Table of Contents
Introduction
The Israeli society is small in number but big in issues. It is even smaller when talking about the Jewish group alone, which comprises around 80% of the whole Israeli population. Most of the members of this collective are Zionists, including left and right, religious and nonreligious, well-to-do and poor, coming from a variety of origins. I'll refer to it as ZIC: Zionist Israeli Collective.
The ZIC suffers a post-traumatic syndrome, mainly as a result of the Holocaust. Such a syndrome occurs when there is no opportunity to forget the trauma or to work it through. By this I mean accepting certain repressed elements and being able to overcome psychological resistance in order to examine them. If the traumatic event retained in the collective memory is not worked through, in time it becomes ritualized and codified as part of the collective identity. The group relates to the trauma it experienced and survived as a founding event of the society. This is what happened in the case of the State of Israel.
The Jewish group did not have the historical time and chance either to recover from the trauma of the Holocaust or to cope with the massive aggression hidden within its inner borders before the State of Israel was founded. Therefore, the ZIC stays in an unsolved post-traumatic condition, which results in the ZICs' admiration for power, stemming from identification with the aggressor. For instance, Avraham Shalom, a former head of the Shabak, says in the film The Gatekeepers, “[we’ve become] a brutal occupation force similar to the Germans in World War II.” Another, even more shocking example, occurred during the second intifada, when Ynet reported on December 3, 2002, that Chief of Staff Shaul
Mofaz directed army officers and soldiers to stop marking numbers on Palestinian detainees' arms following Arafat’s charge on Abu Dhabi TV that “Israeli soldiers are writing numbers on Palestinians' arms like the Nazis did." MK Raz (Meretz) said, “This shocking act of writing numbers on Palestinians' arms must be stopped immediately. Those officers who decided on this act caused . . . Huge damage to [the] IDF’s image and gave a dangerous weapon to Arafat." Let me add a literary quotation from 1948, a book by Netiva Ben Yehuda: "We aimed our guns at the Arabs, we shot and we killed Nazis." Netiva was a member of one of the élite Israeli troops of the Jewish collective, PALMAH, before the Israeli state was established.
The ZIC minimizes the humanity of non-Jews, especially of the Palestinians, by marking ethnicity and religion on ID cards and conducting a policy that includes targeted assassinations of Palestinians, deportations, house demolitions and the creation of ethnic ghettos like the Gaza Strip.
These policies are coupled with a deep contempt for the weak, the loser, and the fleeing refugee. The image of the weak passive victim seems to hold up a mirror, an undesirable one, reminding Israelis of the mythical codified and painful aspect of the Holocaust that rendered Jews as passive, weak, and defenseless, without an army. The ZIC cannot forgive itself for what happened in Europe and consequently transfers this lack of forgiveness to the weak entity in the present – the occupied Palestinians and asylum seekers fleeing Eritrea and Sudan to Israel.
Yet the strong conqueror perceives himself as a persecuted victim. This sense of the victim-self is a cornerstone incorporated into the ZIC identity. The victim feels persecuted and lonely. He denies the evil and cruelty within himself, and projects it on the enemy, which enables him to turn the weak enemy into a mighty persecutor. I saw the same conduct time and again in my psychotherapy room, in couples and families treatment. Being a victim in one’s own eyes can serve as justification for every wrongdoing.
The ZIC is always preparing for the inevitable catastrophe in spite of Israeli military might and has always viewed itself as being under mortal threat from "Arabs" and the whole world. These mortal fears have included over the years fears of invasion, defeat in war, and becoming a Jewish demographic minority again.
The ZIC is organized around unchallengeable basic assumptions and most aspects of life in Israel are affected by them. Such underlying basic assumptions are that "we are pure, we are right, we have high moral values that are dominant and exemplary, we don't do evil, we are victims, and we are united." In the ZIC's eyes, its army conducts itself with "purity of arms," meaning that it uses only unavoidable force, only for self-defense and that it constantly pursues peace.
The role of the denial mechanism in the human psychic setting is to facilitate passage from knowing to not knowing, as well as to not remembering unacceptable knowledge. In this way denial helps the ZIC ignore the fact that although they have the biggest and mightiest army in the Middle East, they feel an existential threat to their existence from the Palestinians who have no air force, no bombs, no navy nor any kind of sophisticated weapons. The fear is real; only the facts on which it is based are incoherent.
The Jewish Israeli victim views present reality through the prism of the past, the Holocaust. The means and ability to achieve coherent reality-testing are consequently distorted.
Distorted historical perspective goes hand in hand with distorted thinking in general and critical thinking in particular. Thus obliterating the potential for insight, Israel has arrived at a state of catatonia in its public political discourse: There are no real voices of political opposition, despite the public relations image of being a lively and genuine democracy.
Intoxication with Power
The Israeli tendency, since the founding of the State, to believe in power and to rely on it was intensified and turned into intoxication with power.
Psychologically, power intoxication leads to disturbances in the Israeli collective psyche and in individuals within the collective. These disturbances include, among others, the avoidance of historical perception, splitting, a self-image of victim, increased aggression within Israeli society, manifestations of psychological trauma, the prevalence of hate and antisocial behavior. This state of psychological trauma might be translated into hatred and aggression, and/or into withdrawal and despair.
Hate is the inverted libido energy of love. It can serve the ego as a source of energy, and might turn into an addiction. Hate nourishes angry feelings and actions. Hate and anger will usually serve the ego with a sense of righteousness, efficacy and self- preservation. The hatred of the ZIC toward the Jews' image as victims was profoundly agonizing and so extensive that it could not be contained. It was therefore projected onto the Palestinian Other. The more the Palestinians’ misery increased over the years the more they became for Israelis the proper object for the displaced feelings of contempt and hatred. Hatred of the Palestinians thus serves an emotionally existential need of Jewish people and Israeli Zionist society. Hate towards the Palestinians functions as the outlet of the Israeli Jewish fear of inner fragmentation: The price paid for inner peace is avoiding peace with the Palestinians.
Violence has become a defining characteristic of Israeli society. The targets of this violence are the weak: Palestinians, foreign workers, asylum seekers, African refugees, women, the elderly, and the poor.
A clear indicator of the increased violence of Israeli society is violence against women. The number of women murdered by family members and the number of rapes has increased significantly. Israel has consistently held the first place in the western world in juvenile violence since 2000. In the same period of time cases of murder or serious violence as a result of minor arguments, like fights over a parking space, have accumulated.
Responsibility
The most meaningful political phenomenon occurred as a consequence of the Oslo Accords: the reallocation of responsibility between the State of Israel and the newborn Palestinian Authority, which took place without a parallel redistribution of power. In the relationship between oppressor and oppressed, the oppressor always sees responsibility as resting in the oppressed and not in himself. During the years of peace negotiations Israel increased its power and control over the Palestinians and got rid of its responsibility toward them. Too much power and too little responsibility affected the oppressor’s consciousness and conscience and led to a psychological intoxication with power expressed as arrogance.
Israeli society is neglecting and avoiding the vital task of looking at its true face in the mirror. Refusing to look into the past is refusing to take responsibility for one’s actions in the past. In the same way, the inability to have a vision of the future is refusing to take responsibility for one’s actions in the present.
Central axioms in the ZIC mind is that Israelis want and crave peace and those wars are always forced upon them. Facts of life have no chance to penetrate this solid denial and to provide grounds for critical thinking. The Other, meaning the Palestinians and the Arabs as a whole, are always the warmongers, not the ZIC.
The ZIC sees the occupation as a constant condition. The contradiction between the ZIC's claim of its own inevitable willingness to have peace and the prolonged status of occupation belongs to the psycho-political zone of denial. The ZIC is unable to confront this contradiction.
The occupier is trapped in his own forced existence – he must be and cannot stop being an occupier. He cannot change his conduct even though this would benefit both sides.
The crucial question is not that we are aggressive, but whether we will learn to take responsibility for our aggression.
The Zionist Left
The Israeli Zionist Left suffers from dual morality norms: on the rhetoric-declaration level it talks about "Zionism, Socialism, and the Fraternity of Nations" while in reality it takes part in militarism, occupation and oppressing Palestinians. The Zionist Left in Israel is deeply involved in the Israeli settlement policy. Settlements of Hashomer Hatzair, a Left-Zionist organization, placed across the Green Line in 1967, gave legitimacy to the Israeli expansion policy. The establishment of these settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory occurred when the Labor Party was in power and were connected to the political establishment. They operated under its instructions and received significant economic support.
Members of the ZIC fought one war after the other without stopping for a moment and to think about why they were going to kill and get killed. The image of axiomatic Israeli pursuit of peace is stronger by far than reality.
Zionism is a powerful common denominator for the ZIC and the Zionist Left. Therefore the Left cannot and does not want to be a real opposition. They cannot accept a dissident critical position because of the threat of being left outside of the Zionist community. A critical Zionist Left could not collaborate with the occupation and the settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory.
Israeli Left-Zionists must confront the dissonance between their morally-based declarations of wishing for peace and coexistence, and their power-based clinging to Israeli control over land water and air. Their main aim, as the ZIC, is to protect their privileged life, the resources, the economic profits, and they rejoice in power with no inhibitions.
The Zionist Left's solution is to unite the two levels of language: In this way it keeps a clean conscience while continuing to do exactly what it has always wanted and still wants to do. The new language says: There will be a Palestinian state, and we will rule it; there will be peace, and Israeli settlements will continue to exist, meaning – we will continue to exploit and to rob the Palestinians. This was the language of Ehud Barak, who represented the Left. It has always been the language of Shimon Peres, who founded the settlements and never stopped supporting them, and who planned for cheap Palestinian labor to work in Israeli “industrial parks,” which he called “joint parks,” as a way of continuing to exploit Palestinians and to rob their water and land.
When one speaks of moral and peace principles but acts on power principles, after a certain time there is no way but to come to a moment of truth. It might take a long time but it is inevitable. When facing this moment of truth, many in the Left react with confusion, disorientation, anger and blame of the Other. For others, confusion and disorientation are translated into withdrawal and avoidance of any political activity and social responsibility.
People are not afraid of what is unknown to them, but rather of what they do not want to know. Many Israeli Left Zionists do not want to know that they are unwilling to respect the Palestinians: respect means the willingness to share power and responsibility.
At the moment of truth the Zionist Left collapsed.
PHR-Israel
We as doctors are guided by the conviction that human dignity and the integrity of body and mind are basic human rights, without reference to class, gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation or religion. We begin with the belief that without deeply rooted convictions, activism means very little: and that without concrete actions, convictions, no matter how noble, are lacking. Our convictions support us in tough moments when we feel quite alone in our own society, particularly because our activity takes place in our own backyard, not in another part of the world.
Thinking about the past in order to write my recollections, I see that respect for the Other is the best inner compass a human rights activist can have. Having it, one will not fall into the trap of patronizing, despising, degrading or humiliating while “doing good.” Respect monitors the dignity of both sides.
In early 1982, I wrote a short paper saying that the ZIC is not a peace lover; on the contrary, peace might cause them a trauma. I analyzed the psycho-political condition of the ZIC under the title “The trauma of peace,” saying that the severe fragmentation of Israeli society into various sectors, aggravated at the time, required a war as a tool for inner cohesion, a remedy for social disintegration. The impending peace with Lebanon in the north following the peace treaty signed with Egypt in the south (1979-81), brought up the inner threat of fragmentation and disintegration to the degree of psychological trauma. I predicted a war that would “save” Israel from the trauma of the peace. The war in Lebanon started in June 1982.
The first Lebanon war, then the second, attacks on Gaza Strip, attacks in the West Bank, all of them–let alone the long occupation which is the longest in the world, 46 years— are all not enough to shake the ZIC's belief that “we crave peace” and “we are right and do not do evil.” That includes war crimes, systematic torture, killing without trial, house demolitions, prolonged administrative detentions, deportations, and above all – the vast settlements in the West Bank.
— Ruchama Marton, M.D., Tel Aviv, 2013
Speeches and Articles
[Speeches and articles follow in chronological order.]
WHERE SHOULD THE BORDERLINE BE?
[Fourth UN European Regional NGO Symposium on the Question of Palestine, Geneva, August 1990]
In mid-July, a Physics student approached me, wishing to convey a troubling emotional struggle he was undergoing. Apparently, his fellow students in the study group at the University Mathematics Department had arranged to study together for a crucial final examination and the place set for studying was at a fellow student’s house in Ellon Moreh settlement.
The student was troubled by conflicting deliberations. On the one hand, when with the study group, he studies more efficiently and saves quite a lot of time. On the other hand, he had set himself several political borders, corresponding to the principles he believes in. His comfort was in conflict with the borders of the inner moral code he had defined for himself. Friendship was threatening to deface his integrity, or as he put it, “I am in danger of becoming a spineless entity.” He then went back to the issue of his dilemma, attempting to diminish its measure, adding: “Will the Israeli-Palestinian conflict really be affected if I travel a few kilometres across the green line?”
In principle, the dilemma in question was: Where exactly does he draw the border of his refusal to collaborate with the settlers?
In the course of that week, an article appeared in one of the daily newspapers. The article recounted the personal story of three members of the Labour Party's Young Generation who reside in the occupied territories. The data presented indicates that contrary to their declared ideology, 10 percent of the members reside in the occupied Palestinian territories. The personal story of these young people can be viewed as a conflict between ideology and necessity, a conflict which has been resolved with the absolute victory of the pragmatic attitude.
One of those interviews in the article claimed that in Jerusalem itself, new small apartments designated for young couples are not being built, whereas in the nearby Ma’ale Adumim settlement, the cost of an apartment is 15% lower than the cost of an equivalent apartment in Jerusalem. Moreover, those living in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) are exempt from paying some taxes and fees. The temptation was far too great, said a member of the Young Generation.
The economic temptation, then, is one of the main driving forces which prompt Israelis to reside in the territories. The social pressure combined with the economic temptation, constitute the central pillar of the Israeli consensus. Only a few can stand up to that consensus. The rising power of the Israeli consensus drives those who actively oppose settlement in the oPt into the social and political margins of Israel.
The two prominent political parties, Likud and Labour, are placed at the center of the political consent on the issue of the settlements. The Labour Party has been attempting, for years, to place itself as the leader of shaping the image of the “beautiful Israeli”: the image of the fighter, the pioneer who defends his country, personifies the attachment to the land. The Israeli, according to the Labour Party, is a Socialist, who believes in equality and peace. The pioneering figure, invented in the past by the Mapai Party (which later became the Labour Party), reappears in all its splendor in the contemporary image of the settler in the oPt. The settlers derived their inspiration, conduct and their values from Mapai’s pre-state ideology.
It is not by coincidence that the first steps of the settlers in the oPt were a continuation of the historical ethos of the Labour movement, the Israeli pioneers conquering the national land. The establishment of the settlement posts in the oPt started as early as 1967, when the Labour Party was in power. The settlements were connected to the political establishment and were operating under its instructions and getting its economical support.
In April 1968, a group numbering tens of Jewish citizens wanted to spend the Passover holidays in Hebron. A permit to that event was issued, in advance, by the area Chief Commander, Uzi Narkis. During the second day of the holiday, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Immigration, Yigal Allon, arrived at the Park Hotel in Hebron, to pay a visit to the group. Allon congratulated them and promised his support. Within a very short while the settlers’ stay in Hebron became a fait accompli. The settlers managed, by means of Hebron’s settlement, to impose an essential change on the government’s settlement policy. Prior to the settlement in Hebron, the Labour government refrained from establishing settlements in areas which were densely populated by Palestinians. In Hebron, the precedent was established to the effect that such a settlement is indeed possible.
The Zionist Left in Israel is deeply involved in the Israeli settlement policy. The Mapam Party, which until 1984 was an official and actual participant in the execution of the Labour Party policy, represents the Zionist Left’s participation in the Government operations. Hashomer Hatzair’s Nahal army units fulfill an important function in the fortification and strengthening of the settlements. Hashomer Hatzair settlement posts, placed across the Green Line, gave legitimacy to the Israeli expansion policy.
Those who determined the policy hoped to derive reinforcement from the massive immigration from Russia. This hope, however, is unrealistic. The new immigrants are mostly devoid of any Israeli political awareness. They are not Zionists. Most of them, having lived in the Soviet Union, developed antagonism to any political ideology, including Zionism. Inadvertently, the new immigrants influence Zionism in a new, unfamiliar way. These immigrants want to re-build themselves, not the Zionist homeland. Contrary to the old Israeli song “We came to the Land of Israel to build and be built,” they have a new song containing only the later part of the old one, “to be built.” For them it means modern housing, modern electrical equipment, books, music and theatre. It definitely does not mean barren, parched mountains and stony, dangerous roads. These people do not intend to go and live in settlements.
