-reflection is something that is rarely heard from pro-Israel activists in Germany; they are simply incapable of such self-criticism and introspection in this country:

American Jews bear particular responsibility for this catastrophe. For decades, we have provided support for Israeli policies while insulating ourselves from their consequences. We have celebrated Israel’s achievements while ignoring its failures, donated billions to sustain settlements, while claiming ignorance of their purpose, and reflexively defended actions we would condemn if taken by any other nation.

This complicity has been enabled by our own version of the Masada Complex, a mythology that frames any criticism of Israel as disloyalty to Jewish survival, any expression of Palestinian humanity as betrayal of Jewish pain, and any call for justice as an invitation to another Holocaust. We have allowed trauma to become doctrine, turning the lessons of Jewish suffering into justification for Palestinian oppression.