we need to take into account that Israel is causing a reduction in the security of Diaspora Jewry, instead of the opposite. So this Zionist solution is very deficient, and we need to examine what caused this deficiency.”
When the separation of powers is in danger, the independence of the judiciary is in danger and the rights of the individual are in danger, it’s clear that the fears of the advocates of liberal democracy are definitely justified. When the majority operates according to fundamentalist religious values or racist principles, the fears are a matter of certainty. The tyranny of the majority, together with rule over another people by an apartheid-like, racist system, is a terrible mixture, certainly if we look over our shoulder to history in other places.”
Zimmermann is currently engaged in a new research project – the study of “nations that went mad” – which sets out to explain “how nations deviate from their course and become extreme,” he says. “The occupation with Germany, which went mad in 1933, until it decreed its self-destruction, and the occupation with astonishing developments in Jewish and Israeli society, led me to deal with a trans-human phenomenon: societies that at a certain point went off-course, or simply ‘went mad,’”
Israel went mad starting in 1967 when the idea of biblical territory began to dominate it politically. Romanticism is a dangerous tendency, as we saw in 19th-century Europe. The story of ‘Greater Israel’ and the settlements is the story of a society that is becoming a hostage to biblical romanticism that is sweeping the whole society to perdition. And that is the problem: Once you have embarked on the path, it’s difficult to leave it without undergoing another catastrophe. That happened to Germany in 1945 in the most drastic way. We obviously do not want a catastrophe like that.”
Law, Power, and Justice 