Free Associations on Hamas’ War and the Psychology of Victimization

As soon as the horror of Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel occurred, I told a friend, “Hamas has won!” The goal of this terrorist organization was multifold, including killing or at least delaying the movement toward peace with Saudi Arabia and some Gulf states; killing Israelis; taking numerous Israelis hostage to slow down and perhaps lessen the anticipated retaliatory reaction; prompting the Israelis to massively wreak destruction and death upon Gazans as a way of winning the Olympics of Victimization around the world (including in the U.S.); and to gain a seat at the bargaining table. I also correctly presumed that the Israelis, like Americans before 9/11, had been warned of this forthcoming attack, which they chose to ignore, as did my government. Denial and the grandiose feeling of invulnerability are powerful defense mechanisms that can have catastrophic consequences! Sadly, nothing that’s transpired has led me to question my initial assessment as I’ve watched the horror unfold.

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The Immediate Impact of October 7^th and the Olympics of Victimology

Returning to the immediate impact of October 7^th, only time will tell if the peace negotiations with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states are dead or just greatly delayed. Perpetrators included some ordinary Gazan civilians who took the opportunity to loot, rape, and slaughter. More Israeli deaths, about 590 at this moment of writing on March 14^th, have occurred as the Right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu continues to send Israel Defense Forces (IDF) into Gaza (with its incredibly large tunnel system). Hamas is embedded among the population in a manner designed to protect the terrorists at the cost of the lives of its own children and other noncombatants, bringing Israeli destruction to as many of the ordinary Gazans who voted it into power in 2006 as possible. This is clearly a victory in the Olympics of Victimization before the World Court of Public Opinion.

In teaching a course on the Holocaust and genocide for over four decades, it was almost impossible to get most of my students to focus on more than one genocide at a time. My successful solution was to assign in every class a report by students on a different genocide while our greatest focus was on the destruction of European Jewry. Psychoanalysts and well-trained psychohistorians learn how to empathize with more than one person at the same time. Regrettably, our ahistorically-minded younger student generation normally does not have this ability to empathize with or even have real sympathy for the suffering of two opposing groups locked in a violent struggle. They incline to see only good guys and bad guys! Nor do they understand the inevitable human costs of war. They only see aggressors and victims, and consequently, there has been an outpouring of antisemitism on some campuses. Thus, at Harvard and other major universities, especially among Left-leaning students and professors, the horror of October 7, 2023, is emotionally and intellectually nullified in the face of Palestinian suffering. The tragedy of the 7^th and its aftermath was masterminded by the leaders of Hamas and their allies, as they call on the world to hate Israel and cry for the poor Gazans—the very people they cynically set up for death, destruction, homelessness, hunger, injury, misery, and repeated cycles of martyrdom.

Netanyahu’s claim that he would wipe out Hamas represented an impossible goal since the actions he continues to conduct militarily solidify the terrorist group’s hold on the hearts and minds of

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numerous Palestinians, especially the young. Not all Hamas leaders are in Gaza, and their movement will likely survive no matter how many of its fighters are killed and hailed as shaheeds (martyrs) by the Palestinians. The dead become a recruiting tool for Hamas or its replacement. But the politics of shock and horror demand retribution, as Americans saw after 9/11, even if the U.S. wasn’t sure who carried out the attack initially. President George W. Bush, for reasons of his own, was able to convince the American public that Osama bin Laden’s enemy, Saddam Hussein, was responsible. Americans attacked Iraq with a majority of them thinking that they were destroying the perpetrators of 9/11. When faced with the horror of October 7^th, Israelis responded emotionally in a world that preferred seeing Jews as victims and holding them to a higher standard of civilization. But Shakespeare was right in The Merchant of Venice (1596-1598) when he spelled out the common humanity of Jews, including the desire for retribution when injured. The Israeli response should not have been what Hamas wanted: the creation of a massive number of Gazan martyrs. It is totally out of proportion, putting Jews around the world in danger of major blowback. My Jewish and human values are offended by the extent of the destruction wrought by the IDF as Netanyahu seeks to cling to power.

