ג'סיקה בנג'מין, מתוך כנס חוצות "לחשוב את הטראומה מקרוב ומרחוק - מעין הסערה ומחוף נרעד", ספטמבר 2024

To begin, what I say here is coming especially from my particular experience and my identity as a diaspora Jew, specifically a Jewish person very strongly identified first, that is principally, as an American. And yet, at the same time, I am very saturated with my family history in the Jewish Pale in Eastern Europe and have spent years becoming more aware of it. On my father’s side, my first cousin’s son established a reunion website for us called, with some irony, The Happy Vilna Diaspora, which might give you a sense of how we are positioned and connected to our origins. My grandfather, who was a Zionist, and was blinded by illnesses he contracted repairing the clock towers in his city, traveled through the Pale giving lectures on Zionism, probably in the 1890s to the early 1900s. Sometimes, I imagine that he would be supportive of my view of things, given that most of his children became radicals: anarcho-syndicalists, communists or left leaning Zionists- but also that in his effort to set up a Yiddish publishing house, the one book that he managed to publish was called “Damenrecht,” which means “women’s rights.” Over a hundred years later the descendants of my grandfather remain unusually politically left and active by comparison with most other American Jews.

That legacy is only important to mention in order to express how the past that I carry may trace back to similar roots in Eastern Europe as many Israelis, but also took a very different shape, especially from those who survived the Holocaust. Also, it is a reminder of how the carrying of that history does include a great deal of mourning and grief for all the different promises of the last century that have gone into the dust. Through my parents and their friends as well as in my own life I have experienced the blossoming and shrinking of the most powerful political movements of the last century, meaning that I’ve been deeply affected by some victories but also by many failures and tragedies. I see what we’re living through now in both America and Israel, in American and in Jewish history, as tragic. I will not only be describing this as tragic but trying to think about what tragedy means in our context.

At the same time, because I have been so imbued with those ideas that moved many peoples to struggle for freedom and justice (to use shorthand), my mind inevitably seeks to create a vision of an alternative, even at a moment where we experience the tragic ending as if there were no alternative, no way out. I hope very much that I can transmit this vision and it can be received not in a spirit of saying “this is what you should do, or this is how we should act, or this is what must happen.”  I want to acknowledge that such visions can appear as mere abstraction, detached from what you experience when you are sitting underground in fear of being struck by a missile, when you are frightened not only for yourself but all the children, and not only your children but the even more violently threatened children and people of Gaza. It is important to recognize, as psychotherapists, that when we humans are dysregulated and frightened, we don’t actually have much access to a broader vision. It’s necessary for us to use our survival mind.  My remarks here should take account of but not appeal to that self-state or mind; rather appeal to that other mind that we’re fortunate enough to maintain at key moments, even ones where it is apparent that many people have lost their right mind entirely and operate only out of fear and hate. Obviously, there is more space for this mind here in America, and yet here too we witness many people losing the ability to admit to their responsibility for their own violence and reactivity to that of others—reactivity that has been politically manipulated to suppress freedoms we formerly expected to enjoy.

The Matrix and its Evolution

Before turning to a vision of alternative, what is the analysis I propose of the tragedy being played out in this moment, by Israel and its American accomplices and supporters? In the last few months, since the attacks began on Lebanon, and continued upon Syria, as the open plans for ethnic cleansing through starvation and continued bombing in Gaza have been discussed, the intentions of the Israeli state have become clear. And those intentions along with those actions have led the most important human rights institutions to declare them to constitute genocide on the people of Gaza.  There were many indications a year ago, in October 2023, of this outcome, and we in the US anticipated that this would make more likely the election of a fascist, which has also come true. In one sense, America is and will be an accomplice, deeply involved in your fate; in another sense, its government has actually co-created this fate. In both views, our fates are now intertwined more than ever before even as we suffer differently.

Despite this forewarning, the reality has been even more catastrophic than we could imagine; the refusal of any restraint has been more shocking and unprecedented than those who have experienced war and human rights violations could anticipate. So, despite months of witnessing this horror, I reacted strongly when I read in the news about Anthony Blinken pretending that he didn’t know about the reports from our State Department and our Agency for International Development that described in no uncertain terms the way that Israel is blocking aid and how he had then lied or performed this devious denial to the Congress (cooperating for the most part in believing the lie) in order to evade the law about withholding weaponry from countries that obstruct humanitarian aid. The boldness of the lies and denial was still shocking. But I reacted even more strongly to a sentence in that news story about how, not many miles across the border, there were truckloads of flour large enough to feed one and a half million people in Gaza for five whole months. When I read that, I felt a cold horror, and this feeling overcame me as I was speaking at the Hotsot event. I felt it was indeed devastating that my government can do this, devastating that with so much protest, we have not been able to stop it, and finally, devastating that the protests against this slaughter have been labeled as antisemitic. In particular, referring to this deliberate starvation as genocide, as did Omer Bartov, the prominent Israeli Holocaust historian, has been called antisemitic. There is, in other words, an unprecedented combination of live television coverage of the genocide and an organized multi-governmental campaign to deny what we are seeing with our own eyes and to condemn those who saw what they saw. This tragedy requires that we face and watch such horrors and devastation while simultaneously being threatened with persecution for refusing to disavow them and challenging the silence.

