Freefall by Joseph E. Stiglitz

It is said that a near death experience forces one to reevaluate priorities and values. The global economy has just had a near-death experience. The crisis not only exposed the flaws in the prevailing economic model but also flaws in our society. Too many people have taken advantage of others. A sense of trust had been broken. Almost every day has brought stories of bad behavior by those in the financial sector – Ponzi schemes, insider trading, predatory lending, and a host of credit card schemes to extract as much from the hapless user as possible. This book has focused, though, not on those who broke the law, but the legions of those who, within the law, had originated, packaged and repackaged, and sold toxic products and engaged in such reckless behavior that thy threatened to bring down the entire financial and economic system. The system was saved, but at a cost that is still hard to believe.

We should take this moment as one of reckoning and reflection, of thinking about what kind of society we would like to have, and ask ourselves, Are we creating an economy that is helping us achieve those aspirations? We have gone far down a path to creating a society in which materialism dominates moral commitment, in which the rapid growth that we have achieved is not sustainable environmentally or socially, in which we do not act together as a community to address our common needs, partly because rugged individualism and market fundamentalism have eroded that sense of community and have led to rampant exploitation of unwary and unprotected individuals and to an increasing social divide.…

Much has been written about the foolishness of the risks that the financial sector undertook, the devastation that the financial institutions have brought to the economy, and the fiscal deficits that have resulted; too little has been written about the underlying 'moral deficit' that has been exposed – a deficit that may be larger and even harder to correct. The unrelenting pursuit of profits and the elevation of the pursuit of self-interest may not have created the prosperity that was hoped, but they did create the moral deficit.


There was perhaps a fine line between creative accounting and deceptive accounting – a fine line that the financial sector has crossed time and time again, including a few short years ago, in the WorldCom and Enron scandals. It is not always possible to distinguish between incompetence and deception, but it is not likely that a firm claiming to have a net worth of more than a hundred billion dollars would suddenly find itself in negative territory without knowing that its accounting was deceptive. It is not believable that the mortgage originators and the investment bankers didn't know that the products they were creating, purchasing, and repackaging were toxic and poisonous. The investment bankers would like us to believe that they were deceived by those that sold the mortgages to them. But they were not. They encouraged the mortgage originators to go into the risky subprime market because it was only through the ample supply of mortgages and the transformation of risky assets into new products that they earned the fees and generated the returns that, through leverage, made them look like financial wizards. If they were deceived, it was because they didn't want to know. It is possible that a few didn't know what they were doing, but they are also guilty then, of a different crime, that of misrepresentation, claiming that they knew about risk when clearly they did not.

Exaggerating the virtue of one's wares or claiming greater competency than the evidence warrants is something we might have expected from many businesses, though the extent was surely out-sized, just as were the egos and the pay. But harder to forgive is the moral depravity – the financial sector's exploitation of the poor and even middle-class Americans. Financial institutions discovered that there was money at the bottom of the pyramid and did everything within the law ( and many went beyond the law) to move it towards the top. What happened to the moral compunctions of those engaging in these practices?

Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme was not all that different from the schemes of others who undertook high leverage. The financiers knew that the high returns in the short run (with concomitantly high fees) would likely be followed by large losses, which under their contracts would not affect their bonuses. These devotees of perfect markets should have known that leverage can't deliver a free lunch – out-sized returns with no out-sized downside risks.


No matter how you look at it, our banks and our bankers, both before and during the crisis, did not live up to the moral standards that we should hope for, especially in their exploitation of ordinary borrowers. The subprime mortgages are just another example of a long litany of abusive practices in a variety of venues, which include student loans, pay day loans, rent-a-centers, credit and debit cards.

Those who are suggesting that they are free to operate as they like, so long as they remain within the law, are attempting to get by too easily. After all, the business community spends large amounts of money trying to get legislation that allows it to engage in these nefarious practices. The financial industry worked hard to stop legislation to prevent predatory lending, to gut consumer protection laws, and to ensure that the federal government – with its lax standards – overrode state regulators. Worse, many corporations have tried hard to get legislation to protect them from ordinary liability. The dream of the tobacco companies is to have the kind of 'light' regulation that doesn't prevent them from doing anything that they would otherwise do, but allows them to say, in defense of any deaths that result from their activity, that they assumed that everything they did was okay – because it was all legal and done with complete oversight of the government.

A naïve reading of Adam Smith might have suggested that he had relieved market participants from having to think about issues of morality. After all, if the pursuit of self-interest leads, as if by an invisible hand, to societal well-being, all that one has to do – and all that one should do – is to be sure to follow one's self interest. And those in the financial sector seemingly did that, even claiming that it was their obligation to shareholders. But clearly, the pursuit of self-interest did not lead to shareholder or societal well-being, either in this episode or in the earlier scandals involving WorldCom and Enron.

The swash-buckling model of rugged individualism, epitomized so strongly by President Bush with his cowboy boots and manly swagger, pictures a world in which we are responsible for our own successes and failures – and we reap the rewards of our efforts. But these are myths. “No man is an island” What we do has large effects on others; and we are what we are at least partly because of the efforts of others. Much of the talk about accountability too seems just a matter of words: In Japanese society, A CEO who was responsible for destroying his firm, forcing thousands of workers to be laid off, might commit hari-kari. In the United Kingdom, CEOs resigned when their firms failed. In the United State, they are fighting over the size of their bonuses.

In today's financial markets, almost everyone claims innocence. They were all just doing their jobs. And so they were. But their jobs often entailed exploiting others or living off the results of such exploitation. There was individualism but no individual responsibility. In the long run, society cannot function well if people do not take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. “I was just doing my job” cannot be a defense. There is meaning to individual and corporate responsibility. Firms need to do more than just maximize their market value, think more about what they do and the impacts on others. They cannot get by by saying that they are 'just” maximizing their incomes...