Former immigrants, the sons of the 50’s immigrants, born into economical distress, were educated by the Zionist leadership to believe that their suffering is essential for the nation building, and they internalized it.
The new immigrants in 1990 destroyed the veteran-immigrants’ belief in the necessity of their suffering. They have suddenly realized that it is possible to act differently. The old belief was replaced by the image of the Russian immigrant; he became an imitation model. Thus, they demand apartments in the areas within the Green Line, modern electrical equipment, and refuse to live in distant, dangerous places. Despite the fact that their living conditions, and particularly their housing situation, have deteriorated, the chance that they will surrender to the economical temptation or the social pressure and choose settlement as a solution to their problem, is extremely slim. From their point of view, this solution means the preservation of their inferior status.
The young Israeli Left people, sons of the Founding Fathers, are in the opposite position. They, who claim that the settlements are an obstacle to the achievement of peace, are the ones who actually go to live there, thus establishing dual-morality norms. The untruthful, deceitful protest of the Israeli Left against the settlements prevents the development of a real, wide protest, thus paralyzing any prospect of launching a real action against the settlements. The Israeli Left reduces the number of those who are interested in a real protest, and drives them into the political margins of Israel. The prevention of the creation of a meaningful political action against the settlements consequently reduces its power to influence.
The emotional conflict of that young Physics student might have been prevented had he had a strong group he could relate to. Such a group could have given him emotional, social and political support to match the standards offered by his fellow students.
Those who wish to generate an active political protest against the settlements have to find new ways which will be different from the deceitful protest of the Israeli Left.
We have to establish a new left, a true one.
We are talking about a boycott of the settlements.
We are talking about the exposure of the real cost of the settlement.
We are talking about exposing the crimes committed by the settlements and the settlers.
A boycott means the severance of all social contacts with the settler's families.
A boycott means the refusal of soldiers to guard the settlements.
A boycott means to refuse to accompany the settler's children to their community centers and refuse to engage in their protection and security.
The New Left should refuse to purchase products from the settlements as well as refuse to maintain any economical contact with them. All those who, consciously, do not identify with the idea of settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories should take part in the boycott.
A boycott is the methodical expansion of the refusal to co-operate, directly or indirectly with the settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories.
A boycott like this demands a high price from those participating in it. The poet, Natan Zach, for instance, prohibited the sale of his books in the occupied territories. The musician, Arieh Shapira, cancelled the premiere of his new composition because he refused to play his music in the occupied territories.
The Palestinians, residents of the occupied territories, should participate in the boycott. This co-operation is both practically and politically important.
The Palestinians must refuse to work in the settlements.
The Palestinians must refuse to build the settlements, clean them and do the various service jobs there.
The boycott’s advantage is that it demands, daily, from each person, both reflection and action. These two, the reflection and the action, will help build an essential, ideological and political protest against the settlement policy, thus enabling, at long last, the creation of an Israeli Left whose actions equal its declarations.
A distinct Israeli action against the settlements might prompt the American Jewry (as well as the world Jewry) to become more critical of the settlements. Such action can emotionally and practically allow the American Jewry to carefully examine the destination to which their donation funds are channelled. An alliance between the American Jewry and the Israeli Left will initiate a supremely significant turn which can influence the American Government, not to mention the European Community, which has already taken that road. The European Community can help a lot by giving moral and financial support to the small part of the Israeli society who actively opposes settlement in the occupied territories.
A PROFILE OF THE ISRAELI-ZIONIST SOCIETY
[Medecins du Monde conference: Israelis and Palestinians: Health Tomorrow, Paris, October 1992]
When I'm in the occupied Palestinian territory or in Europe, people often ask me: how does it happen that the Jewish people, who suffered so much, are inflicting so much suffering on others?
In my daily work at the Association of Israeli-Palestinian Physicians for Human Rights (the former name of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel—Ed.) I witness many examples of suffering that the Israelis, the occupiers, inflict upon the occupied Palestinians. We deal with cases of injuries to body and soul, violation of human rights by soldiers, policemen, security forces or Jewish Israeli citizens.
I would like to talk about those who commit these actions rather than the actions themselves. I'll try to understand the mental profile of the oppressing people who have been committing these actions for 45 years, and still regard themselves as victims.
Jewish society in Israel suffers a post-traumatic syndrome, mainly as a result of the Holocaust. It is not possible to describe the collective Israeli mentality without understanding the significance of the Holocaust as the cause of a post-traumatic disorder. Such a syndrome occurs when there is no opportunity to forget the trauma or to work it through. In time, the traumatic event retained in the collective memory undergoes ritualization and codification that helps to create a collective identity. The group relates to the trauma it experienced and survived as a founding event of the society. That happened in the case of the State of Israel.
The Israeli group didn't have the historical time and chance neither to recover from the trauma nor to cope with the massive aggression hidden within its inner borders before the State of Israel was founded. Therefore, the Jewish group in Israel stays in an unsolved post traumatic condition.
A state, as an organization of society, acts, among other things, as a bank of aggression. The individuals disengage their selves from their own responsibility (or part of it) for their aggression and deposit it in the state's hands.
The principal capital of a newly-created state, born out of war and still fighting, is its aggression. Contrary to the citizens of a state with a long historical tradition, which, to some degree, counter-balances the aggression capital, the citizen of a newly-born fighting state transfers a greater part of its individual responsibility to the state's bank of aggression, and thus is left much freer of the burden of self moral judgment. This situation must lead to disregard of human rights, characteristic of Israeli society as a whole.
To this day the state of Israel has not yet enacted a law of human rights.
The trauma of the Holocaust, unsolved and not worked through, resulted in the Israeli Jews' admiration for power, stemming from identification with the aggressor. This was coupled with a deep contempt for the weak, the loser, and the fleeing refugee.
This account sheds light on the rapid forgiveness shown by the young Israeli collective towards the strong German people and its inverse inability to forgive and converse with the weak – the occupied Palestinian, the refugee. The image of the weak passive victim seems to hold up a mirror, an undesirable one, reminding us of the mythical codified and painful aspect of the Holocaust rendering us as passive, weak, and defenseless, without an army. We cannot forgive ourselves for what happened in Europe and we consequently transfer this lack of forgiveness to the weak of the present – the occupied Palestinian and refugees.
On one hand, we have an embassy, diplomats and normal relations with Germany; while on the other hand, we have a law forbidding Israelis from meetings and talks with the PLO, a law enacted in order to prevent any dialogue with the Palestinians and especially any dialogue concerning peace.
Another phenomenon resulting from the post-traumatic syndrome is the fact that Israeli Jews see themselves as victims, threatened and attacked, in spite of the reality of having a strong and well-equipped army or the fact of being the strong occupiers.
When the traumatic event is suddenly re-experienced during times of stress and pressure, this might result in the use of images taken from the Holocaust, from the trauma. Thus, for instance, the Israeli leader Menachem Begin refers to the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Lebanon as “Hitler hiding in his bunker.” There are many other similar examples.
The strong conqueror perceives himself as a persecuted victim. This sense of the victim-self is a cornerstone incorporated into the collective identity. The victim feels persecuted and lonely. He denies the evil and cruelty within himself, and projects it on the enemy, which enables him to turn the weak enemy into a persecutor.
The victim has an insatiable expectation for revenge and compensation. While the need for compensation is conscious, the need for revenge remains unconscious. The victim views present reality through the prism of the past, the Holocaust. The means and ability for a correct reality-testing are consequently distorted.
Such a group perceives a dichotomy between good and evil. We are the good and they are the evil. This dichotomy, inflicting the evil parts of the self on the other, makes it legitimate and even desirable for the collective and individual to act aggressively towards the other with childish and destructive rage. Members of the group encourage one another in such activities. For example, last Saturday in Jerusalem (Oct. 14, 1992), a military policeman shot Mustafa Abaidat in the abdomen while he was lying on the ground held by another policeman. After he shot Mustafa, the policeman turned to his colleagues and said, "Isn't it true that this man tried to take away my gun?" His colleagues applauded him.
Israeli Zionist society reacts mentally to the occupation in different ways: One part sheds all moral responsibility, as in the above example. It places total sovereignty over its aggression and childish rage in the hands of the State, as represented by the local commander. These people will commit the most severe acts of violation of human rights, not only without any moral doubts, but quite happily, feeling that they are fulfilling their duty. This uncontrolled violence does not stop with clashes between Israelis and Palestinians. Violence within Israeli society and within the family has risen significantly: Murder of women, sexual child abuse, wild driving, etc.
Another part of the society does not agree with these norms. These people choose different ways of conduct, as they have developed a more mature and individualistic psyche. Some of them refuse to serve in the occupied territories. Some are active in various human rights organizations.
Some, mainly young ones, leave Israel. Some cannot cope with the conflict between obedience versus human values, and react to the conflict, located in the "inner border of sinning," with mental crises. There is a steep rise in the number of suicides among soldiers.
The majority react by what is referred to here as "pin-headedness" (rosh katan). They refrain from political thinking, do not read newspapers or listen to the news. They live in a kind of internal exile. They do not refuse to obey, but they make their compliance with the system as minimal as possible. They take no initiative at all in social or military fields.
It is difficult to make this part of society understand that refraining from what is called political involvement or human rights issues is in itself a political act. The guilt and shame over what is happening inside Israeli society are powerful and impenetrable paralyzing factors. This large group strengthens the violent and immoral group by its lack of involvement.
The victim-identity is nurtured, among other things, by the unconscious guilt feelings of the nations of Europe, who have reason to feel guilty but do not fully succeed in bringing these guilt feelings to the surface and dealing with them consciously, partly because they are busy denying the guilt. In this way part of the guilt remains unconscious.
The desirable role of an important European nation such as France is in working through its guilt, in coping with it cognitively and thus allowing itself a conflict-free approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We need your help in order to strengthen those post-Zionist forces that wish for peace between the two peoples, a peace in which the body and soul of both will be respected.
A VIEW FROM WITHIN: PROBLEMS CONFRONTING HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS IN ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES
[Reprinted from Arab Studies Quarterly, Vo. 22, Number 1, Winter 2000]
What is it like to be a human rights activist in Israel and the occupied territories? In both areas, one is contending with a context very different from the one that gave rise to the State of Israel. While 1 was growing up in Jerusalem, a newspaper passed from hand to hand in the rooms my family shared with two other families. Every morning I read the same slogan underneath the title of the newspaper: "For Zionism, For Socialism, For Fraternity of Nations." 1 honestly think that for Jews then living in Palestine and later in the new State of Israel, the principles of social justice, equality, and legality were tremendously important. We were socialists. And while even then the needed sense of fraternity towards Palestinians was missing, Jews shared a set of assumptions about what was important. Even my parents were considered relatively normal in their conviction that nobody should own land and that people should share what little they had with those who had less. In that way, equality mixed with solidarity in my childish understanding of social justice.
Years later, as an adult, I could see that those wonderful social values, this sense of fairness, existed mainly for one segment of the Israeli Jewish population. Moreover, "socialism" was being overcome by capitalist-oriented policies, "Fraternity of Nations" was being replaced by xenophobic Zionism, and "Zionism" itself, which was a kind of secular national liberation movement, was largely turning into a Messianic religion.
These historic shifts in socioeconomic structure and ideology gave rise to three distinctive gaps:
1) The social justice gap, between the haves and the have-nots.
2) The legal gap between Israelis and Palestinians under the law.
3) The psychological gap, between the Israeli ideal self-image and reality.
These gaps have defined the context for the activities of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-IL). The first two gaps, leading to discrimination and violations of human rights, are the problems that triggered the establishment of PHR in the first place. Only later did we discover that what sustains them is the third disparity, the gap between the way Israelis see themselves and the reality of how they behave.
The Social Justice Gap
In the first years of the State, the gap between the haves and the have-nots (among Jews) was minimal. Statistical records collected after 1957 show that for nearly 20 years there was little change in the income gap between the richest and poorest Israelis. Now wealthy Israelis earn 48 times the amount earned by the poorest Israelis (A. Kaspi, Ha'aretz, 2 October 1998).
The ever-growing economic inequality has contributed a lot to the unhinging of solidarity and social justice among Israeli Jews. What had been a cohesive society founded on social justice values became a society whose social fabric is best characterized by illegality and violence.
Palestinian workers who were "illegal" according to the Israeli definition were, since 1967, the backbone of agriculture, construction, and low-paid service work in places like restaurants, hotels and municipal garbage collection. In the past six or seven years, as an Israeli reaction to the intifada, foreign workers from Africa, Thailand, the Philippines, and Eastern Europe have replaced most of the Palestinian workers. These foreign workers, like the Palestinians before them, are exploited; they do not receive social security or social benefits and are cruelly treated by their Israeli employers. This exploitation, compounded by the regular violation of their civil and human rights, has become an accepted part of the Israeli social and psychological environment.
An Israeli story illustrates this reality. A grandfather points out a building to his grandson and says, "Years ago I was one of the workers who built this place." His grandson responds, "Grandpa, I can't believe it, I didn't know you were an Arab when you were young." The grandfather in this story could have been my father. The adults I knew believed in work. The ideology of Zionism called for the establishment of a Jewish labor force. Work—manual labor and agricultural work—was seen as sacred. Indeed, the notion of labor was so crucial to the Zionist agenda that the first Zionists talked about the "religion of labor." But in the last three decades respect for labor and workers has disappeared.
Respect for the law has disappeared as well. In many ways the law has become a dead letter in Israel. This development has extreme consequences. People frequently take the law into their own hands, which translates into violence. Violence has become a defining characteristic of Israeli society. The targets of this violence are the weak: Palestinians, foreign workers, women, children, the elderly, and the poor.
The widespread violation of human rights towards Palestinians in the occupied territories and the illegality and violence that have become a given for Israelis within Israel proper are inter-related. In committing these violations, Israel is breaking numerous international laws, including international declarations of human rights to which Israel is a signatory. These human, civil, and economic rights violations include the illegal confiscation of Palestinian land and water, the execution of "wanted" Palestinians, the torture of as many as 20,000 Palestinians over the past ten years, and the detention of people without trial for extended periods of time. Israel has also engaged in collective punishment of Palestinian civilians in some of the following ways: cutting off electricity or water supplies, denying sick and wounded Palestinians access to medical facilities, and preventing travel of medical workers to hospitals and clinics. Punitive demolition of Palestinian homes and the deportations of Palestinians from the occupied territories to Lebanon and elsewhere.
When Israelis talk with pride about “our democratic state,” they do not consider the Palestinians within Israel (i.e., Palestinians living inside Israel since the 1948 war) who constitute approximately 20% of the Israeli population. Over one hundred thousand hectares of Israeli Palestinian land have been confiscated and given to Jewish citizens since 1948. Israeli Palestinians are not allowed to serve in the army, and thus, they are deprived of the privileges associated with military service such as housing and career opportunities. They receive approximately one-fourth of what Jews receive from the state in terms of education, culture, sports, health, and municipal services like sewage, roads and more.
The lack of a democratic egalitarian attitude toward Israeli-Palestinians has not followed other predictable traditional left-right distinctions. Every Israeli government has practiced discrimination against Israeli-Palestinians. I believe it serves all governments as a means for creating the emotional basis for what is called “separation” between the two populations, thereby avoiding feeling discomfort with the “separation.”
Let me provide a recent illustration: On 2 October 1998, there were two demonstrations — one by Israeli-Palestinians against confiscation of their lands in Umm al-Fahm and one by Jews on the northern border against a new rule that would deny their income tax privilege.
The Palestinians and the Jews demonstrated in similar ways. While nothing happened to the Jewish demonstrators, the Israeli-Palestinians from Umm al-Fahm were beaten, arrested and fired on by the police. Approximately 500 people, including school children, were wounded. This disparity in treatment mocks any idea of democracy, but there is no real outcry by Israeli Jews against this discrimination.
The Legal Double Standard For Israelis And For Palestinians
This point leads me to the second major gap—the operation of one legal standard for Israeli Jews and a different one for Palestinians in the Occupied territories. When a Jewish settler murders a Palestinian, he usually receives a mild punishment, if any. However, a Palestinian who commits even a minor crime usually serves many years in prison. He will certainly serve a life sentence for murdering an Israeli Jew. Although capital punishment is illegal in Israel, "wanted" Palestinians, who are suspected of anti-Israeli actions, are often summarily executed by special Israeli military units.
