Have today's Jews become the Japanese of the Occident? Millennia of isolation behind protective waters has left Japanese culture inwardly fixated. Two millenniums of imposed and self-imposed isolation plausibly may have left the Jewish people comparably self-focused.
Factor in the Ultimate Pogrom for a pathologically synergistic combination – like alcohol and drugs – precipitating blind-to-the-real-world foolishness?
Case in point: In 1949, the new Israelis picked up almost 80% of the former Palestine. Palestinians living within their borders caused no violent strife: no blown up buses or teenagers' hang-outs. It is said everyone in Israel knows someone harmed by a Palestinian terrorist. What -- purely self-interested -- sense is there in spending the last through next centuries fending off violent retributions, all the while morally bankrupting a modern Western nation (it's called "ethnic cleansing") to pick up a few percent more?
In 1968, "West Bankians" perhaps could have looked upon Israelis as liberators in some sense – having freed them from Jordan -- in any case they had no deadly beef with Israel. A nice combination of economies might have enjoyed wholesome prosperites, side by side.
http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/The-Gatekeepers/70264711?strkid=1242111655_1_0&strackid=19ea2249a50c63f3_1_srl&trkid=222336
Case in point: Hezbollah has stamped "Made in Israel" all over it. In 1982, the Israeli military was welcomed in Lebanon as liberators – tossing out the PLO which was terrorizing everyone. Then Israel decided, in its too typically couldn't-care-less mode, not to completely clear out: rest in peace 240 US Marines. In 2006, Israel retaliated for a skirmish with Hezbollah that killed a few of its soldiers by carpet bombing the same's entire home base for 30 days, killing 1000 adults and 400 children. Now made to last forever.
Hint -- Vietnam lessons: three years of attrition warfare under General Westmoreland (long stretches of bringing home 500 American body bags a week) and locally raised Viet Cong were breaking into the major cities and even into the American Embassy during the 1968 Tet offensive. Three years of counterinsurgency operations under General Abrams (as in Abraham, not Arabian) and American ambassador Bunker could drive himself anywhere in South Vietnam unescorted in 1971 – homegrown Viet Cong all gone. (South Vietnam overrun in two months by external invasion in 1975 -- earlier attempt fended off with full US financial backing and extremely heavy air support in 1972 -- by which later juncture we had abandoned it.)
http://www.amazon.com/Better-War-Unexamined-Victories-Americas/dp/0156013096/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382401200&sr=8-1&keywords=a+better+war
Case in point: a Jewish school and social services center, in the sleepy Jewish end of Chicago's sleepy West Rogers Park neighborhood appears constructed to ward off a terrorist attack! Children's playground looks to be insulated from the adjacent streets by twin steel fence lines containing the double row auto parking. Front and back exits guarded by raised slicers with signs warning of "severe tire damage."
https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=chicago,+pratt+and+kedzie
The Cossacks are coming; the Cossacks are coming -- to Rogers Park?! Or is ever guiltier conscience further toxifying (in-toxifying?) the synergistic fixation -- further decreasing the ability to live rationally among one's neighbors? Even in West Rogers Park?!
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Israel -- as with much of the world across the millennia, of course -- is that if it had begun life on a more even psychic keel it might have been a civilizing influence amid the pervasive sectarian violence of the Middle East -- instead of a major instigator of said tribulations: a light to the Gentiles instead of a blight to the Gentiles.
I only hope I may have been "of assistance", Hebrew-sans. (Hands at sides -- slight bow) :-)
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