In a performance-orientated society such as ours, we strive to do well – but what we do is affected by what we measure. Politicians, policymakers and economists all strive to understand what causes better performance as measured by GDP. But if GDP is a bad measure of societal well-being, then we are striving to achieve the wrong objective. Indeed, what we do may be counterproductive in terms of our true objectives.

The measure GDP in the U.S. didn't really give a good picture of what was going on before the housing bubble burst. America thought it was doing better than it was, and so did others. Economists did sophisticated studies relating success to different policies – but because their measure was flawed, the inferences they drew from the studies were flawed. The crisis then showed how badly distorted market prices can be – with the result that our measure of performance is badly distorted. Even without the crisis, the prices of all goods are distorted because we have treated our atmosphere as if it were free, when in fact it is scarce.

Our economic growth has been based too on borrowing from the future: we have been living beyond our means. So too, some of the growth has been based on the depletion of natural resources and the degradation of the environment- a kind of borrowing from the future, more invidious because the debts we owe are not so obvious. We are leaving future generations poorer as a result, but our GDP indicator doesn't reflect this.

GDP per capita measures what we spend on health care, not the output – the status of our health reflected, for instance, in life expectancy. The result is that as our health care system gets more inefficient, GDP may appear to increase, even though health outcomes become worse.

Another example of the misleading nature of the standard measure, average GDP per capita can being going up even when most individuals in our society not only feel they are worse off, but actually are worse off. This happens when societies become more unequal. A larger pie doesn't mean that everyone – or even most people – gets a larger slice. In the U.S., by 2008, the median household income was some 4 percent lower than it was in 2000, adjusted for inflation, even though GDP per capita had increased by 10 percent.

Most Americans standards of living, their sense of well being, have declined more than the national incomes might suggest. They feel less secure about their job, knowing that if they lose their job they will also lose their health insurance. With soaring tuition costs, they feel less secure that they will be able to provide their children with an education that will fulfill their aspirations. With retirement accounts diminished, they feel less secure that they will spend their old age in comfort, or keep their homes. For many Americans, life is on a precipice [ and this is not well reflected when we pass an official GDP benchmark that says 'the recession is over'.]

There are many other values that are not captured in our standard measure of GDP: we value leisure, whether we use it for relaxation, for time with the family, for culture, or for sports. Leisure can be particularly important for the millions whose jobs provide limited immediate satisfaction, for those who work to live rather than who live to work. But America, as a whole, has not enjoyed the greater leisure economist predicted by increases in productivity or GDP growth. The number of hours worked per household has actually gone up by 26 percent over the last thirty years. We have become a consumer/materialistic society: two cars in every garage, iPods in every ear, and clothes without limit. We buy and dispose. Europe took a very different tack. A five-week vacation is the norm – Europeans shutter at our two week standard. France's output per hour is higher than than that in the United States, but the typical Frenchman works fewer hours and so has a lower income.

We may not be able to say which lifestyle is better. But the U.S. lifestyle is not sustainable. Others may be more so. If those in the developing countries try to imitate America's lifestyle, the planet is doomed. There are not enough natural resources, and the impact on global warming would be intolerable. America will have to change – and it will have to change quickly.


It has become a cliché to observe that the Chinese characters for crisis reflect “danger” and “opportunity”. We have seem the danger. The question is, Will we seize the opportunity to restore our sense of balance between the market and the state, between individualism and the community, between man and nature, between means and ends? We now have the opportunity to create a financial system that will do what human beings need a financial system to do: build an economic system that will create meaningful jobs, decent work for all those who want it, one in which the divide between the haves and have-nots is narrowing, rather than widening; and most importantly of all, to create a new society in which each individual is able to fulfill his aspirations and live up to his potential, in which we have created citizens who live up to shared ideals and values [ or that those values at least be reciprocal and mutually predictable], in which we have created a community that treats our planet with the respect that in the long run it will surely demand. These are the opportunities. The real danger now is that we will not seize them.

Attack on Gaza by Haggai Ram

On 27 December 2008, long after I submitted the final proofs of this book [ Iranophobia; The Logic Of An Israeli Obsession], Israel launched a devastating military campaign on Gaza. Codenamed “Operation Cast Lead,” this campaign was officially intended to put an end to Hamas rocket and mortar attacks on Israel ( by “teaching Hamas a lesson”) and at the same time to recover Israel's deterrence, which allegedly had suffered a severe blow in the 2006 Lebanon debacle. It has also been hinted – even by senior Israeli government officials – that the operation was aimed at eliminating Hamas rule in Gaza altogether.

When three weeks later, on 17 January, Israel announced a 'unilateral ceasefire,” Gaza was in rubble with the number of Palestinian deaths exceeding 1,300, 670 of them unarmed and helpless civilians (mainly children and women). This was by far the most brutal and devastating Israeli attack on Gaza since the 1967 war. President Shimon Peres, appearing on Israeli television urging cheering Israeli reserve soldiers to go into battle, attested: “You, the IDF, have achieved in 16 days what many states taken together have not been able to achieve in 16 years.”

This was like deja vu, all over again: the printed and electronic media lining up behind the government and competing against each other in disseminating the official account of the unfolding events as impartial news; and the public succumbing to the great and terrible conflagration that consumed any remnant of critical and dispassionate appraisal of this account: “fall[ing] prey to the wretched wave that has inundated, stupefied, blinded and brainwashed us.” [ Gideon Levy, “An Open Response to A.B. Yehoshua,” Ha'aretz, 18 Jan. 2009]

Never has the chorus been so loud and uniform, never has the public been so indifferent and impervious to the misery and pain of other peoples.


