Pereat mundus if I can’t have my way

In July 2002, Yossi Klein Halevi wrote in the New Republic, in a long piece entitled “The Wall” and subtitled “How despair is transforming Israel”:

The more that Israelis are treated as pariahs, the greater their tendency toward recklessness… And one friend, a veteran critic of the occupation, said to me with a terrible casualness, “If the world can’t find space for a sliver of a Jewish state, then the world doesn’t have the right to exist. And if it blows up because of a nuclear war in the Middle East, maybe that’s poetic justice.”

The first sentence describes a more general pattern of behavior than Israel’s reaction to the new wave of stigmatization and ostracism at the beginning of the millennium. “The world doesn’t have the right to exist” if some condition is not met, an impossible condition sometimes. An outburst of suicidal and murderous despair might overwhelm actors with much greater power than Halevi’s friend and with a narcissistic idea of justice. Elsewhere.

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