"The Oslo Syndrome," Part I

This is a review/summary of the book "The Oslo Syndrome: delusions of a
people under siege" by Kenneth Levin, Harvard psychologist and historian.
It will be in several parts for convenience.

In the middle ages, the only way to escape Jewish identification was
conversion or death. In later periods, liberalization of laws allowed Jews
to become citizens of Germany, France and other countries. Although hopes
were high, the anticipated emancipation never did materialize. Jews were
equal citizens de jure, but were still subjected to extreme prejudice, bias
and discrimination. In order to overcome this situation non-religious Jews
adopted three main strategies. They became either:
1. Socialists, who saw their identification with the suffering of the
working class as an escape from their narrow Jewish world and who attacked
Jewish capitalists in anti-Semitic terms (examples are Marx, Lasalle,
Trotsky/Bronstein, etc).
2. Middle-class nationalists, who identified themselves with the surrounding
bourgeois society and in order to be accepted as good citizens adopted their
typical anti-Semitic attitudes (such as Heinrich Heine and Walter Rathenau
in Germany, Walter Lippmann in the US, Madeleine Albright, who was first a
Czech nationalist and then an American Secretary of State, who denied her
Jewish origins).
3. Universalists, who jettisoned their narrow Jewish identity to embrace a
liberal or radical view, in which all downtrodden ethnic groups are valued
except for suffering Jews (e.g. Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, Leonard
Fein). These people tend to prefer the rights of the Palestinians to those
of the Jews.
In all cases, these unaffiliated Jews escaped from the negative stereotypes
of anti-Semitism by identifying themselves with a wider non-Jewish
affiliation (either socialist, nationalist or universalist), in which they
deliberately disassociated themselves from other Jews, whom they regarded as
both embarrassing and/or the real cause of anti-Semitism. In doing so, they
indulged in a psychological process of self-reform and dissociation that
they considered released them from the bonds of Jewish connection, and that
also freed them to express the anti-Semitic bias and canards of the general
society. Only by doing this, they believed, could they become truly
acceptable as part of their surrounding social milieu.
However, in the long run this strategy of escape from their Jewishness did
not save them, once the true anti-Semites in Germany took power. The success
of the Holocaust in ridding the earth of most European Jews, of whatever
persuasion, resulted in the ascension among the surviving Jews of what had
been a strictly minority view before, namely Zionism.
The doctrine of this differed from those others in that it advocated that
Jews, whatever they did, could never live amongst a European majority, and
the only way to remain safe and ensure the continuity of the Jewish people
was to establish a Jewish State in Eretz Yisrael, protected by a Jewish
Army. Although there are many Jews in the diaspora who still adhere to the
above escape mechanisms to become acceptable to non-Jewish society, Zionism
has become the accepted dogma of the vast majority of the Jews of the world.

Part II will be a description of how these psychological considerations of
self-reform and self-hate affected the development of Zionism.