The People of Israel Live

By Dr. Brian Robinson | August 19, 2019

We’ve had a problem these last almost four years, politically, in Britain. For a multiplicity of reasons, a diverse group of people have united in noisy opposition to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. There has never been a British political leader like him – a vigorous supporter of the Palestinian cause, campaigner against nuclear weapons, supporter of human rights everywhere, vehemently against belligerency, advocate for equality in society, and leftwing critic of the excesses of capitalism.

You can at once see why we can’t have any of that! Whether we’re privileged senior journalists, city financial types, military personnel, arms dealers, or merely politicians of the average docile kind, the Corbyn project, as it came to be called, had to be killed off before it saw a flicker of life.

Ominously in its potential for dangerous consequences, Jewish groups – religious and secular – came to be the most prominent voices in the anti-Labour campaign, and the non-Jewish elites were clearly content to allow that to continue. Indeed, as the scholar Norman Finkelstein has recently stated, prominent members of the Jewish community have become the “enablers” of the campaign against Labour. As he put it, establishment figures would never have dared to accuse the Labour party, and Corbyn himself, of antisemitism had the Jewish community not itself been so heavily involved.

Now, I’m not religious and take no part in communal affairs, but I’m Jewish, and in such matters as this, I speak and write as a Jew. (Ask me if I’m religious and I won’t tell you that I’m an atheist, I’ll tell you I’m a Jewish atheist.) Millions of Britons, young and old, suffering under more than 10 years of a brutally imposed austerity, partly to pay for the financial crash of 2008, suddenly saw in Corbyn ways to a brighter future, much as in the USA so many have been inspired by Bernie Sanders, a figure similar to Corbyn in many ways. My fear is, if those hopes are dashed because Corbyn and his project have been destroyed, people will look around for people to blame. And which group, historically, has always been there to have the role of scapegoat thrust upon it?  No-one needs it spelled out, but the antisemitism unleashed will not be of the bogus variety.

So what, ultimately, is this really all about? Anyone who knows anything at all about Corbyn knows that he’s not an antisemite: his record is transparently clear on this. And the party itself, like any other group, reflects the society in which it exists, but in a party of over half a million members the percentage of genuine antisemites is vanishingly small, as published academic studies show.

Certainly it’s not about real antisemitism which, after all, is quite simply hostility to or prejudice against Jews as Jews. It was, and still is, about threats to what I now think of as the symbolic immortality project of Zionist Jews. I think this phrase was first introduced by the psychiatrist and psychohistorian Dr Robert Jay Lifton in his book The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life.

I have come to think of things in the following way: Hitler killed the Jewish God. Jew or gentile, most of us in the West have not yet recovered from the Shoah, that specifically Judeocidal part of the holocaust that blasted Europe in the 20th century. In historical terms it’s still, as it were, of yesterday and its echoes are still of today.

How on earth does any of us even begin to live after such a monstrous negation of every decent value? One way might be, as the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer once said, to cope with the Holocaust by dying with the victims and surviving with the survivors. Most western Jews who were not literally killed were certainly psychologically and spiritually wounded to varying degrees, in many cases almost unto a kind of symbolic quasi-death. The way to revive oneself or to resuscitate another who has been rendered thus quasi-dead is through a commensurate act of symbolic and spiritual resuscitation. In the aftermath of immersion, direct and indirect, in so necrophilous a protracted horror, it’s not enough to return to a routine, every day or banal sort of life; that would be insultingly jejune. In an act of transcendent overcompensation we need something approximating immortality itself – something merely human isn’t therapeutically distant enough from our too-animal, too red-in-tooth-and-claw natures. No, it must be something godlike, or if that’s too blasphemously impertinent, then something that is a gift from the gods, or in this case, from “our own” God with his promise of everlastingness: the symbolic immortality project of political Zionism.

As the old joke (there’s always a Jewish joke – another life-against-death survival tactic) had it, to be a Zionist you don’t have to believe in God but you do have to believe that he gave that scrap of land at the eastern Mediterranean to the Jews.

It seems to be the case that a significant number of Zionist Jews – especially those whose religious worship takes a particularly Israelocentric form of Judaism – get their Jewish identity through Zionism and a very personal identification with the state of Israel. A new meaning, perhaps, for L’État c’est Moi.

So for the sake of argument, if my sense of my Jewishness is bound up inextricably with my love for what I think of as the state of Israel, if I have merged my own existence with that of Israel, if Israel is, post-Shoah, the only god left to me and one of the few ideas worth living for, and an Israelocentric Judaism the only faith that sustains me, if Israel is indeed the core of my very life itself, and at the core of my religious community’s life, then if I, if we, think we see our potential prime minister as a threat to the state of Israel because of his lifelong condemnation of Israeli policies against the Palestinians, if his government will change British policy towards Israel to something far less benign than it has been for decades, then we can only see him as a threat to us existentially, just as we’ve written in letters to national newspapers and said on mainstream media: we shall have to leave the country.

I believe that this kind of thinking is at the very heart of all those fruitless, bitter, friendship-ending, family-shattering arguments between Zionists and anti-Zionists: a clash of opposing symbolic immortality projects.

I’m writing now only of Jewish Zionists (there are other kinds). Suppose I might want to argue them out of their Zionism by detailing all the harm I believe it has done, not least about how it has corrupted Judaism itself and been damaging to Jews in other ways. Then surely I ought also to nurture an empathic awareness that at some subconscious level within them there would be a response to my words, manner, tone, or style that would feel like a threat, as if I’m killing them or something deep within them. More than some threatened death in this world, the onslaught, as they would experience it, would be tantamount to annihilating their soul.

If I were to persist, it should not surprise me if they come back at me with considerable vehemence. To me, as to other critics of Zionism, it may be merely a wrong-headed political ideology, but to a passionate Jewish Zionist living with the feeling that another Holocaust is lying in wait for them barely the other side of the near time horizon, it’s a matter of defending their life against death, with a nod to that fascinating book by Norman O. Brown, cited by Becker, Life Against Death. It’s Terror Management in practice. It’s the traditional saying in Hebrew through the ages, Am Yisroel Chai — “the people of Israel live.”

That phrase can for each existentially wounded Jew become a kind of substitute prayer of self-rescue from the nightmare of memory, perhaps a verbal ritual that Brown might have called a survivor’s causa sui. I like to think that the late psychoanalyst Otto Rank, a great influence on Becker, and Becker himself, would have approved. For Rank, what can save us from nihilism and despair, if anything can, is our creativity, which includes for each person the creation and re-creation of one’s self. Unfortunately, Zionism in its political form, initially so unpopular amongst Jews, became one such post-Shoah causa sui project of restitution.

Poor Jeremy Corbyn, poor Labour Party, targets of a brilliantly run campaign dealing in allegations of bogus antisemitism designed not just to protect Israel, but more significantly to counter the wounded group narcissism of, and bolster the symbolic immortality project of, a pathologically hypervigilant community that seems to have forgotten how not to be victims.

And poor British Jewish community, for throwing itself into that trap, and for letting non-Jewish elites keep them there.

About Brian Robinson: I am a retired psychiatrist living in Milton Keynes. I became interested in Ernest Becker’s work a couple of years ago. Reading Becker and books such as The Worm at the Core by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, as well as watching video clips around the web, especially the wonderful film “Flight from Death: the Quest for Immortality,” resonated with my interest in existentialism. I was hooked!