That’s all the pity, because in my view what the roughly 1,500 international human rights activists, from at least 15 countries, had intended to highlight in their visit was, at a seminal level, carried more importance than the message of their counterparts aboard six ships on the doomed flotilla — with its tragic climax on the Marmara — that carried humanitarian aid and construction material to a besieged people inhabiting a strip of land long known as the “biggest open-air prison in the world.”

A recap. The organizers of the Welcome to Palestine 2012 campaign had no ambitions to stage demonstrations or confront the occupation authorities at any level. Their planned activities included laying the foundation for a school, planting trees in villages, participating in cultural workshops, painting murals in refugee camps, attending artistic events such as dabki folk-dancing and musical performances — and the rest of it.

Innocent fun, right? Wrong, because that’s not the way Israeli leaders took it. Rather, by way of response, Israel (now don’t smirk at its laughable self-definition as “the only democracy in the Middle East”) got on its high horse and into full battle gear. As is well known by now, two weeks after the fact, dozens of activists were refused entry at the airport or remained in detention awaiting deportation. Others were stopped at their points of departure in European countries after foreign airlines were instructed by Israeli government officials not to allow them to board their flights. The fate of the dozen or so activists who had somehow made it through was not in the least bit pleasant. In a video widely seen on YouTube, an occupation soldier, Lt.Col. Shlomo Eisner, is seen smashing a 20-year-old Danish activist in the face with his M16 rifle. (The youngster needed several stitches on his lips.)

Now I don’t know who the individual is who oversees Israel’s public relations and media program, but if I were his boss, I would fire the schmuck in a heartbeat for incompetence.

The long and short of it is that the Welcome to Palestine 2012 was effectively aborted. Or was it? Whereas the aim of the activists had been simply to reach out to a colonized people, to share with them the inward preoccupations of their culture and sensibility, they ended up in fact doing much more — they highlighted the mindset of a regime whose code is that of the bully and the hoodlum. One cannot conceive of a state bristling with arms being shaken by the arrival of mere idealist peaceniks whose goal was to express solidarity with a helpless community subjected daily to the rule of the gun. Nor can one conceive of the notion that a people are so dictated to their everyday lives so controlled that they are unable to choose what guests will visit their home and homeland.

For a regime that fancies itself as the vanguard of democracy in the region (again, no snickering please), Israel is bound to pathology, the kind of pathology that drives it to cling to insecurities resurrected from the attic of the Jewish people’s tragic history in Europe. Israel clings to these insecurities, and to the animosities that the pathology of insecurity engenders, as if they were ramparts. And as any undergraduate student majoring in psychology will tell you, insecurity causes paranoia and encourages behavior such as aggression and arrogance.

In this mental state, everybody is the “other” and anybody not of the tribe, as it were, represents an existential threat to you, regardless of how benign that others' intentions are. You remain forever on guard. You do not tolerate criticism. You are different, and you wallow in that difference. And if that is the way you see yourself, then in the end that is the way others will come to see you.

If Israel has had, since it was foisted on Palestine in 1948, a long history of troubled relations with international activists, not to mention the international community in general, it is not because Yuli Edelstein, the country’s current Minister for Public Diplomacy, has failed in his task, but because of Israel’s policies and projections of a fossilized mindset still anchored in the millennial past.

Why haven’t modern Israelis broken loose from that straightjacket and what constitutes that straightjacket’s bizarre powers on their minds? This is the sort of question to which there ought to be a trenchant reply. Search me! But I’ll tell you this: Israelis looked like a bunch of fools two weeks ago as their government went about posturing and lashing out at idealistic youngsters who had no more sinister intentions in mind than (to borrow a term from the ‘60s) to “do their thing.” They looked to the rest of us, in other words, like a bunch of losers, like so many Biff Lomans in Death of a Salesman, strutting wearily on the stage from an exhaustion that is not just physical but spiritual.

All I know is that the more Israel splinters into raw fragments of fear and hysteria, evidenced by how it improbably viewed harmless human rights activists as a frenzied pack descending on it like the fabled, heraldic monsters of yore — the enemy with many heads — threatening its very existence, the more it shows its face as a mere importunate scarecrow, a pallid figure frightened of its very own shadow.

Meanwhile, Palestinians, by continuing to be Palestinians, by making their identity a pure blaze of will, by their passionate affirmation of the symbolism of the Nakbe every year in their lives, they will one day, if God is my witness, claw their way to the top of the rock.

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