Some financial observers have hypothesized that the problem with our economy is that it is run by highly intelligent people. They may have a point. Stupid people can lose money, but they can’t create imaginary money. And they are always waiting for the police to show up at their door with a warrant. Highly intelligent people though can create entire tiers of imaginary value and trade them back and forth in a glorious tulip economy, which everyone believes in, until unaccountably the whole thing evaporates because it was never there.
Israel’s peace economy is the work of highly intelligent people trading real world items for an imaginary currency. Their burning conviction is that the only reason the imaginary currency has not realized its full value is because they have greedily not given up enough real world items to make the imaginary currency appreciate in value.
It’s not a mental illness unique to Israel or to Jews. It is how cons work. Once you’ve been conned, you either wise up and move on, or you protect your sunk cost, your self-esteem and your credibility by throwing in more good money after bad. The only way to keep justifying this destructive behavior is by believing that the con artists are legitimate and that you just need to put in more money to get back ten times what you put in.
In a time of war, modern people base their goodness on wanting peace, because doing so allows them to believe that they are good people, not bloodthirsty monsters cavorting on a throne of skulls. And to go on believing that, they cannot refuse any offer of peace; otherwise, they would be choosing war over peace. Then they would be bloodthirsty monsters resting their feet on a giant pile of corpses.
If a war is worth fighting, then it is worth fighting until the conditions that make that war necessary no longer exist. The minimal condition of any war is the willingness of the other side to stop fighting. If this condition is not met, then nothing else matters. It is not a matter of opinion at that stage, but a matter of fact, that the war will go on. It will go on regardless of what you do because you are not in control of the conflict.
To believe that you will have something because it is an absolute good and that to strive for it is so moral that the failure to do so is immoral regardless of its feasibility, is magical thinking.And once you base your identity on a commitment to an absolute good that cannot be achieved except through your own destruction, then you have committed suicide.
That is Israel’s peace disease in a nutshell. It is not unique to Israel. It can be found in America and Europe. It can be found anywhere modern enlightened people fail to come to grip with the necessity of force in the defense of their peoples and nations, and escape instead into illusion and delusion. It is a fatal disease. It does not kill quickly or cleanly, but with an agonizing fevered death filled with hallucinations, peace doves circling the ceiling, amputation after amputation, bloody limbs piled on the altar of peace that burns and burns until everything is consumed and only the ashes remain.
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