Israel is being gripped by a deadly madness. An Israeli soldier has shot dead an armed Israeli settler who attacked him. Each thought the other was a Palestinian. Meanwhile, Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed the Holocaust on the Palestinians in an accusation that would be laughable in any other circumstances. He based his assertion on a 1941 meeting between Nazi leader Adolph Hitler and the Grand Mufti during which the Mufti is reported to have told Hitler to "burn" the Jews. In a breathtakingly absurd revision of history, Netanyahu told a Zionist conference that Hitler had only wanted to expel the Jews from Europe. Yet by 1940 the extermination of Jews was well under way. SS Einsatzgruppen were slaughtering them in Russia. The Israeli leader has not only been widely ridiculed in the press for his crazy statement, but Angela Merkel's government has said somberly that Germany alone was responsible for the Holocaust. It is not hard to see why Israelis are becoming unhinged. They are faced with a Third Intifada which promises to be every bit as deadly as its predecessors. Palestinians are striking back at the highly public aggression of Israeli troops. This has been marked by a very disturbing development. Journalists have posted a succession of videos in which Palestinians have been beaten up or gunned down. What makes these crimes so remarkable is that the presence of world media and of cameras making a record of what they are doing has clearly had no effect whatsoever upon the behavior of the soldiers. They are acting with impunity. They no longer care if anyone sees their monstrous savagery. This takes Israel's attitude to a whole new level. It has spent 68 years ignoring world opinion, not least the very occasional uncomfortable protests of its staunch American ally. It has insisted it wanted peace, even while it destroyed the foundations on which that peace could be built. The systematic construction of illegal settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem has been nothing more or less than the annexation of Palestinian land. These seizures have now reach the stage that an economically viable Palestinian state has become an impossibility. The core message with which Israel has begged for international sympathy and support has always been that it is a poor and vulnerable outpost of democracy and civilized values in a region where it is surrounded by aggressive and implacable Arab enemies. But this message will no longer wash. Far from being vulnerable, Zionist Israel has exposed itself more and more as an aggressor state. In Europe, a once huge sympathy for beleaguered Israel is rapidly ebbing. In short, the mask of innocence has slipped from the face of the Israeli wolf. Knowing that there is no replacing it, knowing that it has lost all credibility, the Netanyahu government has shrugged its shoulders. There is no further need for pretense. A Third Intifada will be the excuse to rob Israeli-Palestinians of their citizenship and expel them to the Gaza Ghetto or what is left of the Palestinian West Bank. To make sure of the white-hot anger that will fuel the revolt that occurs, Israel actually needs to be seen to be behaving deplorably. This is the madness of the psychopath, of the serial killer who actually glories in his crimes. At least the Nazi SS leader Himmler sought to conceal the details of his Holocaust.