A few statistics should be mentioned to illustrate this point: In the last 10 years, Jewish settlers killed 135 Palestinians, 23 of them children under 17. Nonetheless, the four Israelis who were convicted of murder and received life sentences had their terms reduced to 10 to 16 years of imprisonment. Thirty-eight cases were closed with no measures taken and in other cases the charges were dropped. (Those numbers do not include the 1350 to 1400 Palestinians that were killed by the army during the lntifada.)
During the same period, Palestinians killed 90 Israeli citizens in the Occupied territories, among them four under the age of seventeen. Israel's response was very different. Ten Palestinians were "eliminated" by security forces as "wanted men." Twenty-three received life sentences, and only one file was closed with no measures taken (Bet'selem).
Let me give you the details of a recent murder case. It occurred on 16 June 1998. Two youths, settlers from a West Bank Israeli boarding school, Beit Hagai, murdered a Palestinian passerby, striking him with a large wooden stick as they rode past in a car. Many politicians, including the Prime Minister, loudly condemned the crime promising to "punish the killers with the full severity of the law." Mussa Abu Turk, one of the victim's 12 children, said at that time: "I don't trust your courts. Like so many previous cases, you will say that the murderer is insane. You will release him immediately or after a short while—a year or year and a half." (Ha'aretz, 20 November 1998)
In November 1998, the judge, Zvi Cohen, sentenced the killer to two years in jail. He found the second youth guilty of negligence but declared him incapable of understanding his actions. The driver of the vehicle who did not stop to transport the murder victim to the hospital was acquitted. So Mussa Abu Turk quite accurately predicted what would happen in the Israeli court.
The question that, I as a human rights activist, must confront is what one should do when the law has come to represent lawlessness. When the judicial system operates according to a double standard, what are we to do? Within this context, how do we understand human rights work?
I believe that within the Israeli context, human rights work must go beyond acts of protest and documentation, however effective they are, to assert some alternative sense of morality, to advance social values based on equality, dignity and respect for the other.
During the eleven years since our founding, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel has attempted to face both challenges. We as doctors are guided by the conviction that human dignity and the integrity of body and mind are basic human rights, without reference to class, gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation or religion. We begin with the belief that without deeply rooted convictions, activism means very little: and that without concrete actions, convictions, no matter how noble, are lacking. Our convictions support us in tough moments when we feel quite alone in our own society, particularly because our activity takes place in our own backyard, not in another part of the world.
A plethora of questions consistently plague us. What is the role of a human rights organization in a society that respects neither laws nor human rights? Should we respect the law? Should we break the law? This question is a critical one, due to the fact that without law, society can not function. However, I believe that obedience to the law should not be automatic, but should rather be contingent upon whether the law is just and equitable. When the legal system does not respect human rights, how can we, in turn, obey the law?
In a complex situation, the organization's actions must also be complex: we break the law consciously on numerous occasions. Yet, we diligently try to respect the law.
For example, when the state outlawed talking to PLO members, punishable by three years in prison, we broke the law. We talked with Palestinians all the time, both in clandestine and overt ways. We talked to them lawfully in conferences and UN conventions (Geneva, New York, Vienna, Strasbourg, and Moscow), and unlawfully in the Occupied territories. Talking to Palestinians, not talking about Palestinians, was PHR's way of embodying our respect for them.
We broke the law on a weekly basis when we circumvented the army's roadblocks in the roads of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. For example, in 1991 during the Gulf War, we distributed baby food and medications donated by the American-Israeli Civil Liberties Coalition in West Bank refugee camps and in the Nablus Kasbah. I remember hiding behind a green curtain in a supply area next to the operating room in al-Ittihad Hospital in Nablus while soldiers searched for me. I could hear them just a few feet away from me, on the other side of the curtain, almost as if we were playing a game of hide-and-seek. There was fear, but there was also a kind of childish joy in breaking the law then, no pangs of conscience. In the end, I was not found and nothing happened to the Palestinians who helped hide me. We successfully distributed the baby food to the needy families.
On other occasions we decided not to break the law. For instance, I did not break the more serious law of "treason" by taking money from the PLO. The first time the Palestinians offered financial assistance to the PHR-IL, I immediately responded, "No, thank you." Money, as you know, is an emotionally loaded issue. Despite my enormous phone bills and the stamps I had to buy, it never occurred to me that 1 could ease the burden by accepting this money. My refusal was an effort to protect the purity of our motivations, to say that our intentions were not in any way for sale. It was also a question of loyalty to—to what? Perhaps loyalty to the "virtuous" State of Israel, the state that ideally should exist.
In the first instance we defied the law; in the second we obeyed it. But our main goal was to challenge the law to make the law do what it was supposed to do–to protect everyone equally. During the Gulf War, for example, when Israel faced the threat of chemical missiles from Iraq, we appealed to the Supreme Court challenging the state decision to deny Palestinians from the occupied territories gas masks while at the same time distributing them to every Israeli.
So while sometimes we broke the law, we also appealed to it, even when that meant appealing for the protection of Palestinians' rights to the very body, the Israeli Supreme Court, that was condoning torture, deportations, and house demolitions. The alternative choice would have been to boycott the judicial system entirely. We would not and could not have made that choice. Choosing a boycott option would have meant that we had lost hope that Israel might be a state with respect for human rights and equality.
Often, our ability to effect change via legal challenges was undercut by clever government moves. Time and again, a day before we were to submit an appeal to the Supreme Court, the security forces or the government would offer a concession of some sort concerning the specific case on which we were basing our more general claim. In this manner they prevented the court from considering overarching questions concerning torture, the free movement of medical personnel, and the like. In this way the state limited our work to "the immediate" case; we managed to stop the torture of certain Palestinians or allow the movement of doctors during a specific curfew, but the "structure" which allowed torture and the restriction of movement remained intact. We realized that a human rights organization must deal with a painful dilemma: how to tend to both long-term systemic structural changes and to the immediate existential dangers faced by individuals and communities within that system. If we focus solely on achieving structural change, we run the risk of neglecting individuals and communities in dire circumstances. However, the danger of working only on the individual level involves the risk of becoming so consumed with individual problem-solving that structural issues are never broached and the struggle is in a sense depoliticized. There are dangers on both sides of this dilemma. We must do both—but this is easier said than done. We were never content with our activity; no matter how hard we worked, because frequently we could not attend to someone's suffering or to some important issue. The nature of our work is one of constantly recognizing the missing elements. At the end of the day, my colleagues in PHR-IL and myself could never feel like our work was done.
For example: Dr. Zacaria El-A'ra was administratively detained in Israel during the first year of the intifada. (Administrative detention means detention without trial.) As we decided to try to get him released we could not help thinking about the thousands of Palestinians in the same condition. What about the basic human right not to be detained without a judicial process? And what about the violation of international law forbidding the imprisonment of a person from occupied territories inside Israel? Should we put our focus on attempts to change the “structure” that enables the practice of administrative detention or shall we take care of Zacaria? We decided to try to do both: To demonstrate in front of the Ministry of Defense against administrative detention (as a structure) and the detention of Zacaria as an immediate problem. Our achievement was that Zacaria was transferred from the prison inside Israel, Kezi'ot jail, to a prison in Gaza which was a substantial relief for him and for his family, and then he was released after four months. His detention was not renewed, contrary to the usual routine. So, our efforts did some good on the “immediate” plane, but practically nothing on the “structural” one.
We never again demonstrated in this manner, despite the echo it made in Israel. The effort invested was too much for us—for me, as a matter of fact. In order to get twenty doctors to demonstrate on a weekday, I had to spend ten hours on the phone, which meant three evenings, after my day's work. We did not have any paid staff or an office at that time.
Even when the Supreme Court did hear our appeals and decided in our favor, its rulings were not always respected by the army and the Ministry of Defense. For example, in 1991, we appealed to the Supreme Court in order to obtain freedom of movement for medical teams and patients in times of curfew in the occupied territories. In such times neither patients nor medical staff could reach East Jerusalem, the site of most of the medical centers that serve the West Bank and Gaza Strip. When the army closes the checkpoints, they prevent passage of Palestinian pregnant women, sick children, and wounded individuals on the one hand, and they prevent the movement of Palestinian doctors, paramedics, and medical teams on the other. The end result is that people die on the way to the hospital, at the checkpoints, or at home. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled in our favor, but the army did not respect the ruling. Therefore, we had to return to the Supreme Court to plead the same appeal. For seven years, we fought the same case, and judicially speaking, we won. In reality, we continue to lose. Today, people are still dying at the checkpoints.
The Gap between the Israeli self-image and the real self
The disparity stems from the gap between how Israelis think of themselves and what their actions show them to be as a people.
The Israeli-Zionist worldview assumes that as a collective and as individuals, we (the Jewish people) are always victims, always moral, always humane, and must always be united. They reinforce the idea of themselves as good by thinking of the Palestinians as bad. Israelis perceive Palestinians as inhuman aggressors, unscrupulous and treacherous and lacking the same authenticity as a people.
The existential nature of this gap finds expression in the poet T.S. Eliot's statement that "Human kind cannot bear very much reality." The circumstances of occupation and the devastating violations of Palestinian human rights have been too much to bear for many people in Israel-so much so that they employ various means to avoid both perceiving and acknowledging this reality. Very many people choose to deny the reality of the Israeli oppression of Palestinians; others fall into despair or apathy in the face of what they acknowledge to be true. Either choice prevents examination and analysis of our political reality, or neither offers much room for effective change.
In 1993, PHR held an international conference in Tel-Aviv: "The Struggle Against Torture and the Case of Israel." (See the detailed discussion of torture, pp. xxxxxx – Ed.) The vast majority of the Israeli- Zionists at the time were unwilling to believe that torture could possibly exist in Israel. It was so much against what “we” wanted to know about ourselves. At such a moment, when people are confronted with a denied fact they cannot continue denying, they attempt to accommodate it within their worldview by arranging a comfortable place for it within the old framework. For example, cases of torture were labeled as “exceptional” in order to avoid acknowledging of the widespread and systematic practice of torture. Or torture was spoken of in euphemisms such as "moderate physical pressure." The Israeli government actually uses this term; if they do not call it torture, it is no longer torture. Or, as a last resort, torture may be defended as an absolutely necessary means of maintaining state security. In this way, the ideal self-image remains intact. People can keep thinking of themselves as humane and pure, and continue to see themselves as potential victims.
PHR-IL has encountered tremendous resistance to critical thinking on the part of the Israeli public. For this reason, in the long run, this third gap may prove to be the most detrimental to the health of Israel. PHR worked to eliminate denial in the Israeli public, to develop the capacity of self-reflection, and to think critically. To this end, we must constantly confront those who want to kill the messenger.
While critical thinking and self-criticism are crucial to close this gap, we think that at the heart of the matter, at its very core, is the whole issue of respect for other people.
How do I understand the word respect, which has no legal or political currency? I think that respect is the emotional aspect of equality, serving and shaping the relations between equals. Respect allows meaningful and honest engagement between people and people’s full acknowledgement and acceptance of the other.
In psychological language, respect involves maturity. Infants, in the very beginning of their mental development, do not recognize the other as a whole human entity. It is as if they don't "see" the other person. In the second stage of development, babies see only halves or dichotomies—a totally good person or a totally bad one that they can see. In the final, mature stage they can see a mixture of good and bad, dark and bright sides of one individual. One could add to the above that to arrive at this stage of full maturity, the individual must first come to acknowledge the mixed nature of his or her own personality.
There is very little respect for Palestinians in Israel today. The Prime Minister does not respect them; neither does the soldier on the roadblock. The Israeli media, as the most powerful tool in creating public opinion, reflects this disrespect, and in doing so, sustains it. The lack of respect manifests itself in different ways. I am not going to discuss the overt manifestations in everyday life—at the roadblocks or in governmental offices. Rather, 1 would like to discuss the more subtle aspect of disrespect, to show how deeply rooted it is. Look, if you will, at what happens when well-intentioned Israeli Jews decide to invest their time and energy in creating a dialogue with Palestinians. At first, these Israelis are usually enthusiastic; they actively listen and try to understand what is being said on both an intellectual and an emotional level. Then, at a certain point in the dialogue, they reach a juncture, a crucial moment. The dialogue might touch a hidden, well covered, shameful corner. In that moment, an inner voice tells the Israeli Jew, "If I were Palestinian, I would do something about it. I would fight for my honor, my property, my land, my life, my culture, and my freedom." This moment of empathy, evoked by one Palestinian or the other, will suddenly, without calculation, reveal itself with words like "If I were you, I would join the PLO," as then Chief of Staff, and now Prime Minister, Ehud Barak once said. Those words, spoken out of empathy, may lead in one of several directions. The Israeli Jew, feeling empathy with the Palestinian's terrible situation, might take it as a threat to his/her own existence. The inner voice will then say: "If I would fight for these things, so would he/she. And if he/she did so, I would lose a lot that I don't want to lose." The fact that, to a large extent, what belongs to the Israeli Jew once belonged to the Palestinian only makes him/her feel worse. In this context, the dialogue runs aground and fades out without accomplishing real change.
Respect is not cheap. If there is no willingness to share power, authority and resources, there is no true respect, and therefore, no true dialogue. Instead, there is only a conversation between occupier and occupied, between have and have-not, between radically unequal power systems, in which one system fights to preserve the power structure, while the other system fights to change it.
Israel's unwillingness to share power ultimately makes Barak's words of genuine empathy meaningless. In fact, under pressure from politicians who understood his words to legitimize the struggles of the Palestinian, he issued a public statement of apology.
I would like to say again that dialogue and the empathy evoked by it can move in a variety of directions. Dialogue can open new ways of understanding and relating to each other. Out of my experience I can tell that a dialogue that follows mutual activity might be fruitful and long lasting. This is the story of PHR-IL.
We have paid strict attention to our language because we want to avoid any possibility of patronizing the Palestinians with whom we work. After all, we as Israelis have freedom, power, resources and force; Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have little. If we forget to be self-aware for even a little while patronizing words find their way into the text and into people's minds, and we can say things that diminish others and ourselves.
For example, I remember a trip to the West Bank with our Israeli-Palestinian field worker, when on the way we encountered a roadblock. The line of cars at the roadblock extended for at least two miles, bumper to bumper. It was hot—so hot. There was no air-conditioning in the cars. People were boiling. The young field worker, frustrated, pulled the car out of the line, and sped along the outside of the queue. In doing so, he referred to the Palestinians in the queue as "soles of shoes," one of the most degrading ways in which to refer to a group, especially one's own group. Then he smiled at me broadly and with something like complicity. I did not know what to do.
When I went home that night, I realized that we at PHR-IL were in trouble. In the staff meeting that same week, 1 talked generally about our feelings about those who are dependent upon us. People began to evaluate their responses, and we gradually came to the insight that no matter how devoted we are, we may develop resentment and contempt for the people who are receiving our help. They may be patients, Palestinians in the occupied territories, family members or friends. 1 brought to the meeting a quote from an Aboriginal Australian woman: "If you have come to help me—go home. However, if you have come because your liberation is tied with my own, then let's work together."
It is important to understand that none of us at PHR-IL had any standardized theory from which to work, any prescription, any rulebook to follow. What we did was to take the intuitive, in reaction to the reality we observed. We worked so hard at the time that we did not reflect much on the group itself. Only now, more than a year later, can I see the forest, where before I could only see trees.
As I think about the past in order to write my recollections I see that respect for the Other is the best inner compass a human rights activist can have. Having it, one will not fall into the trap of patronizing, despising, degrading or humiliating while “doing good.” Respect monitors the dignity of both sides.
PHR-IL's respect for the Palestinians threatens the Israeli-Zionist "fiction" that everybody wants to partake of Jewish-Israeli morality, purity, and righteousness. On this issue in particular we have decided to remain outside the partisan system, outside the Israeli consensus—in the words of Hannah Arendt, we have decided to be pariahs.
If respect is to be the guiding principle for Israelis and Palestinians, the political end result will be genuine power sharing—in other words, a relation between two peoples based on equality and social solidarity. A visionary might even recommend one state for two people based on those principles. The fact that neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian community is mature enough to engage in this vision is no reason to give up the struggle for mutual respect.
EVERYDAY LIFE IN CONTINUOUS CRISIS: THE PSYCHO-POLITICAL IMPACT OF THE IMBALANCE BETWEEN RESPONSIBILITY AND POWER IN THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT.
