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By Laurent Guyénot − October 2023

I’m tired of reading that Netanyahu is a psychopath. I see no reason to consider him a psychopath in the psychiatric sense, any more than any other Israeli leader. They have a collective psychopathy, which is very different.

The difference is the same as between a personal neurosis and a collective neurosis. According to Freud, religion (he meant Christianity) is a collective neurosis. Freud did not mean that believers were neurotic. On the contrary, he observed that their collective neurosis tended to immunize them against personal neurosis ¹ . I don’t subscribe to Freud’s theory; I just use it as support for my own theory: Zionists, even the most bloodthirsty of them, are not individual psychopaths. Many of them are loving and even dedicated people within their own communities. Rather, they are vectors of collective psychopathy, that is to say, an inhuman way of considering and interacting with other human communities.

This is a crucial point. Calling Israeli leaders psychopaths does nothing to help our understanding of Israel. What we need is to recognize Israel as a collective psychopath and study the origin of this unique national character. It is a matter of survival for the world, just as it is a matter of survival for any group to identify the psychopath among them and understand their thought and behavior patterns.

What is a psychopath?

Psychopathy is a syndrome of psychological traits classified as a personality disorder ² . Some psychiatrists prefer to call it  “sociopathy”  because it is essentially an inability to socialize authentically. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual on Mental Disorders , the bible in the United States for psychiatrists, suggests “antisocial personality disorder,” but the term  “psychopathy”  remains the most popular, which is why I use it. will use here.

The fundamental character trait of the psychopath is the absence of the capacity for empathy and, consequently, the absence of any moral inhibition in his relationship with others, combined with a thirst for power.

The psychopath also shares certain traits with the narcissist : he has a grandiose vision of his own importance.

In his mind, everything is due to him because he is exceptional.

He is never wrong — and so his failures are always the fault of others.

The truth has no value to the psychopath. He is a pathological liar, but he is hardly aware of it.

Lying is so natural to him that the question of his  “sincerity”  is almost irrelevant: the psychopath beats the lie detector.

The psychopath is incapable of showing empathy, but he learns to fake it. His power lies in his extraordinary ability to deceive. Although he himself is immune to guilt, he is a master in the art of making others feel guilty.

Because the psychopath is unable to put himself in anyone else’s shoes, he cannot look at himself critically. Convinced of his right in all circumstances, he is truly surprised by the resentment of his victims – and will punish them for it. If he steals someone’s property, he will consider the resentment of those robbed as irrational hatred.

Although the psychopath can be considered completely crazy, he is not sick in the medical sense of the term, since he does not suffer: psychopaths do not consult psychiatrists unless they are forced to do so.

In a certain sense, the psychopath is over-adapted to social life, if the goal of social life is to chart his individual path. This is why the real mystery, from a Darwinian point of view, is not the existence of psychopaths, but their low proportion in the population. The most optimistic estimate for the Western population is 1%. But psychopaths are not to be confused with the proverbial 1% who own half the world’s wealth, even though a study of top executives of large companies showed that psychopathic traits are widespread among them ³ .

Israel as a psychopathic state

The fact that Jews are today disproportionately represented among the economic elite (they form half of American billionaires, while they represent only 2.4% of the population), does not mean that the psychopathy is more prevalent among Jews.

In a way, it is quite the opposite: Jews show a high degree of empathy, or at least solidarity, among themselves, often to the point of self-sacrifice. But the selective nature of this empathy suggests that it is addressed less to the humanity of others than to their Jewishness.

In fact, Jewish thought tends to confuse Jewishness and humanity. It follows that what is good for the Jews must necessarily be good for humanity. Conversely, a crime against Jews is a  “crime against humanity” , a concept they created in 1945. Confusing Jewishness and humanity might just be collective narcissism, but considering non-Jews as less than human is a clear symptom of collective psychopathy.

As a community, Jews consider themselves innocent of the accusations against them. This is why the Zionist pioneer Leo Pinsker, a doctor by training, considered Judeophobia to be a  “psychosis” .

“As a psychosis, it is hereditary, and as a disease passed down for two thousand years, it is incurable. »

Consequently, Jews are  “the people chosen by universal hatred”  (even atheist Jews cannot help but define Jewishness as a  chosen-ness) ⁴ .

Israel, the Jewish state, is the psychopath among nations. He acts towards other nations in the same way that a psychopath acts towards his fellow men.

