Separation-Individuation in the January 2003 Israeli Election

In thinking about the 2003 Israeli election, Margaret Mahler’s process of separation-individuation comes to mind. The issue is: What are Israeli voters separating from? The answers lie in the Left’s dream that Muslims and Jews can live peacefully together and in the Right’s dream to expand Israel to its Biblical heights.

Crucial to a fuller understanding of the election is the meaning of the rise of the Shinui Party (meaning change in Hebrew) from 6 to 15 seats (out of 120 total) in the Israeli Knesset (Parliament). Shinui is a protest movement that proclaims to both the Labor Party (the Left) as well as the Likud Party (the Right) of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that neither is revealing the truth to the Israeli people. For example, there are important domestic problems with the Israeli Palestinians other than security, there is poverty in Israel, and there are deep splits between secular and religious Jews over the privileges of the latter. For instance, orthodox religious factions are neither drafted into the army nor work, while middle-class Israelis’ taxes support their religious studies and no-work ethic.

Shinui and the idea of looking inward instead of outward are new in Israeli politics, and a positive development for Israeli society. It is a new beginning of the process of directing desire (libido) inward rather than permanently outward. Historically, the difficulty of Israel has been to separate itself from the Palestinians. What is mine and what is not mine? Where do I end and someone else starts? Those are fundamental psychological questions of the growth process. The realization that this inward search is the right growth process is most important.

A few examples of what Israeli difficulties in separating from Palestinians have been and still are will illuminate why directing energies inward is so important for achieving the separation-individuation of Israel.

• We know that separation is accompanied by a mourning process following the realization that not everything is mine. Likud is now willing to relinquish West Bank territory that even Labor had not dreamt of giving up 20 years ago. When Sharon states that he is willing to make “painful” concessions, we can understand that the emotional separation-through-mourning process is at work.
• The recognition of the “other,” in this case the Palestinians, entailed the pain of giving up one’s egocentricity during the growth process. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Labor Prime Minister Golda Meier stated that there was “no Palestinian people.” Yet today Sharon supports the establishment of a Palestinian state.
• Likud rejects building a fence against terrorist invasion along the West Bank border that could save many Israeli fives because, by doing so, it states politically where we end and the others begin. This would be a commitment to the end of settlements.
• The Right is coming closer to the Left in moving toward the idea that Israeli’s natural borders should mostly be set according to demographic realities.

The Palestinians also experience difficulties of separation-individuation from Israel. The “right to return”—to co-exist within Israel by returning Palestinian refugees to their homes inside the State of Israel—is wishful thinking. Palestinians do not invest in themselves by trying to create and build their own country instead of permanently living it only in their imagination. The rest of the world, including Sharon, supports an independent Palestinian state, but, strangely, the Palestinians do not. In the past, they used to threaten Israel and the world that they were going to unilaterally declare

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their independence. Their inability to do so has profound psychological reasons. To declare independence means to take responsibility and build your country from within—its infrastructure, economy, education, and health system. It means for the average Palestinian to wake up in the morning thinking less about their troubles with Israel and more about investing in their own growth. Palestinians would not have to declare that they are giving up their right to return, just that they will take care of themselves in a better way.

An example of how both sides reinforce each other’s difficulties is in Israel’s supplying water, electricity, and telephone services to the Palestinians in the midst of all the struggles. The background on electricity is particularly interesting. Before the Six Days War in June 1967, the Palestinians in the West Bank had two electrical power stations. Israel closed them down after the war, telling the Palestinians that they were unnecessary because Israel would supply them electricity. The erroneous idea was that if they were dependent on Israel they would not rebel. Israel still wants the Palestinians to be dependent on it for many psychological reasons that are not hard to guess: feelings of superiority, and fear of separation-individuation and the autonomy of the other. The Palestinians also do not address the issue because they do not want to become independent and rebuild their own electrical power stations.

Separation-individuation, in all its psychological depth, involves what it means to let the other be independent and to take responsibility for one’s own independence. Think about a Palestinian who sits in die restroom. The water, electricity, and toilet paper come from Israel. This Palestinian then leaves the lavatory to shoot some Israelis. While the psycho dynamics of separation do not explain everything, there is a lot of humiliation and anger in this mutual dependency.

The separation-individuation perspective might help us understand suicide terrorists who act as an extension of their societies and are unable to separate from their society by thinking and acting as individuals. Yet they are unable to separate from their enemy with whom they chose to die with rather than live with. The suicide terrorist cannot think as every ordinary soldier does: I am going to win, which means I will live and my enemy will die. This is a healthy thought of separation—to have a different fate than the enemy. Suicide terrorists cannot contemplate the “win” possibility, which means separateness, and the whole Palestinian society identifies with their solution. In their wish to die together with the enemy and to remain in the collective memory together, they express an aborted drive to separateness.

Likud won such a large majority over Labor in the Knesset (37 seats to 18) because in the last several years the reality testing of the Right has been more accurate than that of the Left. The Right traditionally represses aggression less than does the Left. This means that it can detect more accurately Palestinian aggression against Israel and therefore be less surprised than the Left. For example, Labor consistently believed the peaceful intentions of the Palestinians and were totally surprised by the second Intifada. The peaceful romantic vision of the world of Simon Peres’ “New Middle East” is an example of a failure to be willing to see the painful reality. In the recent election, the people of Israel said to themselves (as well as to the rest of the world if it cared to listen) that the mistake of the repression of aggression, up to the point that you refuse to see it in others, is a dangerous illness of the Western democratic world.

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