I found it refreshing and interesting to talk to a psychotherapist about a subject—Israel—that I find increasingly confusing. Along with more and more people it seems, I am asking: Why do the Israelis do what they do? Why do they keep on doing it? Can’t they see what damage they are doing to themselves, to the Palestinians, to us all? I asked Avigail if she would diagnose Israel as if the nation were a client of hers and then suggest an appropriate treatment regimen.
Here, summarized as succinctly as I can, are the main threads of Avigail’s response along with her emphatic assertion that underlying everything she says is a clear distinction between explanation and excuse.
Trauma and its ramifications lie at the heart of the Israeli nation:
it is the organizing principle of the Israeli people and the psychology that has shaped its national character. But not just because of the Holocaust of World War II; rather, the seeds are already there, in the culture, the biblical stories (see Joshua, see Deuteronomy, Numbers, Exodus) and through centuries of history, including the Zionist movement in the late 19th century. The roots of victimhood and persecution go back to a long time ago.
Unfortunately, one of the characteristics of trauma is that it is passed on, through the generations and proliferates within the generations.
Trauma, as we know from PTSD, is a clinically-established phenomenon that can manifest whenever the suffering individual perceives existential threat. The problem is that this former threat may or may not be real today. Objectively, Israel with its military might and nuclear power is one of the most formidable forces in the world; however, the irrational aspects of insecurity persist, nourished rather than managed, treated and healed, amplified now to include Iran.
With an identity forged by its enemies and reinforced by the state’s religious, education, military and cultural institutions along with the trauma narrative, Israelis are not open to seeing themselves in new ways.
Those who suggest such alternatives—you, me, liberal Jews, Judge Goldstone–are dismissed as hostile to Israel and included among the expanding number of enemies. As George W. Bush put it: “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.”
Protective isolation against what is perceived as a highly dangerous world and against anyone perceived as an enemy is a natural consequence of trauma.
The huge dimensions of the wall and fence complex built by Israel in the West Bank speak clearly to just how dangerous every Palestinian man, woman and child is seen to be.
On her blog in the extensive section about Palestine/Israel, Abarbanel writes: “the story of Israel and the Palestinian people is the story of trauma being transmitted from one generation to the next” and “my people…have allowed the quality of their life and their identity to be determined by those who hated them and committed crimes against them.” But, she continues: ”Healing is a risky business that requires a willingness to change one’s identity” and not, as she puts it, an endeavor for the faint-hearted.
Abarbanel draws on the work of the American psychiatrist Murray Bowen, and the “close relationship between trauma and persecution, and the tendency to emphasize the force of togetherness. When togetherness is emphasized, those those who do not feel, think, agree, act in the way that the group does, can be seen as traitors.” Citing Bowen’s theory of differentiation, she believes Israel is a “culture of consensus” and a “very poorly differentiated society…with the sense of self very, very meshed and entangled with the sense of the group.”
Based on this analysis, Avigail Abarbanel believes “Israel cannot be reasoned with”, that it “is a traumatised society and it is therefore very dangerous.” Applying family therapy models, she compares Israel to the abusive husband, the Palestinians to the abused wife and the United States to the enabling neighbor;.
She advocates for a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict but warns that the coexistence of two traumatized people will require a great deal of imagination and intelligence.
She suggests that there are enough good and skilled and spiritual people in the world whose energies can be mobilized to do the work of healing and reconciliation when the time comes. “It can be great, you know!” she adds.
The interview ends with Avigail reflecting on the ‘secondary traumatization’ that can affect volunteers and human rights workers who are dealing with traumatized populations all over the world. “Look after yourself first,” she counsels, since “you have to be well to help other people…The only way I am able to work sustainably without burning out…is because I do put myself first.”
(I do urge you to listen to the podcast and listen to her compelling, fluid presentation. Sometimes an mp3 is worth thousands of words of text!) The interview is also available in German. Note: June 20, 2015: Unfortunately the podcast is no longer available although the German translation is.
To become more familiar with the body of Avigail Abarbanel’s work, here are her writings and her professional website. MAY 11, 2010
How do some in the society recognize the sheer hate and brutality of the Israel military machine toward the people they occupy and rise above their trauma or abuse of past generations to stand up to this criminal behavior? I think that is worth a study.
I guess I am fatigued at this frequent diagnosis and discussion as to why the state of Israel has to brutalize another people, steal their land, etc…
How many generations of this brutal nation do we have to endure supporting and watching? I have seen therapists turn around generations of abuse within a family…because they are abusing people not considered family does that mean we can expect this behavior for generations and generations?
+100. sawah!!!
Thank you for your excellent comment, sawah. I felt much the same upon reading Hazel’s good article this morning. Yes, a study that you suggest would be welcome. Your question is a good one…
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Thanks so much for this piece, Hazel. Avigail Abarbanel has contributed here before, and has helped me understand much more about the majority of Israelis. During/after last summer’s massacre and when the 95% support among Israelis of same massacre was revealed, I was actually sickened. I ‘ve never known a lack of empathy to be a symptom of PTSD, but it is a prominent characteristic of sociopathy/psychopathy.
