The Gilad Shalit Saga And The Jewish Superiority Complex

Just like any other much hyped event coming out of Israel, the ending of the saga of Gilad Shalit gives us an opportunity to glimpse into the current state of affairs and the Jewish collective psyche. It also helps highlight one of the underlying causes of the Jewish State’s perpetual state of conflict – the innate belief in Jewish superiority. Like all colonialists before them, the Jews in Israel see themselves not only culturally and militarily superior but also morally superior – the prerequisite condition for being able to commit continuous atrocities without any compunction of wrongdoing.

Far from being a reconciliation or a step towards resolution, the exchange of Gilad Shalit for about one thousand Palestinian prisoners will be just a footnote in the ongoing saga of Israeli Apartheid and its long list of evils. While Israeli society seems to be divided over the cost of the exchange, have no doubt, there is no dispute and no division in Israel over the important implication of the prisoner exchange: for them, it is yet another confirmation of Jewish superiority and a uniting feel-good casus along the lines of “we care about the life of every single person while they…” and “one Jew is worth a thousand Arabs”. They will smugly congratulate each other how much more humane and how much more human they are than all others. This feel-good celebration will surely be accompanied by a good measure of hatred and contempt towards the untermensch, a standard requirement for Jewish unity. The exchange helps cement the Israeli delusional belief in moral superiority, since the Palestinians are seen as mere terrorists and the Jewish soldier as an innocent child, while the oppression that leads to the violence is completely banished from the Israeli consciousness.

Gilad Shalit was technically a guard of the Gaza Open Air Prison five years ago (the ironic coincidence that Gilad’s last name, Shalit, means “ruler” in Hebrew, was lost on most commentators), positioned with his tank on its fence, when Palestinian fighters dug a tunnel under the ghetto wall and captured him in a brilliant guerrilla operation. In response to this affront to Jewish superiority by the untermensch, Israel went into a rampage, launching a military operation with jet fighters and tanks which killed over 200 Palestinians.

In a typical representation of the Jewish collective psychosis, the Israeli press and national discourse turned a captured on-duty soldier into a “kidnapped” one, and newspapers and TV broadcasts were full of sinister depictions of “an innocent Jewish child held in the dark dungeons of Hamas”, a war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness no less (of course the actual dark torture chambers are in Israel and have been operated by Israel for at least 43 years as thousands of Palestinian prisoners tortured by Shabak, Israel’s notorious security service, can attest). A captured tank driver of a brutal occupation army is turned in the collective consciousness into a Jewish child victim of a pogrom in a remote Jewish Stetl in Ukraine.

Of course, Israel can release a thousand prisoners and it has thousands more in its detention camps. In the bigger picture the Palestinians are released from a smaller prison into another open air prison, aka the Palestinian “territories”, a nickname for Israel’s Bantustans, surrounded by walls and barbed wire and fully controlled by Israel. Israel will be able to recapture or liquidate them with ease if it decides to do so in the future. It is like shooting fish in a barrel. The exchange rate is just a reflection of the balance of power.

More than just a feel-good celebration of Jewish superiority, the Gilad Shalit case was an opportunity for American Jewry to energize and flex its muscles. American Jewish organizations and Jewish leaders need an Israel in a perpetual state of conflict in order to create solidarity and a sense of identity and purpose without which secularization, assimilation and a general lack of interest would decimate their communities.

Every Jewish community was mobilized and Jewish influence was used to the full extent. Fund raisers were held and children in Jewish schools wrote essays about Gilad Shalit. Photos of Gilad Shalit were circulated all over the internet and posters were plastered in every synagogue and community center. Rallies, gatherings and sit-ins were organized. It was a campaign of awe inspiring proportions. Hundreds of meetings were set and almost every American congressman and person of influence was harnessed to the cause of releasing an Israeli soldier. Not a single American politician would dare shut his door as it would mean political suicide. It is reported that House minority leader Nancy Pelosi wore dog tags of Gilad Shalit throughout the five years and had a framed picture of him on her desk. Think about it again: a United States Congresswoman wears the dog tags of a soldier of a foreign country and 535 Congressmen of the United States can pronounce in their American accent the name of Gilad Shalit if they were to be woken up at 3 o’clock at night.

I truly doubt that these American politicians or the Jewish community leaders who organized the Gilad Shalit campaigns, know the name of the American soldier who has been held for almost three years now by the Taliban (I will save you the trouble of googling, his name is Bowe R. Bergdahl). But Gilad Shalit is an Israeli soldier, the embodiment of Jewish pride and the apex of the Zionist project while an American soldier is just one of many pawns, almost negligible in importance. The Jewish belief in Jewish exclusivity has taken hold over American politicians who seem to accept it as a natural order. “There is few of us and many of them, that’s why a Jewish life is more important” – this Jewish traditional view seems to reflect the prevailing maxim that has taken over the American mind.

Indeed even the Israeli press could not avoid the comparison and an honest Israeli writer was wondering aloud about the reason for this strange phenomenon and glaring discrepancy between the perceived value of the two soldiers and the proclivity of American politicians to favor an Israeli soldier over their own where one is elevated to the level of a tortured saint while the other languishes in obscurity. Eventually the writer concluded that it is because Bergdahl is a paid professional soldier who volunteered to join the United States armed forces and also proffered as a potential explanation a rumor that Bergdahl had deserted his post, therefore is not worth as much effort and attention. Much like in any field of research where a taboo is laid out (reminding the attempted explanations of the “special relationship” between the US and Israel), the reporter scraped the bottom of the pot for any other possible explanation except for the obvious one: that it is a testament to Jewish Power. This taboo of all taboos, the big fat elephant in the sitting room that nobody is willing to admit that he even exists. The family of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier, can tap a network of thousands of influential American Jews and Jewish organizations across America (and beyond) to harness politicians and top Pentagon officials for his cause. Bergdahl’s family can hardly reach an Idaho Representative and Bergdahl’s name is hardly known outside his small rural Idaho town.

At the end of the day, Gilad Shalit is coming back to his family, Bergdahl is forgotten. Israelis will feel vindicated about their superiority over the lowly Palestinians, with a new official exchange rate that affirms their belief, while American Jewry has once again demonstrated its vitality and showcased its ability to flex its muscle and rally its constituency for an Israeli cause. Israel’s Apartheid rule will continue unabated and we are not a single step closer to ending it.