This condition of exposure to the arbitrary exercise of violence by the powerful involves the witnessing of what I would call transgression, thinking in theological terms. We—more constantly in the US than in Israel--witness daily a massive, unthinkable transgression against any law that human beings have developed to make a livable society among us. This spectacle is almost unbelievable even as our eyes behold it.

This unbearably painful sense of sin and transgression has led me to formulate the idea of tragedy, and when I use that word I would like you to hold in mind that I use the words in its classic sense-- events that unfold out of a major act of transgression against the morals or laws of a society. I am designating the original transgression as the Nakba, which, of course, encompasses many decisions and acts of harming, not a singular event or one dramatic action, though it certainly functions as the main cause of the unfolding history. Of course, this transgression was supported by many other nations, but also by the Jews of America who continue/ed to play a crucial role in the evolution. However, I think it’s fair to say that we keep returning to choice points that repeat and expand the transgression, until now when the catastrophe has been recreated with an intensity of bombardment never before seen directed at such an unprotected civilian population. 

The Tragedy

So let us consider this story as a tragic narrative. We have a Jewish homeland, that is meant-to-be a refuge for a recent violently devastated people, in the area called Palestine. That meant-to-be homeland was, in the beginning, not necessarily going to be a situation in which the other people who already inhabit it as their homeland would be so violently transgressed against. It seemed possible (at least to some well-known intellectuals) there were going to be some violations, but not the kind of major transgression that became clear when the Palestinian people were forbidden from returning to their own land, homes, villages and cities, and became refugees.  For the purpose of showing how this decision initiates an irrevocable movement of the history (a narrative construction that you may object to in part or whole), that major transgression is the beginning, the choice point where the protagonists make their fatal mistake. To switch metaphors for a moment, this can be seen as the point along the river where a block or obstruction gathers and thereby shifts the whole course of the river. This transgressive event becomes “that which needed to be acknowledged and repaired.”  In the logic of tragedy, which is also consonant with the logic of trauma and of psychoanalytic understanding, the very attempt to avoid or outrun a certain fate leads you right into it (as I said in “Our Appointment in Thebes”. Benjamin, 2018). By this tragic logic, each further attempt to avoid facing the consequences ties more tightly the knot of fate. In other words, each time you move away from your chance to repair, you go deeper into the transgression or “sin,” driving you toward the very catastrophic consequences you imagined you could avoid. As the historian Moshe Zimmerman (Haaretz December 29, 2023) put it, the powerful, militarized state that had been created in order to protect the Jewish people was now, on October 7, shown to have been utterly incapable of fulfilling its responsibility to provide that protection.

Whereas the initial intention was to formulate a society based on repudiating the victim identity in favor of the identity of strength, power and military force, at some turning point a need to justify the ongoing transgression led to an emphasis on the historical trauma that required repair through such force. The shift toward an identity of victimhood coupled with the idea of being hated by the world, developed in response to the loss of widespread international goodwill after the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and critiques from the countries of the Global South as well as their identification with Palestinian claims. In order to justify the now doubled transgression of occupying the West Bank and protect themselves from this opprobrium, the belief in their own unsafety pushed recall of responsibility for their own aggression further out of the consciousness of Jewish Israelis. The now intensified resistance and violence by Palestinian liberation groups fed the sense of entrapment in an impossible bind of being both victim and perpetrator. The belief that the state’s legitimacy, the “right of Israel to exist”, was being undermined from within or without led to a heightened sense of insecurity that impeded further reflection on the origins of that insecurity.

Although this account may abstract from some important details, I hope it will serve to identify the tragic line of a moral narrative, by means of which we might construct a psychological, metaphorical version of that history. In this version of history as drama, political choices assume a moral dimension, one that lines up with our emotional responses to harming, that sears our conscience, and sharpens the pain of lost possibilities. This dramatic version corresponds to our need for a narrative that speaks to the part of ourselves that revolts against the use of violence against the innocent, one that, from the witnessing standpoint of the tragic chorus, foregrounds the awe that great suffering inspires. In other words, the part of the self that witnesses the original transgression tracks the tragic events and ensures holding the burden of knowing their terrible consequences.