I’ve long wondered whether the illegal wall was used to barricade behind or to keep others out…
Anyway, today I read an interview in Salon with Max Blumenthal and he gave me additional material to ponder. It makes sense to me, so I’ll share it here:
…”I just want to make one more point: we have to understand to what the Gaza Strip is, in the grand scheme of things — not just since 2005, but since 1948.
What do you mean?
Seventy-two to 80 percent of the Gaza Strips’ population qualify as refugees. That means that they are the descendants of people who, during “the Nakbah,” between 1947 and 1948, were forcibly expelled from what is now Israel. These people can’t be allowed to return to their homes under the Right of Return — which is guaranteed to them under UN Resolution 194 — because they’re not Jewish. If they come back, Israel’s Jewish demographic majority will be compromised.
That is how the rulers of Israel, who also rule all Palestinians, see it. They see the population of the Gaza Strip as a demographic threat. So the Gaza Strip is a human warehouse for a surplus population — it’s anachronistic in the modern world. A population is being warehoused because they are of the wrong ethnicity. That’s why the Gaza Strip resists. To me, that is really the essence of the crisis.
Your mentioning the demographic angle brings me to Arnon Soffer, whose colleagues nicknamed him “The Arab Counter.” Who is he? Why is he important?
Arnon Soffer is a chief adviser on demographic engineering — i.e., how to forcibly engineer a Jewish majority in areas under Israeli control — to successive Israeli governments. He conceived of not only the unilateral disengagement from Gaza, but also the separation wall. In each case, he said that they wouldn’t lead to greater national security for Israel, but they would lead to the maintenance of a Jewish [demographic] majority. He’s obsessed with maintaining a threshold of 70 percent. His last name, Soffer, means “counter” in Hebrew; so his colleagues at Haifa University refer to him as “Arnon, the Arab Counter.”
He anticipated that his policy recommendations would reduce Israel’s national security, all in the name of maintaining a demographic majority?
Listen to his words. As he was explaining the need for the unilateral disengagement from Gaza, he said, “When 2.5 million people live in a closed off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. These people will be even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane, fundamentalist Islam. Pressure at the border will be awful; it’s going to be a terrible war. If we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”
He said that to the Jerusalem Post — and this is when he was a close adviser to Sharon. Sharon credited Soffer with convincing him to disengage [from the Gaza Strip]. It was printed in Israel, but not in the U.S.. I don’t endorse Soffer’s racist language or ideology, but what he said has come true. What we saw last summer with Operation Protective Edge was the fulfillment of his bloody prophecy: “kill, and kill, and kill every day.” That is what the Israeli army did for 51 days. …”
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/27/the_question_is_just_when_max_blumenthal_on_war_in_the_gaza_strips_past_%E2%80%94_and_its_future/
What I do know is that Palestinians appear able to maintain their empathy and humanity in the face of ongoing, relentless traumatic stress, and a lot of Israelis seem to have lost theirs in spite of their safety and lifestyles.
Dr. Rothchild said this about Gaza : “This is a form of continuous PTSD (or as I like to say, it can’t be “post-traumatic stress disorder if it is not yet post.”” – See more at: https://mondoweiss.mystagingwebsite.com/2015/03/no-time-to-mourn#sthash.PIYYLKgL.dpuf
“Netanyahu won. Now what?” Avigail wrote the piece, and there is some really good discussion about trauma and cults in the comments. Here’s an excerpt:
… “Survival as a Jewish people (religious or not and whatever that even means) is the most important principle in Judaism and by extension in Jewishness (which is a sense of identificantion with the group that is not based on religion as such). This is a really big deal.
Israel is a state that was created by, and belongs to a cult. As such, anything truly democratic, universal, any openness to others, to the outside world, is by definition in conflict with the very essence of the cult. …”
– See more at: https://mondoweiss.mystagingwebsite.com/2015/03/netanyahu-won-what#sthash.92rgdEPr.dpuf
I hope I’ve made some sense… Thanks again.
Available again on youtube Tarek Jabbers Sanukhudu, why worry about the traumas of the past now is sufficiently awful, isnt it, and to come…
https://youtu.be/cthY7zxOl6I
Maybe there is a glimmer of hope:
“Israelis telling the Middle East like it is
A new group of researchers think it’s time for the public to be offered a calmer and more nuanced portrait of the Middle East’s complex reality. Some of their colleagues in the ivory tower beg to differ.
Toward the end of a lecture that Dr. Assaf David recently delivered to a group of retirees, under the subject heading “Trauma and Reconciliation: Relations between Israel and Jordan,” a woman in the audience could be overheard whispering to her friend: “In the end, the leftist in him is coming out.” David, whose primary area of research is Jordan, did not construe the comment as casting doubt on his professional integrity. On the contrary. “I thought to myself, why only ‘in the end’?”
A few weeks had passed, and David was now retelling the story at his home in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Masua.
