Here is an important emotional/psychic idea about Israelis. Back in June, Bruce Wolman, who has done business in Israel, wrote to me:
"The Number 1 ethic ruling Israeli culture (business and politics) is DON’T BE A SUCKER. If there is one thing you need to know about Israel, this is it. You will even see this stated often from Israelis when they write about Barak’s negotiating while he was PM. (Not only did he not get a deal, he looked like a sucker for what he offered.) No politician and certainly no businessmen gains any respect if he gets taken. And if you are generous, you are considered fair game."
I don’t know much about Israeli culture. But Wolman is a smart guy. I filed it away.
A month later, MJ Rosenberg wrote on Huffpo: that the 11th commandment of Israeli politics was not to be played a sucker, in Yiddish, a freier. And this made peace impossible. If you can’t trust anyone, you won’t have trust. He wrote, "In my experience, most Americans would rather be accused of being a sucker than of being an a-hole. For Israelis, it is just the opposite." I agree.
Yesterday, Wolman sent me another email. Haaretz: Netanyahu: "We’re ready for peace but won’t be suckers"
"We have proven time and again that we are willing to make compromises for peace, but we won’t lead ourselves astray – we are not willing to be suckers," Netanyahu told members of his center-right Likud party.
Wolman: "I told ya, the worst you can be called in Israel is a "sucker". It’s an entire nation paranoid about making a poor deal or giving up something for nothing. I’m not even sure security matters anymore. Would any other head of government in the world say this?"
I know nothing of Israeli culture and the “sucker” dynamic, but Israeli tourists are frequently derided as abrasive and demanding. Perhaps this comes out of the “everybody is out to get us” mentality, so the best defense is a good offense.
Most Americans, at least on a personal if not governmental level , have a certain generosity of spirit that is frequently characterized as naive.
pineywoodslim: Most Americans, at least on a personal if not governmental level , have a certain generosity of spirit that is frequently characterized as naive.
Indeed.
Illegal Israelis Lured to Mall Kiosks
The products you sell, you can buy them in Israel for $10. Here in the U.S. people pay $60, $70.”
When Keren says this, there’s an undertone of condescension toward the naive American shopper, who’s willing to fork over big bucks to buy mud and salt from the Dead Sea.
Boy have I run across quite a few Israelis at the mall. I Was once suckerd into buying an iron that was supposed to do wonders. Being a businessmans daughter I did get him to lower the price considerably. The iron never worked.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I was stopped by another israeli in the mall selling some kind of facial cream. He said $80 and i said $15. His jaw dropped. He said just because he liked my answer he was going to give it to me for 20. I asked him if he was israeli. He lied and said he was a christian from serbia. Anyway, never did buy the product and he got mad at me for not being a sucker. An american salesperson would have smiled and said something like “maybe next time”
Yes, I’ve seen Israelis selling curling irons–or something like that–at the Mall of America in Bloomington MN.
The Minneapolis area has a substantial number of Muslim women who wear the hijab, and the Israeli saleswoman would mockingly ask every single one of them who passed by, to try out the curling iron on their hair.
“Don’t be a sucker” is just another version of “Anxiety is the supreme proof of our authenticity.”
The world wants to sucker the Jewish nation into national suicide by abdicating our native land to terrorist groups and western imperialist powers.
And ImTirtzu wants to sucker us into believing that Israel is America’s “best friend in the region,” a “staunch ally” and the “only democracy in the Middle East” having “shared values”. After Jonathan Pollard and the Bush-era neo-con adventures in Iraq, can anyone really fall for this tripe unless they’re politicians who receive campaign contributions from AIPAC?
Right, and Israel wants to sucker us into believing they care a wit about 20% of their citizens, and that they are only defending themselves against anti-semites by grabbing arab land for the last forty years in defiance of international law wrought
from (ex post facto) Nazi crimes by the international community. Your not the natives of the land you exist on as a state, nor, more obviously, of the land you’ve been grabbing and populating with dual citizen American Jews. You are the imperial power, and racist too boot. Time for USA citizens to wake up to you shysters.
