palestinian suffering: some personal, historical, and psychoanalytic reflections

Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 7: 197–208 (2010)Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps

International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic StudiesInt. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 7(3): 197–208 (2010)Published online in Wiley Online Library(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/aps.252

Palestinian Suffering: Some Personal, Historical, and Psychoanalytic Refl ections

ADIB JARRAR

ABSTRACT

This paper reminds the “share holders” of the international psychoanalytical enterprise of their collective responsibility towards a major social, national and moral injustice that has been grasping the attention of the remaining world for many decades. This involves the suffering of the Palestinian people who are under a brutal siege of occupa-tion, intimidation, and disenfranchisement. Lacking a world-endorsed nationhood, threatened in the preservation of their culture, barred from travel, used and abused by Arab regimes, and, often ignored by the international community, the Palestinians strive to save their dignity – sometimes by political praxis and at other times by violent resistance. This paper offers a description of this national/political/humanitarian tragedy in the hope of enhancing knowledge, engendering empathy, and mobilizing reparative action. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Key words: Nakba, occupation, peace process, settlements, refugees

The continuous suffering of the Palestinian people, their displacement, denigra-tion, humiliation, attacks on their identity and dignity deserve the attention of the psychoanalytic profession. A major cause of ongoing suffering for Palestinians, in the collective psyche as a nation and as individuals in their daily life, particu-larly in the occupied territories, is their recognition that both Israeli consecutive governments and institutions attempt to subjugate Palestinians to their will and force them willy-nilly to live and die accordingly in every aspect of their lives, which constitutes a constant struggle and war of confl icted wills and choices. Their quest for freedom from oppression, their hope for a better future, and their search for justice also demand notice. In indirect ways, these matters touch upon the role of politics, power and social “objectivity” in psychoanalysis. They pose a challenge to this discipline and ask whether it can dare to name, acknowledge and confront its masked biases, prejudices, and even what might be its disguised racism. This is both an intellectual and ethical challenge, addressing whether

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this well respected community can tolerate revisiting its prevalent but ques-tionable basic assumptions about the nature of the Palestinian–Israeli–Arab confl ict.

Before proceeding further, I alert the reader to the fact that I am not going to offer any magical solution to this continually unfolding and bloody cycle of hatred, violence and dehumanization. I am, however, authentically eager to convey a sense of hope in spite of all odds, diffi culties and obstacles. This approach partially stems from my perception that this very long, “paranoid posi-tion” is beginning to show signs of fatigue, and out of desire to move into the much needed “depressive position” (Klein, 1940) in light of the recognition that enough is more than enough. In this paper, I offer my own reading and percep-tion of this confl ict and some speculation for a potentially realistic resolution.

The essence of the Israeli–Palestinian confl ict has never been religious. The confl ict is not between Muslims and Jews, as some tend to believe. It is not even a dispute over a territory. It is a protest against a post-modern colonialist project of creating an exclusive national entity for the Jewish people by eliminating and replacing the existence of Palestine. Many Israelis do not share this perception and believe that they need to have their national home and to build a Jewish and democratic state as a response to a long history of persecution and oppres-sion particularly in Europe.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF PAIN

Allow me to begin with a brief review of some historical events to set up the context that keeps shaping daily reality both for Palestinians and Israelis alike. Although we cannot draw symmetrical lines of “truth” concerning the two peoples, we can say that they are both psychologically imprisoned for different reasons by their own narratives, memories, recollections, losses, pain, fears, anger, and perceptions of this confl ict. For Palestinians and to all Arabs to a certain degree, the loss of Palestine, fi guratively their own paradise, was both displacement and replacement by an invading hostile group; reversal of this trau-matic reality is very diffi cult, and currently unattainable (Awad, 2007).

In writing about fantasies shared by members of a large group, (Kemberg, 1980; Anzieu, 1984) claim that large groups represent idealized mothers (good breast) who repair narcissistic injuries and that external processes which threaten the image held by group members of an idealized mother can lead to political and confl ictual processes. Palestinians hold the image of Palestine both as the lost Paradise and caring and loving mother. Palestinian and Arab poetry and novels refer to Palestine always with this kept image. It seems to me that Palestinians preserve unconsciously their “mother land” as idealized mother who is not capable of healing their wounds in spite of their displacement, oppression, humiliation, and deportation.

In May 2010, both Israelis and Palestinians marked the 62nd anniversary of an experience which has adversely impacted both these peoples, the Middle East,

199Palestinian suffering


and the entire world: the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. This well designed though violent project brought on the ruin of the indigenous Palestinian people and created the Nakba (catastrophe, in Arabic), and the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem (Said, 1979; Khalidi, 1984; Morris, 1987, 1990/1999; Beit-Hallahmi, 1992).