Viewed from the standpoint of the tragic chorus, October 7 was a moment of reckoning in which it became clear that all that sacrifice for the military state, to which people had entrusted their safety, could not forestall those consequences. Brutal repression ensures a cycle of revenge, one encouraged precisely in order to interfere with a lawful struggle for liberation. The state’s promise to prevent the harming that would arise from that choice could not be made good. The vengeful brutality of the attack was registered as the second Holocaust because it signified the return of the helplessness of the stateless condition that deprived the Jews of all defense and protection.  Almost immediately, spurious arguments begin in the Diaspora between people who insist on the context for Hamas’s savagery and those who are deeply offended by what appears as a shallow dissociative response—as if what was at stake were simply validation of the horror and not the future itself—that contained on the part of many a desperate magical thinking that invoking the chain of causality could halt the violence, restore sanity and prevent the horrific retaliation that would follow.

But if, as it seemed, the vow to destroy Hamas was meant to counter and transform the shock regarding the failure of protection (noted with fury by Breaking the Silence), that move would be crucial for preventing the exposure and absorption of the true meaning of this broken contract. In other words, those promises to now destroy the enemy would mobilize manic defenses against the helplessness and confusion stemming from the dreadful insight that threatens to emerge: about the fact that the State no longer exists to protect the people, rather the people exist to serve the state. This upending or rupture in the relation of the people to their state (king) might well cause an intolerable loss of the sense of safety and social cohesion around which belonging and identity are organized for Jewish Israelis (see Rozmarin, 2024). 

The State had become independent of the people’s aims without all but a small minority realizing it; a fact that is largely concealed for many even now, as they continue to obediently imagine it as their own instrument of revenge. And the State cannot even afford to acknowledge this failure; in fact, it does not even seem to feel obligated to repair and redeem its original function and contract by getting back the hostages, because it now has ends of its own. These ends neatly coincide with the view of the new zealots who see the state as their instrument of a higher destiny, for which they are prepared to sacrifice. Their dream is perceived as tragedy only by the few who protest.

 For any number of years, the state has functioned like an imperial monarch whose goal is regional dominance, including acquisition of the entire Greater Israel, to which end it has been willing to place its people in increasing danger. This matrix, as I will call it, depends on the people’s identification with the nation, symbolically formulated as the Jewish People or Zionism. Its currency is loyalty, and it is capable of violently overriding the people’s need for protection or what is experienced in the flesh by the hostages and their families as intolerable suffering.

In short, the Jewish life of the country of Israel is now the energy source serving the reified state entity that has become autonomous, a real-life version of the machines that draw thermodynamic energy from the dreaming humans in The Matrix. The humans do not realize they are being used, they believe and experience the dream as real.

 Analogously, the country of Israel, with all the good things that it had for its dominant majority (some of which exist even today), and the people within it, are now there to sustain the state, creating thermodynamic energy. The citizens of the country can’t fully take in the full ramifications of their condition, although some are deeply disturbed and protesting the fact that the state is outside their control and no longer democratic as well as objecting to sacrificing their children, husbands and brothers. Ironically, the less able they are to grasp how the state’s ambitions have nothing to do with their own needs, the less they grasp the paradox of how the state has created the very condition of unsafety whose consequences they suffer, the more they shirk the knowledge of the genocide and the apartheid occupation. Conversely, the less they face the state’s brutal oppression of their Palestinian countrymen, the more they believe in the necessity of the state’s military apparatus for their safety, the more they acquiesce in their own sacrifice.

The paradox that has come to a head pertains to the idea—born of Europe’s history of world war and imperial power-- that an ethnonational state with its own military was the indispensable condition for a homeland and a refuge, hence there must be an independent Jewish state corresponding to an ethnonational body. By degrees, the idea of the state eventually reversed its function: it became the rationale for an exercise of force and oppression that produced the intensified danger undermining that refuge. Thus, oppression led to more violence, which in turn served to justify the further exercise of force by the state. There is seemingly no escaping this bind or reversing this doer-done to logic, by which the pursuit of safety by force produces further unsafety. The State’s aim of dominance cannot be renounced as long as the people believe that this aim is a realistic solution rather than a cause (as in Netanyahu’s deliberate support of Hamas). The confusion of what is causing and what is solving the problem bears similarity to relations of abuser and abused, where the once-protector-now-abuser functions something like the object of disorganized attachment.   

Perhaps you think I have gone a bridge too far in arguing that the Israeli state has become the Matrix. To my mind there is a parallel between the US Government effort to lead Americans after the September 11 attack into war with Iraq, aided by the false story of “weapons of mass destruction,” which then led to creation of many more violent groups that have terrorized many places in the world. The comparison to the frightening and destructive acts of violence directed at Israelis by Palestinians, the vulnerability and fear it arouses, but also the ignorance as to how such attacks have been set up by the expansion of the occupation and settlements, the refusal to seek a peaceful agreement, all in the name of security., necessitated by the Other’s resistance to that very expansion: a double bind for the Palestinians. To this was added the usual colonizer rhetoric of dehumanization: “they only understand force.” This mimicking of the particularly European colonial stance of dehumanizing the Other by the European Jews, not only denied the rationality of the Other’s reaction to dispossession, it served to make these aggressive acts of dispossession seem rational rather than provocative. It allowed the Jews to identify with the Europeans, and the Europeans (the British) to seize upon them as an intermediate outpost to aid in controlling a vital region. This Faustian bargain was from the very beginning accepted willingly by those who would determine Israel’s fate.