To get to the bottom of this contemptuous attitude, so vast and profound, towards the lives of human beings, it is necessary to turn to the rhetorical ways by means of which the Israeli government has placed its post-9/11 “wars of no choice” against the Arab vicinity within the discourse of the “war on terror”, as discussed in Chapter 3 [of my book]. Indeed, a decisive majority of Israeli did in fact accept and support the Gaza attack in the name of the “War on Terrorism,” a collectively manufactured Orwellian term that stripped the attack from its enduring contexts of occupation and dispossession, thus rendering Palestinians into an undifferentiated mass of terrorists whose humanity is seriously wanting. Israel's ultra-right-wing Knesset member Avigdor Lieberman provided a terrifying expression of this sentiment when he candidly called upon the Israeli military to “continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japaneses in World War II .”[ Jerusalem Post, 13 January, 2009].

The inverse of such a radical deflation of the lives and humanity of Palestinians was, of course, the act of investing the Jewish state with the role of vanguard on whose performance in the war the destiny of Western civilization depends. As Netanyahu told foreign reporters in the midst of the Gaza attack, “If we don't put an end to missile attacks on (our) citizens right away, they will spread. This will be bad for everyone (worldwide).” [www.netanyahu.org..etc, 13 January, 2009]

That European leaders, too, have uncritically upheld the notion that the Israeli attack on Gaza was, in fact, an impediment to such a spillover effect is attested by their impressive show of support for it. Many such leaders – including French President Nicolas Sarkozy, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Italian Prime Minster Silvio Berlesconi – while voicing concern for the increasing death toll of Palestinian civilians nonetheless arrived in Israel on Sunday, 18 January, to demonstrate their support for the Israeli cause. “Watching missiles directed against residential homes in Israel,” as Berlesconi explained why he undertook the trip to Jerusalem, ' we too felt that our homes were in danger. This is a real threat to the West.” [Ynet, 18 January 2009]

To relocate Palestine into the matrix of 'world terrorism' Israel has treated post -9/11 Palestinian realities as a puppet show in which the Iranian regime was pulling the strings. The entire phenomena of Hamas was said to be an Iranian creation, aimed exclusively at advancing Iran's objective of having the Jewish state “wiped off the map.”* It is therefore not at all surprising that when Olmert appeared on Israeli national television, on 17 January to announce his cabinet's decision to end the campaign, he devoted a good part of his speech to the truism that “Hamas...was established as a power base of Iran...Pursuing regional hegemony, Iran has tried to replicate its methods of dealing with Hezbollah in the Gaza Strip.” [“The Complete Speech”, Ynet, 18 January 2009]

Even if the recent war on Gaza has proved that only poor quality, rudimentary weapons passed through the smuggling tunnels connecting the Gaza Strip to Egypt, the fact remains that Iran has provided moral and logistical support for Hamas. Yet, as shown in this book, by invariably overstating the extent and volume of this support, Israel has, in fact, been able to induce a radical amnesia among the public as to the continuing apartheid regime in the Palestinian territories and the Palestinian plight in general. Consequently, these and other pressing issues have been pushed to the margins. When asked in the wake of the ceasefire, “What (do) you think is the first most strategic threat to Israel,” Avigdor Lieberman stated unequivocally:

“Iran, Iran Iran.... If we were a normal state, we would top quarreling about the Palestinian issue and the Golan Heights and focus on Iran. A day after a new government will be elected (9 February, 2009) it should tell the international community that from now on we will talk neither with the Syrians nor with the Palestinians. All of you can simply fuck off. As long as there's no solution to the Iranian problem we will not deal with the settlements or the settlers – in fact, we will not deal with anything. Only after we will have taken care of the source of the problem – Iran- it will become impossible to talk about...the problem in Judea, Samaria, and the Golan Heights” [ Ari Shavit, “Avigdor Lieberman: Missiles Will be Launched at Tel-Aviv within One Year”, Ha'aretz, 20 January,2009]

It has been argued that ' the war on terrorism' is itself a supreme act of terrorism, a...pseudonym for U.S. Imperial designs for the globe.” [ Hamid Dabashi, Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire, London, 2008).** Whether you accept this insight (and I do accept it), Israel, as I've demonstrated in this book, has repeatedly taken advantage of Bush's anti-terrorism agenda with the view of facilitating and covering up its belligerent policies in the region. One should only hope that, with Barack Obama assuming the presidency of the United States, the Gaza attack will prove to be one of the last dying gasps of this agenda, allowing for a new, sanguine era of global politics to emerge.

.............................................



*“wiped off the map.” Again, while not denying anti-semitic elements in Ahmadinejad's rhetoric, or dismissing his Holocaust denying conference in Tehran as 'irrelevant'( though largely unpopular moves by the Iranian President in Iran itself) Ram treats this as a mistranslation of Ahmadinejad's actual words.

“The myth that Iran is the new Nazi Germany and its president the new Hitler has been endlessly recycled since a translating error that was made of a 2005 speech by Ahmadinejad (has) converged with the international uproar against Iran's nuclear build-up. As we have seen, this erroneous translation has survived and prospered because Israel (and her supporters in the United States) has exploited it for its own objectives of the 'war on terrorism'....

"similarly another fictitious report originating in the Canadian National Post that the regime in Iran would henceforth require Iranian Jews to wear a yellow armband ( May, 2006), though immediately proven false, was widely accepted in Israel as a fact of life and undisputable proof that 'We are confronting a man ( Ahmadinejad) who is the Hitler of the twenty-first century,' as Labor Party's Offir Pinnnes-Paz charged. Neither a single paper ( with the notable exception of Ha'aretz nor a single expert was found to set the record straight in public.” ( pages 111-12)

**“U.S. Imperial designs for the world”.[When individuals like Newt Gingrich off-handedly accuse Barack Obama of harboring a world view tantamount to “Kenyan anti-colonialism”, this adds a good deal of credence to Mr. Dabashi's hypothesis. What would be wrong about Kenyans wanting to throw off the yoke of their colonial masters? Or that the struggle for independence in Kenya amounted to nothing more than excuse for the “primitive” (supposedly 'non-western) excesses of the Mau-Mau rebels? Nevertheless, I find the notion that the U.S. Government or “power elites' have explicitly imperial designs on the whole world ( which Chomsky, for instance, often seems at least to imply, for example) a bit hard to swallow. Despite the remarks of Mr. Gingrich, the logic of the 'the war on terrorism', the moral panics engendered by the attacks of 9/11, the general ignorance of U.S. Representatives and their political cowardice makes it seem not that far off the mark. Like many Israelis, many Americans are extremely reluctant to view their own pronouncements and the policies of their governments as others might see them. “ Dominating the world” seems to them to be an innocent business decision.]