[Paper delivered at conference on “War Society-Society War?” panel on socio-psychological aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Bad Segeberg, Germany, November 2001]
In the years before “Oslo,” it was clear who the occupier is, and who is the occupied. The ruler of the occupied territories, the State of Israel, was legally responsible for the well being of the Palestinian population it governed. Israel was obliged by international conventions to provide for such needs of everyday life as water, electricity and sanitation, roads, health care and education. Along with this responsibility, which it performed very poorly, Israel had full control over Palestinian life.
Shifting responsibility
In 1994, as an outcome of the Oslo agreements, the responsibility for needs such as health care and education was shifted to the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority took on costly responsibility without the requisite power. Israel maintained full power to control the borders, restrict movement on the roads and the import and export of goods, levy taxes and control access to basic resource such as water and health services. The Palestinians could not even guarantee free movement to medical centers, hospitals and clinics for their health teams and patients. They were not free to decide where to buy medical equipment like oxygen and distilled water or medications. This new form of occupation was actually worse, since the new “balance” saddled the Palestinians with material costs while giving them only the illusion of power. The concept of a Palestinian Authority was emptied of meaning.
In the relationship between oppressor (the powerful partner) and oppressed (the weak one), the oppressor always sees responsibility as resting in the oppressed and not in himself.
To be responsible and powerless is an extremely miserable condition. The best analogy to it is the role of the dependent “classical” wife, who is responsible for most of the household chores but has no control over money, decision-making and interactions with the larger world. With so much responsibility and so little power she has no control over her life.
On the other hand, too much power and too little responsibility affect the oppressor’s consciousness and conscience. If for moral or practical reasons one feels uncomfortable with the consequences of one’s actions but does not want to change, then one will constantly invest psychic energies in futile attempts to avoid oneself. In this way, an individual or, analogously, a society, will not get the chance to develop insight as to their own behavior and motivations.
Oppressor and oppressed
As a consequence of the Oslo accords, in the view of Israel the occupation had been terminated. In fact, it continued, untitled, but Israel no longer saw itself as an occupier and therefore denied any responsibility for Palestinian well being. Along with the new narrative Israel became incapable of seeing that the Palestinians are engaged in resisting the occupation. It therefore conceived them as terrorists. At the same time its oppression of the Palestinians increased. In this new reality the Palestinian collective became less visible to Israel’s perception. The specific psychological dynamics of oppressor and oppressed came into play.
I choose to describe these dynamics in reference to the peace negotiation process rather than through other features of this reality, such as what happens at border checkpoints. In examining the peace talks, I will focus on the verbal level of the oppression.
While talking highly of peace and coexistence on the level of declarations, Israel emptied these talks of their content of hope for a true and just peace. It thus created a constant state of disappointment in the Palestinians and humiliated them. This was achieved by characteristic oppressor’s tactics, which I have frequently encountered in my psychotherapeutic work between partners:
The oppressor will not give answers to crucial questions. Answers are always partial, avoiding the main issue or deceptive. This causes the weak partner to ask the same questions or to pose the same demands again, taking on the role of the one who is never satisfied. The strong partner counters with condescending accusations such as “you’re never satisfied; nothing is good enough for you. No point in giving you an answer.”
This happened, for example, with regard to the issues of Jerusalem and of the refugee problem.
The powerful partner will not give anything to the weak partner. If anything is given it is given partially, too little, too late and without respect to the oppressed. This happened in the case of releasing Palestinian prisoners, of creating ‘safe passages’ from Gaza to the West Bank, and others.
The powerful partner will overlook the weak partner in setting important dates and schedules, as if the oppressor is in charge and alone in the negotiations. For example, Israel unilaterally postponed at its convenience (“until we feel safe”) its withdrawals from Palestinian territories that were agreed upon in Oslo, claiming that there are “no sacred dates.”
The oppressor will ignore the oppressed side’s needs to receive acknowledgement based on an understanding of the wrongs and damages done to him, to receive an apology and a request for forgiveness, and lastly to repair the relations and receive compensation. As an example, a Palestinian-Israel journalist from Nazareth opined: “The conflict will be solved when the Jewish nation admits it occupies the land of the other nation.” (Ha’aretz, Sep. 28, 2001)
The powerful side will undercut the reality of the negotiations by determining “on the ground” facts that increase the absolute power of the oppressor and the consequent weakness, frustration and anger of the oppressed. Thus Israel doubled the number of settlers in the West Bank since Oslo, and built 50% more housing units for these settlers during this time. Palestinian houses are increasingly demolished, more trees are uprooted than ever and a growing number of people are killed.
It is not enough for the oppressor, in this case Israel, to be powerful and mighty. The oppressor must hide his “bad face” from himself and from the world. In order to feel good about himself he must demonstrate, inwardly and outwardly, his “good face.” At the same time and for the same goal he will try his best to present the “bad face” of the weak partner.
The oppressor will invest much time and effort to prove that the oppressed, in this case the Palestinians, are the aggressors. It is important for him to claim that they are the ones who refuse to talk, and at the same time to claim that there is no point in talking to them because they will always have further demands. Therefore the negotiations are bound to be an endless fruitless process: “They don’t want peace.”
Together, these tactics not only humiliate the weak partner but also deflate the negotiations’ potential value to achieve a peaceful agreement, and destroy any faith in non-violent modes of coming to an agreement. If this process is long enough, the oppressed side’s frustration and despair might lead to withdrawal from the talks and to violent actions.
During the years of the negotiations Israel increased its power and control over the Palestinians and got rid of its responsibility toward them. Israel’s accumulation of power led to a psychological intoxication with power expressed as arrogance. The arrogance of power made the Israelis “see” Palestinians as “invisible.” For individuals as well as for a collective, feeling invisible is unbearably painful and makes one want to be seen and heard. Violence is very commonly effort to be seen and heard. Not surprisingly, the second Intifada began.
The complexity of Israeli fears and reactions to the second intifada
The current a-historical political perception
In the present psycho-political climate, there is a tendency to reduce the historical vision to zero, as if the relations between Israelis and Palestinians began when Barak offered his “generous” plan to Arafat and the Palestinians reacted in violent uprising.
Reducing the historical perspective goes hand in hand with reducing thinking in general and critical thinking particularly. Thus obliterating the potential for insight, Israel arrived at a state of catatonia in its public political discourse: There are no voices of political opposition.
Refusing to look into the past is refusing to take responsibility for one’s actions in the past. Incapability to have a vision or refusing to plan the future is refusing to take responsibility for one. Here is the point of osculation between the outer zone of responsibility and the inner one. The fault is finding its way from without to within.
Sharon is the ultimate representative of this culture because he has no vision, no program for the future. Barak, who created this atmosphere, lost his leadership because he claimed to have a program.
Violence inside Israel
In a culture of narrow thinking, where there is no place for history and vision, there is no place for compassion, tolerance and respect for others, no listening to the other’s complaints or to his arguments as to justice. The lives of others are held cheap. Palestinians are at the bottom, i.e., the policy of executing without trial by the state. “72% of the Israeli public supports the assassination policy” (Ma’ariv, Nov.5, 2001). There is almost no outcry from the Israeli Zionist left.
Next on the list of those who are vulnerable are women. The number of women murdered by family members was more than doubled this year, as was the number of rapes. Youngsters “solve” conflicts with knives.
Splitting
In such a psychological state mechanisms of splitting will take place in order to avoid discussion and critical thinking. The world is sharply divided into Us—right and just—and Them—wrong and evil. No comprehensive causality can exist in that frame of mind.
A self- image of victimhood
Being a victim in one’s own eyes can serve as justification for every wrongdoing. Israelis have held on to their own victim status long past its salient historical time. I see this psycho-dynamic in individuals in therapy: Seeing oneself as a victim, a person feels entitled to be mean, cruel, and unjust, deriving his/her energy from fear, anger and hate, and creating similar feelings in his/her partner. A vicious cycle is set in motion.
Cognitive dissonance
Since the second intifada, there is a new kind of fear in the Jewish Israeli public, in addition to the normal personal fear of being killed. This new fear stems from a cognitive dissonance. Palestinian ‘terrorist’ actions unmasked the fragility of a feeling of safety that is based on the image of Palestinian submission on the one hand, and the wish/demand for more power against them on the other. But more power does not work as expected. The uprising does not stop. On the contrary, it is getting more severe. Therefore even more power is demanded (“Palestinians understand only power”) but less success is gained.
The result is a cognitive dissonance between the way Israelis conceive the Palestinians and the reality that they are entering Israeli cities and killing Israeli people. The cognitive dissonance leads to feelings of loss of control and helplessness. Israelis were prevented by their false collective basic assumptions from recognizing the rules of reality, and from seeing coherent connections between its different parts. In particular, they did not see that humiliating and killing Palestinians would not result in their surrender but rather in increased anger and hate. This is why Palestinian violent actions always catch Israelis by surprise and find them shocked, scared and confused.
Uncertainty
Human certainty is based on perceiving connections between one’s actions and one’s life. It’s extremely hard to cope with life situations when information is lacking, understanding is vague, and predicting the future is difficult. This is especially true when it comes to matters of existential importance. In order to minimize the pain of uncertainty, we make great cognitive, emotional and social efforts to create for ourselves a sense of constancy and control of our lives (Winnicott).
The need for constancy and the sense that yesterday predicts tomorrow is a basic human need. In crisis situations some of our constancies are disrupted. In every crisis our interpretation of the situation is the primary determinant of whether we will have a sense of constancy or of disruption.
Israelis had been convinced all along that power and more power would teach the “inferior” Palestinians a lesson, and would solve the problem of Israeli national and personal security and safety. This conviction brought about the election of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who promised to “Let the army win,” and inflicted more and more force on the Palestinians. However, this did not work. In spite of the excessive use of power by Israel against them in the last year, Palestinians were penetrating Israeli towns and killing Israelis. Israeli certainties were thus shaken. A sense of safety, which is an outcome of one’s ability to predict the future, was broken and gave way to a painful sense of uncertainty.
When confidence in constancy is broken in a state of crisis, psychological trauma is expressed in disorientation, anxiety and fear. In such a crisis the person might suffer diffuse body pains, sleeping disturbances and eating disorders. Other symptoms might be an obsessive need for information (expressed in, for example, listening to the news constantly), clinging to what is familiar (thus fueling rigidity of perceptions), and difficulties in concentration.
On the emotional level, there might be excessive worry and fears, dysphoria or depression, rages and rampages, loss of confidence in oneself and of trust in others, intolerance, blaming others, and turning to mysticism, to religion, and to extreme political and social ideologies. Such symptoms appear among Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, especially among adolescents (N. Sharagai, Ha’aretz, 10/6/01). Other sectors in Israeli society are also susceptible to the same symptoms.
For individuals the loss of a sense of constancy is thus translated to hatred and aggression, and/or to withdrawal and despair. The result on the social level is social disintegration.
The prevalence of hate
Hate can serve the ego as a source of energy, and might turn into an addiction. It is the inverted libido energy of love. Hate nourishes angry feelings and actions. In the collective, these might take the form of war and other forms of aggression. Hate and anger will usually serve the ego with a sense of righteousness, efficacy and self- preservation. As in many addictions, reality testing is very poor or absent.
For the sake of a sense of well-being and self-preservation, a person or a collective is capable of destroying the environment, the other, but also itself. As long as the Israeli public perceives the reality –which is bloody, cruel and unjust– as rewarding, it will not stop its leaders from continuing the oppression of the Palestinians.
Regression in political concepts and language
During the years of peace negotiations a new Zionist rhetoric took hold among the majority of the Israeli public. It spoke about coexistence, peace between braves, good neighborhood and about a Palestinian state. The anti-Palestinian rhetoric, prevalent since 1948, became hidden from view, except in the words of the radical right.
The Palestinians bought into the new rhetoric of peace. Quite late they found out that they had been fooled, misled by the rhetoric of good neighborly relations and by the apparent spirit of Israeli good will. Their violent reaction to this understanding caused the old Zionist rhetoric to re-emerge, and to become dominant in Israeli public discourse, in the media, and in the words spoken by policy makers. The revived old rhetoric replaced the mitigated style of the rhetoric of peace with a clearly expressed violence and brutality. For example, A. Lieberman, the Minister of Infrastructure, said: “We have to exchange our wooden club for a spiked iron mace (against Arafat).” [Ma’ariv 4/5/01]
The political right, by its nature, speaks a clear and simple language. It does not need to use vagueness or ambivalence in declaring its intentions, since it has no moral reservations regarding the Palestinians: Its guideline is that Israel is a purely Jewish state.
On the other hand the “confused left,” which thinks 'liberal' but feels “right,” solves this problem by speaking in two languages: The first language talks of a Palestinian state, good neighborly relations and peace, while the other/second/old language says that the Palestinians should not be believed and should not be “given” a state, since they and only they are responsible for their disasters and for all that happened to them during the last century.
The Zionist left's solution is to unite the two levels of language: In this way it keeps a clean conscience while continuing to do exactly what it has always wanted and still wants to do. The new language says: There will be a Palestinian state, and we will rule it; there will be peace, and Israeli settlements will continue to exist–we will continue to exploit and to rob the Palestinians. This was the language of Ehud Barak, who represented the left. It has always been the language of Shimon Peres, who founded the settlements and never stopped supporting them, and who planned for cheap Palestinian labor to work in Israeli “industrial parks” that he called “joint parks” as a way of continuing to steal Palestinian water and land.
This “united” language causes much confusion among the left, especially among those who, like the Palestinians, only heard the level of language the spoke of peace between good neighbors and did not hear the level that counts, the militant level, which denies Palestinian independence. Many Palestinians as well were caught, for a time, in the spell of this magic. At the moment of truth, the Zionist left collapsed, and the Palestinians' frustration and rage found its expression in the second intifada.
What we see this year is regression in emotion and rhetoric to the conceptions and terminology of the early 1950’s: “All Arabs are enemies, terrorists who must be destroyed.” This psychological situation exists as if it is a direct continuation of the 1948 War: The State of Israel is at stake, not only the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The sad joke is that by this time Israel’s sense of responsibility had so atrophied through the years of being an oppressor after Oslo, that it demanded that Arafat and the Palestinians take responsibility for Israeli security and safety.
The Zionist Left: A Moment of Truth
Following the second intifada, Israeli Zionists faced a moment of truth as to their intentions toward the Palestinians. Deep down, Israeli Zionists never wanted a Palestinian state. All Israeli government, left and right, took part in establishing Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. All of the governments enabled the growth of these settlements and protected them, refusing to uproot them. This clearly meant that in the mind and sentiments of the governments and of most of the public there is no place for a Palestinian state.
The Zionist left, with Shimon Peres as their leader, prefers a National Unity government—which means the continuation of the occupation—to a historical “Tikkun” and reconciliation with the Palestinians. Once again they refuse to recognize the Palestinians as equals who have the right to an independent state. The Zionist left knows, as the Zionist right does, that such a state cannot exist together with the settlements. It is either one or the other.
Israeli left-Zionists must confront the dissonance between their morally-based declarations of wishing for peace and coexistence, and their power-based clinging to Israeli control over land water and air. When a person speaks of moral principles but acts on power principles, after a certain time there is no way but to come to a moment of truth. It might take a long time, but it is inevitable. When facing this moment of truth many in the left react with confusion, disorientation, anger and blame of the other. For others, confusion and disorientation are translated into withdrawal and avoidance of any political activity and social responsibility.
Separation
In reaction to the second intifada, Israel attempted to deal with its psychological trauma through the not entirely new supposedly magical tactic of “separation” from the Palestinians. This tactic is being applied – as is typical for an oppressor—one-sidedly, without regard for the Palestinians’ needs and without consulting them.
Even before Barak’s vision of separation from the Palestinians materialized as a political arrangement, it became a reality. Israelis are prohibited by law to enter into the PA territories and Palestinians are closed in their places of residence by military siege. Moreover, people from both sides are afraid to cross the lines. The new separation allows hatred to flourish. When viable human contacts are prevented, dehumanization prevails. It is easier to demonize the unseen.
The benefits of the previous period of contact, which allowed for some mutual human awareness and dialogue with the other side through commerce, labor, tourism, and human rights work, have become almost impossible.
In sum, the Oslo Accords, which should have solved the conflict between Israel and Palestine, exacerbated this conflict instead. The political right, center and left blame Arafat for this. The collapse of the Oslo agreements, the continuous crisis, is all Arafat’s fault. By this way Israel avoids taking its share of responsibility in the situation.
