“Israelis are bold and visionary, passionate and generous. But they can also be grandiose and self-absorbed.....They are willing to sacrifice themselves for the collective but also to sacrifice that very collective for a higher, and likely unattainable, ideal.” In THE ISRAELI MIND, Ilan Gratch describes how all these qualities affect the way Israelis react to their world.
Gratch is a seventh-generation Israeli and a New York-based clinical psychiatrist. Using the knowledge garnered from his life experiences and professional training, he analyzed the Israeli people to determine how the nation’s history has shaped its character. He wrote that the overall psychological description would be paranoid-narcissistic.
He used the peoples’ history, primarily its inception and the Holocaust to arrive at his diagnosis and used it to suggest ways in which to use that diagnosis to bring about a peace treaty.
It appears that he came up with his diagnosis first and then proceeded to find the evidence to prove it. His children were raised in the United States where he lived with his Jewish-American wife. He wanted them to feel totally American so they did not learn to speak Hebrew. Many immigrants to the United States raise their children to be bilingual.
He wrote of the experience of American preacher David Millard, when he traveled through the area in 1843 and saw a large native Arab population tilling the soil and populating the cities. He did not mention Mark Twain’s experience when he took the same trip in 1867 and saw very few people or signs of occupancy (though he did travel to a limited number of locations) nor does he mention that during the years before the State of Israel was declared, the British allowed mass immigration into what was to become Israel for Arabs but refused to allow Jews to enter even though it meant their deaths during the Holocaust.
While he does focus on the Israeli Jews and what they are like, he barely mentions the activities of the Palestinian leaders who have refused to sign any permanent peace treaty and who raise their children to want to become martyrs, kill the Jews, and destroy Israel. He doesn’t mention that of all the millions of refugees in the world since 1949, only the Palestinians are still considered refugees and have not been resettled. He doesn’t mention that there were about the same number of Jews living in Arab lands who were driven out, many leaving all their possessions, but who have all found new homes. When he was writing this book, he visited his dying father who was in a hospital on Mt. Scopus. He doesn’t mention that the hospital, probably Hadassah Hospital, was erected at that location before 1947 but was cut off from the new Jewish State after the 1948 war until the Six Day War in 1967.
He wrote that the Israelis are like adolescents but not that the Palestinians are the ones who have refused to make the concessions necessary for a final agreement.
On the whole, the book is well-written. I wish it had been a more honest, unbiased account.
I received a copy of this book from Goodreads First Reads. ( )