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“Only psychiatrists can explain Israel’s behavior ,” Israeli journalist Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz in 2010.

However, his diagnosis, including  “paranoia, schizophrenia and megalomania” , is incorrect ⁵ . Given Israel’s unlimited ability to manipulate other nations, primarily the United States, we are dealing with a psychopath.

In drawing a parallel between psychopathy and Israel’s behavior, I am not blaming Israelis or Jews as individuals. They are only part of this collective psychopathy to the extent of their submission to the national ideology.

We can make a comparison with another kind of collective entity. In  The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power , Joel Bakan noted that large corporations behave like psychopaths, insensitive to the suffering of those they crush in their quest for profit:  “Corporate behavior is very similar to that of a psychopath ⁶ . »

My analysis of Israel is based on the same reasoning. Except that Israel is far more dangerous than any multinational corporation (even Pfizer), because the ideology that breeds its personality disorder is far more insane than a corporation’s liberal, social-Darwinian philosophy. Israel’s philosophy is biblical.

The biblical virus

Israel’s collective psychopathy is not genetic, it is cultural, but it was formed very ancient times, and it is therefore anchored in the ancestral subconscious (which is perhaps epigenetic): it comes ultimately of the jealous god invented by the Levites to control a few hungry tribes launched against Palestine about three thousand years ago.

By birth certificate, Israel is the nation of the psychopathic god.

Yahweh,  “the god of Israel” , is an angry and solitary god, emerging from a volcano in Arabia, who manifests implacable hatred towards all other gods, and ends up considering them as non-gods, he alone declaring himself the true god—and by implication, the creator of the Universe.

This very clearly characterizes him as a psychopath among the gods. On the contrary, for the Egyptians, according to the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann,  “the gods are social beings”  and harmony between them guarantees harmony in the cosmos. There was also a certain degree of translatability between the pantheons of different civilizations ⁷ .

But Yahweh taught the Hebrews a mortal hatred towards the deities of their neighbors:  “You will abolish all the places where the people you dispossess have served their gods, on the high mountains, on the hills, under every green tree. You will demolish their altars, break their steles; their sacred stakes you will burn, the carved images of their gods you will cut down, and you will destroy their name in this place”  (Deuteronomy 12:2-3).

Yahweh may be a fictional character, but his hold on the Jewish mind is nonetheless real. “To rely on a crazy and violent father, and for three thousand years, that’s what it is to be a crazy Jew! » said Smilesburger in Operation Shylock by Philip Roth ⁸ .

Yahweh taught the Jews to keep themselves strictly separate from others. Food prohibitions serve to prevent any socialization outside the tribe:  “I will set you apart from all these peoples so that you may be mine”  (Leviticus 20,26).

The nature of the Mosaic covenant is not moral. The only criterion for approval by Yahweh is obedience to his arbitrary laws and commandments.

Treacherously slaughtering hundreds of Baal’s prophets is good, because it is the will of Yahweh (1 Kings 18).

*** When all the people saw him, they immediately fell on their faces and said, “Yahweh is the true God!” Yahweh is the true God! 40 Then Elijah said to them, “Seize the prophets of Baal! Don’t let a single one of them escape! Immediately they seized them, and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon+ and slew them there.”

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Showing mercy to the king of the Amalekites is wrong, because when Yahweh says,  “kill them all , ” he really means  “all of them”  (1 Samuel 15).

In biblical historiography, the fate of the Jewish people depends on obedience to Yahweh’s orders, no matter how foolish they may be. And his misfortunes can only come from their lack of obedience to their god, never from the resentment of his victims. Because the victims have no will of their own; they are only instruments in the hands of the God of Israel.

If the Jews follow Yahweh’s command to alienate themselves from the rest of humanity, Yahweh promises in return to make them rule over humanity: ”  If you truly obey the voice of Yahweh your God, keeping and practicing all these commandments which I command you today, the LORD your God will exalt you above all the nations of the earth ”  (Deuteronomy 28,1).

Note that this is very similar to the pact that Satan proposed to Jesus:  “The devil shows him all the kingdoms of the world with their glory and says to him: “All this I will give you, if, prostrating yourself, you pay homage to me.”  (Matthew 4:8-9).

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***This is a great hint for the discerning reader. Yahweh can confer world domination, and so can Satan. So, by logic…..