It might appear to have required a dissociation of great magnitude to deny that Israel would face a similar fate to the colonial powers they imitated at the hands of those they dispossessed since so many direct declarations attested to the function of Israel for and its modeling on the Western imperial powers. At any rate, this imitation and mimicry, including dehumanization of the other, was a classic reversal, that is to say, unconscious or dissociated. Perhaps better thought of as dissociated -. The dynamic of reversal, whereby after successfully fighting for liberation, the victims begin to behave like their oppressors, is well known. Likewise, it is often precisely the victim’s belief that they are defending against further victimization by the dangerous object that obscures their identification with that object. The dynamic of this doer and done to complementarity, in which the only escape appears to be getting into the position of the other, seemingly prevents the subjects from engaging otherwise. We have observed how the defensive idea that one is merely reacting, as in “you made me do it,” has another unconscious meaning--that of being, as it were,  involuntarily enlisted to identify with the aggressor. This confusion of identity gets reproduced in the transference when patients who suffered traumatic abuse become accusatory and thus aggressive, as described by Ferenczi in his diaries (1988) and his famous paper on “Confusion of Tongues,” (1933/49) The doer-done-to form of enactment, in which the abused person’s defense seems to force the analyst into the role of abuser, has been described subsequently by relational analysts (Davies & Frawley, 1994) 

Thus, we do not restrict ourselves to a narrow political understanding of the Matrix as simply a metaphor for imperial Capital.  Because in this system, the State actually consists of a set of processes that must enlist the people, must keep evolving the idea of the nation to match the complex psychological conditions. My impression is that for Israelis, the external trauma experience of being violently invaded by a victim/perpetrator elicited a psychically violent repudiation of the preexisting internal ambivalence around having internalized/ identified with the aggressor. This repudiation demanded an urgent enforcement of rigid boundaries between the good, justified defense and the other’s illegitimate, evil aggression.  However, the dissociated aspect was that not merely the assault but the inexplicable failure of the state protection that for decades was meant to have distinguished Israeli identity from Jewish victimhood—while clearly recognized, the dissociation was related to its import in unleashing an overpowering uncanny sense of repeating a once-known helplessness. This intergenerational reliving of extreme helplessness, a condition described by Gampel (1998) regarding children of the Shoah who suffered the utter eradication of any connection to a protective person, may go some way to explain the complete shutdown of perceiving, let alone empathizing with, the suffering of the people in Gaza.

Thus, the psychological part played by the belief in the necessity of state military power as the only solution to the deeply feared victimization is not simply based on the present, and any attempt to contradict it arouses intense reactivity. Those who attempt to expose the damage being perpetuated are seen not only as denying the real and urgent danger - they are seen as causing the danger, and in turn accused of betrayal and disloyalty to leader and country. However, the paradoxical reversal whereby the solution generates further threat works not only because it does effectuate further traumatic violence but also because the fear is continually restimulated by propaganda that offers dominance as salvation.  Indeed, the state’s expanded regional attacks, as well as the complete devastation of Gaza, serve to affirm that reassuring dominance.

There are and must be reasons that the people remain in the grip of this dominance mentality, although I guess for most of us it has been a necessary and painful struggle to face this presence in real people who we care about. We ask ourselves why and how the dominance mentality takes over. Many years of reflection led me to the idea that a crucial dynamic associated with that of doer and done to is the dynamic of Only One Can Live. This is the belief that there is no way out of the choice between kill or be killed, take or be taken from, be elevated as the Dignified or denigrated as the Discarded.  It is notable that for some people, in the face of the supremely painful loss of a loved one, this mentality gives way to mourning, leading to such group formations as the Bereaved Families or the present nonviolent protest of the mothers of hostages, who illustrate Klein’s ideas about reparation—finding a way to recreate positive connection. In my thinking, this intersubjective repair that creates lawful relations through witnessing and acknowledging injury is a dimension of the moral Third. The moral Third is a position in which we can accept both our perpetrator and victim parts, acknowledge transgression we have enacted or suffered. When this Third breaks down, as tragedy teaches us, the law of talon—getting even—prevails; sacrifice and obedience replace justice.

For the Jewish Israelis, it would seem that the sacrifice of the hostages encapsulates the apotheosis of the tragic trajectory I proposed earlier. So let me pick up that thread and consider how this current tragedy relates to the mythology around sacrifice, in both the Jewish tradition and the Greek tradition.

