What this episode is about
In 1987, Israeli soldiers beat Palestinian teenagers bloody with batons during the day, then returned to their barracks at night and sobbed uncontrollably—the army did not have enough psychologists to go around. They were not crying for the teenagers they had beaten. They were crying for themselves. The side with overwhelming power firmly believed that it was the persecuted victim. In Crying While Shooting: The Psychological Predicament of the Israelis (The Israeli Mind: How the Israeli National Character Shapes Our World), author Alon Gratch uses the scalpel of psychoanalysis to cut open the endless war raging inside a people the whole world both loves and hates, respects and fears: in the body of a “new human species” whose country was founded barely more than seventy years ago lives a “old soul” persecuted for two thousand years. They wrestle, bleed, and sob inside every Israeli, every single day.
Highlights:
• The diagnosis of the “old baby”—why does a small country of nine million people simultaneously wear the faces of a “regional military hegemon” and a “whipping boy who could be wiped out at any moment”? In the psychoanalyst’s eyes, this nation has grown both a white-bearded old man and a swaddled infant.
• The Sabra project’s ambition—how Zionists launched an unprecedented program of “anthropological reconstruction”: reviving a language that had been dead for two thousand years, changing names, building muscles, and even rewriting child-rearing practices, all to create a new human being who could “never be slaughtered again.”
• A three-layer psychological dissection of “crying while shooting”—from “extreme narcissism paired with extreme self-hatred,” to “the perpetrator’s unshakable conviction that they are the victim,” to the preemptive-strike logic of “Beginism.” Layered together, these explain the posture Israel adopts whenever it acts against others: a gun in its hands, tears in its eyes.
A spine-chilling Easter egg—why is Eren’s “Rumbling” in Attack on Titan the visualized, maximized, ultimate version of “crying while shooting”?
Jump to a section
- 00:00 Opening | “Crying While Shooting”—a scene that splits global opinion
- 01:56 Two keywords for understanding Israel: inner conflict & living toward death
- 04:23 Core diagnosis | Israel is an “old baby”
- 06:15 The old Jew sentenced to death | Psychological armor forged by two thousand years of diaspora
- 09:35 The “Sabra” project | Turning yourself into your own opposite
- 15:22 Three psychological civil wars that erupt every day
- 15:39 Layer one: extreme narcissism paired with extreme self-hatred
- 17:08 Layer two: the perpetrator forever refuses to admit they are the perpetrator
- 21:37 Layer three: from “Beginism” to preemptive strikes
- 24:03 Easter egg | The “Rumbling” in Attack on Titan: the ultimate version of “crying while shooting”?
- 26:31 Why can the old soul never be killed? Nourished by geopolitical reality
- 28:23 Living toward death | The spine-chilling line in the café
- 30:30 Why a “startup nation”? A deeper explanation
- 33:17 Two souls, one body: they are not crazy
- 33:58 Closing | Another ancient people, thousands of kilometers away
The book
- Title: The Israeli Mind: How the Israeli National Character Shapes Our World
- Author: Alon Gratch
- Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
- Publication date: 2015-09
- ISBN：9781250067807
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