In my book titled Psychological Trauma, I attempt to explain the interpersonal dynamics of three functional entities involved in abuse, whether domestic or political (published by Authorhouse, 2015).
A model posing a triad of predator, victim, and caretaker, applies both at the individual or community level.
Since its establishment as a sovereign Jewish State in 1948, Israel was able to survive continuous boycotts and sanctions from Europe most of the African States and all of the Muslim States, in large measure thanks to the enduring emotional, diplomatic, and material support from the United States.
Following centuries of relentless persecution by Christians and Muslims alike during the two-thousand year Jewish exile, the privilege of being under the umbrella of protection by a benevolent Super-Power was historically unprecedented.
This status of being a benign Superpower was conferred on the United States because following conquest, the U.S. never attempted to impose military, cultural or religious authority over its foes.
Following WWII the United States took upon itself, at enormous cost, the responsibility of defending West Germany, Japan, and Western Europe against threats posed by the Soviet Union and China.
Likewise, following the Korean War, the U.S. signed a Defense Pact, whereby she expanded the pledge of alliance on the Asian Peninsula, from Japan and Taiwan, to include South Korea.
Without the protection of the “Benevolent Superpower” serving as a permanent watchdog against its nuclear-armed and hostile neighbors to its North, South Korea remains unable to defend itself against the threat by posed by North Korea and China.
It would already have been swallowed by the militant totalitarians in
North Korea and China were it not for America.
Israel too enjoyed the good-fortune of this umbrella of “specially favored nation” status, and would not have endured 8 wars and 2 intifadas since its inception in 1948.
To this day, Israel remains a highly vulnerable fortress whereby 6 million Jews live under the continuous existential threat of annihilation posed by over 1 billion Muslims who have never acknowledged their right to exist.
America`s goodwill, matched by emotional and diplomatic support and global good caretaker functioning allowed the Jewish nation 70 years of relative respite.
Despite the common belief that America was “always there” for the Jewish nation, I will cite two instances illustrating this to be somewhat of an illusion.
Begin by examining historical archives such as the diplomatic exchanges which led to the Bermuda Summit of 1942.
December 17th, 1942 saw the announcement in the British House of Commons, the United Nations, and a declaration broadcast in 23 languages to all Nazi-occupied Europe, announcing that the systematic extermination of European Jews had already claimed the lives of two million Jews.
As exhibits, which included photographs and first-hand reports by a handful of survivors presented indisputable proof that thousands of Jews were being gassed each day (using poison Zyklon-B), diplomatic officials from London and Washington listened in silence. (“The Final Solution: The attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945”, by Gerald Reitlinger, New York, 1961).
In reality, neither the State Department nor the London Foreign Office had any intention to carry the burden of the “Jewish Refugee Problem”.
Nor did the West want to antagonize Arab communities by allowing Jewish flight from genocide to refuge in Palestine.
Henceforth, all attempts to rescue European Jewry would be doomed.
No other considerations would override these factors, since they had already been secretly enacted as the prevailing policy toward every Jew, irrespective of individual rank and qualification.
Much has been written about the plight of the 500,000 Jews living in Hungary. Historians stress this particular vignette since their lives could have been spared.
During the last 8 months of the War it was already obvious to Hitler`s Generals that they had lost, and they made it known they were willing to negotiate for mutual exchanges of favors and courtesies.
When no country or leader could be found who would step to the plate and negotiate their release, a half-million more souls were sent to Auschwitz and gassed.
The excuse used by the Allied Forces for not bombing the railroad to Auschwitz based on the rationale of “not wanting to divert from our military objective” has since been exposed as a pathetic and illegitimate.
The observation did not escape Netanyahu’s attention when he spoke on Holocaust Commemoration Day at Auschwitz.
“Just tilting the wings” of Allied Bombers could easily have taken out the railroad to the death camp, he noted.
“Negligence by inaction doesn`t go unnoticed” Netanyahu noted.
On observing the treatment of civilian hostages by ISIS, Hamas or Hezbollah, one must assume that Israel being conquered by one of these terrorist entities would be tantamount to a second Holocaust.
Judging by Golda Meir’s Autobiography (Futura Publications, 1975), the possibility of such a nightmare almost occurred during the Yom Kippur War of 1994.