Moral Panic by Haggai Ram

Generally speaking, the term moral panic has been used in sociological analysis to refer to periods when certain groups are negatively framed and labeled as the enemies of society's cosmological order of things and as a threat to its interests. The Massachusetts witch hunt in the mid-seventeenth century was perhaps the first paradigmatic case of moral panic, which achieved more recent expressions in American McCarthyism in the 1950s and in the persecution of the Stalinist Left in Europe during the Cold War. Twentieth-century history provides us with a plethora of phenomena that can be defined and conceptualized in terms of a threat to social mores and moral rectitude: alcoholism, homosexuality, sexuality, the maintenance of family values, abortions, and the smoking of marijuana. Most of these phenomena reaffirmed existing social and racial-ethnic hierarchies and hence induced feelings of misplaced and exaggerated anxiety.

As a mass hysteria generated by the exploitation of people's worst fears, moral panic is, for the most part, not orchestrated by one (conspiratorial) source. Rather, moral panics are produced by social agents ( or “moral entrepreneurs”) from all ranks of society – the media, politicians, social science experts, and so on. That is to say, some are engineered by elites, some come by way of middle-level interest groups, and still others emerge almost spontaneously from the grass roots.

Moral panic depends on the delineation of a scapegoat – or 'folk devil' – as an identifiable object onto which our deeper social fears and anxieties may be projected. Although moral panic centers on a particular folk devil, the locus of the panic, however, is not the folk devil itself. Rather, folk devils are the ideological embodiment of deeper anxieties “symptomatic of a more general situation of protracted state and economic failure, but one not (yet) perceived of in terms of 'crisis'.

Moral panics are constructions or mediations of state contradictions and failures. The receptacles of all these intense feelings of threat are, therefore, culturally and politically constructed, products of the human imagination. As such, they are highly exaggerated. Reflecting on specific historical episodes of moral panic, sociologists Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yeuda this conclude, “In each case, a specific agent was widely felt to be responsible for the threat; in each case a sober assessment of the evidence concerning the nature of the supposed threat forces the observer to the conclusion that the fear and concern were, in all likelihood, exaggerated or misplaced.”

What, among other things, lies at the heart of this study [Iranophobia; The Logic of an Israeli Obsession] is the argument that Israeli phobias about Iran must be understood in relation to the moral panic about the project of modernity's perceived “contradictions and failures” in the Jewish state. More precisely, these phobias are to be understood in relation to domestic (Ashkenazi, secularist, middle-class) anxieties posed by Israel's religious and ethnic ( Mizrahi) underclass since the latter half of the 1970s. Indeed, it is not coincidental, I argue, that Iran has been transformed into a repellent and frightening external other in the Israeli imagination at the same time that Israel's ethnic and religious “outsiders within” ( or folk devils) have shown Jewish-Israeli modernity to be in a state of crisis, and “not a finished ideal state seen as the culmination of a majestically plotted history.”


[see also:'Jewish Terrorism in Israel" by Ami Pedahzur & Arie Perliger, Columbia University Press, 2009. http://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2009/11/evacuating-settlements-by-ami-pedahzur.html]

As I write these words in late September 2007, at the conclusion of President Ahmadinejad's visit to the United Nations General Assembly, during which he also appeared before students at New York City's Columbia University. For most Israeli analysts and laypersons this visit was equivalent to “Satan coming to New York.” Within this context, they lost no time showering contempt and scorn upon Ahmadinejad, even mocking him for putting on eyeglasses during a video interview with American reporters, as though he was trying to deceive them into believing that he was an intellectual. For, according to the dominant Israeli view, Iran is a nation composed of ignorant and ignoble people who could not put eyeglasses to good use anyway. A piece offering my own perspectives on the visit, as well as an overview of the ideas I put forth in this book, was posted on Ynet, the Internet edition of Yedi'ot Ahronoth. Literally 99 percent of the five hundred talkbacks that followed in response accused me of high treason and of complicity with Holocaust denial, with some even calling for for my deportation ( to Iran, of course) and wishing for my death. It is my intention to explore in this book the roots of the mind-set that has enabled the introduction of such extreme venomous reaction.

By systematically engaging with widespread Israeli notions and narratives of Iran, I ( and Israeli historian of Iran) will incorporate my own theoretically informed readings of Iranian history, and in so doing, provide a vista into the conflicting, converging, and conflated discourses that shaped not only the history of reading Iran in Israel but also the history of writing Iran in Israel.

Introduction to Iranophobia by Haggai Ram

The Unthinkable: Integrating Israel Into The Middle East.

Although I did not know it at the time, the idea of writing this book was born in my mind in 1996. In March of that year I gave an interview to Ha'aretz Weekly Supplement. Titled “The Demon Is Not So Terrible,” the interview immediately sparked a public uproar that nearly cost me my academic career. In that interview I essentially suggested (a) that the Israeli government, academia, and media were disseminating distorted images of Iran that are informed by the state's security and ethnocentric concerns; (b) that Israeli scholarly research on the Middle East and Iran has remained impervious to innovative analytical tools and paradigms used in other disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences that are reminiscent of the 'epistemic self-sufficiency' of Orientalism as a mode of knowledge production; and (c) that in spite of dominant Israeli conceptions to the contrary, Iran and Israeli were, in fact, similar in that they were both founded, among other things, on the interpenetration of the secular and the religious.

