Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder-A Glimpse Into Israeli Collective Psychosis

DIAGNOSIS AND SHARP WIT BY
Gilad Atzmon

"Indeed, a growing number of people want to see an end to Israel, the ‘Jew Only State’. Yet, no one around expresses any murderous or terminal plans against world Jewry or even against their Jewish State. No one in the political or the media spheres is calling for a homicidal act against the Jews or their Jewish State. Thus the well-established Judeocentric tendency to interpret almost any legitimate political and ideological criticism as a perpetration of an upcoming Judeocide should be comprehended as a severe form of paranoia verging on collective psychosis, which I define as Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Pre-TSD).

Within the condition of the Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the stress is the outcome of a phantasmic event, an imaginary episode set in the future; an event that has never taken place. Unlike the PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) in which stress comes as the direct reaction to an event that (may) have taken place in the past, within the state of Pre-TSD, the stress is the clearly the outcome of an imaginary potential event. Within the Pre-TSD, an illusion pre-empts reality and the condition in which the fantasy of terror is focussed is itself becoming grave reality. If it is taken to extremes, even an agenda of total war against the rest of the world is not an unthinkable reaction.

Let us face it once and for all. Since no one voices a call to throw the Israelis into the sea or to nuke them instead, one is entitled to argue that the Israeli inclination to blame Muslims and Arabs for holding such murderous tendencies themselves must be understood in terms of projection. The people who rained Lebanon with ‘more than a million cluster bombs’ are projecting their murderous zeal onto their victims and even onto their victims to come.

This is indeed very sad but far from being unique. The case of America’s Cold War paranoia is not that different from the case of Israel. Since America was the first and so far, the only country to use the atomic bomb against other people, it was the Americans who were actually caught in a cold war Pre-TSD. They simply projected their collective murderous tendencies onto the Soviets.

Other early Zionists were stimulated by some East European anti-Jewish riots and pogroms. In general, Zionism can be realised as an urge to formulate a general political agenda based on self-inflicting fright. This is probably why Zionism must maintain terror in order to sustain its power. It is evident that Bush and the Neocons use exactly the same tactic. "