 According to the founding Jewish mythology, God came to Abraham and told him that he had to sacrifice his son, and sure enough Abraham, out of the fear known as respect, obeys. Periodically, people mention this story in relation to how the older generation sends the younger ones to war (see Rozmarin, 2024.  In my reflections for this paper I wondered aloud about Abraham’s apparent willingness to obey and to sacrifice for God, and whether a mother would have been so willing. A good interlocutor friend objected that law does require obedience, perhaps enforced by punishment, to be maintained. Loss of God’s love or loss of belonging to the community would, after all, be a severe punishment. Sometime later, as I was reworking this talk for publication, the same friend sent me the article about Omri Boehm, the Israeli-German philosopher, who at a very young age argued that Abraham did not, in fact, obey God, that the Angel is a later invention, and that according to his character Abraham disobeyed God and demanded that He himself be subordinate to the highest law (Ahituv, Haaretz, 2024).  Disobedience to authority affirms the law worthy of its name, the law that places the value of life and love in the forefront—it applies to the king, the state, even God.

This transmission was extremely fortuitous because the idea of the law was the ultimate point of my discussion of tragedy, as we shall see, for the establishment of the law is the culmination of the Oresteia, the series by Aeschylus. The drama begins with the king of Myceneae Agamemnon’s decision to sacrifice his daughter Iphegenia despite the protest of the mother, Clytemnestra, in order to assuage the goddess Diana and thus set free his ships to pursue the Trojan war-- which was supposedly fought to recapture Helen and thus restore honor.  We might consider this action, which was carried out, to reflect the autocratic power of the king (kings famously used their power selfishly, unjustly, chaotically and did not hesitate to exact from others the price of life, hence their grandiosity could be fatal to others). No lawful God being present, the war and the cycle of revenge proceed. Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon upon his return, their son Orestes returns to murder his mother Clytemnestra.

So to return to the tragic logic, the question for the third play, called the Eumenides, becomes whether justice demands that now Orestes be punished by death at the hands of the Furies. The Furies represent the old idea of justice as revenge, as in making things even, a life for a life. But now an intercession takes place, where the goddess Athena organizes a trial with the citizens as jury.  Her action is ambiguous, as she breaks the tied jury in favor of Orestes, the rights of the father, and rejects the matriarchal Furies who are incensed and threaten the city with barrenness. Athena, however, restores their honor by offering them the position as patron goddesses of the city, adored and respected, now called the Kindly Ones, the Eumenides.  The aim is to establish a law of justice, to replace retaliation with judgment and vengeance with peace, and thereby ending the long sequence of violence in the family and the community at large.

Not being an expert in Greek history and culture or tragedy, I believe I can nevertheless find an idea of a lawful Third in this tragedy. As I see it, in the face of injustice Clytemnestra’s rageful act only serves to continue the violence and revenge, she does not succeed in establishing an alternative power for the mother. For when she has a chance to defend herself in front of Orestes, she shows no empathy for his loss, no remorse for taking away his father, no horror at her own bloody actions. However, inasmuch as the Furies represent the mother and her claims, they are allowed to renounce vengeance in her stead and so become a source of goodness. Seemingly, this requires them to accept that the injustice and loss of the past are irrevocable, crimes that cannot be undone--they can only be prevented in the future by ending the cycle of violence. However, the maternal function and its goodness are preserved. The tragedy of Clytemnestra, as woman and mother, ends on a redemptive and hopeful note as a moral Third of judgment replaces pure talon.

Accepting loss and seeking to repair the destruction requires the depressive position of mourning, the movement from vengeful doer and done to into the Third of the lawful world. Vengeance is the attempt to undo what cannot be undone; to reverse doer and done to; to avoid loss. Yet, there is a further step required to move from getting even to reconciliation, to universalist justice that ends the acceptance of oppression whether by patriarchy, the state, the nation to which one belongs or the god one is ordered to obey.

Let me be clear—I see this tragedy as relevant for Jewish Israelis, not Palestinians, who are sacrificed on the altar of the State and allowed enough weaponry only to be vengeful—allowed to act out in a way that justifies massive repression but not to attain freedom or justice. The world powers do not obey or enforce international law, nor do they renounce the manic nationalism that fed the dreadful carnage of the imperialist World War I, in turn resulting in the even more horrific and massive violence of the vengeful defeated Germans. The chief imperial god, the US, rather blocked the very institutions meant to provide the new form of justice and peace, that it had supposedly ratified. The idea of international law was now exposed as a ruse for controlling the Other, not a requirement for the Western imperial subject. In this more fully lawless world, having inflicted such violence and dire loss upon another people, the Israeli people found themselves ever more in danger of being pariahs while for Palestinians there was neither acknowledgment nor reparation.

