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Israel’s “attack on Gaza” the previous winter, Hadar told the audience, had “little to do with security” (as if 8000 rockets and mortars fell on London people would just yawn). What, then, he asked there, “enables Jewish brutality toward Palestinians?” Since Israel, he explained, has never properly mourned the Holocaust, the society has a “vengeful unconscious”--and takes it all out on the innocent, bewildered Palestinians. Israelis say (or used to say, back in the 1950s) that Jews will never again go “like sheep to the slaughter”; so the Palestinians, insists Hadar, are their “sacrificial lamb.” Indeed, “a full-blown Palestinian Holocaust is part of the unconscious [Israeli] itinerary.”

Tel Aviv University Psych Prof Uri Hadar – Inventor of Blood Libels

by Joel Amitai
4/11/2009

In 2005, the year Israel removed every last soldier and settler from Gaza in the disengagement, 179 rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza. In 2006, the number went up to 946; in 2007 it was 896; and in 2008 it went up to 1752. (These figures don’t include mortar fire, sniper fire, incursions and kidnappings, and so on; the combined rocket-mortar total for 2008 was about 3000.)

During October 27-28, 2008, two months before Israel finally launched the Gaza military operation in response to even further escalation in rocket and mortar fire during December, Uri Hadar, professor of psychology at Tel Aviv University, presented a paper at a conference in Gaza City. The conference was titled “Siege and Mental Health…Walls vs. Bridges.” Prof. Hadar’s own “research” paper was called “The Siege Without and the Siege Within: An Israeli Perspective.” In it--discussing what he called “the siege”--he never once mentioned the rocket fire or any other form of violent aggression against Israel from Gaza. In other words, he walked into the Hamas’ den and said the party perpetrating a siege was…Israel.

Hadar is married to Mirjam Hadar, who cofounded the extremist New Profile organization that coaches young Israelis in using lies and tricks to obtain illegal draft exemptions (her home was raided by the authorities last January). Husband Uri said in his presentation, “The siege situation [in Gaza] is only the most extreme case in which Israeli policies aim to enclose large Palestinian populations and separate them from the rest of the world.” Speaking to Gazan Arabs who have been indoctrinated since they were toddlers to see Israelis--and Jews generally--as the incarnation of evil, Prof. Hadar reinforced their hatred and delivered the goods, stating: “In Gaza, we have seen some of the most unrestrained actions of the Israeli army, such as dropping a one-ton bomb in a residential area or not hesitating to shoot at innocent children on the beach, by way of ‘collateral damage.’”

Hadar didn’t mention, of course, that a one-ton bomb was dropped (in 2002) in order to kill Salah Shehade, then the central Hamas planner of terror operations, responsible for the murder of hundreds of Israelis and known at the time to be planning even larger-scale attacks. Nor did he mention that this assassination became a cause célèbre precisely because it was the only Israeli assassination of a major Hamas figure that took a sizable civilian toll (of fourteen people); in all other cases the pinpoint strikes either minimized or totally avoided collateral civilian losses.

But if in this case Prof. Hadar engaged in mendacity by omission, his reference to “not hesitating to shoot at innocent children on the beach” is either gross ignorance or pure slander against the country that funds his cushy university job. The case he is referring to is one in which Israel was accused initially of having fired Israeli artillery responsible for a 2006 explosion on a Gaza beach that killed seven Palestinian civilians. It was subsequently established that there was no Israeli artillery fire at or towards the beach on that day. But why get Prof. Hadar tangled up in facts when he can demonstrate his anti-Israel bona fides by defaming his own country to a pro-terror audience.

Two months later the Gaza War (or Operation Cast Lead) broke out. It will come as no surprise that Prof. Hadar--the same chap who earlier gave a talk on “the siege” in which he never mentioned a single rocket fired from Gaza--saw the whole war as a brutal Israeli attack. In September 2009, he and three coauthors published an article called “Psychoactive and Operation Cast Lead.” The title refers to an organization, in which the authors are members, whose full name is Psychoactive--Mental Health Professionals for Human Rights, and which “includes both Israeli Jewish and Palestinian mental health professionals and maintains extensive connections with colleagues in Gaza and the West Bank….”

