Adam's blogbox: why do the Jews always over-react to any Arab provocation? It’s the Holocaust, stupid

A friend of mine asks: “What is it about the Jews, that they always go to extremes? Why didn’t they just negotiate for a prisoner exchange when Hezbollah kidnapped their soldiers? Heck, they’ve done it before. Why do they have to go and bomb the bejezus out of Lebanon? Are they goddam crazy?”

Well, there are a couple of reasons for Israel’s attempt to bomb Lebanon back into the Stone Age. The new post-Sharon Israeli government leaders don’t have a military background, so they’re eager to establish their warrior bona fides by siccing the airforce on their neighbor. Also, they think they can pressure the Lebanese government into controlling Hezbollah (impossible: in a straight fight, the stronger Hezbollah militia would trounce the Lebanese army). Then there’s a little score to settle because Hezbollah pushed Israel out of Lebanon six years ago.

But the real reason is the Holocaust. Let me explain.

The Jews are the only nation on earth who’ve actually had to contemplate their own extermination.

Never forget that Hitler whacked six million Jews, which was a third of the Jewish population at the time. There is no nation on earth who’ve lost that many people, and in such a horrible way – in factories of death, purpose-built to exterminate the Jews on an assembly-line of mass murder. It’s the biggest crime of all time. Nothing comes close.

What’s more, it all happened in living memory. There are still Holocaust survivors from Auschwitz and other death camps alive and kicking in Israel and elsewhere. There’s not a Jew on this earth who didn’t lose family, or friends of the family, in the Holocaust.

What are the Jews to do in the face of virulent anti-semitism from the Arabs, which might have existed even if there were no Palestine problem?

To Jewish memory banks, the realistic conclusion is that the Arabs are the Nazis in a new guise – and “never again” means they’re going to thump these guys any and every time these guys take action against Jews. (Do you blame the Jews? Listen, was your family murdered by the Nazis? Not? Then shut the heck up.)

In Jewish souls, they’re still fighting the Nazis.

Now this might be silly of the Jews, and they might be extra-touchy and all, but that’s what lives deep in their bones. That’s the atavistic tribal reality of being a Jew. That’s why Jews can get oh-so-boring when they freak out about Hamas and Hezbollah not recognizing the right of Israel to exist. To Jews it means that Hamas and Hezbollah don’t think the Jews themselves have a right to exist -- i.e. the Jews should be exterminated.

Then there is another crucial factor to consider: the AA Kill Ratio Theory of History, a useful new tool to analyze all conflicts. (The AA stands for an-eye-for-an-eye, A for A, and also for my name, Adam Ash, since I’m inventing this theory even as you read about it.)

The fact of the matter is that the Kill Ratio between Jew and Arab has changed dramatically over the last couple of decades.

In the first intifada, the Israelis killed about 30 Arabs for every Jew the Palestinians killed.

In the second intifada, the Israelis killed about 3 Arabs for every Jew the Palestinians killed.

As the Arabs come closer and closer to a one-to-one Kill Ratio, the Jews get more and more upset. Because what if the Kill Ratio switches, and the Arabs kill more Jews than the Jews can kill Arabs? Presto, the threat of extermination will jump right up into the forefront of Jewish psyches. Naturally the Jews want to stay ahead of the game, and kill more Arabs than the Arabs can kill Jews.

Take the US as an example of the AA Kill Ratio Theory. We lost 3,000 civilians on 9/11. What did we do? We invaded Afghanistan, and killed 10,000 civilians right back. Then, still unsatisfied, we invaded Iraq, where we’ve whacked maybe 30,000 civilians (some say over 100,000).

Why? It’s that old AA Kill Ratio. You’ve killed 3,000 of our guys, so we’re gonna take out 3,000 of your guys, and then some. The AA Kill Ratio demands that you kill back at the same level and more, depending on how outraged you are -- and we were extremely outraged and thoroughly pissed by 9/11. I remember how I felt on that day: my city had been attacked, and my first thought was that we should attack Afghanistan, exterminate Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban, and put the oppressed women of Afghanistan in charge of their country.

In Vietnam our Kill Ratio was even more favorable to the US. There the Vietnamese killed 50,000 of us, but we killed at least a million and a half of them in return. We didn’t even have the excuse of the Holocaust, which makes us a very sore-headed bunch when it comes to AA Kill Ratio Theory. For every A you kill, we’ll kill at least 30 A’s.

In the Second World War, Russia lost more people than any other nation -- 20 million Russians were killed. Is it any wonder that Russia held on to Eastern Europe as a bunch of vassal states for so long after the war ended? They’d lost too many people not to hang on to their newly won Empire. Their unfortunate Kill Ratio demanded a stranglehold on Eastern Europe. 20 million dead Russians told them to take revenge.

As for the First World War, why did the English and the French insist on such a punitive peace with Germany? That old Kill Ratio – they never got a chance to kill enough Germans to make up for their anger at being killed themselves.

The disease of Kill Ratiotis operates on an extremely atavistic tribal-memory level. Why did it take the American South so long to get over the Civil War? Too many Southerners died, and they never got a chance to kill the Northerners back and equalize the Kill Ratio.

Not that Kill Ratio is always a bad thing. One man in recent history used an imagined Kill Ratio to promote something good. He was President De Klerk of South Africa (Nelson Mandela’s co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for freeing South Africa from apartheid). Some months before De Klerk unbanned the ANC and released Mandela, he made a remarkable speech to a group of South African policemen, who were at that time the stormtroopers of apartheid. De Klerk told them that the whites could easily keep apartheid going by shooting a couple of hundred or thousand black protesters every few years. But, he asked, how many blacks would the whites eventually have to shoot every year? Hundreds of thousands? De Klerk decided that the future Kill Ratio wasn’t worth the present status quo. The numbers simply didn’t bear contemplation. Too many A’s on the other side would have to be killed. So he decided to unban the ANC and release Nelson Mandela.

History being what it is, there is never a fair and equivalent Kill Ratio – a stable A for an A. One side always kills more of the other, and usually much more. For the A you kill, I’m going to kill A plus of you. The only equivalent Kill Ratio ever imagined is the perfect AA Kill Ratio of a nuclear war -- Mutual Assured Destruction, in which everybody gets killed.

How many Arabs would the Jews have to kill before they stop -- before they’ve cured themselves of their disease of Kill Ratiotis? According to strict AA Kill Ratio Theory, at least six million (or a third of the Arabs).

Obviously, the Jews are not going to do that, because the Arabs aren’t the Nazis -- and even if Israel used all its bombs and firepower to kill Arabs 24/7 for the next year, they’d run out of ammo long before six million Arabs were dead.

But the AA Kill Ratio Theory explains why there’s no telling how many Arabs the Jews will kill, because in the back of their minds, and in their souls, those six million dead Jews are crying out for satisfaction – a satisfaction that can never be had, but that can be expressed in such over-reactions as bombing Lebanon to pieces.

The AA Kill Ratio Theory also explains why the Arabs have to kill many more Jews to get satisfaction, because they’re playing catch-up – they’re way behind the Jews in the Arab-Jew AA Kill Ratio game.

The AA Kill Ratio Theory tells us in no uncertain terms that there will have to be a whole lotta more killing going on before peace can arrive.

Tragic, isn’t it?