As a young and admittedly self-conceited ( but untenured) faculty member at the newly established Department of Middle East Studies in Ben Gurion University, I was completely unprepared for the devastating backlash that would soon follow. A barrage of condemnations coming from various academic and political sources in the printed and electronic media questioning my “intellectual integrity and basic knowledge of facts.” Prof. Avishi Braverman, the university president ( now turned Labor Party politician), demanded my head and let it be known that he would be content with nothing short of my dismissal. Save a handful of colleagues who hailed my “daring attempt to challenge the accepted perceptions in the [Israeli] Middle East Studies establishment,” the message coming from virtually everywhere was loud and clear: “Dr. Ram doesn't represent us.”

Fortunately (for me) I survived the backlash. More to the point, however, it appears that what prompted the scathing outrage against me was not my charge that the boundaries between the Israeli state and Israeli Middle East studies were dangerously porous; many of Israel's Middle East scholars would see nothing wrong with that. Rather, it was my contention that the Israeli and Iranian politics deserve to be studied comparatively or contrapuntally. Consider, for example, how David Menashri – Israel's most prominent expert of Iran and more former teacher at Tel Aviv University – responded to this call of mine:

Dr. Ram's main original contribution is a comparison between Zionism and Khomeinism. I see no fault in such intellectual drills, but we must distinguish between what is important and what is marginal. It is, of course, possible to compare many things, even a mosquito to a helicopter, or a fish to a submarine. But are the two really essentially similar? Compared within the context of their ideational substances, the similarities between Khomeinism and Zionism are marginal. It suffices to read Herzl and Khomeini in order to appreciate how different the two are. Did Zionism aspire to establish a theocratic state ( medinat halacha)?


In this book I take issue with this kind of contemptuous dismissal of the possibility that a comparative study of “Zionism” and “Khomeinism” may be of beneficial value.


For nearly three decades Israelis have understood the enmity between Iran and Israel to be a manifestation of a perceived opposition between a backward, Islamic, religious, and Oriental dictatorship, on the one hand, and a modern, Jewish, secular, and Western democracy on the other hand. Others have come to view this enmity as a manifestation of a strategic rivalry for power and prominence in the Middle East. In this book, however, I argue that Israeli understandings of Israel's conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran ( IRI) were not necessarily transparent reflections of the politics of difference. Nor were they necessarily expressions of strategic concerns about the Iranian regime's drive to have the Jewish state 'wiped off the map”. Rather, they were at least as much (perhaps more?) concerned with what historian David Cannadine described in the context of the British Empire's relations with its overseas possessions as the 'construction of affinities'. Put differently, these understandings were rooted in the intimidating presumption that Iran was the same as Israel, that the two states were, in fact, inexorably entwined by common trends and phenomena. This presumption, in turn, has yielded reactions by the Israeli media, the public, and agents of social control that can be collectively described as a displaced or exaggerated “moral panic”.

Israeli anxieties about Iran are indeed linked to, and cannot be (properly) examined in isolation of domestic ethnic and religious challenges to the nature and outlook of the Jewish state. Still, because these challenges might imperil neat and homogeneous conceptualizations of Israel as a “Europe in the Middle East”, many Israeli scholars insist on examining them in relation to the countries of Euro-America. By leapfrogging over the immediate Middle East, they have in effect joined, intentionally or unintentionally, the enterprise of calibrating an insurmountable gap between the Jewish state and its Arab and Muslim neighbors. Historian Benny Morris provides a striking example of this, contending that the Middle East is in reality “a world whose values are different from ours. A world in which human life doesn't have the same value as it does in the West, in which freedom, democracy, openness and creativity are alien.”...

It was against this backdrop that I set out to write this book. Disenchanted with the exaggerated or misplaced anxieties about Iran among Israelis, and, equally so, about the overall failure of much of literature to make sense of the Israel-Iranian conflict outside the realm of geopolitics, in this book I set out to inquire into the cultural logics at work behind Israel's “Iran Psychosis. While there are many good reasons for the Jewish state to be apprehensive of the Islamic Republic, I feel there is also a great deal of irrationality involved in that apprehension, and it is the cultural roots of that irrationality I seek to investigate in this book.

On Killing by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

Brigadier S.S. A. Marshal was a U.S. Army historian in the Pacific and European theaters during World War II. He and his team of assistants interviewed thousands of soldiers in more than four hundred infantry companies immediately after they had been in close combat with German or Japanese troops. He asked these soldiers what it was that they did in battle. His singularly unexpected discovery was that, of every hundred men along the line of fire during a period of encounter, an average of only 15 to 20 soldiers “would take any part of their weapon”, 'whether the action was spread over one day, or two days or three”. Marshall's results were consistently the same: only 15 to 20 percent of American riflemen in close combat during World War II would fire at the enemy. Those who would not fire did not run or hide. In many cases they were willing to risk great danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages, but they simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges.

General Marshal's findings were received with shock and disbelief. Although some faults were found in Marshal's credentials and methodologies- raising questions about the exact percentages of 'conscientious objectors'' within the ranks- these proved insufficient to discredit his general results. Furthermore, other historians began to ransack the military archives and found plenty of evidence, previously overlooked or unexplained, that the situation was exactly the same in previous wars.

In the 1860's the French general Ardant du Picq noted the tendency of his soldiers to fire uselessly into the air, over the heads of their enemy. At the Battle of Vicksburg in 1863 Benjamin McIntyre observed that “a company of men can fire volley after volley at a like number of men at not over a distance of fifteen steps and not cause a single casualty.” After the battle of Gettysburg 27,574 muskets were recovered from the battle field. Of these, nearly 90 percent were loaded, 12 thousand loaded more than once, 6 thousand had from three to ten rounds loaded in the barrel. One weapon had been loaded twenty-three times.[“Of the 27,574 muskets picked up ou the battlefield of Gettysburg and turned into the Washington Arsenal, at least 2,400 were loaded. About one-half of this number contained two charges each, one-fourth contained from three to ten charges each, and the balance one charge each. The largest number of cartridges found in any one piece was twenty-three. In some cases the paper of the cartridges was unbroken, and in others the powder was uppermost.” Benton's Ordnance and Gunnery, page 341.]
 The obvious conclusion is that most soldiers were not even trying to kill the enemy. Commanding a British platoon in World War I Lieutenant George Russell stated that they only way he could stop his men from firing into the air was to draw his sword and walk down the trench, “beating the men on the backside and telling them to fire low.” A study of more than one hundred nineteenth and twentieth century battle by the British Operational Establishment determined that the killing potential of the units considered was much greater than actual casualties, confirming Marshal's conclusions that a large percentage of infantrymen were unwilling to take part in combat. ... [etc.]. The evidence was there all along. Nobody had looked at it.

