Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/10/07/myth_and_madness_in_the_middle_east.php

Myth and Madness in the Middle East

Friday, October 7, 2005

Editor's Note: Dr. Kenneth Levin will be speaking in Dartmouth 105 on Monday, October 10 at 4:00 PM on his new book, The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege.

"Education is to guide man in the evolving dynamism through which he shapes himself as a human person...while at the same time conveying to him the spiritual heritage of the nation and the civilization in which he is involved, and preserving in this way the century-old achievements of generations."
—Jacques Maritain

Kenneth Levin, a clinical instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, has written a book that all at once feels grand, self-evident, and mundane. The title suggests, and the book delivers, an analysis and diagnosis of what Levin judges to be the psychological flaws behind the failure of the Israeli negotiators at the Oslo Peace Talks in1993. Taking the long view of the imbroglio in the Holy Land, Levin's detailed analysis of Oslo hits the ground running in Judea (67 AD), winding its way up to and through medieval Europe, traversing the time between the two great wars and finally passing through the fateful decision to allow Yassar Arafat and his trigger-happy crew dominion over the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in what can only be termed a hapless drive-by.

In The Oslo Syndrome, Dr. Levin is not content to simply count and separate the brass tacks of the negotiations in Norway. Rather, the professor's anomalous psycho-historical method is to see Israel's current intractable situation with the Palestinian Authority as the pathological consequence of that cynical-original once crudely described as the 'self-hating Jew,' which Levin now tabs, with the precision of clinical analysis, the 'delusional Jew.' Such an ongoing self-deception, as is unveiled in The Oslo Syndrome, culminates in the current belief by many in Israel "that Israeli actions can control Arab actions" over and against what the Arabs themselves have not only done in the past, but have repeatedly stated they will do, now and in the future. Dr. Levin not only finds such reasoning delusional but, within the Israeli "Peace Movement," presumptively arrogant.

Many social and historical factors have conspired to fashion the "delusion" Dr. Levin believes the Israelis entered into at the peace talks in Oslo. All are laboriously traced back to the Jewish Diaspora after the destruction of Judea in 132 AD, and the ensuing difficulties of preserving a healthy and viable self-image amongst the "haters" of this world.

In order to fully understand the failure of the Israelis and the self-deceptions of their leaders at Oslo, Dr. Levin takes us back to the unfolding drama of Diaspora Jews—amidst a that of an abused child who suffers the neglect and mal-intent of their parent-abuser. According to The Oslo Syndrome, an abused child will experience either despair or a corruption of hope rising from an illusory sense of control. In the first case, the child sees himself in a tempestuous situation beyond his control and will thereby demur and dwell within the abuse's cloudy residue. In the second instance, the child "can ascribe the abuse to their own misbehavior, assume responsibility […] and sustain an illusion of control, a hope that by reforming, by becoming 'good', they can elicit an end to the abuse and set their lives right." Thus the child, or the oppressed Jew in Dr. Levin's estimation, enters into a delusional relationship with his tormentor and, far worse, his very being.

Dr. Levin has loaded his erudite analysis into an exhaustive six-hundred page tome in support of this striking child abuse hypothesis: abusive parents—and nations—beget delusional children. The delusion manifests itself most clearly in those who, for their own reformist reasons, are more than ready to accept not only the legitimacy of the abuse but to believe that such abuse is the necessary condition for an ill-conceived reform. This is a delusion not unlike that suffered by those who tediously examine the arguments of the likes of Osama Bin Laden and, per chance, having reached an intellectual and moral impasse, are compelled to repeat the insipid refrain, "Why do they hate us so much?"

Grandiosity tends to take hold of these progressive reformers, often revealing its full force in the social institutions most suited to delusions of grandeur: academia, the media, politicians, and celebrities (Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua take a bit of a reasoned drubbing). Dr. Levin draws a parallel between the reformist's exhortations of the Israeli Left looking for a compromise with those who seek to reform Jews in their totality, and the blame once cast upon the conservative and primitive Eastern European Jews by, amongst others, a worried and progressive German Jewry anxious to extricate itself from its perilous circumstances under the charge of the pre-war Nazis.

It is, to a degree, a case of believing in, with something approaching apodictic certainty, the efficacy of a "hater's" belligerent hype, and by the force of that certainty acting upon those supposedly suffering from such maladies as had been first diagnosed by the "haters" who have ever sought an end to your cultural—and perhaps physical—existence. Dr. Levin puts an even finer point on the historical rift that, from time to time, rears its ugly head within the preserve of Jewish political and cultural trends. Not surprisingly, this psycho-historical chasm seems most evident in the divide that exists between those of a more progressive or reformist nature, and traditional Jews. Dr. Levin writes, "Consider a Jewish community subjected to chronic anti-Semitic assault and those within it who are inclined to embrace the indictments of the surrounding society. Some such individuals will seek to escape their Jewish identity, to distance themselves entirely from a community they see as bearing the ugly taints that the haters ascribe to it…others will dedicate themselves to reforming their fellow Jews in conformity to the indictments of the surrounding society."

In the first instance, Dr. Levin describes those who will simply become apostates to Judaism, either converting to the religion of the "haters" or losing religion as such; whereas, in the second instance, Dr. Levin pegs the progenitors of the Israeli negotiators at Oslo. Extending the metaphor of the abused child, Dr. Levin writes that until the Israeli leadership—and media—come to understand that they cannot control the behavior of their opponents by re-inventing themselves as something they neither are, should be, nor are suited for, Israel will not be able to address its ever expanding security and psychological needs as a democratic Jewish state.

Although Dr. Levin, insists that secularism is not the cause of the delusion, he clearly believes that the cure for the delusion lies in the traditional institutions that have served as a bulwark against the "abused child's" tendency toward self-hatred or self-deception. According to Dr. Levin, the battle is not so much between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, but rather between a normative, traditional worldview, and a brittle, transient worldview too often defined by scofflaws and malcontents abetted by the residues of the Labor-Zionists and what the Doctor proclaims to be the "delusional" left of Israel.

In one direction, there stands a bastion of historical truth and wisdom, in the other, off in the distance, there looms the ephemeral and proverbial houses built on sand (read: proud levees of New Orleans). Some, more exuberant in their cynicism, may extend this critique to the modern usurpation of religious tradition by the ascendant clergy of psychiatry.