At an incredible cost to the Gazans, Hamas is winning the Olympics of Victimization, including among numerous Jews in America, especially some young ones. There is a contradictory and ambivalent human tendency to identify with the suffering of the victim or the strength of the powerful in a type of identification with the aggressor. To start with, there are about 16 million Jews in the world and 465 million Arabs as part of a total Islamic population of over two billion. The loss of support for Israel and the antisemitism generated by their reaction brings the Palestinian issue to the forefront of an Israeli government that has severely weakened itself. President Biden’s strong support for Israel is likely also weakening his reelection prospects. Fortunately, he is sanctioning a few West Bank settlers for their violence toward their Palestinian neighbors.

Not only great powers, like the United States in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Iraq, but also regional powers, like Israel, overextend themselves because of hubris. The U.S. weakened itself in Vietnam, Iraq (in the Middle East generating more terrorism than it destroyed), and Afghanistan. But despite its misguided policies

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and hubris, with a vast continent, 336 million people, as well as the largest economy and most powerful military in the world, it remains powerful. In contrast, Israel is a sliver of land surrounded by populations that mostly envy and hate it, even if a few of their governments have made reluctant peace with it. Israel’s failure to implement a two-state solution, allowing settlers to split apart the West Bank, makes a lasting peace more difficult. Without a separate Palestinian state, Israel’s democracy is threatened, given the much higher birth rates of Palestinians than Jews. The Israelis indeed live in a tough neighborhood, and in the past, especially before Netanyahu and other Right-wing politicians were in power, they had taken considerable risks for the sake of peace, including giving back the Sinai Peninsula.

Many Perspectives of the October 7^th Atrocity

My perspective is that of an Eriksonian participant observer who hopes for a just society and home for Jews in democratic Israel. I also have always had a strong desire for the West Bank to be used as a bargaining chip for peace with a two-state solution; I remember my father warning me when Israel was created that there would be endless trouble between Arabs and Israelis. Regrettably, he was correct.

Now, I will look at some of these issues from various viewpoints, starting with the hostages. Their capture puts enormous pressure on the government to at least temporarily cease military activities in Gaza in response to the desperate calls of the family members of hostages to have a cease-fire in the hope that their loved ones will be released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. Thus, Israelis are ambivalently torn between destroying Hamas through war and getting back their people. The U.S. strongly supports these cease-fire efforts, but it is still the current Israeli government that is in control.

A basic rule of success in war, violated by Netanyahu, is to not do what your opponents want you to do. As a result of the October 7^th Hamas attack, the Israeli public (the Jewish public, not the about two million Arab Israeli citizens) was furious at their leader for not protecting them after having sowed extreme division in the country through his judicial “reform” aimed at weakening the check on his power and that of the extreme Right-wing. They are overwhelmingly enraged at Netanyahu for allowing this catastrophe to happen and for Hamas being mostly viewed as an asset while the Palestinian Authority was seen as the major problem under his lead-

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ership. He knowingly allowed aid to flow into Hamas from the Arab world as a way of keeping the status quo. As a leader who is almost certain to be voted out of power once the Gazan War is over and will probably go to jail, Netanyahu has powerful reasons to continue the fighting for as long as possible. Since 2019 and as of December 2023, his criminal trial for bribery, breach of trust, and fraud has been ongoing. In addition, his long warmly received courtship of U.S. conservative Republicans has not resulted in their coming through with funding for his war, despite President Biden offering many concessions on U.S. border policy to make this and Ukrainian aid happen.

Hamas, by refusing (as of March 14^th) to have another prisoner swap, appears to be counting on Israel to maintain an ultimately fruitless effort to destroy a terrorist group while generating so much more hatred for it among Palestinians and around the world. Any Israeli victory over Hamas will be a pyrrhic one.

In addition to its negative impact on the economy, war itself is an atrocity-making situation, and urban warfare is especially murderous to noncombatants. With Hamas having embedded itself in the civilian population, including in or under hospitals, the Gazan civilian death toll is especially high as the Israelis seek to destroy the Hamas fighters, create more of a buffer zone, and get vengeance while also attempting to minimize danger to its citizen soldiers. Collateral damage means that innocent noncombatants are killed, an inevitable tragedy of urban warfare. War is in itself an atrocity-producing activity. Ultimately, the best hope for ending the Palestinian problem is the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and perhaps in Gaza.

