When Success Becomes the Accusation

And how Human Resentment ➡️ Human cruelty

Why do the enemies of our people speak about dismantling Israel in ways they would never speak about dismantling any other nation?

It is a question I have been pondering for some time.

There has been no shortage of criticism directed at Israeli public relations. I’ve heard repeatedly that Israel simply does a poor job of telling its story.

Perhaps. But I sometimes wonder if the problem runs deeper than that.

Israel often highlights its contributions to the world— its innovations, medical breakthroughs, humanitarian aid, scientific achievements, and democratic institutions.

For a long time, while that message invoked a sense of personal pride, I struggled to understand why it also stirred anxiety. After all, these accomplishments are real and worthy of recognition. They are achievements of which any people would be proud.

Then I realized my unease had less to do with Israel’s successes than with a lesson history has taught repeatedly: success does not always inspire admiration. Sometimes it inspires resentment.

History offers a sobering lesson. Jewish success has rarely insulated Jews from hatred. Often, it has intensified it.

Indeed one of the more troubling aspects of prejudice is that it is not always fueled by fear. Sometimes it is fueled by resentment.

There is another question that has been haunting me: How do ordinary people come to believe they are morally entitled to usurp what another people have built, and how do they expect to live with themselves with the prospect of tearing down what others spent generations creating?

The answer, I suspect, is that they rarely see themselves as destroyers. Before people can tear down what another people have built, they must first convince themselves that those people never truly deserved it in the first place.

They tell themselves stories — that the success was unfair, that the prosperity was illegitimate, that the achievement came at someone else’s expense, and that the people who built it are somehow less deserving.

Only then can taking something away begin to feel like justice. Only then can resentment masquerade as morality.

This is how resentment evolves into something far more dangerous. Once people become convinced that another group’s success is undeserved, cruelty no longer feels cruel.

It feels righteous.

And acting on it through vicious rhetoric and inevitable cruelty and violence can even feel euphoric — a phenomenon that is the most troubling of all.

The downfall of the resented becomes a source of pleasure. Their humiliation feels deserved. Their suffering becomes evidence that justice has finally been served.

Not everyone is susceptible to this of course.

Many people are capable of celebrating the accomplishments of others, even when those accomplishments evoke feelings of inadequacy, jealousy, or envy. They resist the temptation to diminish what they did not build.

But enough people for reasons worth exploring by mental health professionals further succumb to that temptation so much that history has repeatedly been shaped by it.

That is what makes it worth examining.

I once watched a dramatization of Nazi-era Germany in which a group of women excitedly compared the furs, jewelry, and luxury goods confiscated from Jewish families. What struck me was not merely the theft. It was their giddiness and pleasure discussing the human suffering that accompanied the pillage.

The victims had been so thoroughly dehumanized that their possessions no longer seemed stolen. They felt deserved.

That scene has stayed with me because it captured something unsettling about human nature.

Hatred creates moral permission. It allows people to convince themselves that humiliation is righteousness, that hurting others is fairness, and that cruelty is virtue, something deserving of celebration. Much like the candies passed out post 9-11 and again post 10-7.

The Good News

Resentment and envy may have a long and ugly history. But so does Jewish survival.

For generations, those who have insisted that whatever Jews built was undeserved, and that their future was temporary, turned out to be wrong. Dead wrong.

We are still here.

So is Israel.