The question is why. Why did these men fail to fire or fire ineffectively over the heads of the enemy?


As I examined this question and studied the process of killing in close combat from the standpoint of an historian, a psychologist, and a soldier, I began to realize that there was one major factor that was missing from the common understanding of killing in combat, a factor which answers this question and more. That missing factor is the simple and demonstrable fact that there is in most men ( excluding around 2% who are psychopaths) an intense resistance to killing their fellow man. A resistance that grows in strength the closer one approaches the face of the enemy and is so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it.

To some, this makes 'obvious' sense. “Of course it is hard to kill someone,” they would say. “I could never bring myself to do it.” But they would be wrong. With the proper conditioning and the proper circumstances [outlined in this book], it appears that almost anyone can and will kill. Others might respond, “Any man will kill in combat when he is faced with someone who is trying to kill him.” And they would be even more wrong, for, as we have observed through extensive study, throughout history the majority of men on the battlefield would not attempt to kill the enemy, even to save their own lives or the lives of their friends.

Although there are several other factors that can contribute to individual stress in combat situations, including exposure to danger , exhaustion, the possible loss of one's own life and those of one's comrades, ultimately the effort to overcome the natural, innate resistance to killing another man face-to face is the source of all the psychiatric disorders associated with combat and the varied Post-Traumatic Syndromes that arise thereafter. It is virtually certain that any man or woman who has killed an enemy in close combat will suffer psychiatric disorders, possibly for the rest of his or her life. Even those who have experienced the intensive, up-to-date training now provided by modern armies to overcome their resistance to killing, where they have been in proximity to combat but have not themselves killed another man , regardless of the after -action remedies now provided, are likely to suffer some degree of PTSD.

When we consider the matter, should we really be surprised to discover that it is not danger that causes psychiatric stress? And is the existence of an intense resistance to participating in aggressive situations really so unexpected?

To a large extent our society – particularly our young men- actively and vicariously pursues physical danger. Through roller coasters, action and horror movies, drugs, rock climbing, white-water rafting, scuba diving, parachuting, hunting, contact sports, and a hundred other methods, our society enjoys danger. But facing aggression and hatred in our fellow citizens is an experience of an entirely different magnitudes. All of us have had to face hostile aggression. On the playground as children, in the impoliteness of strangers, in the malicious gossip and comments of acquaintances, and in the animosity of peers and superiors in the workplace. In all of these instances everyone has known hostility and the stress it can cause. Most avoid confrontations at all costs, and to work ourselves up to an aggressive verbal action – let alone a physical confrontation – is extremely difficult.

Simply confronting the boss about a promotion or a raise is one of the most stressful and upsetting things most people can ever bring themselves to do, and many never even get that far. Facing down the school bully or confronting a hostile acquaintance is something that most will avoid at all costs. Many medical authorities believe it is the constant hostility and lack of acceptance that they must face – and the resulting stress- that are responsible for the dramatic rate of high blood pressure in African Americans.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of psychology, states that in post-traumatic stress disorders “ the disorder may be especially severe or longer lasting when the stressor is of human design.” We want desperately to be liked, loved, and in control of our lives; intentional, overt, human hostility and aggression – more than anything else in life – assaults our self-image, our sense of control, our sense of the world as a meaningful and comprehensible placed, and, ultimately, our mental and physical health.

The ultimate fear and horror in most modern lives is to be raped or beaten, to be physically degraded in front of our loved ones, to have our family harmed and the sanctity of our homes invaded by aggressive and hateful intruders. Death or debilitation by disease and accident are statistically far more likely to occur than death or debilitation by malicious action, but statistics do not calm our fears. It is not fear of death and injury from disease or accident but rather acts of personal depredation and domination by our fellow human beings that strike terror and loathing in our hearts. The sense of impotence, shock and horror in being so hated and despised as to be debased and abused by a fellow human being causes a psychological harm greater than any injury.

Thus the average citizen resists engaging in aggressive and assertive activities and dreads facing the irrational aggression and hatred of others. The soldier in combat is no different: he resist the powerful obligation to engage in aggressive and assertive behavior, and he dreads facing the irrational aggression and hostility embodied in the enemy.

Indeed, history is full of tales of soldiers who have committed suicide or inflicted terrible wounds upon themselves to avoid combat. How could it be fear of death that motivates these men to kill themselves? Like many of their civilian counterparts who commit suicide, these men would rather die or mutilate themselves than to act or be acted upon aggressively in a hostile world. Such circumstances defile their humanity. When training and circumstance overcome soldier's innate resistance to aggressive behavior in close combat, deep seated and long-lasting psychiatric disorders , albeit of varying orders and degrees, invariably result.


Killing at a distance with bombs at thirty-thousand feet, with artillery, jointly operated machine-guns, rockets, tanks, mortars, drones , through the telescopic sights from a sniper's rifle, or firing at the backs of a fleeing enemy represent an experience of a different magnitude, less subject to resistance and usually have less damaging psychological effects than close combat. It is when a soldier can see the eyes of his enemy, the expressions on his face or observe him doing any number of human things like eating a bowl of rice , pissing on a bush in the jungle, or his wife and children immediately gather around his corpse, or are among those that have been injured or killed, or are on display as photos in his personal effects that the difficulties arise.

