The Holocaust as an Impediment to Peace in the Middle East (article)

Just as the Shoah has not yet ended for families impacted by it decades ago, the State of Israel exists under the heavy influence of the trauma of the attempted annihilation of the Jews, which affects their efforts to make peace with the Palestinians. The meta-

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phor of Israel as a psychology patient was aptly applied in Ofer Grosbard’s Israel on the Couch (2003), where he clearly saw difficulties in the peace process. Therefore, it might be useful to approach the “case” of Israel/Palestine from a psychotherapeutic and analytic perspective and integrate various authors’ ideas to perceive how the Shoah influences the incapacity/intransigence of the Israeli people and political leaders in that process.

Two Narratives, One Hologram

The creation of Israel was supported by powerful myths, many of them still operative. The Zionist pioneers were contemptuous of Eastern European Jews who were considered weak and incapable of living off the land or fighting for it. Israelis cling to that pioneer myth of the thick-skinned, softhearted “Sabra” (Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, 1991). Israeli politicians are proud of getting their hands dirty or even bloody without publicly regretting the pain or loss of life their actions might have caused. Yet from Israel’s beginnings, two narratives were operative: the strong pioneer narrative, and the almost as strong—and ambivalent—narrative of the vanquished, traumatized victim. Both are applied—interchangeably—by politicians and media in Israel as if they are part of a hologram in which the perceived image shifts from one to the other as needed to make a point.

Avraham Burg wrote in The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise from Its Ashes (2008) that the renewed spirit of a new nation was redefined. “Israel was no longer a future-oriented state, but a society connected to its bleeding, traumatic past… the years of grief and of utopia, depression and mania fused two monumental events, the Holocaust and the building of Israel, into a single entity” (75).

When over 300,000 Shoah survivors came to Israel after the Second World War, their arrival coincided with the War of Independence in 1947-1948. Though regarded as cowardly, and objects of shame, they were recruited wherever possible to fight for the State. There was no time to look back, mourn, or be honored for their losses and suffering. The subliminal message of the pioneer-based majority population was to deny and ignore their weakness (Segev). They were expected to adapt, conform, and not draw attention to what they experienced or left behind.

Segev maintains that this collective denial of the Holocaust was rampant during Israel’s formative years. It was turned around

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by the capture, trial, and execution of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1960-1961. The event transformed the Israeli self-concept and the attitude toward the Shoah: in a single act, revenge on the Nazis was consummated and the deep shame for the weakness of the victims was expunged. The two sides of the Israeli self-concept were melded into a myth that endures today.

Israeli historian Idith Zertal sees in the dramaturgy of the Eichmann capture and trial a relevant dimension to our search for understanding in Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (2005). She believes the Zionists deliberately transformed the collective anxiety and memory of the Holocaust into an interpretation of history in which Hitler and Auschwitz become intricately connected with the present and future threat of annihilation by Arabs. Zertal believes Prime Minister Ben-Gurion deliberately and painstakingly re-invented this historical interpretation over several decades. His first motivating force may have been to distract people from noticing that the Zionists did not act decisively or directly to prevent the slaughter of the majority of European Jews during the Second World War.

Zertal wrote: “Israel…was, in its first, formative decade, a monument to selective amnesia and erasure of certain chapters in Jewish history that would have hindered its constituting effort and contradicted the state’s narrative of power and renewal…It was heroes’, not victims, time” (94). She observes that a national Holocaust Day and the establishment of the Holocaust Remembrance Authority (Yad Vashem) were not created at the outset of Israel’s existence. The past had to be “forgotten” to achieve nation-building, while heroic memories were created according to Ben-Gurion’s psychological national plan. The Eichmann case became part of Ben-Gurion’s “grand national pedagogy” (Zertal, 95).

The “hologram effect” was applied to transform the trauma of the Shoah into an affirmation of Israeli machismo. The Holocaust, [and] its victims, were to be the metaphor, “a terrible, sublime lesson to Israeli youth and the world that Jewish blood would never be abandoned or defenseless again.” Ben-Gurion, who ordered and planned the capture of Eichmann, guided the process of creating Israeli discourse of the Holocaust from the perspective of power. It was his finest hour. “Only two weeks before he announced Eichmann’s capture in the Knesset, he was an embattled, worn-out, and much criticized political leader… Now, once again… he was hailed as the great, historic Zionist leader” (Zertal,

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96-97).

Ben-Gurion merged two of the most powerful enemies and made public assertions linking Nazis and Arabs. He justified taking German reparations money because he needed it to keep “Nazi Arabs” from slaughtering Jews. Eichmann’s capture and arrival in Israel consolidated the linking of Nazis and Arabs as eternal enemies of Israel, with the Holocaust invoking existential threats as a means of nation-building.

According to Burg, it worked. “We have displaced our anger and revenge…from an old foe to a new adversary, and so we allow ourselves to live comfortably with the heirs of the German enemy—representing convenience, wealth and high quality—while treating the Palestinians as whipping boys” (94). The irony was not lost on the late Israeli social psychologist Dan Bar-On, who wrote “Germans, Israeli-Jews and Palestinians wish to move beyond victimhood: Some reflections on the possibility of displacement of aggression” (unpublished paper, 2007). The Jewish failure to retaliate and avenge themselves for the Shoah in the hearts and minds of many survivors’ and Jews transformed into a war against the Palestinians—who are perceived as an existential threat to Israel.

The Healing Process

The most sobering and humbling point of departure for most practitioners is the painful acknowledgment that not all traumatized people can be healed. Healing can only begin when the violence has stopped and the victim/survivor is safe from further threats of violence. That is not today’s reality. Israelis and Palestinians must refrain from violence to recover from fear of attack and annihilation, and recovery may take longer than anticipated because decades of shock and trauma may have created a time lag before the survivor/victim’s metaphorical “muscles” can relax the heightened sense of alarm and anxiety which has been normal for them. This process can also trigger new or long-repressed emotions: sadness and mourning for the losses, and shame for feeling vulnerable as well as for behavior during the decades of trauma and denial.

To start to heal, the traumatized person or collective must be recognized as a victim. Today, Israel insists on recognition as a “Jewish State” but also needs to be acknowledged as pure, innocent, victimized, and worthy of compassion. As long as that does not happen, the Israelis will continue to insist on it. If the Israelis don’t feel safe, they’ll remain in battle mode. As long as both sides

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see each other as perpetrators, the peace and healing both sides so urgently require won’t happen.

Conclusion

As therapists, we are intimidated by the overwhelming amount of untreated trauma on both sides. As human beings, if we allow ourselves—as some Israelis quoted above do—to see the nakedness of the emperor, we should be outraged by the decades-long appalling abuse of human rights by Israeli politicians and generals who used the Holocaust to support their actions.

Is Israel’s Holocaust Hologram a grandiose publicity trick, to generate good will for Israel? Does it distract people from noticing Israeli human rights abuses? Is it the seriously distorted thinking of deeply traumatized people, who waver between “borderline” attributes or even “schizophrenia”? Whom do we help with these diagnostic labels? We can each try to find our own position, possibly a schizophrenic one between compassion for the victim while confronting the perpetrator, both in the same entity.

[*Editor’s note: This article is extracted from a longer version that appeared in German in Peter Schulthess and Heide Anger, eds., Gestalt und Politik. Gesellschaftliche Implikationen der Gestalttherapie (2009). Normally, we have a rigid rule of originality in all languages, but an editor suggested that, given that the above argument is not covered in any other submission, we include this article.]

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