UNDER SIEGE:

Israel's Deadly Delusions a review of THE OSLO SYNDROME: Delusions of a People Under Siege By Kenneth Levin (Edward Alexander, June 13, 2005, NY Post)

In this massively researched, lucidly written and cogently argued narrative, Kenneth Levin tells the appalling story of what has been called the greatest self-inflicted wound of political history: Israel's embrace of Yasser Arafat and the PLO in the Oslo Accords of September 1993 and its dogged adherence to its obligations under them even as its "peace partner" was blatantly flouting its own.

The book is divided into two sections. The first recounts Jewish political failure in the Diaspora, where Jews lived with a constant burden of peril, as the background for the self-deluding rationales that engendered Oslo. The second traces the same self-delusions in the history of Israel itself.

Levin shows how a tiny nation, living under constant siege by neighbors who have declared its very existence an aggression, was induced by its intellectual classes to believe that its own misdeeds had incited Arab hatred and violence, and that what required reform was not Arab dictatorship and Islamicist anti-Semitism, but the Jews themselves.

That core idea is the most compelling feature of the book, that Jews have throughout their history fallen prey to the idea that they could escape the hatreds of their enemies by changing their own behaviors. In essence this requires them to treat themselves as enemies too.

MORE:
The Oslo Syndrome (Jamie Glazov, November 25, 2005, FrontPageMagazine.com)

Frontpage Interview's guest today is Kenneth Levin, a clinical instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a Princeton-trained historian, and a commentator on Israeli politics. He is the author of the new book The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege. [...]

FP: What inspired you to write this book?

Levin: It was obvious to me at the start, as it was to many others, that the Oslo agreements could only lead to disaster. I said as much in a Jerusalem Post op.ed. a few days before the 1993 signing of the first accords on the White House lawn. That there was something very deluded about the thinking of Israel's leaders and their pro-Oslo constituency became more evident as Oslo proceeded. Arafat and his Palestinian Authority immediately used their media, mosques and schools to promote hatred of Israel and violence against Jews and continued to make clear their objective remained Israel's destruction. The level of terrorism increased to unprecedented dimensions. Yet Israel responded with more concessions.

During this period, there were many cogent critiques of the Oslo process. But none addressed why Israel's leaders, supported by the nation's academic and cultural elites and much of the broader population, were pursuing a course that was demonstrably placing the nation, including their own families, at dire risk. It seemed to me then, as it does now, that, given the irrationality of Israel's course, the explanation had to lie in the realm of psychopathology.

Israel's Oslo diplomacy was also reminiscent of aspects of the political life of Diaspora Jewish communities that likewise reflected a self-destructiveness inexplicable except in psychiatric terms.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 17, 2005 6:58 AM