To sum up. The experience of immense vulnerability after October 7 was not dealt with by attempting to find safety by dealing with the conditions that caused the violence, by interventions that would ensure that Israelis could live in peace. No moral third, no end to the dynamic of doer and done to. Instead, the victims are offered encouragement for a boundless vengeance; genocide becomes the culminating move in the tragedy, receiving approbation from the Furies, the lawless imperial powers. The Matrix now receives an enormous influx of energy as it harnesses the desire for vengeance and the fantasy of restitution.

For the Greeks, it appeared that this intoxicating desire and the associated ecstatic thrill of righteousness and power is what delivers the tragic figures over to the impulse to harm and destroy. However, observers in Israel often note not the sadism but the widespread dissociation regarding the immense horror of Gaza, even among democracy protesters and advocates for the hostages.  While this has often been attributed to the fact that Israelis do not see images of the Gazan people suffering on their screens, and instead view constant replays of the horror of October 7, I have suggested one reason for this dissociation, related to the inability to reconcile the identification with the extreme helplessness of the Shoah, caused by the failure of the state,  with the identification with the aggressor manifest in their current aggression. But I see yet another deeply tragic element: the unconscious wish for a do-over.  The constant evocation of the Holocaust and refusal of any other solution than wiping out the enemy, reflects the need for a manic reparation of powerlessness. This massive exertion of force expresses the intergenerationally transmitted reaction to being made utterly helpless and unable to take action in the Holocaust. This reaction is both known and yet not known: the pain is known, but the hidden-in-plain-sight fantasy of giving it back to the Germans is disavowed. The mobilization (not for the first time) is experienced in the social imaginary as a completion of the blocked action, even as it serves to discharge tension in the present—as when victims are encouraged in somatic therapy to complete the action of pushing away the abuser.  

The experience of an uncanny fulfillment of a command from the past was called by Aprey (2014) the “urgent voluntary errand.” It creates a sense of destiny; the collective action is felt to be sanctified by the trauma bond that demands only this form of repair. My take on this comes from having witnessed the German postwar generation in the grip of a fantasy that they could and must undo their elders’ complicity, must complete the action of fighting and resisting fascism by enacting violence against the State. This is sometimes, too simplistically, referred to as mass psychosis. It is as if the events of the past generated a wave that only now reaches you with its irresistible emotional force to which it is finally a relief to surrender. Paradoxically, you have become one with history and its charge –It Must Be—you submit to the demand for sacrifice while believing you are obeying a higher law. This collapse of past and present was part of the compelling force of fascism, and this is how it appears to be working for one large part of the Israeli society.  

Much has been written about reversal, the repair of previous powerlessness that constitutes (by mimicking what one previously suffered) a false repair of the self, the nation as self.  But at what point does the judgment of the witnessing world join with the split-off part of the self that knows they have been driven by fear to justify doing terrible things? When the dialectic of reversal turns one into a perpetrator in the eyes of the world so that it threatens the legitimacy of one’s own victim identity?  Where does sanity lie? The movement from dissociation to conflict would confront the insistence for recognition of victim identity with the opposing identification with the suffering of the other who is sacrificed on the altar of one’s own ostensible security.  However, the Matrix has it figured out. It has ensured that the urge to complete and the need to compete for recognition of one’s own suffering become the organizing principle for group cohesion. The trauma bond itself now provides a sense of safety in group cohesion for the nation/people and feeds the politics of serving the State, whose protection still seems indispensable. As was demonstrated in fascism, such collective desires for restitution fused with projection—that is, mystification regarding the internal origins of the brokenness-- impels people to pursue an ideal of wholeness, strength, and power by mobilizing against the external threat. The result is that a nation of victims can be organized by the State into a collective primed for reversal of doer and done to, ready to inflict the same destruction upon the Other of Blame.

In this way deep psychic processes pull for the justice of talon, “getting even”-- and repel the justice of protecting the vulnerable and innocent, of turning to the law of nations rather than violence for redress and safety. In this ultimate transgression, the victim is “forced” to defend themselves; aggression is not really aggression; one’s own action is always a reaction; violation is refigured as justice—the justice of vengeance. The assertion of rights, laws, order is seen as a ruse of the Other’s will to power, indeed a threat to the singularity of victimhood that for the victim appears to be the only basis for recognition, which is necessary as affirmation of the (formerly denied) right to exist. The unconscious belief of all persecutors/victims is the idea that Only one can live. This idea and the externalized competitive struggle for recognition, to which the outside world accedes, are mutually reinforcing. [1]

Of course, most of this is well known, however, it bears emphasizing that within this largely closed system, the universal values of justice and dignity for all would appear to oppose rather than create safety. No small part—how much I cannot say—is played by the effects of what Sadek (2024) has called “the militant field,” the unconscious symmetry of the doer and done to relation that leads many Palestine advocates to believe they must refrain from ethical critique of Hamas and other violent actors who do not take responsibility for harming, including the massive destruction unleashed upon their own people by triggering such deep trauma in the Israelis (Sadek, 2024). Sadek points to a similar dynamic of reversal among militarized liberation movements as observable in Israeli history that includes the demand for uncritical loyalty (the violence of belonging that Rozmarin [2024] had pointed to) and suppression of freedom to think. Long, painful, I should say disastrous experience has led those of us connected to the history of liberation movements to a mediated appreciation of the humanistic position as a hard-won moral Third that upholds universalism of human rights in dialectical tension with the particularism of struggles against the hegemony of the West.