“I’d been talking about the rightward shift in Israel, as reflected in the contention that Jordan is the homeland of the Palestinians. I said that there was a time when the Likud espoused the official government line on Jordan, but that the radical right’s views were now being adopted by the party’s mainstream,” he said. “You cannot talk about Israeli-Jordanian relations without referring to Israel’s part in the relationship, and the deep currents that run through it. And what I would term professionalism is being mistakenly interpreted as leftism, because a sort of mindset has taken root here that a Middle East studies expert mustn’t talk politics.”
David, 41, is the co-founder and managing director of the Forum for Regional Thinking, a brand-new initiative intended “to disseminate knowledge about the Middle East in the aim of fomenting perceptual and practical change in Israel.” He does not deny his identification as a leftist, even though on the basis of his biography he was supposed to be in the other camp.
David was born in Kiryat Arba to a national-religious family and studied at the yeshiva high school in Efrat. In the army, he served in the Intelligence Corps’ Unit 8200, and then continued on to the standing army. But his service was truncated in 1995, when he was seriously injured in a suicide terrorist bombing on the No. 26 bus near the Rene Cassin High School in Jerusalem while on his way to his base.
“The terrorist was sitting in a very crowded bus, and was very close to me. I remember a strong jolt to my eye, and then a sensation as if I was flying in the air, a soul without a body. I lost consciousness – I don’t know for how long – until at some point I became aware of the fact that I was lying on the floor. I moved my tongue over my teeth to see if they were still there, and then came the dreadful smell and taste. I felt people walking on top of me to escape, and then I understood a terrorist attack had occurred. I got up – my rifle was still on me – and sat down on the sidewalk, in shock. I did not absorb the fact that I couldn’t see in one eye, and assumed I was simply in a deep fog.
“In the ambulance,” he continues, “the woman sitting across from me stared at me as if it were a horror film. At the hospital, they suspected that the piece of shrapnel that damaged my eye had penetrated to the brain. In the end, the bleeding in the brain was absorbed, but it wasn’t possible to save my eye. I went on to have a series of operations on my hand, because the shrapnel had cut into it down to the bone. I still don’t have much feeling in my hand. I subsequently heard that the people sitting on either side of me were killed.”
Aside from the physical scars, the trauma also triggered a fundamental shift in David’s worldview. “On the personal level, it caused me to understand what the important things in life are, and that if this whole business is going to end tomorrow, then I would be best off doing what I believe in and not what the establishment dictates I do,” he relates. “What’s more, the event changed me in the sense that I am able to imagine the suffering of the other side.”
These two principles lie at the ideological core of the Forum for Regional Thinking. At first glance, the establishment of the group is a rebellion of sorts against the Middle East studies establishment in Israel, which has made academic research its focal point and decided that engagement in current events is of secondary importance. The second and more significant factor combines empathy for human beings and their social structures with a call for redirecting the focus from the political and social elite and governmental institutions, and placing it on the residents of the Middle East.
“When I write about the military putsch in Egypt as a professional, I do not care if it is good or bad for Israel,” explains David. “We look at it from the point of view of Egyptian politics and of the civilians who suffered from the harsh brutality of [former presidents] Mubarak and then Morsi, and then [current President Abdel-Fattah] al-Sissi’s. Regrettably, this sort of thinking situates you on the left, but it shouldn’t be like that.”…
…Nevertheless, this is not the ephemeral initiative of some runny-nosed junior researchers. The founding nucleus of the group includes Prof. Dror Ze’evi, who founded the Middle East studies department at Ben-Gurion University, Dr. Nimrod Hurvitz, a lecturer in the same department, and lecturer and researcher Dr. Shaul Yanai of Tel Aviv University, all from the heart of Israel’s Middle East studies establishment.
“Our primary aim,” says Hurvitz, “is to offer an alternate voice about the Middle East, one that is less harsh and more diverse. For instance, take a movement such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, whose image in Israel is particularly bad. You cannot disregard their compassion and caring for the people, as has been expressed in long years of infrastructure work in the establishment of hospitals, soup kitchens and educational institutions. Once you understand that, it is impossible to simply describe all their supporters as extremists.”
“The lack of knowledge makes it easier to maneuver and manipulate the public,” adds Hurvitz. “Islamic State [also known as ISIS and ISIL] is viewed as representing political Islam, but in actual fact, the Islamic political parties denounce it. The discourse tends to be yanked toward the extremes, and this makes it possible to construct towers of intimidation on top of the ignorance. The right makes abundant use of this.”
“The comparison that [PM Benjamin] Netanyahu makes between Hamas and ISIS is altogether distorted,” says Ze’evi. “This scrambled comparison can be accepted only by an audience that does not know the facts. These are organizations with completely different worldviews, which are fighting one another and killing one another. The vast majority of members of the Middle Eastern studies profession believe that Hamas, despite all its drawbacks, is a pragmatic organization, while ISIS is not.”…”
More @- http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/.premium-1.663021?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter (paywall)
RE: Based on this analysis, Avigail Abarbanel believes “Israel cannot be reasoned with”, that it “is a traumatised society and it is therefore very dangerous.” ~ Hazel Kahan
JOEL KOVEL (1-20-13):
SOURCE – https://mondoweiss.mystagingwebsite.com/2013/01/israel-nominaton-hagel.html