And once again, Israel is centre-stage. Now that it is, let's get one thing out of the way. Few people like the Israelis. I've never met anyone who cries: "Wow! What a fun-loving lot the Israelis are! My, they know how to live, partying morning noon and night, so warm, hospitable, open, friendly, free and easy with the booze, merry quips at every turn."
UN soldiers of any nationality working with them in southern Lebanon say they found the Israelis arrogant, ruthless, single-minded and almost wilfully dismissive of the Arabs. To which I can only say two things. That's right. What else can you expect? How long does it take for a people to get over a deep national trauma? It could be argued that the Irish people began to emerge psychically and psychologically from the after-effects of the Famine only in the past 10 years. Refuge from that trauma was previously sought in pathological celibacy, in dysfunctional sexuality, in mass displays of near-hysterical religiosity, and even in the neurotic devotion to the unattainable holy grail of "the Republic".
Pre-Famine Ireland
These celebrations of public unreason have virtually no roots in pre-Famine Ireland, which was not conspicuously pious and which was free and easy about sex and sexuality. This, after all, was the culture which came up with The Midnight Court, with the most sexually explicit image in western European culture, the s∅le na gig, and which openly called an effeminate man "piteog", which even now we cannot say in this newspaper in its raw English form, but which roughly means "vulva-like".
It was the catastrophe of the Famine, and the injection of the toxins it generated, which created so many of the characteristics which came to be judged as "Irish": and having had that experience, should we of all people not understand what has made the Israelis what they are? The Holocaust is not 55 years ago for these people. It is part of their mentality. They have internalised those abominable events, and unconsciously shaped their personalities around them. The Holocaust is as much part of the culture of Israel as is Hebrew or the Talmud. It is an inseparable part not merely of their world view, but of their individual selves. It is carved deep in the tissue of every Israeli's heart.
Remember, Jews have been under constant physical attack since 1933, first in Europe, then in Israel. No human beings can take the psychological pressures of endless conflict, of the actuality of genocide, and then the threat of its return, for nearly 70 years, without being gravely disturbed.
We cannot forget the terrible wrong which was done to the Palestinians; but it was done by a people who had nowhere else to go. They were the survivors of the most evil events in European history. If they had little regard for the rights of others, is this not the human way? If your plane is crashing on take-off, and you have a family at home to mind, will you not scramble over others to get to the exit first? Are you not mad if you don't? Nor were the Palestinians the only victims of mass deportation at that time. Millions of Sudeten, Balt, Polish and Russian Germans were expelled to a Germany which their ancestors had left half a millennium before. Poor, war-ravaged Germany gave them homes in a way that no Arab country gave Palestinians refuge.
Jew-hating propaganda
Of course, much of what the Israelis did to bring about the exodus of indigenous Arabs in 1948 was wrong; but they were a damaged, indeed even demented people; and that damage, that dementia, remains still, kept alive by ceaseless Jew-hating propaganda from the Arab states all around them.
So yes, Israel is a disordered, neurotic place. It cannot be otherwise. It is not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, simply because the trauma continues. Its young people are the most militarised in the world, its budget the most deranged by the need for defence, and by the absolute certainty of the demonic bloodletting that awaits them if they lose a war. What Israeli can forget the televised images of a Palestinian jubilantly displaying the bloodied hands with which he had just lynched a captured Jew? Yet, for all that, Israel remains a democracy, with a free press and a vigorous parliament and strong traditions of public dissent from government policy. Its Arab minority have full rights, which is more than you can say of the minorities of any Arab countries - which for the most part love their Palestinian brothers so much they will give them neither home nor passport nor protection.
Suicide bombings
What is Israel to do? It cannot unfound itself. So what can it give Hamas which will stop the suicide bombings, which will guarantee no more intifadas, which will enable Jews to live in peace in their land without fear? Europeans are rather good at giving Israelis easy advice about what not to do. But what advice can they give which both keeps Israel alive and guarantees peace? What treaty can the Israelis make which will assure them of normal, peaceful relations with their neighbours? What deal can they offer Palestinians which will make both sides happy?
There is no such treaty, no such deal. Instead, the Israelis can see only perpetual war reaching into a dreadful perpetuity, binding the present to the future to the past in a perpetual contract of bloodshed and fear. No, the Israelis are not always much fun. They have no reason to be: the Jewish nightmare continues.