Synchromism by Henry Adams

While art historians have often treated them slightingly, Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright achieved quite a number of notable firsts. They were the first American painters to create a new modern artistic movement of any sort; they were the only Americans to contribute to the development of modern art in Paris; they were the first artists of any nationality to exhibit truly abstract paintings, in which clear references to a particular subject disappeared. Moreover, although this has not yet been fully recognized, the work of the Synchromists was not a dead end but a beginning – for their originality was not simply on the surface but in the intelligence with which they addressed fundamental questions of art-making and visual expression.

The movement was a hybrid. Sychromism used Cubist techniques of faceting forms to analyze the rhythmic formal sequences of old masters such as Michelangelo and developed the working sculptural methods of Auguste Rodin and Henri Matisse for painting. It also employed prismatic sequences of color to articulate and dramatize these formal techniques. Synchromist painting could be either abstract or fairly realistic. It ranged from purely abstract color spirals to figure paintings in which representational shapes were only thinly disguised by veils of luminous color. The alteration of the sculptural 'hollow and bump', the muscular rhythm of the figures ( whether human or abstract), and color tone-sequencing were used to project a compositional unity- symmetrical and dynamic - which seemed to reach out for some larger truth associated with the cosmos as a whole.

Thomas Hart Benton's viewpoint on modern art was largely shaped by his close friendship with Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who was his best friend in Paris. Benton helped promote Wright's first Synchromist show in New York at the Carroll Galleries in March 1914, and in 1916 Benton himself showed brightly colored Synchromist paintings – including both figure paintings and pure abstractions at the Forum Exhibition, the first comprehensive group exhibition ever staged by modernist American artists. Equally significant, Benton shared an apartment with both Stanton Macdonald Wright and his brother, Willard Wright, during the period when Willard wrote his book Modern Painting, published in 1915, which was based largely on Stan's ideas. Thus, Benton actively participated in the heated arguments between the two brothers that shaped the book – arguments about the meaning and direction of modern art. Tom Benton passed these ideas on to his student and life-long friend, Jackson Pollock.

And one more thing – something that can by no means be overlooked, at least as regards their influence on Benton and Pollack – Russell and Macdonald-Wright were the first American artists to rewrite art history by composing a manifesto. They showed that being a great artist was not simply a matter of making pretty paintings but of seizing a place in history, and of staging a grand performance that confronted and challenged the assumptions of the audience.

Today we are accustomed to the notion that painting needs to be buttressed by art history and art criticism; that great painting plays a role in history and should represent some sort of creative new idea. In 1913, however, this notion was very new. While a few French artists such as Rodin or Picasso had gathered a circle of friendly writers – Rodin's secretary was the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and most of Picasso's closest friends were poets and critics, such as Guillaume Apollinaire – no American painter had ever really grasped the close relationship between artistic innovation and artistic criticism. They might be friendly with a writer or critic, but in a casual social way. It never occurred to them to form a working alliance and to create an advertising and publicity department, like those used to sell other products. Macdonald-Wright demonstrated that becoming a great artist depended not only on visual achievement but on generating publicity through outrageous statements and manifestos and rewriting art history to spotlight the originality of one's work. The techniques he introduced – though largely unsuccessful in the early 1900s when no Museum in America would consider hanging the work of a living artist- [pre MOMA and Peggy Guggenheim)- changed the whole game of achieving success as an artist in America.

Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock both benefited from such critical publicity. Benton through the work of Thomas Craven and Maynard Walker by which he became the first artist ever featured on the cover of Time magazine on December 24, 1934. The work of Clement Greenberg secured Pollock a feature in the August 8, 1949 edition of Life magazine, titled “Is he the greatest painter in the United States?

The irony is, as is common in the great American P.R. Machine, the lives and works of these artists were seriously misrepresented in these broadsheets: Benton as a “Regionalist”, Pollock as someone entirely divergent from the movement which Benton helped create, though the image of 'The All American Anti-Hero” the article helped create increased the values of the paintings, for which Pollock while he was alive never received much more than $4,000, right into the stratosphere. ( $142 million for Number 5, 1948, for example)

The Battle of Cannae by Robert L. O'Connell

August 2, 216 B.C.

The moment of Hannibal's killer epiphany had arrived. The order went out, and man by man the Africans on both the left and right sides pivoted inward, dressed their ranks, and in unison fell upon the Roman flanks, most likely the location of the least-experienced citizen and allied troops. There was little the Romans could do in response besides turning as individuals to face the threat, their formations were too compressed and disorganized to maneuver effectively. They were reduced to a crowd of loners trying to fight off a coordinated engine of destruction. Meanwhile, the emotional shock waves rippled inward, spreading paralysis throughout the Roman ranks and halting the forward momentum of the entire army. Their fate was all but sealed.

The Numidian cavalry wheeled around and headed towards the rear of the Roman infantry, a soft mass of up to twenty thousand velites , most of them adolescents and very lightly protected . Without room to throw their javelins, and with no avenue of escape, they were the perfect prey for heavy cavalry. Terrified by the horses and the slaughter of their comrades, they recoiled inward, exposing their backs and hamstrings to spear thrusts and sword slashes while they pressed desperately against an ever more compacted and undifferentiated human mass.

Tactically the battle was over, but the killing had just begun. The Roman army (between sixty-five and seventy thousand Romans and allies) was still too large and full of fight to be taken prisoner; besides, with its leadership immobilized in the press, it had no means of surrender. The only choice was its effective extermination, a task the Carthaginians accomplished through systematic butchery almost until the sun set on this terrible day, still the worst in the entire military history of the West. The Roman suffered more battle deaths on this one day than the U.S. during the entire course of the war in Vietnam.