The article describes the travails of the Israeli Jewish members of Psychoactive during the war--which it exclusively refers to as “the attack,” i.e., by Israel. On the Israeli side, “the indifference, and sometimes hostility, with which we were met by the [pro-self-defense] Israeli consensus, our relatives, friends, neighbors…led to a growing sense of helplessness and isolation which…accompanied us throughout the weeks of the attack and beyond, until this very moment: a sense of deep disconnection from the Israeli collective.”

But on the Palestinian side it wasn’t much better. Hadar and friends write:

“Mostly, our attempts to express empathy, too, for our own suffering--that of Jewish Israelis in the south who had been under attack for years from Qassam rockets and Jewish Israelis whose lives have been disrupted by fear of terror attacks--such attempts were on the whole seen [by Palestinian interlocutors] as a bid to justify the attack on Gaza. The fact that we were activists speaking out against the attack did not really count in our favour: we were perceived as part of the attacking entity and hence as an address for expressions of frustration and outrage….

“…by and large, our Palestinian colleagues challenged Jewish hegemony in Israel and thought that Israel should stop defining itself as a Jewish state as a condition for coexistence and civil equality.

“Our listserve during this period also became a source of alternative information….We were exposed to pictorial material which, among other things, compared the activities of the Israeli army in Gaza with those of the Nazis against the Jews. This evoked hard feelings among the Jewish participants…. From time to time the Jewish participants came up with calls for Palestinians to express their disavowal of Hamas or their recognition of the suffering of the Jewish citizens of Sderot or the Gaza area. Such demands were perceived as non-legitimate by most Palestinians….

“…We needed to confirm our humanity and morality through its appreciation by the Palestinian participants. When this did not quite happen, we found ourselves, again, coping with a sense of isolation and loneliness.”

It is not hard to see through the fog of verbiage here: Hadar and his associates, incapable of loyalty to or identification with their own society even in wartime, seek acceptance from their “Palestinian colleagues” by demonstrating to them that they are “good Israelis” who condemn Israel for carrying out an “attack.” No need to mention or condemn the eight-year rain of Hamas rockets on Jewish children. The peace-loving Palestinian “colleagues” respond by demanding Israel’s demise, likening Israelis to Nazis, supporting Hamas, expressing total indifference to the Israeli victims of rocket fire, and incomprehensively refusing to acquiesce in “confirming” the “humanity and morality” of Hadar and associates.

Did this kindle any suspicion in the minds of Hadar and his friends’ minds that the ambitions of the Palestinian “peace partners” are less than peaceful? Or that Israel’s use of force against terrorists was fully justified? Of course not. Why that would expose them to suspicions of being Zionists!

Now if Hadar writing elsewhere at least seemed to express a modicum of sympathy for Israeli suffering, all such pretense vanished the next month when, again on his own, he gave a talk at a conference of London University’s Birkbeck Institute. The conference was called “Sites of Conflict: Psycho-Political Resistance in Israel-Palestine.” Hadar’s address had the imposing title “Burning Memories: Sacrifice and the Unconscious in History.”

A genocidal Nazi-like Holocaust being planned by the Jews! Nothing less, all from Tel Aviv University Professor Hadar. Leaping on the anti-Semitic bandwagon, Hadar proclaims that Israelis are Nazis, planning the next Holocaust, but of Arabs. Amidst a storm of risible psychobabble, a pathologically pseudo-academic libels his own country in the most disgusting terms before anti-Semitic pro-terror forums -- in Gaza City and London. And all the while getting paid for it by Tel Aviv University with the hard-earned cash ponied up by the Israeli taxpayer.

Joel Amitai is an independent researcher and filmmaker. Reach him at jamitai40@gmail.com.

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