The Problem: Understanding Israeli Aggression and Impunity

1. Psychoanalytic Thoughts on Israel and the Siege of Gaza:The Exploitation of Childrenby Judith Deutsch

2. The Problem: Understanding Israeli Aggression and Impunity • Although much information is easily accessible about Israel’s many violations of international law, Israel’s abuses continue unabated. What lies behind the paralysis to stop this cruelty, and what does it mean to “know” when this does not guide behavior? • How is reality reversed into its opposite so that most Israelis and their supporters believe that Israel is under siege, not Gaza? • Psychologically, it is predictable that brutalizing, impoverishing, and humiliating people will lead to violence. Yet Israel is seen as the victim. • All violence is entirely preventable by putting an end to humiliation and to impoverishment (see Gilligan). • Humiliating parents in front of their children is psychologically the most devastating experience for children and will often evoke vengeful feelings. This is described by Dr. El-Sarraj, Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, and by Sigmund Freud.

3. Psychoanalytic Insights • The psychological factors examined here are cruelty, humiliation, hypocrisy, and the absence of conscience. • Psychoanalysis distinguishes between reality and illusion. • Two documentaries show how Jewish adults exploit youth by provoking the specific anxieties of each phase of childhood and adolescence. • When Israeli youth are in a state of anxiety, adults offer an excitedly violent solution to deeply held fears. • In this state of fear, there is an unquestioning acceptance of exciting distortions of reality and a pull to identify with the aggressor. • When adults do not acknowledge children’s feelings, it is difficult for children to develop the capacity to be introspective and to empathize with others. • From early childhood, there is interference with the mastery of essential psychological tasks that make for citizenship in a democracy: the capacity for individual responsibility, for repairing wrongdoing and shameful acts, for feeling concern for others.

4. Film #1: Avi Mograbi’s “Avenge But One of My Two Eyes” • Youth in Israel are taught the Samson and Masada suicide myths. The adults do not acknowledge that the stories are upsetting and frightening to children. Children learn from early childhood to not notice their own feelings or those of others. • Early childhood: a father tells of Samson mutilating a lion, stealing the honey from inside the lion, and killing 10,000 people. At this age children fear bodily injury and loss of control, especially of oral impulses. • Oedipal age: parents repeatedly tell their son that Samson was blinded. At this age blinding equals castration and punishment. The only way to not feel vulnerable is to identify with the aggressor. • School age: a teacher enacts Samson heroically committing suicide terrorism. The children say that suicide terrorism is heroic. Aggression is exciting and pleasurable. Interference in individual conscience development.

5. Mograbi: Samson and Masada myths: Developmental Anxieties and Tasks, continued • Adolescence: An adult guide tells adolescents to empathize with the victims of siege at Masada. He repeatedly instructs them to merge with the group, to not think for themselves. They talk of “separation wall”, “watchtowers”, and choose suicide terrorism as a solution, yet they make no connection with the present. • Adolescence: other adults express seductive, intense excitement about revenge, suicide terrorism. They distort reality, breach incest barriers, demand obedience to charismatic authority. • Guides press loyalty to the group at a time when adolescents waver between finding their own identity vs. conforming to others. • Adults are overtly seductive when adolescents need to distance themselves from incestuous wishes.

6. Psychological Mechanisms: Documentary about Masada and Samson myths • Using children in these ways to satisfy adult needs is a fundamental aspect of abuse. By stirring up anxiety and then coupling it with exciting fantasy solutions, adults and children collude in not acknowledging reality, in supporting identification with the aggressor, and in seducing youth into excited and pleasurable aggression. • This documentary indicates that Israelis know exactly what conditions produce violence, namely hopelessness, rage, and humiliation. • The mechanism of projective identification is used to provoke violence in Palestinian people. In this way Israelis minimize their own anxiety and justify their own grandiosity and aggressiveness while feeling entitled as victims to be violent. • This mechanism is how parents directly induce their children to behave in delinquent and forbidden ways to satisfy their own wishes and to feel powerful and in control (Johnson and Szurek).

7. Film #2: Juliano Mer-Khamis’ “Arna’s Children” • Arna Mer’s “children” are Palestinian children in Jenin who were students at her theatre school. The programme was designed to enhance self-esteem and hopefulness by inviting children to express their anger about the Occupation. • Arna received the Right Livelihood Award for her contributions to peace. She is a Jewish woman who fought in the Palmach in 1948 and who married a Palestinian man. • Even as an old woman, she defiantly protests a checkpoint closure and energetically leads the children in songs about peace and freedom. • She talks of her own background but does not take responsibility for her involvement in the Palmach. She does not feel uncomfortable about her excited and sexualized army experience. • There are many scenes in the movie about the children being invited to express anger, often in a sadistic way. Arna invites the children to hit her. One boy is invited to enact his sadistic teacher. A child is instructed to enact an angry dog. Children do not speak in their own words and do not verbalize feelings other than anger.

8. Psychological Mechanisms: Arna’s Children • The ideal of being a fighter is explicitly promoted, albeit with the aim of lifting self-esteem through being active rather than passive. • Control comes from the outside, from adults, at an age when the psychological task is forming one’s own inside voice (conscience) to monitor and guide individual feelings and actions. • Excited fantasies and play acting that involve excited aggression replaces a reality orientation that prepares children for the serious choices they will eventually need to make. Three of these boys later die fighting in the Israeli invasion of Jenin. • Generational boundaries are breached when adults use children as part of their own psychological functioning, disrupting mastery of essential developmental tasks. • It is shocking that the director, and Israeli Peace Now leader Uri Avnery, compare these boy’s tragic sacrifice with Masada and Samson, admiring these youth for fulfilling the Israeli ideal of suicide.

9. The Application of these Observations Ibdaa Cultural Center at Dheisheh Refugee Camp

10. The Inner Psychological World andOuter Socio-Political Pathology • For individual mental health, people need to be able to express themselves in their own words and to be listened to. In these documentaries, children were actively invited to be vengeful and aggressive: words were given to the children in the form of songs, stories, scripts. • At the GCMHP, the mediation program at public schools allows youth to speak for themselves and to speak with each other. • In clinical work, it is important to distinguish between inner psychological pathology and outer social pathology to diminish the pressure to collude and comply with a disturbed social environment. • Helping youth to understand Israeli pathology may diminish personal feelings of humiliation and the pull to identify with the aggressor. • In these documentaries, people in authority distort psychological and social reality. The adults do not see that admiration of extreme aggression can cause anxiety in youth; they do not acknowledge Israel’s separation wall and siege – only the wall and siege at Masada; they show no discomfort about idealizing mass murder; they do not hesitate to alter facts (e.g. one adult substitutes “Palestine” for “Philistine”). Children learn not to think and to notice feelings. • An alternative education system developed in post-war Germany. In addition to learning about the Holocaust, children learned about individual responsibility and about challenging authority.

11. Peace or War? • Two hundred two Israelis signed the Olga Document: “If we muster within ourselves the appropriate honesty and requisite courage, we will be able to take the first step in the long journey that can extricate us from the tangle of denial, repression, distortion of reality, loss of direction and forsaking of conscience. We are united in the belief that peace and reconciliation are contingent on Israel’s recognition of its responsibility for the injustices done to the indigenous people, the Palestinians, and on willingness to redress them. The State of Israel was supposed to tear down the walls of the ghetto; it is now constructing the biggest ghetto in the entire history of the Jews….” • The Samson Option: Israel has the fourth largest military and the fourth largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Eminent journalist Seymour Hersh states that it is conceivable that Israel would use its nuclear weapons.