The terrible compulsion to repeat the horror we have experienced

I have grown up with the State of Israel. As the child of parents who escaped from Nazi Germany and who lived their lives as husks of their former selves, I saw the State of Israel as a beacon of light. At the time of the Six Day War, I travelled hopefully to Israel as a volunteer. Together with thousands of other young Jewish people from around the world, we vowed ‘never again’.

Since those heady days, returning many times to Israel to visit family and to run training programs for Israeli and Palestinian professionals, I have held on to hope. Hope that the denigrated language I witnessed towards Arabs that reminded me of growing up in apartheid South Africa, would be countered by the humanity and enlightenment of the many Israelis I met and worked with.

As a child psychotherapist and clinical psychologist, I reflect on how it has come about that the extreme right-wing leadership of Israel now presides over not only the slaughterhouse of Gaza but is also immune to the death and captivity of its own people.
The uncomfortable and painful truth is that trauma has many faces and lives a long life. It manifests itself when we least expect it to and contains at its heart the terrible kernel of repetition.

Jews are not immune from this experience and from changing from victim into aggressor. When we examine the current events through the lens of trauma, we come to understand that the Palestinians and Israelis have together been overtaken by an overwhelming collective trauma.

They have been misled by false prophets; by leaders who talk only in absolutes and division as in ‘we are the sons of light they are the sons of darkness’. For both, the history of dispossession and violence has become enacted through what I describe as The Imitation of Oppression. It is summed up by the image of young Palestinian boys hurling stones at Israeli soldiers, a stunning reversal of the story of David and Goliath.

The Imitation of Oppression refers to the extraordinary specificity and repetition of violent and demonising behaviour in which the injustices of the pogrom in the Pale of Settlement in Russia, become enacted in Hebron and other Arab cities. These reenactments are suggestive of a collective dream or nightmare in which truth and reality become negated in a fever of people believing themselves not only to be eternally under threat, but also in a state of permanent identification with the aggressor.

Psychoanalysis has long understood the dangers of what Sigmund Freud described as ‘repetition compulsion’ in which individual and collective memory become enacted destructively.

Freud took a pessimistic view of how humans manage the immutable drives of aggression and sexuality in the context of a civilized society and emphasised the need for psychological maturing and development of the self, and how in the absence of these achievements, human nature and humanity itself is put at risk.

The development of psychological maturing both for the child and for the nation state requires the support of insightful and courageous mentors. These mentors particularly within the extensive Jewish Diaspora could have acted to halt the fatal lurch to the far right of the Israeli leadership.

The Jewish community at large has instead, reverted mainly to closing ranks in response to the carnage in Gaza. A reluctance to engage over the years with the truth of the dangerous regressions in the Israeli body politic has led to a hollowing out of the voice of the Jewish Diaspora. Criticism is silenced and those within the community who dare to speak out are labelled Jewish Jew haters, an ancient slur as old as antisemitism itself.

From a religious perspective, rabbis have a duty to offer spiritual guidance within the context of the foundational precepts of Torah with its overarching emphasis on the sanctity and preservation of life, and of Halacha, how we conduct ourselves in everyday life. Instead, there has been a thunderous silence from the Rabbis in the face of the unfolding of one of the greatest catastrophes of the current century.

The Jewish community at large cannot seem to go beyond an intransigent twin discourse concerning the evils of antisemitism and the Holocaust. There is a danger that these discourses almost always devoid of any commentary about Israel’s behaviour in the occupied territories, and indeed in Gaza, may have the effect of trivialising and undermining the truth of the Holocaust. It may potentially risk giving weight to the notion of denial.

As Jews, we rightly memorialise the horror of the Holocaust. However, the Holocaust inevitably holds us as Jews to higher account. It is a responsibility we can never avoid because it represents those aspects of the long reach of trauma that bestow upon us the irrevocable condition of possessing intimate truth and knowledge about the horror of violence and discrimination. The possession of this truth and knowledge carries within it the responsibility to be sensitive and protective towards the violence and horror that is visited upon others.

Central to the violence and horror is the generational question ‘what are we going to tell the children?’ It is a question that overrides all extreme positions in the current conflict. It overrides all demonising, all polarising all rhetoric and all revenge.

We must not turn away from seeing the tiny white shrouds of children killed in what remains of the rubble of Gaza; the little curly haired boy who shakes uncontrollably from the Israeli bombardment; the desperate weeping boy on the back of a golf cart who knows his parents cannot protect him from what is to come; the children who have died from bullets and burning in what they believed to be their safe spaces.

Children from both sides of the conflict must be protected from repeating the trauma to become the agents of the Imitation of Oppression. It is a weighty task and one which must and can only be undertaken by their parents and families on both sides of the conflict. It is a collective task in which Israeli and Palestinian families, inextricably bound together as they are, in sharing this collective horror, must find a way to create deliverance for themselves and for their children.