I’ve always thought that world’s greatest public relations job in the world has been to convince Americans that they like Israelis… in fact they are like oil and water.
There is a certain set of Americans who will always admire brutal force, and they love to admire Israelis from afar, imagining them to be tough guys in the American mode.
And funny how Jewish Hollywood writers continue to diss the USA’s rednecks; yet
Israel depends on them to fuck over the Palestinian natives over there with redneck dollars. We need a new country singer tune. At present, no USA country song writers and singers have any balls not owned by Zionists.
Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by your Man” does a pretty good job of describing America’s infatuation with it’s BFF Israel:
“Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman
Giving all your love to just one man
You’ll have bad times
And he’ll have good times
Doing things you don’t understand.
But if you love him you’ll forgive him
Even though he’s hard to understand
And if you love him
Oh be proud of him
‘Cause after all he’s just a man.”
What’s it going to take for the battered wife to grow a pair?
Isn’t it exactly the same sentiment that defines dissent on Israel.
“We don’t trust them. They will deceive us.”
Given that they have continually deceived us, made us the suckers, this is a reasonable conclusion.
“Don’t be sucker” — make the other guy a sucker. Contrast with: “Americans would rather be accused of being a sucker than of being an a-hole.” What about Jewish-Americans?
I think this “Don’t be a sucker” mentality probably extends to Jewish business and political culture in America, as well.
So at what point does NOT being a sucker become BEING an a-hole?
Maybe instead of religious, the best way to talk about these differences is within the cultural framework. In Jewish culture, being cunning, ruthless and shrewd (vis-à-vis the “outsiders”) is not being an a-hole, but being smart and protecting the clan from potential predators.
But this is why I don’t trust social and economic theories disproportionately originated and promoted by large numbers of Jews to be applied to gentiles (like Marxism and Neoconservatism). On some level, they seem designed to undermine the interests of the majority as a means of advancing the interests of the Jewish minority. Even the ostensibly secular Jewish theorists may not be aware of the role that their Jewish cultural and psychological background has played in the formulation of their theories and outlooks, and how it has tainted their work — as would any bias brought into an ostensibly scientific approach.
So Chris, what is your cultural and psychological background and what biases do you have as a result? What role have they played in the theories and outlooks to which you are attracted and espouse?
Being Jewish, I doubt you would trust my observations, but here goes:
To my surprise I found American Jews tend to be uncomfortable doing business with Israelis, especially less internationalized Israelis. Their respective business cultures are very different.
American Jewish businessmen tend to assimilate, try not to be too abrasive and follow the norms of American business outside of New York and its transplant satellites in Los Angeles, especially Hollywood, and Southern Florida. New York has a separate business culture, which by now is multi-ethnic in composition.
I hated doing business in New York, but I know New Yorkers who are Italian and African-American who think it is the greatest.
@ Bruce: “So Chris, what is your cultural and psychological background and what biases do you have as a result? What role have they played in the theories and outlooks to which you are attracted and espouse?”
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Well, that’s kind of my point. Jews apparently believe cultural Christians can’t be objective when it comes to Jews and give them a fair shake (and thus seek to level Christianity), but become indignant when it is suggested that Jews can’t really give gentiles or Christians a fair shake, either.
I believe in the sweep of history, there are equal amounts of evidence to suggest that both have a fair point. But there is far less evidence in America that the Jews haven’t been given a fair shake here. For example, I note the hugely disproportionate representation Jews enjoy in the U.S. Congress (and really, all over the American establishment today.)
I think Jews in America have gone a long way in forcing Christians to question their own built in bias’ (and Christians have gone a long way in listening, internalizing addressing these complaints), but there has been little to no corresponding self-critique by Jews, or expected of Jews. Liberal Jews seem to believe (or profess to believe) that declaring themselves secular is all that is required to somehow make them objective and fair-minded vis-à-vis Christians and gentiles, but I don’t think it’s as simple as that.