Positive developments
On the other hand there are also some developments in the Jewish Israeli public that show a different political tendency. Several petitions were signed by people on the left and published in newspapers calling for international intervention in order to protect the Palestinians from the Israelis and the Israelis from themselves.
A group of 62 young people facing conscription published a letter in September of this year, decrying Israeli war-crimes, explaining their reasons for refusing to join the army, and declaring their support of a just peace. A public survey of young people in Israel found a steep decline in the motivation of both young men and young women to serve in the army. An increasing number of army reservists refuse to serve for reasons of conscience.
During this year, some recently established feminist organizations have consistently protested against Israeli militarism and for peaceful solutions. In this, they have joined the longstanding vigils of Women in Black.
American intervention
The American “therapist” invited by both sides to intervene in the crisis and help in the negotiations provided the wrong kind of therapy. He empowered the “favorite” patient at the expense of the “un-favored” one, instead of focusing on the relations between the partners. His therapeutically incompetent intervention, which accepted and supported the empty benevolent Israeli declarations while ignoring the reality of oppression, helped blow up the crisis to its present dimensions. The less favored patient lost trust in the therapist, and the favorite became even more entrenched in his bad concepts and conduct. The relations, which should have been worked through and were not, reached a crisis.
In contrast to common opinion, I believe both personally and professionally that people are not afraid of what is unknown to them, but rather of what they do not want to know. Many Israelis do not want to know that they are unprepared to respect the Palestinians: respect means the willingness to share power and responsibility. Israel has at most been willing to give up responsibility. A decent therapeutic intervention would have helped Israelis gain insight into the gap between their declarations and their conduct as oppressors. This might have helped them to alleviate their irrational existential fears and to start taking responsibility for their own actions, instead of blaming Arafat and the Palestinians.
The more Israel’s government becomes more machoistic in its ideology and conduct, the less responsibility it is willing to take upon itself. This is true not only in government but also in the public sector in general. According to an Israeli expert in public administration (Prof. D. Nachmias), the norms for taking responsibility in the public sector in Israel have evidently undergone a consistent devaluation. For example, not one of the last three Prime Ministers has taken responsibility for his failures. This is why our interpretive flexibility tends to create a sense of hope, while rigidity tends to lead to a sense of calamity.
UNTITLED SPEECH AT THE NEW SCHOOL
[New York City, June 2002]
I understand respect as the willingness to share power. Otherwise, it is an empty nice word. Having this in mind, we have managed for almost 15 years in PHR-IL to be genuine co-workers: Jews and Palestinians from Israel and Palestinians from the Occupied Territories. Among PHR-IL’s accomplishments are, for instance, providing mobile clinics every week in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, waging a successful battle in the High Court against torture, and working for permissions for movements of patients and medical personnel.
For me, on both the political and personal levels, the most important accomplishment is our working together, with true solidarity and mutual respect.
Such solidarity and cooperation are the best shields against fear, which is the most efficient tool of racist and tribal attitudes. This is the kind of attitude at the bottom of the remarks Ehud Barak made in the U.S. recently, when he actually said that Palestinians are genetically not capable of grasping truth. (need cite)
If Israel could think that the remedy to the conflict is not putting more power into humiliating and violating Palestinians human and social rights, but rather into thinking about how to share power, all those checkpoints that are causing death and harm and humiliation wouldn't exist.
The concept of security that comes by means of oppression, occupation, and military force is totally wrong. I'm not naive. All the military generals who warned Israel that going out of Lebanon would be a security disaster or that "giving back" the Sinai is a guarantee for a new war— where are they today? Unfortunately, the answer is that they are in high positions in the government making the same dire predictions about the perils of peace.
The regime of fear will easily win in the mind of a frightened public—which has good reason to be frightened. It is the Generals who run the state that are keeping us inside the bars of fear with their assassinations and siege of Palestinian towns, which only fuel the violent Palestinian resistance. These officials are willing to commit every crime in order to survive, but are not willing to take the other way, the way of respect.
When PHR-IL goes to the West Bank we do not ask the army for permission or protection. We don't accept the idea that military people should tell medical workers where they are allowed to go or when. The best way to keep them out of the process is not to ask them in the first place. Second, as an Israeli Jew, I don't want their protection because that is a way of cooperating with, and participating in, the occupation.
I want to illustrate the occupation with two brief stories from my experiences. There are thousands of such stories, and any one of them contains the theme of the cruel power of the occupation, the lack of regard for the value of Palestinian life, the lack even of recognition of Palestinians as human beings.
I visited the Holy Family Hospital in Bethlehem in early April this year. The IDF had been shelling this hospital and another nearby in Beit Jala. I met a woman there who had given birth the day before after trying to enter the hospital after several long hours of getting the runaround at the checkpoints. She delivered the baby in the car. By the time she got to the hospital the baby was blue and died within an hour. She had been through 6-1/2 years of fertility treatment to become pregnant with this baby, a boy. This little baby, 1 kilo and 460 grams, could easily have survived if he had been born in the hospital. I couldn't talk to the mother because she was in shock. I talked to the father. He was devastated. It came up in the conversation that the worst thing for him—and this is a man who had lost his baby the day before—was the humiliation at the checkpoint. That the soldiers made his wife show her belly, then didn't let her pass, and were saying things like, are you sure you are the father? Maybe it was Chairman Arafat? The couple had tried to be obedient, going to the checkpoints; it was only after being turned away and abused that they snuck through the long way around.
I want to tell you also about an ambulance driver I met in Tulkarem a month or so ago. He had gone about a week before from the city to pick up a wounded person in a refugee camp. He passed a few checkpoints and they let him go through. He took the young man, who had been shot in the leg, and put him in the ambulance, but on the way back the soldiers would not let him back through the checkpoint, even though he begged. Night came. This young man was bleeding. Meanwhile the battery on the cell phone ran out. The soldiers told the driver if he drove even three feet they would shoot at him. So he stayed there. During the night, the wounded man died. In the morning, the driver was given a permit to pass the checkpoint, but he was in a state of trauma and could hardly drive to the hospital. He remained traumatized. I saw him a week later on our mobile clinic. He is no longer able to dispatch ambulances to emergencies. He just can't do it. He cannot sleep. He has nightmares about this dead man. He is racked with guilt.
These examples are merely two illustrations of what fuels the anger, hatred, and fear of Palestinians, and indeed, their desperation.
PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT OF THE INTIFADA ON ISRAELI SOCIETY
[excerpts from paper given at International Conference: Born into Conflict, Vienna, Austria, November 2003]
The most meaningful political phenomenon that occurred as a consequence of the Oslo Accords has been the reallocation of responsibility between the State of Israel and the newborn Palestinian Authority (PA), which took place without a parallel redistribution of power. This imbalance has had heavy psychological consequences for both Palestinians and Israelis. The present paper focuses on the consequences of this conduct upon Israel’s collective psyche.
Israeli fears and reactions to the second Intifada
One of the tools to serve this avoidance in the present psycho-political climate is the tendency to reduce the historical vision to zero. The Israeli dominant assumption is that relations between Israelis and Palestinians began when P.M. Ehud Barak offered his “generous” plan to Chairman Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians reacted in a violent uprising.
Israelis were prevented by their false collective basic assumptions from recognizing the rules of reality, and from seeing coherent connections between its different parts, between action and results. In particular, they did not see that humiliating and killing Palestinians would not result in their surrender but rather in increased anger and hate. This is why Palestinian violent actions always catch Israelis by surprise and find them shocked, scared and confused.
Violence against women and others
In a culture of narrow thinking, where there is no place for history and vision, there is no place for compassion, tolerance and respect for others, no listening to the other’s complaints or to his/her arguments as to justice and equality. The lives of others are held cheap, no matter who those "others" are – whether women, poor people, the Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel, migrant workers, or finally the Palestinians of the Occupied territories.
A clear indicator of the increased violence of Israeli society is violence against women. The number of women murdered by family members has more than doubled over the past three years, and the number of rapes has increased.
The scale of organized crime – whether in the form of murder, woman trafficking, or “protection” – has increased to a level previously unknown in Israel. Throughout the past two years Israel has consistently held the first place in the world in juvenile violence. Moreover, according to Haaretz journalist Vered Levi-Barzilai (Haaretz, November 7, 2003), “In the past two or three years dozens of cases of murder or serious violence as a result of minor arguments have accumulated. Attackers and victims vary in age and social background. They have no typical characteristics except one: they are all men.”
One might think about the connection between serving in the army in the occupied territories and the growing violence inside Israel.
Hate
Hate towards Palestinians is the outlet of the fear of Israeli inner fragmentation. In other words, the price of inner peace is avoiding peace with the Palestinians.
However, there are growing signs that this is not working anymore. Israelis show growing distrust of the national administration, calling all politicians "opportunists" and "corrupt." There is not a common world view that unites Israelis, not one common vision of a common future, as they divide between new immigrants and locals, rich and poor, orthodox and secular. In the face of this growing fragmentation, Israeli authorities try to create a Jewish unity against the enemy from within, the Israeli Palestinians—the Arab minority in Israel. In this way, again, Israeli society is neglecting and avoiding the vital task of looking at its true face in the mirror.
Separation
In reaction to the second intifada, 2000, Israel has attempted to deal with its psychological trauma through the magical tactic of “separation” from the Palestinians. This tactic is being applied – as is typical for an oppressor—one-sidedly, without regard for the Palestinians’ needs and without consulting them. The new separation allows hatred to flourish. When viable human contacts are prevented, dehumanization prevails. It is easier to demonize the unseen.
The benefits of the previous period of contact, which allowed for some mutual human awareness and dialogue with the other side through commerce, labor, tourism, and human rights activity, have become a distant memory.
Today’s very concrete manifestation of the Israeli government policy of “Separation with Control” is the “Separation Barrier” currently under construction deep within the Palestinian territories. The numerous checkpoints, which control all aspects of Palestinian daily life, were for a short time presented as “temporary security measures.” As these give way to the multi-million dollar project of a wall that eats deep into the Palestinian territories, surrounding and isolating whole cities and groups of villages, Israeli government policies finally become transparently permanent and deliberate: We are now facing material as well as spiritual apartheid.
The Separation Wall
On one part of the separation wall built on the road from the town of Modi’in to Jerusalem, a concrete divide blots out the sight of Palestinian villages from Israelis traveling along the road. Uncomfortable with the grayness of the military concrete, some enterprising people have painted a pastoral view on the wall. A painted sky, a painted horizon, empty of people. This act represents more than ever the process Israeli society has undergone: rather than accepting the presence of another people on these lands, they forcible block them out – or in – and wishfully paint a fake image of an empty land.
The virtual reality serves as a substitute for insight. I’m afraid that only a huge shock will bring about a change in the Israeli public opinion and policy-makers. The change would prevent them from justifying the occupation and therefore investing in it so very much of their resources, into a mature and healthy mind and soul.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT OF THE SECOND INTIFADA ON ISRAELI SOCIETY
[This article, written with the assistance of Professor Nira Reiss, appeared in the Palestine Israel Journal, Vol. 11, No. 1, Feb. 18, 2004]
This paper examines Jewish Israeli society at the present stage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The second intifada started in October 2000, following the breakdown of the Oslo peace negotiations. During this period, the Israeli tendency to believe in and to rely on power has intensified to a toxic level. Israel's enormous military arsenal (endlessly renewed by the US) reinforces this reliance on the use of force. Politically, excessive use of power does not work: Both national security and personal safety are deteriorating in Israel. This is destabilizing for the Israeli psyche, both at the individual and collective level. Psychological disturbances that are becoming apparent include the avoidance of historical awareness, splitting, an image of oneself as a victim, increased aggression within Israeli society, cognitive dissonance, a sense of personal uncertainty, manifestations of psychological trauma, and the prevalence of hate, dehumanization, demonization and antisocial behavior.
The Israeli leadership manipulates the public to justify its excessive use of force, which is harmful for Israelis. On the one hand, s/he is eager to agree that the Palestinians are a permanent and cruel enemy and that overpowering them is the only option. On the other hand s/he sees in his/her own eyes that, in spite of the overuse of power, the situation is getting steadily worse. This leads to confusion, disorientation and fear in the Israeli public.
The complexity of these psychological disturbances prevents the individual Israeli from developing an insight and understanding of their situation, which is essential for mental health. Such insight would contradict what the Israeli militaristic hegemony wants and dictates. It might enable critical thinking about the principle of relying on the use of force alone, and the destruction caused to the Palestinians and within Israel.
Conflict avoidance “arises from the simultaneous presence of two or more equal threats…" (Colman p73)1. In the Israeli case, the two threats are: perception of the past, and perception of the future. Seeing the past accurately implies recognizing the Israel's role in precipitating violent Palestinian reactions in the present. This is threatening, as it would make Israel largely responsible for the present terror. Having a vision for the future requires the vision of a just peace. This is threatening, as a just peace would involve returning the occupied lands to the Palestinians. The vision of any return of territories falsely presented by all Israeli governments as “safety zones” is saturated with fears because it is seen as the beginning of the end of the Jewish State. By avoiding both past and future, Israelis reduce their historical vision to zero. The dominant Israeli assumption is that relations between Israelis and Palestinians began when Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered his “generous” plan to President Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians reacted with a violent uprising.
Reducing the historical perspective goes hand in hand with reduced thinking in general, particularly critical thinking. Avoidance of historical analysis obliterates the potential for insight, and silences public political discourse: no voices of political opposition are currently heard. Refusing to look into the past is refusing to take responsibility for one’s actions in the past. In the same way, the incapacity to envision the future amounts to refusing to take responsibility for one’s actions in the present.
If a state of war is to be preserved, as the present government desires, it is useful to avoid recognition of the ways in which Israeli actions played a part in causing current catastrophes.
Splitting
In Kleinian analysis, splitting is “the most primitive of all defense mechanisms, in which instinctual objects that evoke ambivalence and therefore anxiety are dealt with by compartmentalizing positive and negative emotions, leading to images of self and others that are not integrated” (Colman p700).
The Israeli worldview is sharply divided into "us" – Israelis, right and just – and "them" – Palestinians, wrong and evil. From a developmental perspective this is an infantile dichotomy. Leading Israeli figures, such as the President, Prime Minister, Chief of Staff and the like, say the IDF is the purest, most ethical army in the world, while the Palestinians are murderous liars and terrorists. This distorted binary of good and evil obstructs a coherent perception of reality. Anything inconsistent with this distorted reality is not recognized; no comprehensive causality can exist in that frame of mind.
Splitting means large parts of reality can remain unseen. The suffering of the Palestinians can be ignored, since it is attributed to their evil nature. This makes any public discussion of the situation superfluous. Those who oppose the war against the Palestinians become outcasts. Above all, splitting is necessary to maintain basic Israeli assumptions that we are good, just, righteous, victims and always united.
Self-image as a Victim
Self-evaluation (self- image) is “one’s attitude toward oneself or one’s opinion or evaluation of oneself, which may be positive (favorable or high), neutral, or negative (unfavorable or low)” (Colman p660). The self-image as a victim is, in this context, both negative and positive. On the negative side, a victim is helpless, powerless and unfortunate. On the positive side the victim is, by definition, free of responsibility and blame; perceiving oneself as victim can serve as a justification for wrongdoing.
Increased Aggression and Violence
“Aggression is behavior whose primary or sole purpose or function is to injure another person or organism, whether physically or psychologically” (Colman p18).
Socialization limits and restrains aggression, directing people toward respecting the lives, dignity and property of others. Society ascertains these goals by exacting a high price for behaviors which violates it. In Israel today, the lives of others are held to be cheap. Compassion, tolerance, and respect for others are lacking. There is no universal standard for the value of human life. The lives of Jewish Israelis are considered more valuable than those of Palestinian Israeli citizens, or of migrant workers and sex workers. Palestinians from the occupied territories are at the bottom of the scale, their land confiscated, their houses demolished, and their lives extinguished through indiscriminate murders and killings. Palestinians’ dignity is shattered on a daily basis at the Israeli army checkpoints placed in every village, town and city.
One should also think about a connection between serving in the Israeli army in the occupied territories and the sharp increase in violence inside Israel. During the past two years, Israel has had the highest rates of juvenile violence in the world. Moreover, according to Haaretz journalist Vered Levi-Barzilai (Haaretz, November 7, 2003), “In the past two or three years dozens of cases of murder or serious violence as a result of minor arguments have accumulated. Attackers and victims vary in age and social background. They have no typical characteristics except one: they are all men.”
