My friend: their 'echo chamber' is 2000-3000 year old! Over the millennia, they have become paranoid and internalized victimhood, on top of some superiority complex over all other. And they have been extremely smug because they know they have the world's military and economic Superpower and its powerful, rich allies blindly supporting Israel.
If the Israelis had tried to change their mindset and had seen that Egypt and Jordan have held peace with them for decades and that by territorial concessions to Lebanon and Syria, they could have added two more friendly neighbors. The Muslim world, like most of the world, is basically a world where people want peace and prosperity.
The Israelis could have offered Palestinians a binational state with dignified existence for all. Palestinians are not some backward people. Their outlook is for progress and well being of their fellows citizens. The Palestinians are a sharp contrast to the mindset like those of the Taliban but Israelis, in order to justify landgrab and subjugation, have framed the Palestinians in really wrong way.
I first we have to differentiate Israelis and Jewish people at large, as the New York Times interviewer, being an American person of Jewish heritage, took a while to come around to accept some, not all of the Israeli commentators point of view.
Second, we don’t have to have to go back thousands of years, because that would be too broad and risk stereotypes. Going further back then the Jewish emancipation in Europe; before which they expected to live like little better then peasants (as in the movie Yentl, in the “Pale of settlement” in Poland and Russia) in a Europe where most people were peasants, but since emancipation, Jewish people were suppose to be judged as individuals and no longer collectively is a better place to look. They played by the rules in a continent benefiting from unprecedented economic growth based on the Industrial Revolution and colonialism. It was from this wealth, many people funded the Zionist project, and from the wealth earned in the west that they can keep independently supporting the Zionist projected, more so than any other country in history.
Zionism was a movement of primarily European Jewish people (supported by European guilt for their crimes) as a response to the pogroms in Europe. Jewish people for all those years made the most of their restrictions in Europe to move up the human development index.
It is now, that the world and especially Europe will no longer subsidies the Israel project that the Israeli are shifting to the right. The early Zionist were very blunt, where they called themselves “a settler colonial state”. It was only the PR for the past 50 years, where they made the western public’s try to ignore it.
They are just removing the velvet glove off the fist that was always there, and will try to show they have put it back on when they can extract something some from the Arab leaders, that seem more than happy to give their support for basically preferential access to western tech and financing.
B52 at Incirlik base in southern Turkey.
