http://anisraelitaxi.wordpress.com/2008/06/13/the-israeli-army/

Muslims, however, have little or no respect for this view. Muslims, unlike Christians, tend to feel that “they are the answer to the riddle of history, and know themselves to be this answer” (to borrow a phrase from Marx and Engels). Their theory of what is wrong with history, on the profane level, is simplicity itself : usury is what is wrong with it. Now, speaking for myself, I was born in the Christian culture-sphere, but I was never a Christian, and, having become profoundly dissatisfied with the results of my attempts to feel my way into the Jewish world (by this I mean not so much “conversion” as merely being permitted to learn the language), I propose to become a Muslim. I have concluded that whatever it is ‘the Jews’ imagine themselves to be protecting themselves and us against, they have failed to protect us against it, so that other approaches become morally mandatory.

It would certainly not be correct for me to walk away from such an unsatisfactory encounter cherishing a suspicion of Islam, as the thing we were to be protected against. All the evidence suggests that Jews, and Christians for that matter, are deliberately trying to evoke the hatred of Muslims, merely as a pretext for imperial adventures, in an age that no longer has any need of white imperialists, and indeed urgently needs to be rid of them.

In modern mass societies, psychological climate is, in my opinion, set not by text or speech so much as by visual tableaux. For instance, US pseudo-perceptions of the mid-east are determined largely by cinema and TV. In the same way, Israeli pseudo-perceptions of the role of the IDF are determined for most people by TV and cinema products.

This complicates matters in one respect, namely that an increasing proportion of non-conscript IDF are from Mafdal or Hardal backgrounds, which means that they actually avoid cinema, TV, and popular culture in general, in favour of a sort of yeshiva culture, but I can’t really say anything about this except that it is a problem for the larger, more or less profane, public, not for me.

Anyway, returning to the mass culture treatment of the IDF, I want to mention a couple of things about “Bab el Wad” videos (as opposed to the song per se) that stand out even to me, a non-Israeli and a non-Jew. The most important is that they link the role of the IDF back to the Second World War struggle against exterminationist anti-Semitism, even though this link is anachronistic. The link is mythically NECESSARY, and this is my point.

Just writing about, e.g., the pro-Nazi proclivities of Haj Amin Muhammad al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, though logically suitable, doesn’t immediately engage the emotions. Successful propaganda internalises itself and bypasses logic and critical reason, and this why the thing I would want to study first is the cinema and TV-created mass psychological climate to which ordinary young Israelis are exposed, and which, I feel certain, installs this subconscious link between army service and “fighting nazism” by the time they are fifteen or so. It isn’t unique : English cinema and TV mass culture revolved around similar tropes in the 1950s, as I recall from my childhood.