A clear indicator of the mounting aggression is the rise in domestic violence. The number of women murdered by family members has more than doubled over the past three years, and the number of rapes has increased. The scale of organized crime in the form of murder, “protection” and trafficking in women has risen to a level previously unknown in Israel. An army can be seen as the bank in which citizens of a nation deposit a portion of their aggression, in the belief that it will be managed wisely for the protection of the group. In Israel's case, the army has unwisely refunded too much of the use of this aggression to the depositors. Other parts of the Israeli system, such as the government and the Supreme Court, do not do their part in supervising and controlling the use of aggression. No wonder, then, that aggression rules – not only in the Occupied Territories but also within Israel – within the family, on the street and everywhere.
Cognitive Dissonance
Two cognitions (items of knowledge or belief) where one psychologically follows from the converse of the other are considered dissonant. “The dissonance relation is a motivating state of tension that tends to generate… dissonance-reducing behaviors” (Colman p141)
Since the outbreak of the second Intifada, a new kind of fear has emerged in the Jewish Israeli public, in addition to the normal personal fear of being killed. This new fear stems from a cognitive dissonance. Two cognitions that Israelis hold are the converse of each other. One belief is that the use of force will guarantee Israel’s national survival, and assure Israelis’ individual safety. This agrees with the Israeli assumption that “the Palestinian understands only force”. The other cognition, based in reality, is that the greater the military force applied by Israel the greater the danger: every time the Israeli army assassinates ‘wanted’ persons and other Palestinian civilians, more Israelis are killed in public places by Palestinian suicide bombers.
Palestinian “terrorist” actions unmask the fragility of the feeling of safety based on the image of Palestinian submission and on the total belief that using force against them is the ultimate answer to the “Palestinian problem.” The demand for more power against Palestinians took the form of the slogan “Let the IDF win” which brought Ariel Sharon to power. But this has not worked, as could be expected. The Palestinian uprising has not stopped. On the contrary, it is getting worse. Therefore, even greater use of force is demanded, but without success. This loop aggravates the cognitive dissonance. The mechanism of cognitive dissonance demands dissonance-reducing behaviors. Israelis cannot give up the belief that force is essential: This might destroy Israel’s military character and policies. On the other hand, Israelis cannot ignore the overwhelming reality of children, women and men torn apart by explosives detonated in buses and restaurants. They choose, therefore, to turn a blind eye to the causal connection between the excessive Israeli military power and the Palestinians’ violent actions. This dissonance-reducing solution leads to feelings of loss of control and helplessness. Despite all the power in their hands, Israelis feel frightened, threatened and unprotected.
Uncertainty
Israel's continued use of excessive force, in spite of its failure to achieve the expected outcomes, creates not only cognitive dissonance, but serves as a foundation for another psychological disturbance: personal uncertainty. Uncertainty is “[T]he situation that exists when the outcome that will result from an action is not known with certainty” (Colman p765). A sense of personal certainty is based on perceiving connections between one’s actions and one’s life. The sense of safety, which is an outcome of one’s ability to predict the future, has been broken and has given way to a painful sense of uncertainty. Prevented from seeing coherent connections between action and results, Israelis do not see that humiliating and killing Palestinians does not result in their surrender, but rather in increased anger and hate. This is why violent Palestinian actions always catch Israelis by surprise and leaves them shocked, scared and confused.
Psychological Trauma
When confidence in certainty is broken, psychological trauma appears, expressed in disorientation, anxiety and fear. Other symptoms might be an obsessive need for information expressed through, for example, listening to the news constantly. There might be excessive worry and fears, dysphoria or depression, rage, loss of confidence in oneself and of trust in others, intolerance, blaming others, or turning to mysticism, religion and extreme political and social ideologies. All of these symptoms describe psychological patterns currently prevalent in Israeli society.
Israeli self- hatred arose out of the (real and interpreted) Jewish experience of being victims during the World War II. The hatred of Israel toward the image and the reality of Jews as victims was so agonizingly deep and extensive that it could not be contained. It was therefore projected onto the Palestinian "other." The more the Palestinians’ misery and passivity increased over the years, the more they became, for Israelis, the object of their displaced feelings of contempt and hatred. Being so close, both within the borders of Israel and across the Green Line, they served as a convenient repository for hatred.
On the one hand, the Palestinians were derided and hated for their weakness. On the other hand, the Jewish experience of the Nazis as an horrendous enemy was preserved and the Palestinians were seen as a mythical extension of the Nazis as an overpowering enemy. Hatred of the Palestinians thus serves an emotionally existential need of Jewish society. Israeli depersonalizing of Palestinians into faceless enemies and the labeling of all Palestinians as terrorists are mechanisms that sustain hate. The projection of hatred onto the Palestinians enables the preservation of the self-righteous Israeli Zionist self-image as morally pure, and serves as a cohesive force in Jewish Israeli society. Perceiving the Palestinians as a hated and mighty enemy (in spite of their evident weakness) provides Israelis with the sense that their energies are invested in self-preservation. Hatred towards the Palestinians functions as the outlet of Israeli fear of inner fragmentation: The price paid for inner peace is avoiding peace with the Palestinians.
Hatred becomes an addiction, a dominant guideline of Israeli behavior. The pattern of violence toward the Palestinian enemy is reproduced in patterns of violence, both between the different groups within Israeli society and between individuals. The only solidarity that is encouraged is the solidarity of hate.
Antisocial Behavior and the Policy of Separation
“Antisocial personality disorder is characterized by a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others…manifested by repeated unlawful behavior …irritability and aggressiveness involving frequent assaults or fights…and lack of remorse for the mistreatment of others, as indicated by indifference and rationalization” (Colman, p45).
A lack of remorse for the mistreatment of others is characteristic of antisocial personality disorder. The more extreme is this mistreatment, the more remarkable the lack of remorse for it. For example, in the process of assassinating Salah Shehadeh in Gaza, without due process, the Israeli Air-force deployed a massive bomb, killing 15 innocent victims (Amos Harel, Haaretz, 11/11/2003). The Air Force Commander-in-Chief Dan Chalutz's reply to criticism for this action was that, in his view, the attack was justified and it did not prevent him sleeping well at night.
PHYSICIANS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS ISRAEL AND ITS STRUGGLE AGAINST OCCUPATION: WITHIN THE GAME, OUTSIDE AND AGAINST IT
[Presentation to conference on “The Politics of Humanitarianism in the Occupied Territories, Van Lee Jerusalem Institution, April 2004, with Hadas Ziv, Director of PHR-IL]
When struggling for human rights one has always to make choices of the methods used. Each has its political, moral and practical implications and consequences. We frequently ask ourselves how effective Physicians for Human Rights-Israel activity is in serving our original aims, which are to bring an end to occupation. We see it as being both the reason and the symptom of disrespect and human rights violations.
These questions were there from the day of our founding, but they received acute urgency and daily relevance in our work for the last 3 years.
The crisis in the occupied Palestinian territory in general and in health, in particular, forced us to adjust our work so we can better answer the needs. However, the fact that the principals of our actions were rooted in the organizational culture prior to the crisis enabled us to determine the extent to which we are taking part in the new rules of the game, struggling against them, or staying out of the game all together.
Before we present the daily dilemmas and the implications of the choices made, we wish to detail our perception of the reality to which we respond.
In the Oslo Accords signed on the 13 of September 1993, the Palestinian representatives accepted the responsibility of health services in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. However, all the powers were rested with Israel, which controlled the import of medicines and medical equipment, freedom of movement of patients and medical personnel, water resources, and other factors that have a determinant effect on the right to health in its broader sense. PHR-IL criticized such imbalance between power and responsibility, as the last became impossible to realize. Yet, in a reality where the pretext of the peace process controlled, the hope that powers would eventually follow the responsibilities silenced such criticism until it was neglected even within our own organization.
In the last three years this pretext ceased to exist. It is clear that under the closure system the Palestinian Authority cannot assume its responsibilities. Israel’s control over the entire occupied territories had reinforced what was true from 1967 on, including the Oslo years—that occupation never ceased. Such reality should make it fairly easy to conclude that as an occupying force Israel is responsible for the implementation of the right to health of the Palestinians. However, different players on the scene, mainly Israel and the PA, but also the donor countries, different NGOs and international bodies, are evading taking such a stand.
The PA does not wish to “lose” what it views as an achievement—responsibility as a sign of sovereignty, maybe hoping for future recovery of its control. The donor countries and different international bodies hope to support PA survival for its role in future peace settlement. Under such conditions where do humanitarian and human rights organization stand, and where should they stand?
Israel created a humanitarian crisis but does not carry its economic and moral consequences. Others are taking it upon themselves. The severe needs of the population for such an intervention make the dilemma an extremely difficult one.
PHR-IL relies as it does in the past on three modes of actions, helping us to define and redefine our response according to the changing reality.
First Level: within the game. This mode of struggle is aimed at enabling the existing system—the PA—to function for the benefit of the patients. Mainly we insist on freedom of movement for both patients and medical teams.
Second Level: against the rules of the game. Here we aim at making Israel realize its responsibilities as an occupying power.
Third Level: outside the rules of the game. Here we aim at bringing a change to the situation at its core, by breaking the law and presenting an alternative. We wish to move out from acting in the given reality of occupation to ending it.
Although we refuse to act under the conditions created we find ourselves responding to them in our work on levels one and two. This work however, enables us to create a solid basis to what we believe is the focus of our work: bringing about the alternative.
First level: In order to move, both Palestinian patients and medical teams need Israeli permits into Israel, across international borders (in case one is considered a security threat), into East Jerusalem, via Israel (from the West Bank to Gaza and vice versa), within the occupied territories, from and into the enclaves created by the Wall.
The tedious bureaucracy of acquiring a permit is not the subject of this talk. It will suffice to say now that it is intentionally humiliating and arbitrary. While most people would recognize Israel’s right to control entry into its own territory (we have reservations as in medical cases it has the obligation to treat Palestinians), all other movements should not have been subjected to Israel’s control. However, gradually the PA has accepted the permit system (some in the Oslo accords and some in following agreements or practices). Consequently, PHR-Israel advocates for Palestinians to receive such permits. However, we refused to advocate for permits in cases where the movement is within the occupied territories. We thought that such an action on our side would reinforce the control of occupation on the daily lives of Palestinians to such an extent that those lives became unbearable and impossible. Furthermore, such an action is condoning and thus supporting the occupation. The right to health under such conditions is impossible to be realized. However, when faced with cases in real time—people trying to cross the different checkpoints on their way to medical treatment—we advocate, over the phone, with army officials for their passage. The Israeli civil administration even created a new office called the humanitarian hot line to respond to such “urgent” cases. They, however, insist that in a non-urgent situation, an individual should have pre-coordinated his movements by acquiring a permit. This is nothing but another way of controlling the lives of Palestinians, forcing them to act on the most urgent needs only. Even those are not respected. Thus our refusal to ask for permits lost all its subversive potential by our work with this hot line, and we are now considering our reaction to it.
Second Level: On this level we advocate for Israel to fulfill its obligation as an occupying power, thus making the Israeli society realize the cost of occupation, its moral and economic implications.
Shams A-Din Tabiye is a young child suffering from cancer and in need of chemotherapy. Pediatric chemotherapy is not available in the occupied territories and is either done in an unsatisfactory manner in Beit Jalla (where they have adult chemotherapy) or by referring patients to Israel. Since this child did not get the referral from the Palestinian Authority, PHR-IL took the case to court. We claimed that as an occupying power Israel bears the responsibility to carry out the treatments, and their costs. However, the court never reached a debate around this principle. Instead the judges ordered that the family must first apply to the PA asking them to supply them with a referral form guaranteeing the payment. The PA indeed gave the referral. Both sides preferred to rely on what was agreed in the Oslo Accords rather then redefine Israel’s obligations, the reasons being as we stated earlier. Only if Israel has to finance its occupation will the Israeli public feel its full economic implications. This is, however, impossible as long as humanitarian help and PA interests are preventing it from happening.
Third Level: In the last three years there are glimpses of the third type of struggle in different instances. One of the most remarkable ones is the group Anarchists Against the Wall, where members of both peoples demonstrate a non-violent struggle, and commitment to a different future. The outcome of such resistance is yet to be analyzed. For now Israel reaction is harsh: the dissidents are faced with live bullets and an indifferent Israeli public. Both represent the synergistic factors that are at the core of the political situation.
Another example is that of the residents of Khirbat J’bara in the Tulkarem district who for a long time resisted accepting permits to reside in their enclave. They understood that accepting the enclaves permit system is accepting Israel’s discourse of “security” and thus its control of their lives violated their basic human rights. And yet the daily need to move, and lack of strong support from the PA and the civil society broke that mode of civil resistance.
The PHR-IL struggle on that level constantly crosses the lines from the Israeli to the Palestinian society and back. By applying the same medical and ethical codes in the occupied Palestinian territory as within the Israeli society we try to break the perception of reality that enables occupation to exist.
1) Routine mode of action: Each Saturday our doctors work jointly on the mobile clinics in the West Bank, not just, or not mainly, to ease the medical needs, as those are enormous, but as a show of political commitment to end occupation, while insisting on professional medical collegiality and solidarity.
2) Emergency mode of action: During March and April 2002, Palestinian ambulances were routinely attacked by Israeli forces. Those attacks resulted in deaths and severe wounds to their medical personnel. Our High Court appeals against Israel’s conduct were to no avail, and we have decided to approach the Israeli public directly. Violating the law, we smuggled one of the ambulances whose driver was shot at and killed into Tel Aviv’s museum square. Our staff crossed the lines illegally into Tulkarem and back to Tel Aviv with a huge truck carrying the damaged ambulance. When Beth Lehem hospital was shot at, we went to visit, record, and bring back the stories to our own society, again breaking the law by the mere entry into the city.
Our work on Levels 1 and 2 creates a unique pull of knowledge. But more important, it embodies our moral, ethical and practical commitment to the individual Palestinian person—patient or medical personnel. Creating such an alliance and solidarity enables our relationship to flow without suspicion or condescension. It is therefore essential for us to keep all three levels of action. If we were only resisting occupation, we would have lost the daily contact with Palestinians to unveil the bureaucracy of occupation. If we cancelled our medical work, we would lose the ability to work medically with our Palestinian colleagues and present a practical alternative, and betray our moral and ethical obligation to the patient. If we suffice in “helping” individuals we lose any hope to bring about a change, the end of occupation. It is our ability and need to cross the lines, which are—and need be—the main focus of our work.
It is thus frustrating to find that it is this message that is ignored when the media reports our actions. They center on our “humanitarian” work of the mobile clinics, and at best on our reports on the health conditions under occupation. They ignore our political message.
Borrowing from Gramsci, it safe to say that Israeli media represents and collaborates with Israeli hegemony. When we object to occupation, we base ourselves on universal values. Those are set against the particularity of our society. In the context of occupation those messages are subversive in nature. Our humanitarian action shows that medical ethics are universal by definition. However, the media presents our actions by castrating its subversive quality. Worse than that, they use our action to strengthen the hegemony: We are the nice face of Israeli society, proving that occupation is, after all, human. The public will be left with the question: do you see groups like that in the Palestinian society? They will not have the chance to learn of our Palestinian partners.
As physicians for human rights, unlike physicians in general, we deal mainly with “illnesses” created by men’s conduct and not by viruses and bacteria. Therefore, our main concern and commitment lies with ethical and moral values. When dealing with humanitarian crises—especially when they are man-made ones, there is a unique role for local civil societies, in our case Palestinian and Israeli. They are the ones that know their bureaucracies in detail, and thus can unveil their conduct and wrong-doings. The fact that we are simultaneously inside, against and outside the rules of the game is our source of strength. However, this struggle must be accompanied by mass civil participation and international pressure that will demand the necessary change of the rules of the game. If we wish to undermine the hegemony, we should insist that our actions not be castrated of their subversive political message. More specifically we must insist that PHR-IL will not be seen as a humanitarian organization—as such we are of little significance. If we fail to preserve the subversive content of our conduct we will all—international and national organizations— find ourselves as extras in a game where rules are defined by the strong actor in the arena—the government of Israel.
