Begin's organization, the Zionist paramilitary Irgun, bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22 that year, destroying the British administrative headquarters and increasing British resolve to withdraw, opening the door for the founding of Israel in 1948. The quote is said to suggest the utility of combining disparate tactics of diplomacy and militancy, as demonstrated in the historic Zionist success.
I watched a celebrated YouTube debate yesterday between Dr. Josef Witt, who describes himself on X as an MD psychiatrist turned drug tapering educator and pharma doc from Utah, and Anias Aftab, a psychiatrist from Cleveland and author of Conversations in Critical Psychiatry (2024, Oxford University Press). Dr. Josef looks like an analog of Ben-Gurion, and Aftab, perhaps, like a 1946 British Palestinian Mandate administrator. The Begin role could be performed by some good friends of mine. I'll paraphrase: You should continue to talk the psychiatrists out of their illusions, and we will continue to drive them out of mental health.
The critical point which separates psychiatry from any legitimate future in mental health is quite contained in the word mental. It means relating to that element of a person that enables awareness, thinking, consciousness and intellect: mind, which closely shares etymology with meaning, but not with brain.
Psychiatrists believe there is no such thing as meaning or mind. They worship the brain, effectively as a magical object, although they are not neurologists who actually specialize in the brain as scientists and medical doctors. Psychiatrists call themselves medical doctors and desperately want the public to believe that's what they are, but they have degraded and demeaned the ethical rule, First do no harm! to First do something to the brain! By insisting that we all look in the mirror and admit that we see nothing but a machine, understandable and controllable by manipulation of reactions between chemical transmitters and receptors which define all meaning, emotion, personhood and creativity, they have tried to destroy the soul, insulted humanity, and drastically harmed civilized culture. They have perpetrated this harm with the full complicity of government authority and the reliable back-up of police power.
Reports from many conversations at this month's 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Los Angeles highlight a predominant unofficial theme: psychiatric drugs, including "antidepressants," "mood stabilizers," "anti-anxiety meds," and "antipsychotics," probably need to be re-evaluated. It turns out that they cause certain harms which were ignored, minimized and covered up for decades. This is an unfolding catastrophe.
The public is losing confidence, doubting the legitimacy of psychiatry, as the false pretense of "safety and efficacy" is revealed by scientific evidence and prominent psychiatric survivor narratives all over social media. The promise of new drugs is suddenly very poor, as psychedelics are not being approved quickly enough to save the world. Research in general is threatened by lack of finances. A petition just went live for public comment with an official docket number on an FDA government website, calling for warnings about serious and severe risks from SSRI/SNRI antidepressants.
We may be at what Laura Delano lately called "an inflection point" which will totally reshape the long narrative of religious freedom and science. If the Jews could have their own state after so many centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust, who knows?
We might compare the idea that the study of the mind and the healing of mentally caused ills shouldn't be alienated from or condoned outside of religion with a claim that Israel is inextricable from Judaism.
(I trust my nephew Zev as a rabbi for perspective, I'll ask him.)
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