During the First Great Jewish Revolt, a group of Sicarii (the armed wing of the Zealot Jewish sect) captured the Roman garrison of Masada which later fell under seige by the Romans led by Lucius Flavius Silva who occupied Judea. The Sicarii bravely defended themselves against overwhelming odds but when it became clear that they could not hold the mountaintop fortress and disdainful of the concept of surrender, they drew lots and committed a sort of faux-suicide with each person killing and being killed in turn by each of his brethren until one remained who then killed himself. This account comes to us only through the writings of the Roman apologist/Jewish historian Josephus.

As part of my research on PTSD for my novel, I came across the term Masada syndrome, which refers to a state in which members of a group hold the belief that the rest of the world has highly negative behavioral intentions towards them. They believe that this is perhaps a natural state of being which they are duty-bound to correct. The Masada syndrome holds that the members of the group believe that not just one group of people are against them, but the whole world. It becomes necessary to identify external threats but also, internal, and if none can be found, they must be invented because the central belief in this specific notion is key to their worldview. Now, this isn’t to say that the Masada syndrome is necessarily unfounded in all groups or that the Sicarii (who also persecuted Jews who were seen as collaborating in some way with the Romans) were without justification whatsoever. The fall of Masada is an enduring Jewish trope and one that justifiably speaks to the beseiged position the Jewish community found itself in in various parts of the globe.

I’ve been an avid reader of the New Republic for years but Marty Peretz seems to me occasionally a very frustrating figure. He recently denounced George Mitchell for the sin of “even-handedness” in his dealings even as Peretz called for fairness. As does Abe Foxman of the ADL, who has done yeoman’s work for the cause of fairness and justice in public and private life, who recently affixed the tag of Anti-Semite to Bill Moyers for a fairly non-partisan documentary. Peretz described one of my favorite bloggers, Ezra Klein of the American Prospect, as part of the Juicebox mafia, which is on one level, a delightful pun (I’m silly like that…Jews and Juice..yes?) and one another, dismissive because of Klein’s youth. I’m guessing he threw in the mafia for rhythm.

Jeffrey Goldberg referencing I.J.Singer’s The Brothers Ashkenazi:

“Politics taught I.J. the bitter lesson that, however much the extreme left and the extreme right might disagree, the one common ground upon which they met comfortably was anti-Semitism.”

Goldberg then goes on to call this an “evergreen” phenomenon, which is where I personally think the problem lies. I would hope hatred is not a natural condition, and especially not organized hatred. I could be wrong but I would like to be right. This evergreenness presupposes, as with the Masada syndrome, a central belief that all sides, regardless of ideology, are united against the group. In the present day, is this a fair claim? This is debatable. Certainly, some groups are, but all ends of the spectrum? That’s a harder case to make. On its face, a charge of Anti-Semitism wielded randomly can act as a defence mechanism. Expectations of negative experiences blunt disappointment when said event comes to pass. Pre-emptively smearing Bill Moyers, for example, takes away Moyers’ ability to disappoint Foxman (who we presume operates with the best of intentions, and believes that Moyers is previously an upstanding person with no Anti-Semitic intentions) and if Moyers turns out to not make a further pronouncement that can be construed as such, Foxman may claim a victory for having done his part in marginalizing a possible Anti-Semite. To quote from Milgram’s book on Stress and Coping in Times of War, where he talks about the Masada Syndrome (and includes a quote from Golda Meir to that effect), “Leibman (1978), in discussing the acceptance of the Anti-Semitic norm by religious Jews, points out that: …it provides some protection against the trauma of Anti-Semitism since it prepares the traditionally religious Jew, at least pyschologically, for this phenomenon. (p.45) At various points in history (possibly even today), this psychological protection may have been necessary. Trauma is a very real thing and history is pretty clear on various instances of trauma. I’d hope now isn’t the time.

By slandering enough people, the presupposition is that you’ll nail at least one. Many have been. Take for example the priest at the Vatican. Or even the fact that white supremacist leaders are invited to Middle Eastern countries to speak at universities if they will do so against Zionism (I was asked to cover one such conference in my job as a reporter in the Middle East…I didn’t). These things exist and perhaps Masada is a valid mechanism. However, by doing so indiscriminately or without judiciousness, the weight of the charge may be diluted to such a degree to render it ineffective. The Masada Syndrome is not one where I or anyone else can critique the validity of the belief in any objective sense (as a coping mechanism, it ties in with PTSD, in that both necessarily involve trauma) but it is one that can propagate itself by inventing an enemy “within,” which is the biggest threat to the members of the group. Why attack Moyers or Klein if you don’t presume a natural predisposition to hatred unless expressly curbed/policed? If you are cognizant of the history of the Zealots and the Sicarii, two of the leaders of the factions, Simon Bar-Giora and Johanan Ben Levi, unlike the defenders of Masada, surrendered to the Romans while their followers slew each other or themselves.