Meir had become so concerned about the continuous build-up of Syrian troops on the Northern Front and the rapid evacuations of Russian advisers that she called an emergency meeting of her War Cabinet on Friday October 5.
By eight o` clock on Yom Kippur night the meeting began.
David Elazar, Chief of Staff, recommended mobilization of the entire Airforce and four divisions.
Moshe Dayan recommended a more limited call-up, arguing that a full mobilization before a shot was fired would provide the world with an excuse to call Israel the aggressors.\Meir recounts that she would follow Dayan’s approach of considering world opinion and showing restraint.
“If we strike first we will get no help from anyone”. When she called the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Kenneth Keating, for a meeting, she confirmed that any pre-emptive strike by Israel would antagonize the U.S. and jeopardize material support.
It was suggested that some form of U.S. intervention might still be able to avert a war.
While they were still in the meeting, the military secretary burst into the room with the news that the shooting had started.
On October 7th, a day after Israel was attacked, General Dayan returned from one of his tours, to inform the Prime Minister that the situation in the south was so bad that there should be a substantial pull-back.
“The Egyptians had crossed the Suez Canal, and our forces in the Sinai had been battered”.
The Syrians had also deeply penetrated the Golan Heights.
“On both fronts casualties were very high. There was also the burning question as to whether we should tell the nation how bad the situation really was”.
Golda Meir continues her biography:
“I was calling Ambassador Simcha Dinitz in Washington throughout the day and night”.
“Where was the airlift? Why was it not underway?”
Adds Meir: “The story has already been published of that delay. Of the U.S. Defense Department’s initial reluctance to send military supplies-when all the time huge transports of Soviet aid were being brought by sea and air to Egypt and Syria”.
Israeli aircraft were being rapidly depleted, to Soviet missiles.
Two British authors, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, also explain what happened, but based on confidential information obtained from retired American and British intelligence sources (“Dangerous Liaison”, New York: Harper Collins, 1991).
In their National Bestseller “The Secret War against the Jews”, John Loftus and Mark Aarons inform us of the extent of the shadowy sub-narrative that almost led to a dangerously close doomsday scenario (John Loftus and Mark Aarons, 1994, St Martin’s Griffin, 1994).
As a former prosecutor with the U.S. Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit, John Loftus had unprecedented access to top-secret CIA and NATO archives.
The Investigative report by Loftus and Aarons based on the acquisition and decoding of top-secret documents, and twelve years of interviews with over five hundred former spies and Intelligence agents is difficult to refute.
I have extracted a small sample of this as it pertains to the 1974 Yom Kippur War:
“The Arabs were oversupplied with weapons from the soviets, while the United States sat on their hands until it should have been too late”.
Meir states later in the memoirs in her memoirs that “Today I know what I should have done”.
The negligence of inaction (the failure to respond to the needs of the Jewish Nation during their moment of mortal crisis during WWII) was not only repeated during the Yom Kippur War, but is more evident today than ever before.
It corresponds well with Golda Meir’s autobiography.
Furthermore, it serves as an illustration of how inadequate leadership by Israel`s leaders (the nation’s caretakers) during a time of crises: – placed the Jewish nation in peril.
Golda Meir’s failure to act decisively is illustrated graphically by looking at the picture through the database of decoded U.S. Intelligence.
According to confidential interviews with former employees at the National Security Agency (NSA), the Soviet Ambassador in Cairo was told by the Egyptians on October 3rd of Egypt’s intentions to violate the (1967) ceasefire.
According to these sources, the Soviet Consulate’s cables to Moscow were immediately deciphered by the NSA.
Furthermore, according to former intelligence officers, the Nixon White House ordered the NSA to sit on the information.
“We knew the sneak attack was coming. We knew when. We knew where. We were told to shut up and let it happen.”
While front-line Israeli units were being crushed, Kissinger was conveniently absent, sitting incommunicado at the Waldorf Astoria in New York.
“Israelis were being slaughtered and the White House dithered. When the Jews begged for the spare parts they had been promised, they were told that no American Airline was willing to fly to a war zone”.
By the third day of the war, several thousand soldiers had died, and over 500 Israeli tanks destroyed, while Soviet SAM missiles continued to cripple the Israeli Airforce.
