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.