The process beggars description. The Romans were finished off from the outside in, peeled like an onion. We live in an age when killing is cheap, virtually automated; that was far from the case at Cannae. Other than those who succumbed to the heat and lack of water, each man who died had to be individually punctured, slashed or battered into oblivion. In order for the necessary killing to be accomplished in the eight hours that Appian estimated the fighting lasted, over one hundred men had to be killed every minute. Yet even this astonishing figure underestimates the swiftness and profusion of the slaughter, since it assumes the killing took place throughout the day and not in a great spasm toward the end, as it actually happened.

While Hannibal's skirmishers – the Numidian foot soldiers and Baleric slingers let loose a hail of javelins, stones and heavy throwing spears onto the stationary mass, the infantry of Libyans, Gauls and Spaniards continued their grim work around the perimeter. One modern source in an otherwise believable reconstruction of the carnage describes victims 'dispatched with frenzied blows, usually to the head." This seems to miss the mindset implied by the quantity and rapidity of the butchery. Hannibal's soldiers were practiced killers, very likely most had adopted the cooler, utilitarian approach of the predator of the most prodigious and ruthless sort. They would have known how to kill quickly and efficiently. If a victim's back were turned, then a spear thrust to the kidneys would have been so painful as to instantly paralyze, and would have killed within seconds through massive internal bleeding. Or if the victim were facing forward, an equivalent stab to the lower abdomen would have produced the same results almost as fast.

Given what has been learned through modern combat studies, it seems unlikely that the Romans fought stubbornly to the bitter end. Even among elite units, when sufficient casualties have been suffered, the whole group slides into a state of apathy and depression more extreme than is encountered in almost any other kind of human experience. “Unable to flee and unable to overcome the dangers through a brief burst of fighting, posturing, or submission the bodies of modern soldiers quickly exhaust their capacity to energize and the slide into a state of profound physical and emotional exhaustion of such a magnitude and dimension that is almost impossible to communicate to those who have not experienced it.”* Though a few Romans probably went down fighting, the circumstances at Cannae were beyond the limits of most human beings in any age.

If it is possible to conceive of hell on earth, this human abattoir at Cannae must have been equal to any hell that history in all its perversity has managed to concoct. Thousands upon thousands packed together, unable to move, beset by the cries of those in extremis, dressed in useless chain suits and cooking-pot helmets beneath the broiling sun, without prospect of water, only death offering any relief whatsoever. As time passe, more and more men would have fainted from the heat, slid to the ground, and been trampled beneath the feet of their comrades. At the outer edges the ground would have grown thick with blood, the stink of death and all the bodily functions pervaded the atmosphere and compounded the wretchedness of the condemned. There was no place worse.

Body build-up had to become the central problem of the Carthaginian executioners, piles of dead obstructing them from getting at more Romans, and all that slippery blood. Logically this would have suggested a change of venue, a controlled release of clumps of legionaries away from the mass. These Romans could then be run down and killed or taken prisoner. But chance, this opening, and the inevitably growing exhaustion of the Carthaginian tormentors would have collaborated to sweep away from this disaster the core of a class of survivors who would live to fight another day ('The Living Ghosts of Cannae”, branded as cowards by the Senate and banished to the Island of Sicily for twenty years, who would eventually follow another survivor- Publius Cornelius Scipio- to defeat Hannibal on his home ground.)

The dawn of the next day revealed approximately 45,500 legionaries and 2,700 cavalrymen strewn about a space not much larger than a single square mile. As the Carthaginians set about despoiling the bodies and searching for their own among the dead and half dead, even they were shocked by their handiwork. Livy, the ancient cinematographer, leaves us a scene as surreal as any other in military history:

“Here and there amidst the slain there started up a gory figure whose wounds had begun to throb with the chill of dawn, and was cut down by his enemies; some were discovered lying there alive, with thighs and tendons slashed, baring their necks and throats and bidding their conquerors to drain the remnant of their blood. Others were found with their heads buried in holes dug in the ground. They had apparently made these pits for themselves, and heaping dirt over their faces shut off their own breath. But what most drew attention was a Numidian who was dragged out alive from under a dead Roman, but with a mutilated nose and ears; for the Roman, unable to hold a weapon in his hands, had expired in a frenzy of rage, while rending the other with his teeth.”

If this does not give you pause, it is possible to resort to statistics. By way of approximation we can consider that each Roman weighed 130 pounds – they were lighter than modern man. Then there would have been well in excess of six million pound of human meat left to rot in the August sun – the true fruits of Hannibal's tactical masterpiece, at least for an air force of vultures.

Livy tells us that sometime after the battle, amidst the congratulations of Hannibal's henchmen, Maharbal warned that no time should be lost, and held out instead the prospect of dining in the enemy capital within five days. “Follow me: I will go first with the cavalry, that the Romans may know that you are there, before they know you are coming!” It was the most audacious of proposals. March on Rome! Finish it now!. When Hannibal hedged and refused to make an immediate decision, Maharbal's reply was equally impulsive: “So the gods haven't given everything to one man; you know how to win victory, Hannibal, but you don't know how to use one.”

During the sixteen years Hannibal was in Italy, he destroyed four hundred towns and killed three hundred thousand of Italy's men in battle, figures perhaps derived from the list he erected in bronze at Hera's temple at Croton just before he set sail for Carthage in 203. Aboard the ship carrying him away and at last forever, Livy tells us, “he repeatedly looked back upon the shores of Italy and, accusing gods and men, called down a curse upon himself...because he had not led his soldiers, bloodstained from the victory at Cannae, straight to Rome.” If Maharbal was in earshot, he would have been sorely tempted, but wise not to add, “I told you so.”

The Romans learned a lot from their failures in the long struggle against Hannibal's invasion. They introduced tactical flexibility into their battlefield formations, began to play the hedgehog to Hannibal's fox, professionalized their armies, most importantly retaining successful commanders for longer terms of office than previously allowed, and remained doggedly determined to defeat Hannibal at whatever cost and despite continued setbacks. In the end, this spelled the end of the Republic and the rise of the imperium.