Persecuted victims reproduce the power they fear against others

Evidence

But this civilizing mission and self-determining drive thus initiated through Jews in the name of European civilization is one with a twist. Israel was forged, of course, in the fire and fury of all those migrations, the experiences of expulsions and exiles, arrivals and starting over, assimilations and abjected evictions, wrongful convictions and threatened extinctions. The war of races in which the Jew is the hounded, the perennial foe and fugitive, becomes in Israel’s founding a protracted conflict in which the Jewish State, Herzl’s dream, is turned into oppressor, victimizer, and sovereign. Vulnerable, victim, and vanquished become pursuer, perpetrator, predator. The State is transformed, as Foucault says, into protector of the integrity, superiority, and more or less purity of the homogenizing group, what Foucault marks as “the race.” State sovereignty defends itself above all else so as to secure the group, its ethnoraciality, even to protect its purity, perpetuity, and power, for which it takes itself to exist and which it seeks to represent. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 569 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Oppression, he notices, doesn’t make people saintly, it makes them potential killers; all victims are dangerous. — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 737 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Persecution strengthens the pathological relationship of the excluded; A persecuted people can become oppressors in founding their own state — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 569; Oppression does not confer virtue but breeds potential violence in victims — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 737 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• A persecuted people can become oppressors in founding their own state #exemplifies (0.90) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 569
• Oppression does not confer virtue but breeds potential violence in victims #corroborates (0.88) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 737
• Persecution strengthens the pathological relationship of the excluded #expands (0.85)
• Oppression begins in an act of violence and shapes both oppressors and oppressed alike #expands (0.80) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 140