It is one thing to have to deal with and fight off the effects of one major political cult in one’s country. It is something else entirely to have to confront two major political cults at the same time. For a while, the major political cult that the U.S. was concerned with was that of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement: a right-wing populist movement that reminded many people of Hitler and the Nazis. Now if that isn’t enough to give at least some average Americans the heebie-jeebies. However, metaphorically speaking, there’s a new kid on the block who in his own way is enough to give at least some average Americans a sucker punch. The new kid on the block is the pro-Palestinian demonstrators whose motto is “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.” It doesn’t take a doctorate from Harvard to figure out that if the Palestinians want all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, that doesn’t leave much room for the Israelis to have a home there.
But, as always, I would like to focus on the significance of the addition of a new and distinct social phenomenon, in this case, a second major American political cult, to a field of experience of people, in this case, the American Jews. If a person is a moderately liberal American Jew, he is, like all Americans, totally immersed in the numbness from the experiential vacuum that comes with the modern technological living environment in which he is living. As has been discussed in previous articles, the appearance of Donald Trump and the Maga movement has been a source of a lot of abrasive stimulation. I have focused on those people who have viewed Trump and his movement as something positive, a movement to join and become a part of, a movement that can periodically shock a person out of his numbness and help him feel more alive. On the other hand, there are also those people who find the abrasive stimulation of Trump and the Maga movement to be increasingly uncomfortable. Such people are shocked out of their numbness by what is for them the intolerable discomfort of a tension-pocket. They move from the discomfort of understimulating numbness to the discomfort of an overstimulating tension- pocket.
But wait. There is another tension-pocket that has grown in importance since the terrorist rampage of October 6. This is the growing number of pro-Palestinian groups that make trouble for Jewish students at different universities throughout the United States. At these universities, Jewish students are singled out for harassment and sometimes physical violence. Many non-Palestinians have joined these pro-Palestinian groups for similar reasons to the people who have joined the Maga groups in the United States: it helps them to pull themselves out of their numbness intermittently and feel alive. And what determines if someone joins the pro-Palestinian groups on the left versus the Maga groups on the right? In truth, although it is not as much of a focal point for the Maga groups as for the pro-Palestinian groups, antisemitism still plays an important role in the Maga groups in the form of ethnonationalism. Translated it means that white superiority still plays an important role in fascist groups on the right. And of course, as we all know, Jews are never to be included among white people.
Perhaps the most important difference between the pro-Palestinian groups and the Maga groups is that, in terms of the American membership, there are probably more college educated people among the pro-Palestinians than among the Maga groups. This is what has made the growth of the latter groups so very shocking. One assumes that college-educated people are people of reason and not people of blind prejudice. But too much reason can be incredibly numbing in an experiential vacuum, and prejudice can be an incredibly abrasive form of stimulation to help pull a person at least intermittently out of numbness. In traditional natural societies, prejudice helps to focus a person’s passionate highly emotional hatred by giving it an object on which to vent. In modern technological societies, prejudice acts a form of abrasive stimulation to pull people out of excessive reason, numbness and the experiential vacuum. So, to the extent that right-wing parties are more traditional-looking and left-wing parties are more modern-looking, we can see how prejudice has unfolded in two different ways. It’s just particularly surprising that reason has proven to be the foundation for so much irrational hatred on the left in The United States. On the other hand, the Nazis had a philosophy justifying the Holocaust and a strategy for carrying it out, both of which were supposedly based on reason.
Jews are entering a perilous period of history now. To have one source of hatred and harassment and potential violence affecting our lives is one thing. To have two sources, particularly within a diaspora community where Jews don’t have their own army, is another.
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