If cultural (and religious) Christians need to be weaned from their anti-Jewish bias,’ is it unreasonable to believe that cultural and religious Jews need to be weaned from an anti-Christian bias? As far as I can tell, Jewry has done next to nothing to discourage Jewish echo chambers, and has actually reinforced the worst of them by relentlessly lobbying for (and in the case of the Jewish caucus in Congress — voting) unconditional funding and support of Zionism.
At the very least, I think its reasonable to demand that American Jews stop instigating the funneling U.S. tax dollars to Israel, and ask them how they would feel if their tax dollars were being funneled to the Vatican, for example.
I agree with you Chris. It’s actually much worse since the Vatican has no military troops except a tiny guard with ridiculously old weapons and uniforms, and certainly
no tied at the hip-connection to the USA military industrial complex.
Well, Chris—
I understand the distinctions you make about Jews dealing with Gentiles.
At the same time, from what I have read of Israeli culture–and then, only from online sources such as Haaretz–it appears that Jews deal abrasively with other Jews within Israel. It has been noted that this is a shock to some Jews who make aliyah–and manifests itself in simple things such as aggressively pushing ahead in lines at the grocery or bank.
Again, I know nothing of Israeli culture, just what I’ve read.
I do think however, that in many ways culture goes from the bottom up, so I would think that such mundane social agressiveness most likely manifests itself at the top.
I’m not convinced how enlightening it is today to speak about Jews or Christians as if they are homogenous distinct entities. There are American Jews and then there Israelis for example, and at this point they are quite different societies even if they share an incestuous political alliance. I just spent time with my Norwegian Lutheran friends and my Vietnamese Catholic friends and they and I have a hard time understanding what they culturally have in common with American Evangelical Christians.
In my view what you are describing is more of a generational observation. Older American Jews remember the anti-Semitic discrimination of an earlier period and have a hard time forgetting it, not to mention the Holocaust. Prejudice dies slowly, also among older Christians. Younger American Jews don’t have these same memories and they don’t seem to share their parents’ and/or grandparents’ prejudices. To me the difference between the generations in all religious groups is quite remarkable. In heterogeneous American communities youths don’t seem to let religion get between them.
I don’t accept your argument that Jews are out to level Christianity. It seems to imply that American secularism was a Jewish invention. Jewish organizations tread carefully when going up against the hot buttons of the Religious Right. They are much more likely to aggressively attack a Jew who strays from the Israeli government line than Bill O’Reilly demanding that everyone say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays.”
As for your suggestion that Jews “become indignant when it is suggested that Jews can’t really give gentiles or Christians a fair shake …” I believe you are generalizing a more specific reality. There is no doubt that Jewish pro-Israeli organizations have tried to repress Christian criticism of Israel with false claims of anti-Semitism. I myself have begged Christians to be more outspoken and not to be intimidated. But these organizations also use the same tactic against Jewish criticism of Israel, also calling it anti-Semitic, or self-hatred. This is is a specific political tactic, not a clash of cultures. Your thesis ignores the fact that the most dynamic and fastest growing sects of Christianity in America more rabidly defend a Jewish Israel than even American Jews. Presidential candidate Mike Hucklebee made this very point on return from his recent trip to Israel and the West Bank settlements.
The case of Israel and the rest of the world is another matter. For a thousand years there were two main Jewish cultures, the Yiddish civilization in Europe and the Sephardic/Mizrahi Jews of the Middle East. Yiddish civilization was largely destroyed by Hitler, then finished off by American assimilation and the creation of Israel, whose founders were determined not to build a new society upon the ruins of the Yiddish past, but to develop a “New Jew” instead. With the absorption of the Mizrahi Jews and the Russian emigrants to Israel, this new Jewish nation went on to synthesize its own unique society. Israel is not Judaism, despite its claims, and Israel’s relation with the United States and the rest of the world is its own story.
