Israel's deadly fear and its inevitable end

Israel's aggression and expansionism, its practice of establishing new Jewish settlements, its violations in Palestine, and its attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque are not exceptional or abandonable practices for it. Unfortunately, the ceasefire agreement it accepted as a result of its latest attacks, which ended in a rout, does not show that it may change its policy on this matter from now on. Because all these practices of Israel are practices demanded by the interpretation of Judaism it believes in, by Zionism.

Let us nevertheless separate the essence of Judaism from this interpretation of it, but for today the official policy of the State of Israel is this interpretation of Judaism. There is also a certain Jewish population that does not agree with this interpretation, but unfortunately it is steadily diminishing. Israel is now governed by an understanding that does not even count as Jews those who do not believe in Zionism, that is, in a Zionism that requires hatred of other people and racism, and that deems it permissible, if necessary, to destroy, exclude and expel all people from their homes and lands in order to reach the Zion that they believe has been promised to them in the book. That is why in the US those who criticize this dangerous belief can immediately be deemed enemies of the Jews and treated virtually as criminals against humanity.

Yet this belief itself amounts to committing a crime against humanity. This is a dangerous ideology that you cannot brush aside by saying it is a belief. It is plain what kind of instability a belief that instills racism and rancor and hatred against those belonging to other faiths is dragging the Middle East, and through the Middle East the whole world, into today. While even those who cry out in desperation and criticize Zionism precisely because of this, because it hurts them, are immediately subjected to the accusation of enmity toward Jews, in street interviews conducted on the streets of Israel, all those who speak, young and old, women and men, express virtually in a consensus that "Muslims and Arabs are dangerous and must be destroyed at the first opportunity."

That is, it is a fact that, although Muslims are never enemies of the Jews, the streets of Israel are full of enemies of Muslims. Moreover, they cite their fears as an excuse for this enmity. Because they think all Arab Muslims are terrorists and fear this, they say with a grin that all of them, children and old people alike, must be destroyed. The sole party responsible for the formation of this spiral of rancor, hatred and fear is of course Israel's state policies.

Selahaddin Eş Çakırgil, in his latest article, expressed in a very striking way the formula that makes Israel's habitual aggression a self-renewing culture: "the more they fear, the more they kill, and the more they kill, the more they fear; what is left to them is their shame."

Perhaps what has now become superfluous in this formula is the last sentence: the expression "what is left to them is their shame." Israel is ashamed of nothing. But it is clearly afraid. The more it fears, the more it kills. It kills the one it fears. It can easily kill him; it kills its enemy, who is the one who should really fear its deadly hatred, who has more right to fear.

There is in fact a more real reason for the Palestinian to fear Israel. For these are by no means symmetrical forces when they meet. On one side is an Israel that has turned into a monster of systematic and mass killing. On the other is the Palestinian, who is constantly killed, driven from his home and land, condemned to live in material misery, unable to move as he wishes, with no human need met. The Palestinian who only tries to hold on to his own land, who resists for this, and whose resistance, even so, can lead to an extremely disproportionate effect.

Even so, he frightens. He is able to frighten. Because whatever Israel has relied on and trusted until now leaves a very dark void in its own heart, its own soul and its own spirit. Into this void the stones thrown by the Palestinian child leave, in all their terror, great landslides and earthquakes. Those tiny children, the eyes of the little girls who smile against the violence inflicted on them, frighten the death machine Israel even more; the more it fears, the more it kills, and the more it kills, the more it fears.

I tried to explain at length, with examples from Turkish and world history and with sociological analyses, in my book titled Fear and Power (Pınar Yayınları, 2010), how the balance of fear and power turns into a paranoia, especially in those in power, and how that paranoia turns around and strikes them. The best-known example of the violence this fear leads to is the deadly measures Pharaoh took against a child who would be born of the Children of Israel and threaten him. Although he killed all the male children who were born, a Moses from that people was quietly placed by God in Pharaoh's palace and brought upon Pharaoh what he feared.

Today, that what it fears should befall the State of Israel, which lives with this fear, is its inevitable fate. With this fear and the vicious circle it has been caught in, Israel is preparing nothing other than its own end.

Look, an Islamic world that had become unable to come together on any other occasion, an Islamic world that had even forgotten the fact that it is "one world" and neglected its requirements, remembers precisely because of Israel, thanks to this aggression of Israel, that it is "one world." The intense diplomatic traffic conducted by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan since the last days of Ramadan, and the demonstrations held everywhere in the Islamic world, and even in the US and European countries, because of Israeli aggression, show at least that the pulse of an Islamic world over which a deadening hush had been spread has begun to beat again. The revival of this world is also precisely ordained on the occasion of this oppression, as a requirement of this oppression. This is the way the divine sunnah works.