Arabs understand the Jews very well. Despite the benevolent policies of Israel’s government documented in chapter 4, Arab leaders play the “victimization” card. They also couch their demands in democratic language—in terms of “rights” or “legitimate rights.” They know that such language disarms the Jews (historically an oppressed and persecuted people). The Jews, or rather their own leaders, never challenge the alleged rights of their enemies. Instead, they try to “understand” their enemies, to “see things from their point of view.” Hence they perceive their enemies in symmetrical rather than in asymmetrical terms.
This benign attitude of the Jews incites their enemies to even greater hatred. The reason is this. The demophrenic personality tends to reduce justice to arithmetic justice or equality, and this leads to moral relativism. Wishing to live in peace and equality with others, the demophrenic urges on others an attitude of mutual tolerance. But this symmetrizing attitude tacitly denies the validity of any religious ideology that claims to possess the absolute truth, and whose followers see no logical reason why they should tolerate t error or live in peace and equality with unbelievers.
Although demophrenic personalities cannot be oblivious of their enemy’s ideological hatred, they themselves are incapable of such hatred if only because their relativism prevents them from regarding their enemy as radically evil. Relativism impairs the demophrenic’s capacity for hatred or prevents this emotion from attaining ideological and political intensity. Thus, Israeli journalist Uri Avineri, reflecting the moral poverty that parades as objectivity in the democratic media, could write about his intimate relationship with that the demonic terrorist Yassir Arafat in a sentimental tract entitled My Friend, the Enemy.
A less obvious but more serious example is Shimon Peres. Questioned during a February 2, 1993 interview about the fate of Jewish settlers on the Golan Heights if the latter were surrendered to Syria, Peres replied: “I don’t understand what’s wrong with this. Arab settlements exist under Jewish rule, and Jewish settlements will exist under Syrian rule.” Note the moral egalitarianism: as if living under a democracy were equivalent to living under a tyranny.
Clearly, relativism diminishes moral sensibility. Since nothing is intrinsically evil, nothing is intrinsically good or noble, an idea that cannot but undermine a nation’s fortitude, its ability to persevere in a conflict fraught with death and destruction. The demophrenic’s inability to hate his country’s enemies tends to impair the love he may bear for his own people, or to diminish his anger or indignation should his people be the targets of violence or vilification. As evidence, consider the policy of “self-restraint” pursued by one Israeli government after another despite the thousands of Jews that have been murdered and wounded by Arab terrorists. Recall what Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said while Jews were reduced to body parts, that his son Omri had taught him “not to see things in black and white.”
(Excerpted from “An American Political Scientist in Israel: From Athens to Jerusalem” pg. 102)
