Has there ever been another nation whose leaders were as distinct enemies as were the leaders of this nation? That's what Robert Jordan, the hero of "For Whom the Bell Tolled" by Ernest Hemingway, asked about the leaders of Spain during the Civil War. Amotz Asahel raises this question regarding a series of kings, prophets, priests, rabbis and thinkers, who in his opinion gave birth to a Jewish culture of political anarchy, sectional alienation, national arrogance, political fatalism and the abandonment of the homeland; Symptoms that alone have joined a historic parade of leadership folly. The Jewish Folly Parade is an innovative interpretation of Jewish political history, pointing an accusing finger at leadership that led to major national disasters, starting with the loss of the Ten Tribes, through the Roman occupation, and ending with the Holocaust. In immersive writing that simulates a journalistic tour between political dramas, personal tragedies, revolutions of spirit and turmoil of the soul, Asahel recreates repressed moments in Jewish history, such as the collapse of the alliance between Ahab and Jehoshaphat, the opening of the gates of Judah to Rome, or the conclusions of Don Yitzhak Abarbanal from the expulsion from Spain. From a broad historical perspective, he claims that the Jewish political weakness did not result from political attacks from the outside but from political degeneration from within, and that the psychology that shaped the Jewish past is now overshadowing the Israeli present and threatening the future of the Zionist enterprise. The Jewish Stupidity Parade is a wake-up call to Israeli society precisely now, when the Jewish homeland is about to become, for the first time since ancient times, the home of the majority of the Jewish people. Will the geographical normalization of the Jewish people mark the end of the march of Jewish folly? The question with which Asahel ends his essay is expected to provoke a stormy discussion in Israel and around the world.
