Ilan Pappe
The Electronic Intifada
18 April 2012
"Spending a week in Israel these days is like being trapped within a scene from the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Like Jack Nicholson in the lead role of that classic film, you might not be insane but the doctors and nurses who run the psychiatric ward manufacture every few minutes a collective hysteria to keep everyone in the grip of fear and hatred. Everyone is an enemy, every a visitor an existential threat.....
Advanced stage of disease
The Electronic Intifada
18 April 2012
"Spending a week in Israel these days is like being trapped within a scene from the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Like Jack Nicholson in the lead role of that classic film, you might not be insane but the doctors and nurses who run the psychiatric ward manufacture every few minutes a collective hysteria to keep everyone in the grip of fear and hatred. Everyone is an enemy, every a visitor an existential threat.....
Advanced stage of disease
But Israel in 2012 is in a far more severe and advanced stage of the disease, whether the one imagined by Orwell in 1984, reported by Peled about 1967 or summarized historically by Feldman in the US in 2012.
The hysteria manufactured in Israel has become a constant state of mind and nothing less than a strategy. Its main purpose is to keep both the Israeli Jewish and Palestinian populations within a certain, permanent, anxious existence. The Palestinian population under occupation is denied contact with those who want to show solidarity with their plight, so that the ghettoization of the West Bank would be as effective as the one achieved in the Gaza Strip by a military siege, and yet at the same time would not be too bothersome for the international allies of the Jewish state.
Life there has to be oppressive enough to encourage people to leave or to remain jailed in the largest mega-prison on earth, but more seemingly plausible so as to discourage another uprising.
The hysteria manufactured in Israel has become a constant state of mind and nothing less than a strategy. Its main purpose is to keep both the Israeli Jewish and Palestinian populations within a certain, permanent, anxious existence. The Palestinian population under occupation is denied contact with those who want to show solidarity with their plight, so that the ghettoization of the West Bank would be as effective as the one achieved in the Gaza Strip by a military siege, and yet at the same time would not be too bothersome for the international allies of the Jewish state.
Life there has to be oppressive enough to encourage people to leave or to remain jailed in the largest mega-prison on earth, but more seemingly plausible so as to discourage another uprising.
The Jewish population has to be constantly distracted from what pushed almost half a million of its members to protest massively in the streets of Tel Aviv last summer and continue to be oblivious to the oppression of the Palestinians on the one hand, and the growing global moral repugnance towards Israel, on the other......"
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