Robert L. Oprisko
Anxiety over the existentially precarious position Israel occupies in the Middle East has persisted for thousands of years, though it has grown and intensified after World War II; genocide was no longer mere theory, it had been attempted. While existential anxiety can be alleviated, mitigated, and ultimately eliminated through dedication, discipline, and intentional action, Israel’s persists. Israeli and American politicians have personally found it politically useful to maintain and leverage the eschatological anxiety of the Jewish people. Existential angst matters here: in the spectrum of conflict, it escalates everything into an absolute position, one where defeat is untenable – because there will be no tomorrow (Speier 1941).
When absolute anxiety extends beyond martial conflict and becomes internalized within any dispute or disagreement, it presents in one of two absolute or “fanatic” forms: zeal or spite (Oprisko 2010). Fanaticism generally is, “the political mobilization of the refusal to compromise” (Olson 2009, 83). Within that there is a characteristic of directionality between the self/in-group and the other/out-group; zeal is the absolute will to inflict one’s value system onto others whereas spite is the absolute rejection of others’ values being inscribed onto the self (Oprisko 2010).
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