Having studied history for a number of years, I’m not at all certain what is the “sweep of history,” but I certainly agree with you that the Jews have had it good in America. Coming from a culture in which education and literacy were important values, and possessing a great deal of experience in small business, plus endowed with a history of well-developed self-help institutions, Jewish immigrants were born for success in a bourgeois capitalist America on its way to dominating the world. But like most immigrants that have succeeded in the United States, they and their offspring have a tendency to attribute their success mostly to hard work and their individual characteristics rather than the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time.
I disagree with you that “Jews in America have gone a long way in forcing Christians to question their own bias[es].” Christians did a great deal of that on their own. Most instrumental was the Civil Rights Movement, which was forced upon the nation by the arduous efforts of African Americans who exposed themselves to considerable violence and great risk. By and large, Jews as well as women, went along for the ride. Unfairly, Jews, women and newer educated immigrants ended up the greatest beneficiaries of those Civil Rights campaigns.
I’m not sure what you are driving at with the statement that “Liberal Jews seem to believe (or profess to believe) that declaring themselves secular is all that is required to somehow make them objective and fair-minded vis-a-vis Christian and gentiles, but I don’t think it’s as simple as that.” Outside of the subject of Israel, I don’t see any fundamental differences in attitudes or politics between secular Jews and secular Christians. Both have a problem with the religious in America who use doctrine as the basis for claiming they have a lock on objectivity. This critique would not change even if the Jews disappeared.
As for cultural (and religious) Christians and Jews needing to be weaned from their biases against one another, the two groups of religious adherents appear to be doing quite well in that respect. Orthodox Jews in the US and Israel (and Orthodoxy is the main sect in Israel) and European Protestants and American Evangelicals seem to be getting along quite well. Their political alliances grow stronger with each passing day and in the United States they work together to lobby Congress for funding and support of Zionism.
Your beef seems to be with liberalism and secularism, conflating religious Jews with the Conservative and Reform synagogues of America which have a liberal orientation (well PEP to be more exact).
Whereas I may want our Congress to reduce its unwavering support for Israel as much as you do, you seem to think Congressional support and funding for Israel is nothing more than the result of a Jewish lobbying job. There are three pieces missing in your narrative: (1) Evangelical support for Zionism driven by its own theological straightjacket, (2) Conservative support driven by its rigid ideology, anti-Islamic political ravings, and commitment to an aggressive international posture and (3) Christian passivity, mainly the result of deep splits over what to think about Arabs and Muslims, which results in few objections to Israeli support and funding. Most Christians are not even willing to defend Christian Arabs from Israeli aggression.
If you want matters to change, then you need to work on your fellow Christians. Jews are not going to alter course quickly enough to make a difference.
I negotiated business in a number of countries: England, France, Germany, Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the USA and more. Each country has its own business culture and negotiating styles, and my conclusion is that they are different rather than one being necessarily better than another. Believe me, the USA is not the easiest place to strike a deal either.
I also wrote to Phil the following:
Israelis tend not to consider a deal final. They will not think twice about trying to re-negotiate long after we would consider a deal closed or signed. One night in a restaurant in Jerusalem, the deputy U.S. ambassador and some visiting State Department people asked if they could have our table since they had a larger party and we were only two. We were a little put out, but they sent over a bottle of wine, and we struck up a short conversation about their assignment in Israel. This point about negotiations was the first they mentioned.
However, and this I learned from my Israeli accountant and lawyer, both first-class guys who could function in any international environment, if you make it absolutely clear that you are not going to budge and that these are your final terms (and you have some power in the relationship), Israelis will follow their self-interest and accept the deal. Behind the assertive facade, they are very pragmatic and there is no shame in backing down.
Conversely, when the Israelis have the upper hand, it is very difficult for them not to extract the absolute max out of a deal.
Basically, Dennis Ross has it completely backwards. You have to practice tough love with the Israelis and you have to be very polite and respectful to the Arabs. If you show respect to the Arabs, they will try to be accommodative. Nothing drives me more crazy than to hear American and Israeli foreign policy experts pontificate how the Arabs only understand toughness and how the Israelis need empathy and kit glove handling.