Michelangelo depicts Moses with two horns…. which reminds us of WHOM else?

If Israel scrupulously follows the Law, Yahweh promises to subject all nations to Israel’s dominion and to destroy those who resist him.

“Kings will bow down to you, they will lick the dust from your feet,”

while

“the nation and the kingdom that do not serve you will perish, and their people will be destroyed” (Isaiah 49:23 and 60:12).

The war code of Deuteronomy 20 commands the extermination of  “every living thing”  in the conquered cities of Canaan.

In practice, the rule extends to all peoples who resist the Israelites in their conquest. It was applied by Moses to the Midianites, although in this case Yahweh allowed his warriors to keep the young virgins (Numbers 31).

The same rule was applied by Joshua to the city of Jericho, where the rule is to slay “all that was in the city, men and women, young and old, even the bulls, the sheep and the donkeys” (Joshua 6:21).

In the town of Aï, the inhabitants were massacred  “until there was no longer a survivor or a survivor left. […] When Israel had finished killing all the inhabitants of Ai, in the field and in the desert where they had pursued them, and when every last one had fallen to the edge of the sword, all Israel returned to Ai and put the population to the edge of the sword”  (8.22-25).

Then came the turn of the other Canaanite cities. Throughout the land, Joshua  “left not a single survivor and condemned every living being to anathema, as Yahweh, the god of Israel, had commanded”  (10:40).

As Avigail Abarbanel notes in a text explaining why she renounced her Israeli citizenship, the Zionists  “followed to the letter the biblical command given to Joshua to go in and take everything. You killed, you expelled, raped, stole, burned and destroyed everything, and you replaced the population with your own people. […] For a so-called non-religious movement, it is extraordinary how Zionism […] followed the Bible ⁹ . »

Kim Chernin, another Israeli dissident, wrote,  “I cannot count the number of times I have read the story of Joshua as the story of our people coming into rightful possession of their promised land without stopping to think. say: “but it is a story of rape, pillage, massacre, invasion and destruction of other peoples.” ¹⁰  “

Yahweh offers only two possible paths to Israel: domination of other nations if Israel respects the terms of the alliance with Yahweh, or annihilation by these same nations if Israel breaks this alliance:

But if you happen to turn away and join yourself to the remnant of these people who still exist near you, to contract marriage with them, to mingle with them and they with you, then know well that Yahweh your God will cease to dispossess these people before you: they will be for you a snare, a snare, thorns in your sides and thistles in your eyes, until you disappear from this good soil which Yahweh your God had given you. (Joshua 23.12-13)

Dispossess others or be dispossessed, dominate or be exterminated: Israel cannot think beyond this alternative.

Zionism is biblical

What does this have to do with Zionism, you ask? Isn’t Zionism a secular ideology? I think it is high time to clear up this misunderstanding.

Zionism is a product of Jewishness, and Jewishness is rooted in the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh. Whether he has read it or not, whether he judges it historical or mythical, each Jew ultimately bases his Jewishness on the Bible. Jewishness is the internalization of the psychopathic god. It does not matter whether Jews define their Jewishness in religious terms or in ethnic terms. From a religious perspective, the Bible preserves the essence of the Covenant with God, while from a secular perspective, the Bible is the founding story of the Jewish people and the model by which Jews interpret all their later history (the Dispersion, the Holocaust, the rebirth of Israel, etc.).

It is true that Theodor Herzl, the prophet of political Zionism, was not openly inspired by the Bible. Yet he called his ideology “Zionism,” using a biblical name for Jerusalem. As for the post-Herzl Zionists and the true founders of the modern State of Israel, they were steeped in the Bible. “The Bible is our mandate , ” Chaim Weizmann declared in 1919, and in 1948 he presented Truman with a Torah scroll in gratitude for his recognition of Israel.

Thus begins the  Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel  :

ERETZ-ISRAEL [The land of Israel] is the place where the Jewish people were born. It was there that its spiritual, religious and national character was formed. It was there that he achieved his independence, created a culture that was both national and universal, and gifted the Bible to the entire world.

There can be no doubt that the modern State of Israel is founded on the claim of biblical heritage.

David Ben-Gurion, the father of the nation, had a biblical vision of the Jewish people. For him, according to his biographer Dan Kurzman, the rebirth of Israel in 1948  “was comparable to the exodus from Egypt, the conquest of the country by Joshua and the Maccabean revolt . ”

Ben-Gurion never went to a synagogue and ate pork for breakfast, yet he was steeped in biblical history. “There can be no valid political or military education about Israel without a thorough knowledge of the Bible ,” he said ¹¹ .