In this moment, when nationalist aims have assumed such dangerous and violent forms, upholding the universal of human rights rather than the particularist language of liberation seems very much to the advantage of the oppressed, the Gazan Palestinians subjected to genocide. It seems to me, therefore, that a primary move in this struggle has to do with the reaffirmation of universalism and its practical expression in the ideas of human rights and international law. But thinking psychoanalytically, the foregoing discussion of tragedy and the later thoughts about justice and universalism lead us to the necessity of mourning certain ideas and hopes we may have held dear. For instance, we may conclude that the period in which a singular ethnonational polity and culture could be enjoyed is over, for it is now being exploited to feed the State which is harming the people, creating chaos and misery, undermining the country it was meant to protect. In mourning this Ioss, if honest, we might include renouncing the superiority that Jews only recently attained in becoming White and Western, no longer the Other, as well as all the benefits, privileges, and satisfaction that come from being implicated in regimes of domination. There is pleasure in homogeneity, I know, but in the culture I come from there is an alternative pleasure in feeling the human bond with others not like the self; there is uplifting fulfillment in the polity and multi-ethnic culture based in universalism, for which there is inspiration in both Jewish history and the positive side of European enlightenment, liberalism, socialism, and democracy. (When you miss your national anthem - try listening to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the international anthem celebrating brotherhood/sisterhood.) Speaking psychoanalytically, we can move from a Kleinian idea of giving up the fantasy of omnipotence with depressive mourning to the Winnicottian idea of replacing it with loving the Other, who cannot be controlled and therefore is not destroyed.

To continue in that vein, let us think about how we might come to grips with the unconscious driver of the tragic transgression—the fantasy of repair and restitution by fighting the last war.  According to the tragic logic, embracing the Law is the alternative to sacrificing for a state that is meant to protect by attaining independent access to the means of violence but winds up endangering the people.  Psychologically, I understand this to be the moral Third, with the Third here meaning a position that holds in tension the current contradiction between self and other, and moral referring to an equal weighting of needs and responsibilities to self and other.  

The dissociation that followed the aggression of the Nakba, the unlinking of what you have suffered from the suffering you inflict, led to an affirmation of the Jewish people’s heretofore suppressed aggression while denying its actual effects—the original transgression.

By contrast, real acknowledgment means owning one’s own actions in relation to the moral Third, not in invidious comparison to what the Other did. It requires a form of self-forgiveness constituted by understanding acceptance. Such understanding is not self-justification, and does not involve shoving blame back and forth. This Moral Third of acknowledgment replaces the morality of blame and the justice of talon—you against me--with a vision of real repair. To get rid of victimhood as ideology requires true recognition of all suffering, including one’s own. The suffering you have caused and the suffering behind your actions, formerly dissociated, must now be linked. Bearing this knowledge of one’s own destructive action is called remorse, and it is truly an agonizing feeling.  

Let us briefly refer to the idea of a Truth and Reconciliation process. Reparation regarding truth requires full acknowledgment of harming and admission of guilt, thus embodying a fundamental and universal principle of recognition. Recognizing the violation of the other’s rights and offering repair means that the principle of human rights is made real. Further, the actual suffering of the other must be recognized and made good, that is, acknowledgment requires emotional embodiment to transform peoples and cultures. This, in turn, requires a step less known to Western peoples, that of reconciliation. The latter, incorporated in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committees, as well as many other indigenous traditions, such as that of sulha (صلح), in Palestinian and other Arab cultures, includes forgiveness and the ending of violence. Perhaps there is a similarity to the idea of ending violence through the law that was presented by Athena, since in lieu of retribution, which culminates in real sacrifice, there is instead an offering that symbolizes the sacrifice, preventing the sacrifice of another human, thereby literally diminishing violence. [2] However, the TRC and the Rwandan gachacha emphasize that the reparative act shows the vulnerability of the perpetrator, their dependence upon the victims’ acceptance of this act, and thus show how it is the victims who give the perpetrators back their humanity. The perpetrators’ inability or unwillingness to admit that in dehumanizing others—turning them into collateral damage, undeserving “animals,” sacrificial objects-they have lost their own humanityץ