TRANSPARENT WALL, OPAQUE GATES
[Excerpted from the article in Against the Wall, Israel's Barrier to Peace, ed. Michael Sorkin, The New Press, 2005, co-authored with Dr. Dalit Baum]
A. Transparent Wall
In a recent conversation with one of our friends, a prominent Israeli artist and designer, Prof. Ziona Shimshi, commented that the concrete Wall was quite ugly, and suggested it could have been built from a transparent material, like a polycarbonate Silicone, Lexan, that is extremely strong and used to construct spacecrafts. We found this suggestion intriguing – it was a way of calling into question the existence of the Wall, but on aesthetic grounds. It conveyed a need to see the other side – but only through Lexan. Why IS the Wall so ugly? What is it supposed to block from our view? What does it expose while concealing?
The Gilo Wall
The suggestion of a transparent Wall immediately brought to mind the famous picture of the Gilo Wall, by the Israeli photographer Miki Kratzman. Gilo is a Jewish settlement on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Its main street is lined by an odd assortment of concrete slabs, erected in the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada as a shelter from sniper fire from the neighboring Palestinian town of Beit Jalla. In the picture, the pastoral view of the Beit Jalla hills is continued in painted form along the concrete slabs of the Wall. A pine tree and some stones behind this Wall are portrayed on it as if2 it were transparent. The painting is meant to conceal the Wall itself by reconstructing the concealed view; by concealing the concealment. The reconstructed view serves as a second concealment, since the painted houses on the painted hills are devoid of people. They were supposed to portray the houses of Beit Jalla, but they look like those of a little eastern European village, maybe because the artists were immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
ZIC
Kratzman's picture is an artful illustration of some basic assumptions, deeply held by Israelis, or, more precisely, by members of the imagined collective of Zionist Israelis, or what we will call the Zionist Israeli Collective, the ZIC. The collective is organized around these unchallengeable basic assumptions and most aspects of life in Israel are affected by them.
Such underlying basic assumptions are that "we are pure, we are right, we have high moral values, we don't do evil, we are victims, and we are united." In the ZIC's eyes, its army conducts itself with "purity of arms," meaning that it uses only unavoidable force, only for the self defense of the ZIC. According to the ZIC, Israeli moral values are dominant and exemplary.
The ZIC is held together by a common feeling of victimhood: Jews carry a long history of being victims in different places and times; and behind Israeli military might, the ZIC still maintains the identity of a victim, always preparing for the inevitable catastrophe. In Palestine, the ZIC has always viewed itself as being under mortal threat from "Arabs." These mortal fears have shifted over the years between fears of invasion, defeat in war, of becoming a Jewish demographic minority again, and most lately, the fear of suicide bombings.
Closely connected to the victim identity is the deterministic belief that "the whole world is against us." "The Arabs" too become part of this a-historical enemy entity, focused wholly on Jewish destruction, always intent on "throwing us into the sea".
Another extremely important Zionist axiom is that Palestine was an empty land ("a land without people to a people without a land" is a well known early Zionist slogan, attributed to Israel Zangwill in 1892). This belief was very much needed at the time: it allowed Zionists to maintain their self-image as righteous people, avoiding the notion of taking another people's land. But the land was not empty, therefore, the ZIC implemented an active non-seeing mechanism: its members actually saw an empty land.
This has all worked quite well for years; but the Palestinian uprising, the intifada, made it much harder not to see Palestinians. In order to protect itself, the ZIC has built a Wall that conceals the Palestinians. Of course, the stated reason for the Wall was defense: defense from bullets (overt), defense from seeing (covert). The self-image remained as it should be: pure, good, righteous. The Wall maintains the illusion that on the "other side" is the empty land we have come to inherit: we cannot see over it, we cannot see through it; we see nothing but it—and the land continues to be empty.
Discussing the Wall as a defense mechanism3 of the ZIC, it seems appropriate to discuss it in psychological terms, especially since one of us is a practicing psychiatrist.
The Wall has many psychological advantages: what one doesn't see actually doesn't exist.4 As one knows from the theatre – when the curtain falls, the world we have experienced on stage seems to have come to an end. It is “as if” this world does not exist any more. The curtain, as the Wall, is all we see. Moreover, seeing means acknowledging the existence of the seen, it is a form of understanding. This serves as a very convenient way out of inner conflict: not seeing, therefore not understanding, ensures psychological blindness. This way, there is no danger of achieving an insight.5
Splitting
A useful way of understanding some of the psychological mechanisms involved in the Wall is the concept of splitting. The power and magic of the splitting mechanism lies in its simplicity. It permits only two extremes; the whole world is split into "good" and "bad," with nothing in between. According to Melanie Klein, splitting is the psychological defense mechanism that separates good from bad, both in oneself and in the Other:
Splitting is caused by a high level of anxiety, which offers no options or choice and is considered to be the most primitive kind of defense against anxiety: the object, (the Other) with both erotic and destructive instincts directed towards it, splits into “good” and “bad”… The splitting of objects is accompanied by a parallel splitting of the ego (the subject or oneself) into a “good” ego and a “bad” one.”
The Language of Psychoanalysis, J. LaPlance and J.-B. Pontalis, Norton, NY, 1973, p. 430
In this manner, the splitting mechanism splits both the inner self and the Other into the same extremes, pure and good, versus bad and evil.
Fright activates the most immediate of mechanisms, a primitive mechanism of brute force. As such, the splitting process requires continuous maintenance, and an ever-increasing investment of energy. Eventually, it is not an effective mechanism. It does not reduce the anxiety, only blocks it; it does not enable working through the causes of the anxiety, but just distances them.
The Wall separates the contents of the inner space into two parts: the "bad," unwanted parts, which are hard to deal with, and the "good" parts, which are in accord with the self-image. The "bad” parts are externalized, in other words, projected onto the Other. Thus, the ZIC self is preserved as good and pure.
Projective Identification
Projecting an unwanted part of the self outwards onto the Other serves two goals: relief from the unwanted part, and legitimacy to despise this part in the other. Moreover, this mechanism enables the fantasy of control and possession of the projected parts, in this case, the "bad" parts. Klein defines projective identification as a “mechanism revealed in fantasies in which the subject inserts his self—in whole or in part—into the object to harm, possess or control it.”6
The Wall allows the ZIC self not to see itself as aggressive, violent, cruel, possessive, a violator of human rights, by projecting all these traits on the Palestinians beyond the Wall.
The Wall is not perceived by the ZIC as an aggressive act—it is perceived as a protective act, an act of self-defense, protecting itself from aggression associated only with the Palestinians. It takes a complex psychological mechanism to facilitate such a reversal. This way, the Wall achieves its goal: protecting the ZIC from seeing its own aggression and thus preserving its basic assumptions that it is the "good," "just" victim.
Looking at the Wall
The concrete Wall is an anachronistic splitting device, it is both ugly and opaque, and as such it is highly suitable for its role in the psychological mechanisms described above. It is anachronistic—the formidable concrete Wall seems out of place and time, a "simple" physical "solution" to a historically, politically and psychologically complex question. The ZIC views itself as post-modern, high-tech, up-to-date, sophisticated; as a fashionable Westerner in the wild (Middle) East. "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East," the tourist ads proclaim. In the ZIC's mind, the Wall functions as a space/time machine, a tool to separate the ZIC from primitive regions of the world that surround it. The Wall helps to locate the primitive, simpleton, backwards and savage aspects of the Palestinians behind it. Thus it preserves the ZIC's own self image as advanced, civilized, sophisticated, high tech on the other side of the same Wall.
It is ugly—because it serves the need to create the illusion of an evil, ugly monster on the other side, rather than ordinary people. The Palestinian existence within the Wall is considered inferior, ugly, dirty, violent, and dangerous. A recent illustration of these ideas and concepts can be found in the court testimony of Prof. Rafi Israeli (The Hebrew University, Middle Eastern Studies) as state expert in the trial against the leaders of the Islamic movement in Israel: “the Arabs are neglecting their hygiene. Their villages are dirty. They are criminals in high percentage. They are noisy.”7 The Wall thus becomes both a symbol and realization of the impossibility of identifying with Palestinians.
It is opaque in order to prevent the sight of misery and suffering on the other side. If it was transparent, we could actually see the troubling suffering of the people on the other side. We might see the child who must go through the hills to school and cannot; or the father who cannot reach his farm to cultivate his olive trees; or the sick person who cannot make his or her way to the hospital; or the pregnant woman who cannot deliver her child in safety, or worse, is forced to give birth in the dirt next to the checkpoint. Seeing this misery and suffering might trigger compassion for those people, might develop identification with them. This must be avoided at all costs, because otherwise the question might arise: who caused this suffering?
Walls and Fences
Further away from urban population centers, the concrete Wall gives way to a system of fences, razor wire, and various surveillance mechanisms – sensors, watch stations and watchtowers. Some forms of seeing are to be avoided, but others are considered valuable. The ZIC does not want to see the Palestinians, but it finds it necessary to oversee them, to watch them with non-human sight, through a gun sight.
"It is easier to shoot through a fence, than it is through a Wall," remarked an Israeli activist in the Mas'ha Peace Camp. The Camp consisted of two tents on the outskirts of the West Bank Palestinian village Mas'ha, near the construction site of the Wall. Dozens of Palestinians, Israelis and international activists shared the camp for almost five months in 2003 in protest against the Wall. Six months later, during another protest at the same site, Gil Na'amati, an Israeli activist from the same group, was shot through the wire fence and was severely injured.
B. Opaque Gates
Security
The Wall, in some places made of gray concrete three stories high, snakes across the West Bank. The ZIC notes its ugliness, but blames it on the Palestinians. The Wall is justified as a necessary security measure. The ostensible reason for the Wall is very concrete: it supposedly exists in order to physically prevent a Palestinian youth with explosives strapped on to his or her body from reaching the ZIC body and harming it. Potential terrorists should be prevented from reaching our territory, driving on our roads, sitting at our cafes, shopping at our markets, riding our buses. But all Palestinians are potential terrorists in the ZIC's mind. In other words, for it to achieve its main goal the Wall aims to prevent all suspicious Palestinians, i.e. all Palestinians, from reaching the ZIC's body, i.e. anywhere.
As repeatedly claimed by its planners, the Wall does not delineate the ZIC's borders, since Israel has never defined its own borders and is still refusing to do so. It is a security apparatus designed to defend the ZIC from various threats. As Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime minister, said, “Israel is a villa in the jungle.” In the ZIC's mind, the Wall functions as a space/time machine, a tool to separate the ZIC from primitive regions of the world around it. In this image the world is full of dangers that threaten the white man living in the villa. The Wall is conceived as a part of the villa and, as such, not surprisingly has come to symbolize the ZIC body itself. Army firing regulations have been changed to permit a response to any attack on the Wall as if it were an attack on Jewish lives. The shooting of Israeli activist Gil Na'amati was justified by the fact that he and his group "Anarchists against the Wall" were attempting to open a gate in the Wall. Palestinian residents who wander too close to the Wall have been shot at and killed, and their deaths later justified by army regulations.
Movement
In recent years there has been a vast intensification in the erection of fortifications and fences, roadblocks and checkpoints, walls and watchtowers throughout the West Bank. All of these physical barriers, including the Wall in all its forms, are part of an elaborate system controlling Palestinian movement; a system which includes regiments like sieges and curfews, bureaucratic and legal inventions, technological innovations and brute force. This is not only an attempt to control all forms of movement, but in fact a mechanical attempt to control all aspects of Palestinian life. When viewed as a system for controlling life and movement, a system with dynamic functions, the Wall is, in fact, no more then a frame for its openings, a series of gates and checkpoints that control and regulate all movement flow.
The Amers' House
One example of the fantasy8 of total control over Palestinian life by controlling their movement can be seen in the Amer family's house on the outskirts of the Palestinian village Mas'ha. This was the last site of the Mas'ha Peace Camp in August 2003, and after the Camp was torn down and all the activists arrested, one segment of a 25 feet high concrete Wall was erected between the house and the rest of Mas'ha. For miles and miles in both directions, the wire fence cuts through the olive groves; it encircles the house on all sides, but the only place where the Wall takes its concrete form is between this house and its village. When the Amers look through their windows, they see either the neighboring Jewish settlement of Elkana, or they see the Wall.
The Wall around the house is locking the family in. On three sides there are four gates. One huge gate separates Mas'ha from the Jewish settlement of Elkana; two vehicular gates for army patrols connect this Wall segment to the rest of the Wall; and one small gate allows family members supervised access to their village. The ominous yellow gates are formidable, equipped with motion and touch sensors. No one can come and go without the approval of the army.
Buffer Zone
Just like the Amers, thousands of Palestinian residents are cut off from the rest of the West Bank, from their fields, workplaces, from neighboring towns and vital services. "The seam area" is the Israeli name given to areas locked between the Wall and the 1949 ceasefire border of the state of Israel. Immediately after the completion of the first stage of the Wall in October 2003, the seam area was declared a closed military zone: no Palestinians are allowed in this area without a special permit.
For Palestinians living in this area, an extensive permit system was devised by the Israeli authorities. They are required to apply for permits to continue living in their own homes. Other residents of the West Bank have to obtain special permits to enter the seam area through special gates. There are twelve different kinds of permits, based on the purpose of entry. Each permit indicates a certain gate through which the permit holder must cross, as well as the times of day during which the holder is allowed to pass. Sleeping over in the seam area, bringing a vehicle into the area or transporting merchandise into the area requires additional permits. A long list of forms, certificates and documents are necessary for applying for different permits. The criteria for obtaining permits are not stated anywhere, and the Israeli authorities have almost complete discretion to grant or deny the permits. Permits may be denied on the grounds of secret security concerns by the Military Appeals Committee. The permits have arbitrary expiration times, and have to be constantly renewed.
The permit system is designed to incorporate the entire seam area into the control mechanism. The total control of minute aspects of Palestinian lives in this area secures it as a buffer zone, an added volume to the physical obstacle, a living Wall.
Control
This system is not merely bureaucratic and Kafkaesque. Again, a psychological explanation can be useful: In an obsessive disorder,9 fear of death plays a central role and there is a deeply-held belief that certain actions prevent impending death of the self and of loved ones. The body's orifices are conceived as danger zones, through which hostile agents may penetrate, infect and cause disease or death. In fantasy, total control of the orifices is achievable, preventing all penetrations and thus protecting the self from fear of disease, death and feelings of helplessness. The fantasy of keeping orifices clear of germs is well illustrated by the military concept of controlling the openings along the Wall.
The obsessive control of the body's openings is a typically modern control mechanism, associated with metaphors of hygiene, purity and defense from bacterial infection. Rituals are created with the aim of self-preservation from contamination, diseases and death. These rituals are constantly refined in arbitrary ways. The person knows deep down that there is no total control, thus, the anxiety is ever-present, reinforcing these rituals, which may take over an obsessive person's life, achieving precedence over all other aspects of life, requiring an ever-growing investment of resources.
Sphincters
The openings of the Wall function like sphincters, which are voluntary round muscles that one is trained to control. In the Wall case, the sphincters or openings are controlled by the army.
In the development of a child, control of the sphincters is used not only for the purpose of hygiene, but also in a struggle for independence from parents and in the attempt to demonstrate autonomous power in front of bigger, more powerful others.10 A child will refuse food or stop defecating as a display of control in front of worried or angry parents. Opening and closing the sphincters at will, despite outside pressures (international critique, international law) as well as strong pressures from within (economic necessities, state laws), indicates a fear of powerlessness in front of big and powerful parents, and a need to display basic and crude control of the situation.
The need for control finds its realization at the openings. This is where control is expressed. If the Wall conceals and obfuscates, its openings become clear foci of pressure—the conflict points where the powerful occupier exercises power over the weak occupied.
In spite of the great investment in denial, there is always some inner knowledge that the control system is imperfect, that there can be no total control. The relation between the methods employed and the actual protection achieved always remains unclear. Therefore, the obsessive person has to constantly invent more and more elaborate rituals of "control." After each elevation to another supposedly "secure" level, there is temporary relief and self-assurance that the method is working; but these rituals offer no permanent relief because they require continuous refinement. The price constantly gets higher and higher and, because the limitations are never considered, the fantasy has to be constantly maintained by an ever-greater investment of resources.
Concrete
The Wall is a formidable human-made construction, and it is easy to see it as symbolizing the Zionist Israeli Collective's basic assumptions and fears, standing 25 feet tall as a manifestation in concrete of security itself for the Jewish state, its yellow metallic gates realizing obsessive control fantasies. However, in its concrete form, the Wall is just a wall, and like other human-made constructions, when their symbolic worth shifts, when the beliefs and values that sustain them falter, they can disappear almost overnight.
