* [My father] started out working in an uncle’s appliance store, but business was so slow that pretty soon the uncle needed an out. He set the store on fire, collected insurance, and used that money to open an insurance agency himself.
* Three weeks before the [9-11] terrorist attack that changed America, my brother Ariel — who had moved from Jerusalem to New York a few months before I started college — casually said to a friend while playing golf in New Jersey, “One of these days some terrorists will hijack a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center.” …Ariel was interviewed by The New York Times for an article discussing immigrants’ feelings about the potential war [in Iraq]. I hope the United States goes to war, he said, because it will get so mired in the Middle East Swamp that it will learn once and for all to stay out of it.
* A hundred years ago… an Arab nationalist by the name of Najib Azuri published a book in which he predicted that the Arabs and the Jews will fight over Palestine until one of them is defeated, and that the fate of the entire world depends on the outcome of that war.
* When I was nineteen, the IDF sent me on a special mission… [W]hat was at the heart of our highly popular book packages: Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler and a couple of hard-core German publications, reserved for high officers and other favored visitors.
* Israelis don’t particularly value general norms of conduct. They have a basic disrespect for plans, rules and procedures.
* Judaism has always had two competing trends: a loving, forgiving one, and a separatist, combative one; one seeking to please the gentiles and one hostile to them. (Hugo Bergman)
* Deep in his soul, the extreme secularist wants to believe, while the ultraorthodox wants to stray. But fearful of such desires, each resorts to fortifying his own extremism by attacking the other’s…
* An Israeli driver was arrested for driving while talking on two cell phones…
* Israeli Arabs…by 2013 constituted about 20% of the total population. Though they are Israeli citizens and enjoy a higher standard of living and far more freedom than many of their counterparts in the Arab countries or the Palestinian Authority, they are nonetheless subjected to both official and unofficial discrimination. By design, they are unable to feel at home in the Jewish state, as evidenced most profoundly by their exclusion from the national anthem, which celebrates the yearning of the Jewish soul for its homeland. …It is now more likely than ever that Israeli Arabs will…join the resistance to Israel…
* Israel’s attitude towards its Arab minority and the Palestinians in the territories reveals another facet of Israeli narcissism, namely the Israeli mind’s paucity of empathy…
* Though most times it doesn’t come to blows, this clash of narcissistic entitlements is omnipresent in Israeli daily life. …During their training in El Al, flight attendants are told that when Israelis purchase an airline ticket, they believe they buy not only the ticket but also the plane, the pilot and the flight attendants.
* The Israeli mind’s failures at empathy, its lack of regard for reality, and its relentless drive for success, all produce a predilection for cutting corners, bluffing, and lying.
* A New York-based Israeli locksmith describes how he makes his living. When called at night by a customer who had locked himself out, he fiddles with the lock as if to gain entry. He then “inadvertently” breaks it, which leaves the customer with the options of spending the night in an unlocked home or having a new lock installed on the spot for double the normal cost.
* European associates perceive the Israelis they work with…as liars, thieves, and untrustworthy manipulators.
* The second pattern related to the Israeli proclivity to push the envelope, by hook or by crook, is the culture’s permeable attitude toward boundaries. An extreme example is provided by an Israeli woman who was, in the 1970s associated with a radical leftist political organization that was tracked by the government security apparatus. While a university student, she started a relationship with a man who told her he was trailing her as part of his job for the Shabak… On a more ordinary, cultural level, compared to Americans, say, Israelis are far more open with respect to their innermost thoughts: sex, money, family troubles. They’ll be the first to tell you what you should do about such personal matters, what you should think, or what you do think but don’t seem to know.
* An Israeli patient of mine reported on his treatment in Israel as a nineteen-year old. His psychologist once told him, as he struggled with sexual insecurity, that if he didn’t have sex with a girl he was friendly with by the following session, he shouldn’t bother coming back. The patient discussed it with the girl in question, and with her cooperation he did obey the authority, perhaps because the therapist herself seemed like a rebel.
* David Grossman’s To the End of the Land: Suddenly he starts crying that he doesn’t want to be Jewish anymore, because they always kill us and always hate us, and he knows this because all the holidays are about it. And the adults look at one another, and a brother-in-law mumbles that it is kind of difficult to argue with that, and his wife says, “Don’t be paranoid,” and he quotes “that in every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us” and she replies that it’s not exactly scientific fact, and that maybe we should examine our own role in the whole “rising up against us business…”
* Israeli psychologist Ofer Grosbard likens Israel, the country, to the psychotherapy patient who insists in the initial consultation that nothing is wrong with him. The problem, he tells the therapist, is that he is so talented, so exceptional and so successful that everyone else is simply envious and hateful toward him.
* “A dog is like a Gentile, you can see at once what it’s thinking or feeling. Diaspora Jews became like cats.” (Amos Oz)
* Ka-Tzetnik came to what he considered the major discovery of his treatment: Auschwitz was man-made, and in different circumstances, he himself could have been the Nazi murderer, and the Germans, his victims.
* On the eve of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Menachem Begin told his cabinet: “The alternative is Treblinka.”
* In Israel, hardly a day goes by without reference to the Holocaust in the media.
* While Israelis are relatively quick to label atrocities committed by other nations as Nazi-like, and whereas extremists on both sides of the political map within Israel occasionally slip into reciprocal labeling as Nazis, Israelis in general rarely apply the same labels to their own behavior.
* Most Israelis have little empathy for Palestinians…while Israelis have a thin skin when it comes to their own suffering.
* The strange affinity of Zionism and Nazism: both viewed the Jewish Diaspora as infected, plagued, and emasculated, and both sought to eliminate it.
* In 2014 the Israeli Ministry of Education extended mandatory Holocaust instruction into kindergarten.
* Visitors to Israel are struck by the brutality, vulgarity and insensitivity of the culture.
* Everyday belligerence is rooted in unconscious anxiety. Israelis deny their anxiety and take it out on others in anger.
* In 1954, Israel dispatched secret agents disguised as Egyptian nationalists, Islamists, or communists to bomb American and British targets in Egypt to influence American policy toward Israel’s then biggest Muslim threat.