At this point (October 8th), Commanders of the Israeli Army reported that in another four days their guns would fall silent.
Moshe Dayan is reported to have said, “Everything is lost” (Hersh, “The Sampson option”, Random House 1991 pg 223) and plans were made for Meir and her friends to commit suicide (Dan Reviv and Yossi Melman, “The Complete History of Israel’s Intelligence Community”, 1989, pg 211).
The Soviets, who had completely penetrated Israeli communications, were relaying to the Arabs the despair within the inner circle of Golda Meir’s advisers. They were now encouraging the Arabs to press on for a knockout blow.
The relevance of this narrative is to illustrate the extent of Caretaker failure: Israel`s leaders were more willing to commit suicide than save their nation – since it involved upsetting the gentiles.
In the Yom Kippur War, Israel was saved by the actions of Divine providence, primarily through the insubordination of a Righteous Gentile.
According to former U.S. Intelligence Agents, White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig, who had served in a Relief Camp in West Germany as a young officer following the liberation of Hitler’s Death Camps, was sickened by what he saw.
When Kissinger and Defense Secretary Schlesinger waited until October 10th to begin shipping supplies to Israel to commence on the 14th, Haig realized that Israel would be crushed before emergency military supplies ever reached the battlefront.
As a result, he began making policy behind Kissinger’s back.
The U.S Army had just developed a tube-launched, optically tracked wire-guided missile known as the T.O.W. Fired from a foxhole it could it could destroy a moving tank three kilometers away. The kill-ratio for the TOW was 97%.
The information obtained by Loftus and Aarons continues that
“While Kissinger and Schlesinger were playing games with Israel, Haig was stripping every TOW Missile off the eastern seaboard of the United States, and shipping them to Israel via Germany”.
Authorizing the release and distribution of Tows on October 14th could have cost Haig his career, since it was in total defiance of U.S. policy.
As the Arabs opened their final assault on Israel, the TOWS were deployed for the first time by a country on the verge of annihilation.
The unexpected reversal in this final onslaught was a key element in changing the outcome in Israel’s favor.
Based on interviews with former Israeli Intelligence members and military attaches, Seymour Hersh concludes:
“There was widespread rage toward the Whitehouse, aimed especially at Henry Kissinger–over what was correctly perceived as a strategy to delay the resupply so as to let the Arabs win…. territory, self-respect, and a platform for serious land-bargaining” (The Sampson option).
The blueprint that Israel needs to make painful territorial concessions in order to earn American goodwill has remained the remained the dominant template guiding the United States’ relationship with Israel to this day.
Political Scientists and military strategists are welcome to comment on the results of the accumulative effects to date emanating from all of the Peace Accords, beginning with Camp David, through Oslo, Taba, the Wye Accords, and a liturgy of other concessions culminating in the evacuation of Gaza.
There is a repeating pattern of unrelenting predatorial attacks by Islamic terrorists, accompanied by threats and demands by the E.U. and U.S., supported by mass-media of satellite T.V. and internet whose propaganda-war has effectively shaped an obsessive demonization of the Jewish State.
The Ideological Terrorism now seen unfolding against the Jewish State can be characterized as the acting-out of a collective unconscious genocidal wish.
I would apply the model of Caretaker collusion and betrayal, combined with an entrapment – policy which lures the victim into territorial and strategic concessions via a unified international threat of isolation.
This form of blackmail is already in effect in the form of diplomatic isolation, scientific, academic, and military isolation, as well as economic boycotts (B.D.S.).
Despite endless land-concessions, prisoner-releases, and the dismantlement of security outposts, the world today stands unified in its collective moral support for those who openly support the call to genocide.
From the perspective of the relationship-dynamics underlying trauma, the State of Israel appears to continue its belief in the United States as the “Good Caretaker” to the extent that it is once again willing to place itself in mortal danger.
The Jewish Nation once again stands on the brink while choosing to endear itself to the West, reminiscent of a collective Stockholm syndrome in which the hostage appears willing to succumb to the empty reassurances of a non-existent Caretaker.
Tags: caretaking following disasters, Holocaust Syndrome, political terrorism, PTSD, Stockholm Syndrome, trauma-victim