In August 2004 we joined a mass rally against the Wall in Abu-Dis, a Palestinian neighborhood of Jerusalem. Thousands of Palestinians, Israelis and Internationals gathered to hear Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, speak about the non-violent resistance to the Wall. During the rally, one young man started free climbing onto the great concrete slabs. The audience gasped in awe as in just a few seconds the courageous climber was standing up on the Wall, waving a Palestinian flag at both sides of the Wall, which cuts through this Palestinian neighborhood. After a moment of silence, dozens of people lined up below him, and quickly followed his example. Suddenly stripped of a whole layer of beliefs and psychological investments, the massive concrete construction flickered and shifted meanings before our eyes. For that brief moment, the Wall was just a wall.
DENIAL AND FORCED EXISTENCE
[Conference on “Engaging the Other,” Kalamazoo, Michigan, October 2006]
Denial: a defense mechanism involving a disavowal or failure consciously to acknowledge thoughts, feelings, desires, or aspects of reality that would be painful or unacceptable, as when a person with a terminal illness refuses to acknowledge the imminence of death.
Colman, A.M.: Dictionary of Psychology (2001): p194, New York: Oxford Press
For academic and teaching purposes, denial, as defined by Colman, is good and sufficient. Only in life do different defense mechanisms usually coincide and the picture is much more complicated than in the textbook. Not only are different defense mechanisms simultaneously present, they might work synergistically with some psychological basic assumptions.
In this presentation we will call the members of the imagined collective of Zionist Israelis the Zionist Israeli Collective or the ZIC. The collective is organized around unchallengeable basic assumptions which affect most aspects of life in Israel. Such underlying basic assumptions are that we are pure, we are right, we have high moral values, we don't do evil, we are victims, and we are united.
In the ZIC's eyes, its army conducts itself with "purity of arms," meaning that it uses only unavoidable force, only for self defense of the ZIC. According to the ZIC, Israeli moral values are dominant and exemplary.
The role of the denial mechanism in the human psychic setting is to facilitate passage from knowing to not knowing, as well as to not remembering unacceptable knowledge. In this way denial helps the ZIC to ignore the fact that although they own the biggest and mightiest army in the Middle East, they feel an existential threat to their existence from the Palestinians who have no air force, no bombs, no navy nor any kind of sophisticated weapons. The fear is real, only the facts on which it is based are incoherent.
The ZIC is held together by a common feeling of victimhood: Jews carry a long history of being victims in different places and times; but despite Israeli military might, the ZIC still maintains the identity of a victim, always prepared for the inevitable catastrophe. The ZIC has always viewed itself as being under mortal threat from "Arabs." These mortal fears have shifted over the years between fears of invasion, defeat in war, of becoming a demographic minority of Jews among Arabs, and most lately, it takes the form of fear of suicide bombings.
Closely connected to the victim’s identity is the metaphysical belief that "the whole world is against us." "The Arabs" too become part of this a-historical enemy entity, focused wholly on Jewish destruction, always intent on "throwing us into the sea".
This a-historical collective assumption is based on the profound feeling that Jews were victimized and persecuted at every given time in history without considering any historical or sociopolitical factors. This inner “conviction” takes precedence over the facts of Israel’s current strength.
Another important Zionist axiom is that Palestine was an empty land ("a land without people for a people without a land" is a well known early Zionist slogan, (attributed to Israel Zangwill in 1892). This belief was very much needed at the time: it allowed Zionists to maintain their self-image as righteous people, avoiding the notion of taking another people's land. But the land was not empty; therefore, the ZIC implemented an active non-seeing mechanism: its members actually saw an empty land.
S. Yizhar, one of the greatest Israeli writers, said in an interview (Ha'aretz, Literary supplement, October 6, 2006), "I looked at the landscape, the landscape is an essential part of my personality, therefore I saw the Arabs" in answer to the question, "why he suffered from the lack-of-blindness disease." He saw Arabs while his contemporaries did not see them in spite of the fact that they all were looking at the same landscape. S. Yizhar did not explain where the difference in sight stemmed from.
Forced Existence versus Co-Existence
Forced existence is a “soft” term, not well defined. It cannot be found in textbook indexes. At the same time, “forced existence” sounds coherent, meaningful and even familiar maybe because forced existence is part of the human condition. I'll try to define the content of this term.
The vast majority of our being/existence is forced upon us: no one chooses to be born, our parents or time and place of birth. We cannot choose our sex, race, color, talents, intelligence or other aspects of our selves. We can hardly choose our class, nationality or religion. These are forced on our existence and take a crucial part in shaping it.
Yet there are some fields where we can enjoy freedom of choice: our moral conduct, the actions we do and those we choose not to do according to our moral values.
Another part of the human forced existence which is relevant to our topic is the forced existence made by man, imposed by man on Others. Forced existence is present in the different punitive institutions like jails, prisons, concentration camps, institutions for delinquent youth and in personal and collective life under occupation.
Most aspects of human life are subjected to forced existence under military occupation. The Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have been under Israeli occupation for the last 39 years.
Israel has exercised its power over the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories through nearly absolute control over day-to-day life. This is expressed most prominently in Israeli control over Palestinians' movements and mobility, through a system of sieges, roadblocks, closures, and an arbitrary permit regime.
Israel also uses direct violence: the policy of assassinations and arrests comprises a substantial part of the means through which Israel perpetuates the regime of occupation. Now more than ever, emphasis is placed on control by means of killing and destruction. The entire Palestinian population is a target for Israeli army strikes. Intentional destruction of civilian infrastructures, as in the case of the bombing of electric turbines in the Gaza Strip, shattering the ability of essential civil systems to function, such as health care, sewage, education, culture, work and trade, which is a death blow to the Palestinian economy, inevitably resulting in forced existence of poverty, malnutrition and psychological trauma.
A typical crossroad in the ZIC mind is the junction where the denial and national mythos meet with the deliberate lies. The policy makers are lying; they know everything about the forced existence of the Palestinians created by the occupation. The ZIC's public opinion, which actively does not wish to know the truth, is clinging to the national mythos of being good, right, just etc., so they plant in the very heart of this junction the DUKI, the nickname the radical Israeli left gave to the term Co-Existence.
The hard core of the ZIC concept of Co-Existence, the DUKI, is the assumption that Israelis and Palestinians are two partners, equal entities who engage each other symmetrically. This way of conceptualizing the occupation reality provides Israeli liberals an easy and comfortable psychological setting for disregarding and ignoring the fundamental difference between the violent actions performed by the Israeli occupier and those performed by the occupied Palestinians. The denial of the real imbalance of power between the ZIC and the Palestinians is one of the main components of the ZIC psychology.
The DUKI, as a critical comment on this denial, treats ironically the psychological work of the “good”/liberal Israelis. The ZIC has genuine difficulty in engaging the Other, the Palestinians. They therefore tell themselves the false story of Co-Existence. Under the umbrella of good intentions many wrongs are done. The Israeli radical left identifies this liberal notion of coexistence, DUKI, as a part of the national denial and does not fall into its trap.
The Israeli-Palestinians’ existence has plenty of examples of how the DUKI concept works in the service of denial and wrongdoing on the Israeli side: Road number 443 between the Jewish town of Modi'in and Jerusalem is exclusively for the use of Jews in the last six years. That road includes 9.5 KM that runs in the Palestinian West Bank on Palestinian land confiscated for that purpose where many of their olive trees were uprooted under the title of "public needs."
Formerly, road 443 was the main connecting road between the six Palestinian villages of Beit Sira, Biet Liquya, Hirbat el-Masbach, Biet Ur a-Tachta, Biet Ur el-Fuka and Safa and the city of Ramallah as well as to the rest of the West Bank. Some 250,000 Palestinians used this road. (Ha'aretz, Akiva Eldar, Sep 26, 2006). Now that Palestinian villagers are prohibited from using it, they are forced to spend 3-4 times more money and time to move from their villages to the city of Ramallah or another place in the West Bank. Many cannot afford the extra expenses and others cannot make it because of health reasons. They are forced to stay in their village, which means no access to education, work, health care, social and family connections. For the sake of clarity I would like to mention that this blocked-for–Palestinians road runs in the West Bank. We are not talking about crossing the green line between Israel and Palestine.
In the 80s and 90s, when the land of these six villages was confiscated for building the 443 road, the State argued that the confiscation is legal "because the road will serve the public in the region, including the Palestinians and NOT the needs of Israel alone." On the basis of this argument Judge Aaharon Barak dismissed the appeal against the land confiscation in December 1983. According to the judge, international law allows confiscation of a private property if it is for the benefit of the local population. In other words—the confiscation is justified if it serves the DUKI, the Co-Existence of Israelis and Palestinians.
But the point is that the vague and decisive border between co-existence and forced existence is such by its nature that the co-existence yields to the forced existence. While the forced existence is the harsh reality of the occupation, co-existence is idealization, denial and mystification. The 443 road that was planned and built on Palestinian land is serving Jews exclusively and 250,000 Palestinians are prevented from using it. The ZIC drivers who go back and forth on the 443 road do not see the Palestinian villagers—school children, women and men of all ages—who climb the dirt blocks next to the modern road, detouring around the square concrete blocks, on their way from one vehicle to the other on the other side of the roadblock, in the hot cruel summer and in the muddy dirt of the winter.
Why don't the drivers see the misery of the Palestinians on the edges of the 443 road? It is not a problem to see them. One needs only to look and see. But if one doesn't want to look—one doesn't see. Why doesn’t the ZIC want to look at the Palestinians down there next to their comfortable road? Because then they will see the forced existence of the Palestinians.
And the forced existence doesn't accord with the DUKI, the mythological co-existence that gives justification to the occupation. Without the inner cover of the DUKI, crimes done by Israel might come to light, into the cognitive visual field of the Israelis.
Another reason why it is “forbidden” to see Palestinian misery is the threat that the ZIC might feel some undesirable feelings like identifying with the Palestinians—or that they might feel guilt for the violations of human rights they are committing, or even worse, that they might begin to pose questions like “is all this is really necessary and helpful?” Is there any DUKI at all? All these possibilities must be avoided. The denial will work for the ZIC as much as needed to protect them from reaching an insight.
However, we can see that some change is possible. For example, there has been a significant change in the ZIC denial mechanism, which has gone from total denial of the Palestinian existence to another mixed form of denial: the imaginary or hypocritical concept of co-existence that denies the real forced existence. There is a tiny little hope in this shifting. Hypocrisy means that there is some awareness of uncomfortable feelings at work. Individuals as well as collectives are now reacting to shame and guilt, among other reactions, with hypocrisy. This can be contrasted with the fact that there is no hypocrisy when cruelty, racism and even genocide are concerned, when regimes and leaders declare in a straight-forward fashion that they believe in and intend to kill, evacuate, transfer, torture, etc., without any mask or euphemism. People who do this are fascists or Nazi leaders and regimes. Therefore, we have learned to appreciate this kind of hypocrisy as a sign of some morality.
It is quite easy to show the forced existence of the Palestinians under occupation. I will now turn to the less obvious part, the forced existence of the Israeli occupiers.
The ZIC forced upon itself a rigid regime of denial and a system of basic assumptions and axioms. Those are alleged facts that are not prone to examination, to any kind of test or to critical thinking. They are given facts that need no proof. The denial and axioms create a vicious circle that traps the ZIC without a way out, creating a perpetual circle of militarism and warfare.
A central axiom in the ZIC mind is that Israelis want and craves peace and that wars are always forced upon them. Facts of life have no chance to penetrate this solid denial and to provide grounds for critical thinking. The Others, meaning the Palestinians and the Arabs as a whole, are always the warmongers, not the ZIC. In this way the ZIC's forced existence caused to its members to recruit themselves to one war after the other without stopping for a moment and starting to think about why they are going to kill and get killed. The axiomatic Israeli pursuit of peace is by far stronger than reality. The 1956 war with Egypt, the 1967 war, the 1973 war, the first and second Lebanon wars and the impending one with Syria and Lebanon again are good examples.
The ZIC sees the occupation as a constant condition. The contradiction between the ZIC's claim of their own profound willingness to have peace and the prolonged status of occupation belongs to the psycho-political zone of denial. The ZIC is unable to confront this contradiction.
The occupation which started in 1967 brought about new dynamics in the ZIC's denial mechanism: The original denial of Palestinian existence, the “empty land” posited from the very beginning of Zionism, ended its role. A new epoch started in 1967. Now Palestinian existence must be obvious rather than denied, since the ZIC needs them to exist as Objects for the forced existence.
The DUKI role in the new psychological setup of the ZIC has been to provide “good face”: the false inner image of the occupier as benevolent subject who considers the occupied Palestinians as if they were equal in agency to the ZIC, rather than as the object to domination and control.
In order to maintain the occupation one needs to have an object on which to perpetuate one's domination and control. Therefore, the occupied Palestinians are forced to play the role of a voiceless child. The occupier will use extreme power to keep the occupied in the only one way he needs them to be—in the forced existence of a mute, helpless child. They cannot be conceived by the ZIC as Subjects. If they are a Subject with a voice, the crimes committed by the occupier will be known and come to light. When the mute child tries to rebel it is an intolerable situation for the occupier. It might cause to the occupier to lose his identity and boundaries. If the rebel succeeds, it might force the occupier to face the catastrophic situation in which he needs to talk to the child, to consider him as a partner, a mature subject, an Other with his own mind, needs and demands.
Considering the Palestinians as Subjects would also force the occupier to start taking responsibility for his aggression, a psychological process that he is not willing to do or is capable of. The occupier is trapped in his own forced existence—he must be and cannot stop being an occupier. He cannot change his conduct even though this would be for the benefit of both sides.
In order to achieve a state of psychological and political change of the occupier mind and psychology, the occupier must learn the lesson of compassion. Compassion is the tool we all must have in order to balance innate aggression via shame and guilt within ourselves, thus allowing us to take responsibility for our aggression. We are all born with some amount of aggression. The crucial question is not that we are aggressive, but whether we will learn to take responsibility for our aggression. The immature hypocritical conduct should give the way to psychological growth and development in order to achieve the higher degree of compassion. Practically it means that the occupier will have the strength to give up the occupation.
- All definitions cited in this paper are from Andrew M. Colman (2001) Dictionary of Psychology, Oxford University Press.
- "[The] 'As if' personality belongs to the group of borderline personality disorders. 'As if' characters used to be called 'pseudologia fantastica'…[It] goes hand in hand with an insufficiently developed superego, predominance of aggression against the objects…"
Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism, Otto Kernberg, Jason Aronson, New York, 1975. - "Defence Mechanism: A process whereby the ego protects itself against demands of the id. More generally, it is a pattern of feeling, thought, or behaviour arising in response to a perception of psychic danger, enabling a person to avoid conscious awareness of conflicts or anxiety-arousing ideas or wishes."
Oxford Dictionary of Psychology, Andrew M. Colman, Oxford University Press, NY 2001, p. 189. - "Denial: A Defence Mechanism involving a disavowal or failure consciously to acknowledge thoughts, feelings, desires, or aspects of reality that would be painful or unacceptable, as when a person with a terminal illness refuses to acknowledge the imminence of death".
Oxford Dictionary of Psychology, p.194. - "Insight: (3) The capacity to understand oneself, especially the abnormal or pathological nature of aspects of one’s behaviour or mental experience that result from a mental disorder… In Psychoanalysis, conscious understanding of unconscious reasons for maladaptive behaviour is believed to be curative in itself."
Oxford Dictionary of Psychology, p. 368-369. - Laplanche and Pontalis. p. 356.
- Ha’aretz, December 23, 2004.
- "Phantasy (Fantasy): An imaginary scene in which the subject is a protagonist, representing the fulfillment of a wish in a manner that is distorted to a greater or lesser extent by defensive processes." Laplanche and Pontalis, p. 314.
- "Obsessive – compulsive personality disorder: a personality disorder characterized by a pervasive pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism and control, at the cost of flexibility, openness and efficiency, beginning by early adulthood and indicated by such signs and symptoms as excessive preoccupation with details, rules and order…"
Oxford Dictionary of Psychology, p. 503. - "Anal Sadistic Stage: Freud’s second stage of libidinal development, occurring between the ages of two and four. The stage is characterized by an organization of the libido under the primacy of the anal erotogenic zone. The object-relationship at this time is invested with meanings having to do with function of defecation (expulsion/retention) and with the symbolic value of faeces. The anal-sadistic stage sees the strengthening of sado-masochism in correlation with the development of muscular control."
Laplanche and Pontalis, p. 35.