Obstructions to the Two-State Solution

South Africa accusing Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice in the Hague is a distraction from the fact that its own society is falling apart, as reflected in unreliable electrical power and water; in fact, many of its more educated and prosperous citizens are fleeing abroad. There are perhaps a dozen countries in the world with genocidal activity going on at the moment, but it is Israel that has had to defend itself before the Court in the Hague. (It was the Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin who coined the word “genocide” in 1943 and worked tirelessly to get it made a crime in the Genocide Convention of 1948.) The horrendous suffering of Gazans in the war started by its government shouldn’t be ignored, but Israel should also not be held to a higher standard. Af-

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ter seeing the Jewish population of Europe mostly walking to their deaths in the Holocaust, Israeli Jews have as much right as any other people to fight back, however misguided their effort to destroy terrorists, while in fact strengthening their support, might be.

West Bank settlers, at least those beyond the outskirts of Jerusalem, feel they are reclaiming the Biblical land of Milk and Honey, and often make life miserable for their Arab neighbors. Some seem to have the mentality of many American setters of the old West, viewing Palestinians as obstacles to the inevitable progress of the nation and acting as if the land is theirs for the taking. There are numerous American-born Jews among them. They are a major hurdle to a two-state solution; some of them will do everything to obstruct it should their government reach the point of accepting it as a real goal.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) supports the relief and human development of Palestinian refugees and their descendants. Some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled the war as their leaders called on them to leave and on the entire Arab world to drive Jews into the sea. Many Arabs were driven out by the Zionist militias. They now number 5.6 million Palestinians who are partly fed, educated, and aided by the UN. (A number of the Palestinian UNRWA employees have supported or even been involved in Hamas’ attack.) About 900,000 Jews living in Arab countries and the Middle East fled after the creation of the Jewish state (some went to France, the U.S., and other countries, but over 800,000 to Israel) to save or improve their lives because they were scapegoated as Jews and no longer tolerated. These Jews were integrated into the new country.

The Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan (becoming part of their general population), and Syria focused on their grievances while the Sephardim (Spanish Jews who had moved to the Ottoman Empire) helped turn the desert green. Dependency on the UN while focusing on their hatred and being a bleeding sore held up as evidence of the mistreatment of Palestinians, especially in Gaza and some of the Lebanon Displaced Persons camps, created hatred rather than a better life. The psychology of dependency has severely hurt the Palestinian refugees. The Israeli general and prime minister Sharon decided Gaza was ungovernable and left it to its inhabitants, but not in a way that encouraged emulation of the enterprising Israelis.

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The idealistic Zionists who created the Jewish homeland were ready and eager to have good relations with their Arab neighbors, but on numerous occasions, they were turned down in no uncertain terms, even when they put aside the terrorism of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) under Yasir Arafat and made peace with him. But Arafat was unwilling to reach an agreement that did not grant the right of return, and much more than that was unacceptable to Israelis. The cool peace with Egypt following Israel giving up the Sinai (with its oil and Jewish settlers and resort) weakened the Israeli Left, which had hoped for genuine cooperation between Arabs and Israelis. Given their mistreatment even before the creation of Israel, the Sephardim were less inclined to make sacrifices for peace. Arab countries and the world at large are now showing a renewed interest in the two-state solution with Palestine governing the West Bank. While the U.S. has often given lip service to this solution, Netanyahu, expansionist Israelis, and especially the settlers have done everything to thwart it. As a proud Jewish American, I have wished, except in an emergency when its existence is seriously threatened, that Israel not be given money by the U.S. regularly, as has been the case.

Hope in an Eventual Two-State Solution

Stopping this endless trouble and human suffering while maintaining Israeli democracy requires the two-state solution, even if this is a most difficult task for both sides. There are major issues facing both parties. When will Palestinians care more for the future of their children than for destroying Israel to avenge their past losses and suffering? How can Israelis, after October 7, 2023, the largest murder of Jews since the Holocaust, trust Palestinians, who have built between 350 and 400 miles of tunnels for the sake of fighting and killing Jews no matter what the cost to their own population? How will they vote for this, even in the most unlikely event that their one loyal ally, the U.S., uses its leverage to make this a reality? Is it possible that pressure from around the world, including Arab countries allied with Israel against the Iranian danger, will result in post-Netanyahu and post-Hamas governments accepting a two-state solution? As a historian who takes the long view and remembers that Medieval Christians, at times, made alliances with the Muslims after recapturing the “Holy Land” that is steeped in blood, I still maintain some hope. Time will tell. In the meantime, I am eager to see the horrible conflict that began on October 7, 2023, come to an end.

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