Why are the Protocols considered "paranoid" and not realistic?

An answer to Ernst Steinberg

Ernst Steinberg wrote a question to my talk, The Great Lethal Projection: Antizionism’s Debt to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, now also available in a longer text.

Your reference to the Melian dialog, in which the Athenians told the Melians that power counts above all. My concern is that this dialog is often used as an original statement in realist international thought and anticipates the defensive model developed in game theory under existential strategic threat. Since Israel is under existential threat, many scholars have referred to game theory zero sum concepts. The rest of your talk was about ideologically driven extreme irrationalism, not to be confused with rationalist defensive thinking under technical existential threat, such as nuclear threat.”

I distinguish between “normal time” projection (dominating imperative) and apocalyptic paranoid projection (genocidal imperative) which projects one’s own worst devils onto the enemy. Psychologists distinguish between neurotic projections (somewhat rooted in reality even if a form of projecting one’s own shadow) and paranoid ones, where the beliefs have no relation to reality. One’s zero-sum, the other’s so hard zero-sum that it becomes negative-sum.

But my argument (demotic religiosity) is that the Jews are the earliest practitioners of positive-sum relations and have developed its arts extensively (eg the schmooze). They therefore defy even the normal “zero-sum” game-theory norms that people who “live” in that world assume everyone shares, not only on an individual or social level, but now on a national level.

If we judged Israel by the standards of the nations then we would have expected its efforts at a democracy in 1948 to vanish rapidly. After all, unlike the argument all totalitarian regimes use, that the terror they must impose is in response to an existential attack from an monstrous enemy, Israel really did have the surrounding nations bent on its complete extermination, of the revolutionary entity and of the people. Therefore, the zero-sum model for existential threat would expect to see the forces driving towards paranoia and violent authoritarianism and genocidal attitudes towards its enemies. The French revolution took four years to turn from freeing its own people to turning terror against them, dreaming of watering their plowed furrows with the blood of their impure enemies.

In the world of realist international thought, Israel is the Joe DiMaggio of nations. No one comes near its record of continuous democracy while engaged in a permanent war with genocidal enemies. All other egalitarian revolutionary regimes, under less crushing conditions of insecurity, have turned that revolution, when threatened, into an engine of totalitarian control and even megadeath: Revolutionary France, Taiping China, Bolshevik Russia, Maoist China, Khmer-Rouge Cambodia, Islamic Republic of Iran.

So the “defensive model under existential strategic threat” should apply to Israel even more than any other case. And yet it doesn’t. And yet, rather than ask why, scholars insist it will happen, wait for it, and jump on every sign that it is failing, as proof of their fundamental error of judgment - “see Netanyahu and the right-wing religious zealots are destroying Israeli democracy.” Rather than root for the exception, and keep in mind who, from the start, Israel’s enemies are antidemocratic and genocidally paranoid, they somehow need to reduce Israel to their categories.

“Can the whole world be wrong, and Israel be right?” What a dull and dangerous world where that is answered, “no.”

The proof that the Jews are the least paranoid people on the planet, is that: were anyone else to have the reasons to be paranoid that Jews do, they’d be self-destructive and incapable of interacting productively with others, on both the national and individual levels.

Jews don’t want to believe people are out to get them. It’s an admirable trait, but under current conditions, that tendency has gotten Jews into trouble. they have trouble seeing real enemies. It’s a problem they share with (real) liberals.