David Pryce-Jones has written a tremendous article about the AUT boycott which places it in the historical concept of psychological warfare, or PW:

'What is required is a master idea, and people to propagandize in words clever enough for the general public to accept it as the truth. The master idea in this case is simplicity itself: Jewish nationalism, or Zionism, is an absolute evil, Palestinian nationalism is an absolute virtue. To establish this, the Jews must be shown to be wicked and wrong in every matter great and small, so that the Palestinians appear victims through no fault of their own, innocent people in special need of redress and rescue. With skill and persistence, the Palestinians and their Arab supporters have built up a worldwide PW lobby with helpers in the United Nations, the European Union, the Red Cross, the churches, the universities, and so on. One step at a time, they are subverting the legitimacy of Israel. Their multiple voices and pressures have persuaded the worldwide Left to believe that Israel is a state that ought to be dismantled forthwith. At the very least, they sap Israeli will to survive, and fortify Palestinian will to prefer armed struggle to the necessary compromises of peace.'

The Palestinian 'master idea', he says, is rooted in the Cold War when in the wake of Israel's victory in 1967 the Soviet union started to compare Israel with Nazi Germany -- and the rest of the left duly followed suit. Smearing Jews as Nazis has a wider lineage still, with General Sir Edward Spears, Churchill's wartime representative in the Levant, and the historian A. J. Toynbee repugnantly thus labelling Jews who tried to flee to Palestine to escape the Holocaust. Their modern successors who employ similar PW smears against Israel include José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and Edward Said, to name but a few. And this list of infamy also includes today, as it did in earlier times, Jews who try to appease the monster of prejudice by lining up alongside it:

'Felix Jacoby, for instance, a historian at Kiel University in Germany, opened his 1933 lecture course by declaring that he had voted for Hitler since 1927, and could only compare him to the emperor Augustus. Dr. Hans-Joachim Schoeps even tried to form a movement of Jews for Hitler (though other Jews replied with the grim joke that his real slogan was Raus mit Uns, or "Out with Us").

'The same psychopathology is at work in Israel today. By and large, Israeli intellectuals have succumbed to Palestinian PW, and do whatever they can to weaken the will for a national existence. Appealing for mobilization against Israel in a Raus mit Uns spirit, they speak at international conferences and publish in chic outlets as though they believe with the Palestinians that the Zionist state is a misconceived project to be brought to an end as soon as possible.'

Most chillingly, Pryce-jones points out that in the Nazi era, PW tactics such as boycotts were a precursor of what was to come:

'The burning of books and the boycott of Jewish businesses organized by Hitler and Goebbels are models of PW designed to rally supporters and intimidate enemies. The approaching violence was evident, and so was what Einstein at the time called the "psychic illness of the masses"...in their way the AUT boycotters are helping to confirm the primacy of the Palestinian cause in today's political sphere. Under cover of that cause, irrationality toward Israel is diffusing into irrationality about Jews generally, sweeping one country after another. Palestinian psychological warfare has already created conditions for a fresh eruption of the psychic illness of the masses.'

That psychopathology is exactly what we are witnessing. Pryce-Jones, a distinguished scholar and a decent and civilised man who understands the lessons of history, has pinpointed what is taking place and issued the gravest of warnings. Who will take note?

Posted by melanie at May 23, 2005