This brings me in conclusion to the all-important matter of dehumanization. When I was giving this talk, I expressed regret at not being able to link to what Nur was going to talk about. This however turns out not to be true. Her reference to extreme dehumanization in the beginning of her talk should be our guide and our theme, a call for recognition that I wish to answer now that I have collected myself. What I want to add now therefore is that the true reparation that is required is not merely acknowledgment of the Nakba and all the subsequent acts of violence and dispossession, above all the mass extermination being perpetrated now. What underlies these actions is the extreme dehumanizing that is producing the horror Nur spoke about, extreme dehumanization. What I mean to say is that witnessing and receiving the testimony of this extreme suffering is only one part of what we need to do. The other part is playing a role in challenging the dissociation by which Israel has always seen itself as part of the very imperial Europe that victimized and othered the Jews, subjecting them to extreme dehumanization without coming to their aid (bombing the gas chambers) —after which the other European states and those controlling Germany, like the US, offered them no permanent refuge but happily sent them off to another continent, to seize other people’s land. At this point, infected with the viral stance of othering both through having been attacked by it and by now assuming the role of Europeans in Palestine, the dehumanizing attitude took on a life of its own in Israel. But this has been true for many others who were initially colonized or dehumanized by the imperial powers, as for instance the Hutu agitators who inspired the genocidaires with declamations that Tutsis were cockroaches.  

Dehumanizing is the crime that permits and justifies and drives all other crimes. But as we have seen, there are psychic processes that cause victims to do the opposite, and political forces ready to make use of it, especially a history of European colonialism whose motto could well have been ”exterminate the brutes.”   Being subjected to extreme dehumanization is how Gampel described the people who had lived through the camps. For me, the spectacle of total dehumanization being inflicted on the Palestinians of Gaza, going so far as to strip people naked in detention and so terrifyingly replicating the conditions of the ghetto –as Masha Gessen (2023) rightly called it- is maddening and excruciating to witness. Every torn body and agonized face we see bears the stamp of deliberate dehumanizing.

Once we have acceded to put others in the place of our own helpless, trapped ancestors who had no recourse to any human intervention, their own or others, we have severed our bond with them, our commitment to them. Insofar as the legitimacy of the Zionist project rested on the European experience of antisemitism, constantly invoked in America as well, that history has actually been reduced to a rationale for reversal, and those who promote or comply with this reversal have accepted being merely its zombie remnants. Or, perhaps better said, assuming the zombie form in regard to their enemy while retaining a live passion for their own. This splitting creates the bizarre dissociated state that allows the widespread indifference noted by so many people; in other words, in regard to the genocide, this reaction might perhaps be said to unconsciously mimic the “death in life” (Lifton, 1967) of survivors. In other words, a kind of collective beta fragment that preserves an intergenerational residue of the extreme dehumanization suffered by our ancestors.

What can be done? I was asked. Raising consciousness might feel ineffective but it is absolutely crucial to establish in what remains of the liberal public sphere a continual disturbance of the assumptions on which dehumanizing acts and beliefs are based: for instance, that in order to survive evil must be perpetrated, we must become the monsters we formerly abjured and claim to be fighting, and thus undo our own humanity. This self-corruption has to be exposed, along with the severe mental health consequences for those who have been forced to carry out these dreadful deeds. To raise consciousness means to mobilize the self states that are capable of acknowledging harming and thus feel the enlivening and humanizing impulse to make reparation. The change to repair is, if only for a brief moment, being offered by the ceasefire.

Politically, of course, some of us are able to take the risk of declaring that we stand with the ICC, with the UN resolutions, with the condemnations of genocide; we can support those who are being fired, attacked, persecuted for taking a position against the genocide. But perhaps more important for us, in our field, is to talk about dehumanization, and about acknowledging the active process of dehumanizing that separates us from life. In my view, dehumanizing as an action is the underlying theme to be addressed. We can refuse to allow the indifferent numbness of dissociation to glide by, to let what it hides slither by in the dark. Shine a bright light upon it. Chant it out loud at demonstrations, talk about it quietly with those you care about, paint it in murals, write it on every media platform, chant or sing about it: Stop Dehumanizing Now.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahituv, N. 2024. Interview with Omri Boehm. Haaretz, December 14, 2024.

Aprey, M. 2014. A Pluperfect Errand: A Turbulent return to Beginnings in the Transgenerational Transmission of Destructive Aggression. Free Associations 66: 15-28.

Benjamin, J. 2018. Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third.  London & New York: Routledge.

Davies, J. & Frawley, M. 1994.  Treating the Adult Survivor of Sexual Abuse; A Psychoanalytic Perspective. New York Basic Books

Gampel, Y. 1998. Reflections on Countertransference in Psychoanalytic Work with Child Survivors of the Shoah. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry, 26: 343-368.

Gessen, M. 2023. In the Shadow of the Holocaust. The New Yorker. December 2023.

Lifton, R. 1967. Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. New York: Random House.

Rozmarin, E. 2024 Belonging and its Discontents. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 34, 3: 250-263.

Sadek, N. 2024 Militant Fields and Freedom in Israel-Palestine. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 34, 3: 264-279.