Tom Segev writes in his more recent biography:

He sponsored a Bible study course in his home and promoted two concepts to characterize the moral character of the State of Israel, as well as its destiny and duties to itself and the world: the first was the “people chosen,” a term coming from the covenant between God and the people of Israel (Exodus 19:5-6); the second was the commitment of the Jewish people to the principles of justice and peace which make them a “light to the nations”, in the spirit of the prophets (Isaiah 49:6). He frequently spoke and wrote about these ^concepts .

Ben-Gurion’s biblical mentality became more and more evident as he grew up. Consider, for example, the fact that while he begged Kennedy to allow his people to acquire the atomic bomb because the Egyptians wanted to exterminate them (as they had wanted to do in the time of Moses), he prophesied in Look magazine (January 16, 1962) that within twenty years, Jerusalem  “will be the seat of the Supreme Court of mankind, to settle all controversies between the united continents, as prophesied in Isaiah ¹³ . »  Ben-Gurion was not crazy, but simply biblical.

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Macron’s mother, Françoise Noguès

Françoise with her husband, Jean-Michel Noguès

 

Almost all Israeli leaders from Ben-Gurion’s generation and the next share the same biblical mindset. Moshe Dayan, the military hero of the 1967 Six-Day War, justified his annexation of new territory in a book called Living with the Bible (1978).

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Naftali Bennett, then Israeli Minister of Education, also justified the annexation of the West Bank by the Bible ¹⁴ . Zionists can find in the Bible all the justification they need: for Gaza, they have Judges 1:18-19:  “Then Judah took possession of Gaza and its territory, […] And Yahweh was with Judah who made master of the Mountain, but he could not dispossess the inhabitants of the plain, because they had iron chariots. »

There are now Bible crazy people in the Israeli government, like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. “  God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people  ”  is the alpha and omega of Zionism, not only for Israelis, but also for Christians who, since 1917, have supported the Jewish claim and support Israel today today.

Even more than Ben-Gurion, Benjamin Netanyahu thinks biblically, and this becomes increasingly clear as he gets older. He also knows that American Christians cannot seriously dispute biblical claims.

On March 3, 2015, he dramatized his phobia of Iran before the American Congress by referring to the Book of Esther (although recognized as pure fiction):

 We are an ancient people. Throughout our nearly 4,000 years of history, many have repeatedly attempted to destroy the Jewish people. Tomorrow evening, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, we will read the Book of Esther. We’ll talk about a powerful Persian viceroy named Haman, who plotted to destroy the Jewish people about 2,500 years ago. But a courageous Jewish woman, Queen Esther, denounced the plot and gave the Jewish people the right to defend themselves against their enemies. The plot was foiled. Our people have been saved. Today, the Jewish people face yet another attempt by another Persian potentate to destroy ^us .

Netanyahu had scheduled his speech the day before Purim, which celebrates the happy ending of the Book of Esther: the massacre of 75,000 Persian men, women and children.

In 2019, Netanyahu  said  during a tour of the West Bank:  “I believe in the Book of Books and I read it as a call to action that every generation must do what it can to ensure the eternity of Israel. »

The Bible takes up so much of his brain that he wants  to put a Bible on the Moon  !

As recently as October 25, Netanyahu declared to his people:  “  We will fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah.  »

So please stop calling Netanyahu a psychopath. Call him a biblical psychopath, a worshiper of the psychopathic god. And while you’re at it, learn to see the Hebrew Bible for what it is:  “a conspiracy against the rest of the world ,” as HG Wells said. In the books of the Bible,  “you have the conspiracy clear and clear, […] an aggressive and vindictive conspiracy. […] It is not tolerance but stupidity to turn a blind eye to their quality ^16. ”

Yes, the Hebrew Bible justifies in the eyes of Israeli elites their treatment of Palestinians in Gaza. God himself, they think, commands them to inflict such treatment on those they have dispossessed of their land.

Yitzhak Shamir, prime minister between 1986 and 1992, stated this very clearly in 1943:

“Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral scruples with regard to our national war.

We have before us the commandment of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of law in the world:

“You will exterminate them to the last man.” ¹⁷  “

Laurent Guyénot

Notes