Pathological narcissism occurs when an individual’s psychic horizons close in around him to form an insular, almost opaque bubbleworld. The mostly reflective surface of this glossy bubble provides a peculiarly obfuscated view of the outside world, which the narcissist looks to only to feed his all-pervasive pattern of self-inflating fantasies and behaviours. At the most extreme end of the narcissistic continuum, narcissists display what Freud referred to as “magical thinking,” a process whereby the narcissist is so convinced that the world revolves around his little bubble that he comes to believe that his petty thoughts and fantasies hold mystical sway over not only other people but also the very fabric of reality.

It could be argued that Israel, which acts with absolute arrogance and antipathy towards both its neighbours and the Palestinians, is the ultimate political bubbleworld. While outside of the US, most everyone in the world recognizes that the Middle East is an absurdly fragile equilibrium that’s constantly adjusting to Israel’s and America’s impositions, the Israeli government has long been content to run roughshod over anyone who opposes its will. Israel has worked in concert with its partner in crime, the US government, to transform the entire Middle East in order to make the Jewish state’s intrusion more palatable. But recent events have illustrated that there are limits to how much the bedevilled people outside the bubble are willing to collude with plush, gated communities that not only explicitly exclude them but also treat them with callous disregard. Just as the bubble-headed Bush administration has recently run headfirst into brick walls in Afghanistan and Iraq, Israeli narcissism has discovered an insurmountable obstacle in the form of Hezbollah.

There are many reasons why it is foolish for Israel to attempt to impose its will on Hezbollah. At the most obvious level, Israel’s attempt to mount an American-style whack-a-mole War on Terror on Hezbollah does not mesh with the reality on the ground. First off, Hezbollah may in fact be a more elaborate entity than the Lebanese government itself. Not only is Hezbollah a sophisticated and popular political organization with representatives in the Lebanese parliament, it also has a social services wing that does more charitable work than even the government does for Lebanon’s poorest citizens. There are Hezbollah schools, hospitals, social development agencies, garbage collection and recycling programs, and agriculture centres. Hezbollah even runs a reconstruction company to rebuild all of the houses destroyed by the countless bombs the Israeli army has rained down on southern Lebanon. In short, Hezbollah is so deeply engrained in the Lebanese social fabric that the only way to purge it would be to decimate the entire country.

With the help of America’s top weapons firms, Israel does, of course, have a huge advantage when it comes to military might. In fact, it seemed that Israeli Prime Minister Ehert Olmert went into Lebanon with an outrageously inflated sense of omnipotence. The only problem was that Hezbollah mounted a down-and-dirty Guevara-style guerilla campaign that in many ways neutralized Israel’s tactical advantages. As much as the Israeli army tried to beat Hezbollah down, the guerillas always resurfaced with renewed vigour. In the end, Israel was unable to root Hezbollah out, and the kidnapped Israeli GIs, who were Olmert’s pretext for going to Lebanon in the first place, remained in Hezbollah’s hands.

If Olmert, whose cavalier and ineffective warmongering has now made him almost as unpopular as Bush, decides to break the peace and take this war to the next level, he will encounter even more intractable obstacles. As with Iraq and Afghanistan, the conflict in Lebanon has become a lightning rod for all kinds of anti-American and anti-Israeli forces. Even though Hezbollah’s detractors decry it as Iran’s and Syria’s puppet, it is in fact a relatively autonomous Lebanese organization which receives a great deal of military and financial support from both Syria and Iran. By extension, because of Iran’s ties with Russia, China, and Venezuela, Hezbollah is tapped into a vast support network of all kinds of successful opponents of American and Israeli neoconservative hegemony. We’re not talking about a conspiracy of terrorist networks bent on America’s and Israel’s destruction. This is a desperate alliance forged to defend nations outside the bubble from America’s and Israel’s imperial designs, and there’s no telling how well-armed they are and to what lengths they’re willing to go. The US and Israel should not be backing them into a corner. At best, Israel will be submerged in a lengthy, unwinnable guerilla war. At worst, the conflict in Lebanon will lead us all ineluctably down a slippery slope to World War III. A big part of the problem is that Hezbollah’s most powerful detractors view it through a very odd lens.

Though it’s convenient for them to characterize it as a rabid terrorist organization intent on Israel’s destruction, a closer inspection belies such simplistic claims. Even though Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s current leader, previously made statements in favour of Israel’s destruction, he has since significantly softened his stance. In March of 2003, Nasrallah told CNN that Hezbollah would act only defensively towards Israel, as long as Israel stayed out of Lebanon. He went on to say that Hezbollah would no longer interfere in Israeli-Palestinian affairs. So if Hezbollah is a legitimate political entity which is far more concerned about Lebanese autonomy than the destruction of Israel, why don’t the Israeli and American hawks simply accommodate them by acknowledging and facilitating real Lebanese democracy?

That would be the best way to get back those Israeli GI’s and establish a lasting peace.

In the end, the narcissistic approach towards Lebanon will not work. No amount of magical thinking can extricate Hezbollah from Lebanon or get the world to support the decimation of this poor and beleaguered nation. Any attempts to do so will merely initiate a positive feedback loop that will spiral out of control right in Israel’s lap.

It seems so absurd that Israel and Uncle Sam are pushing the world outside the bubble to its breaking point when there are some very simple steps they could take to put things on the right track. If Bush is so gung-ho about exporting democracy, he should begin with Israel. To start, the Palestinians need to be given an autonomous, contiguous state, with functioning water and energy infrastructure. Next, neighbours like Lebanon require assurance that Israel and the US will not interfere in their democratic political affairs. Maybe the US should even devote a sizeable chunk of the foreign aid that usually goes towards arming Israel’s already formidable military to rebuilding southern Lebanon. Such magnanimous gestures would purchase a hell of a lot of good will from Israel’s neighbours.

But it wouldn’t just be for their sake. Freud observed that the opposite of narcissism is empathy, and that such empathy is required for healthy social interaction. Perhaps the same is true of overcoming political narcissism. By displaying real empathy for those who stand in the way of the untenable neoconservative imperial project, the US and Israel could set the stage for a more stable, salubrious, and united global community in which cooperation—rather than exclusion and exploitation—is the primary modus operandi.

At this point, to those of us with some critical distance from the bubble world, it would seem there is no other choice. Unfortunately, narcissists are the last ones to let reality get in the way of their delusional projects. They’ll just keep inflating that bubble until it finally hits up against a sharp enough edge to awaken them from their delirium.