Thanks for this, Bruce — great insight!
I agree! The problem is neither our congress or executive is willing to play tough love with the Israelis thanks to the power of AIPAC. The arabs are easy compared to our
so called partner, Israel. This is due to a real 5th column here in the USA–at one time
it was Communist, and now it is Israel First.
From an Israeli perspective, the greatest “freier” — or sucker — who ever lived must have been George W. Bush, who turned over his administration’s entire Middle East affairs group over to the neo-cons who brought us that work of genius — “Clean Break.”
W.C. Fields may have said there’s a sucker born every minute. But from the Israeli’s perspective, a sucker like George W. Bush comes around once in a millenium.
Amen. The American 4th Estate has yet to reveal to the citizens thereof just how the
stink tanks furnished rationals for what has come to pass, and they are not now
telling us the same is happening again. And with the same treasonous bugle boys.
I never had sympathy for George the clown, but I felt extremely uncomfortable thinking about how Sharon and his gang must have been yukking it up after spending a session with him. He was, I guess our representative, and it seems obvious that the Israelis really must have contempt for the American people in general.
How could they not? Shrub has never been more what he always was, a male cheerleader f0r god’s sakes, and a frat boy! Problem is, Obama might be more of the same, so long as domestically, he can use Obamcare to eek out essentially reparations, that is, kill off the old whites to to support the new brown generations of USA citizens.
Syvanen, and that contempt continues unabated. The Israelis must be laughing their tukkuses off over how malleable the suckers that make up the US Congress are — and how they robotically do AIPAC’s bidding. And, as someone posted earlier here, the Israelis get a real kick out of the powerless taxpaying “suckers” in the so-called “flyover states.” Those rubes have no say in the $3 billion that comes out of their pockets to fund the IDF’s massacre of women and children in the kill-zone of Gaza. “Our best friend and only democracy in the region!” Thanks a lot, suckahs!
I don’t think George initially had much sympathy for the Israelis and their gross leader; he was, after all, his father’s son. But George wasn’t in charge, Cheney and his gang of neocons was running the place, Israelis further to the right than Sharon.
Members of the Israeli government had their own misgivings about the war on Iraq, but the neocons were too sure that the road to Jerusalem ran through Baghdad.
“Problem is, Obama might be more of the same, so long as domestically, he can use Obamcare to eek out essentially reparations, that is, kill off the old whites to to support the new brown generations of USA citizens”
Remind me to come to Mondowiess more often for this type of stimulating and well-informed discussion.
Thank God I am Jewish, instead of white. I bet we’ll do real well when we unite with our brown brothers to eliminate all the whites! And my new mixture of Delta Blues and klezmer will be decreed by Obama to be America’s new national music.
Bobby Zimmerman, your day is over, with all your Christian crap! “Gotta serve somebody”, my ass!
Loved that recording!
I think Citizen has been listening a bit too much to Glen Beck.
How so? My take on Glen Beck and Palin too is that neither knows much about
realpolitik and the ironical undercurrents and details of world history, which makes both lame regarding foreign policy, however both have latched on at various times
to some real root problems with Obama’s address to domestic issues, e.g., health care, immigration, and Big Banking, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Acorn, etc. Note
that Both Beck and Palin tow the Hasbara line regarding the I-P conflict. The truth is both are flukes rising up despite a well-oiled bi-partisan machine empowered
by the Fourth Estate. Joe the Plumber is more than an episode reflecting pure ignorance–neither parties’ leaders can afford to diverge from the teleprompter less
the truth be at least addressed for all the public to hear on prime time TV. Are you sure if its better to acquiece to MSM spin than to look beyond Joe Plumber’s ignorance?
Mooser, you need to look closely at the wording of the Obamacare bills in congress now. Then look at demographics, and the current health care situation, then the impact. Your knee-jerk response of ridicule is too simple. The answer, my friend,
is blowing in the wind–just perhaps you are not as hip and aware as you think.
What a great thread! I add my thanks, Bruce.