We may be losing our only second-best friend.
#There are no more enemies code
Until now, Germany has kept to a strict code of behavior towards Israel: after the unspeakable crimes committed by the Nazis against the Jews, there could be no criticism of any Israeli act, Germany would pay for a crucial component of Israel’s armaments, Germany would suspend all moral criteria as far as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was concerned. She called Binyamin Netanyahu and gave him a severe dressing-down, something that had never happened before. Merkel, generally a woman of placid equanimity, did not keep her rage to herself. Just a few days earlier, the Quartet had invited Israel and the Palestinian Authority to restart negotiations and abstain from “provocations”. High-ranking German officials confided to their Israeli colleagues that their Kanzlerin, Angela Merkel, was “furious” when she heard that the Israeli government had approved the building of 1100 housing units in Gilo, a neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem. LAST WEEK a black cat came between Israel and its second best friend: Germany. It seems that we shall soon run out of friends whom we can turn into enemies to gather even more prestige. Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister, Moshe Ya’alon, a former army Chief of Staff whose intelligence is below the average even of that rank, has announced that Israel could not possibly apologize to Turkey, even though its national interests may demand it, because it would hurt our “prestige”. The foolish Kaiser now has the heirs he deserves. It was indeed an excellent war plan, and as excellent war plans are apt to do, it started going awry right from the beginning. The spirit of the graffito reflected the hubris of the supreme commander, Kaiser Wilhelm, who relied on the war plan of the legendary German General Staff. In those days, at the very start of what was to be the First World War, country after country was declaring war on Germany. On the wall of the car somebody had scribbled: “viel Feind, viel Ehr’” (“The more enemies, the more Honour”.) Political, economic, military, and historical factors are customarily weighed in any attempt to solve turbulence, but it is necessary to consider also the profound effect of human psychology.AN OLD photo from World War I shows a company of German soldiers getting on the train on their way to the front.
This need is the basis of political psychology, connecting the public arena of political action with individual psychological development.
Anyone trying to deal with interethnic or international conflict must grasp the psychological cogency of man's need to have enemies as well as allies, and his stubborn adherence to identification with a group when undergoing hardship and danger. Members of any given group revert to childhood ways of reenforcing their bonding, developing shibboleths, and investing objects with mystical value. When threatened by political or military conflict, man clings ever more stubbornly to these circumstances in an effort to maintain and regulate his sense of self. This need evolves from the individual's efforts to protect his sense of self, which is intertwined with his experiences of ethnicity, nationality, and other identifying circumstances. This paper describes as an inescapable developmental phenomenon: man's need to identify some people as allies and others as enemies.
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