As I’ve said before, there are an awful lot of people in the world who are made very nervous, even driven to hysteria, by armed Jews defending themselves against genocide, and I can only wonder why.

We all tend to cling to our worldviews and the world has had a view of Jews as passive. My mother was born in what is now Poland, then the Russian Empire, and once remarked that where she was born people saw Jews as “direct objects–someone you do something to.”

We can see this in the plaintive mourning of westerners who find Israel departing from the principled and moral lives Jews have led and who would love to support Israel if only it would return to such a high plane of conduct. Jews with actual power disturb them.

And for the Arabs I genuinely do have a little sympathy, if only for the cognitive dissonance that Israel produces, especially among a people whose culture does not admit a great deal of reflection or contrary information. Until western anti-semitism creeped in they tended to regard Jews less as tools of the devil and more as despised, downtrodden, passive.

Being defeated in wars by Jews and being defeated handily is a humiliation for Arabs that I think few westerners can understand. Defeat by the temporarily powerful west can be dealt with, but by Jews? That really is more than the culture can stand. I can understand–not condone or approve–but understand the Arabs’ inability even to consider seriously a true peace with Israel. A culture that willingly, even eagerly, sends its children off to their deaths is not one that is particularly amenable to the compromise and negotiation that brings real peace.

But I think the Israelis understand this and have decided that rather than accomodate themselves to this worldview they’d rather survive.