I think when someone learns to hate someone, one usually remembers when and why. I think any other sort of hatred is a matter of indoctrination - or else just blind stubbornness in refusing to let go.
It seems telling that only four Pakistanis recall when they started hating Israel: Imran Khan when Israel was born (because he is an anti-Zionist), The Joker (when he heard an accusation that Israel planned to attack Pakistan), and Asim Aquil and Ice Cold when Israel purportedly rejected Musharraf. (That last answer was almost my only surprise reading through this thread - and the pages Ice Cold linked to don't support it.)
Out of thirty distinct responses, one-fifth deny hating Israel or Israel BUT cite Israeli government policies, not always citing the reason.
Of those who did cite a reason, "Palestinian rights" and "Israeli atrocities" tied for popularity at 16%, followed by a tie between "killing innocents" and raw anti-Semitism at 12%, followed by yet another tie between those who hate the idea of a Jewish State and those who rejected Israel because it purportedly refused Musharraf at 8%.
The remaining responses - one each - rejected Israel because of its genetics, hypocrisy, genocide against Arabs, support of India, support of terrorism, is presumed criminal, or because Israel has a government at all.
The nicest part of the survey is that the "don't hate Jews or Israel, just the government" line implies it would be O.K. for any Zionist to visit Pakistan for a visit.
The ugliest part is the realization the hatred of Israel and its Jews is something most Pakistanis support in practice, even when they deny it, for very few of Pakistanis raised any objection to the most heinous calumnies against Israel that have appeared in this thread.
Indeed, for many it seems hatred of Israel is something to be desired, regardless of Israeli government policies or what Jews actually do, or the one Israeli posting here would have had the sense of his responses acknowledged. As one writer put it,
If the Palestinians got everything they wanta sovereign nation and even, let's say, a nuclear weaponthey would wake the next morning still hounded by a sense of inferiority. For better or for worse, modernity is now the measure of man.
And the quickest cover for inferiority is hatred. The problem is not me; it is them. And in my victimization I enjoy a moral and human grandiosityno matter how smart and modern my enemy is, I have the innocence that defines victims. I may be poor but my hands are clean. Even my backwardness and poverty only reflect a moral superiority, while my enemy's wealth proves his inhumanity.
In other words, my hatred is my self-esteem. This must have much to do with why Yasser Arafat rejected Ehud Barak's famous Camp David offer of 2000 in which Israel offered more than 90% of what the Palestinians had demanded. To have accepted that offer would have been to forgo hatred as consolation and meaning. Thus it would have plunged the Palestiniansand by implication the broader Muslim worldinto a confrontation with their inferiority relative to modernity. Arafat knew that without the Jews to hate an all-defining cohesion would leave the Muslim world. So he said no to peace.
And this recalcitrance in the Muslim world, this attraction to the consolations of hatred, is one of the world's great problems todaywhether in the suburbs of Paris and London, or in Kabul and Karachi, or in Queens, N.Y., and Gaza. The fervor for hatred as deliverance may not define the Muslim world, but it has become a drug that consoles elements of that world in the larger competition with the West.
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