In order to avoid reference to the original sins committed in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century (by early Jewish immigrants) and since the Nakba (brought about by “Israelis”), Israeli politicians and lay people tend to focus upon recent actualities as if the confl ict began only yesterday. In contrast, Palestinians admit that they were naïve in not realizing the profound threat posed to them by Theodore Herzl’s (1860–1904) vision. The founder of the Zionist movement, Herzl gave voice – at the fi rst Zionist congress in Basil, Switzerland in 1897 – to his dream of an exclusive national home for the Jewish people in “a country without people for people without a country”. Herzl’s statement followed by a well conceived and planned project, embraced by the Zionist movement and the state of Israel in a later stage, constituted a murderous fantasy, and later, actions taken to exterminate the Palestinians. Herzl’s ideology and the consequent mili-tary power of the State of Israel, and it’s creation of the Nakba, constitute and have embedded in them the psychological denial of the physical, national, social, and cultural existence of the indigenous Palestinian people. I believe (and many share this perception) that the seeds of this still unfolding bloody confl ict were planted in this 1897 Congress which denied the mere existence of the Palestinians as a people, without any empathy or concern for their own desires, hopes, struggles, fears, dreams and aspirations.

Historically and until the beginning of the 20th century, Jews in Palestine were less than 5 percent of the total population. The 1948 war drastically trans-formed the demographic, cultural, and ethnic composition of the country. More than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled by force or fl ed in horror and terror to neighboring Arab countries seeking “temporary” refuge and safety. Only 116,000 of them (about 10 percent of Israel’s total population at the time), stayed under the Israeli military government till 1966; their living conditions were harsh even though they were offi cially granted citizenship of Israel (Morris, 1987; 1990/1999; Beit-Hallahmi, 1992/1993). The newly-born Israel took over 78 percent of historic Palestine. Jordan annexed the West Bank of the Jordan River, and Egypt administered the Gaza strip. Israel has never ceased until this very day its ethnic cleansing, and intensifi ed it after its victory in the 1967 war. Sixty-two years after the Palestinian Nakba, today there are 1.3 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, 2.5 million in the West Bank including East Jerusalem and 1.5 million in the Gaza Strip; a total of 5.3 million in addition to more than 4 million in the Arab countries and the Diasporas; while Israel has about 5.5 million Jews including a half million settlers in the Palestinian occu-pied territories.

The Israeli policy of ethnic cleansing and expansion of settlements since 1948, during which more than 400 Palestinian towns and villages have been

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destroyed, did not exclude their lands and orchards, particularly old olive trees. They were uprooted from their lands in front of sad and outraged eyes, and replanted in Israeli parks and gardens which are often named after Jewish-American and European donors and foundations. This act of aggression has had a profound economic impact on the families who depend on this source of income. In addition, it has had an emotional impact on them since olive trees have sacred symbolic signifi cance for the Palestinians representing attachment to their ancestral lands, their heritage and are the symbol of peace.

Another obstacle preventing the Palestinians from working through the confl ict is that hostility continues to be directed at them by different Israeli governments as well as by many Israeli political and ideological groups. The Israelis are supported in their stance by (i) the American administrations, (ii) the lack of tangible impact of the international community and, (iii) the pas-sivity and collusion of the Arab world. In spite of strong public sentiment for solidarity and identifi cation with Palestinians, most Arab governments have been using and abusing the Palestinian issue for their own interest. While they often support Palestinians fi nancially, their fi erce determination to prevent dem-ocratic developments in their own countries results in only lip-service political solidarity with the Palestinian political cause. Palestinians experience the fl ash-back of their original traumas through the prism of the current frequent acts of killing, torture, physical and emotional harm, oppression, imprisonment, domi-nation and occupation, confi scation of lands and properties, and house demoli-tions. Their “dehumanization” (Akhtar, 2003) at the hands of Israelis has been profoundly traumatic indeed. Continued threats (real and imagined) of displace-ment by the Israelis reinforce their existing fears and the unresolved memories of 1948 and the events that followed (Awad, 2007).

Perhaps the most major secondary trauma among these after the Arab defeat of 1967, was constituted by the hostility and aggression endured by Palestinians during the fi rst Intifada or Palestinian popular uprising (1987–1993) that was ended by the Oslo accords of 1993. They brought a state of elation, hope, dreams of prosperity on both sides after a long time, during which both Palestinians and Israelis were blinded by the enormity of their own bereavement without the recognition of the other’s torment. Soon the bubble of enthusiasm burst and bit by bit matters returned to the usual state of affairs. More political deadlocks occurred leading to the second Intifada (2000–2003) that cost numerous lives which overwhelmingly were those of Palestinians. Matters kept worsening. General elections among Palestinians were held in 2006 but when Hamas won, the results were declared void by outside forces. Violence followed when Israel totally blocked the Gaza Strip from the external world since 2007, making a big and open prison. The proportion of the Israeli population supporting violence against Palestinians steadily increased. The recent 2008 war in Gaza – with 13 Israeli and 1400 Palestinian casualties – revealed that 85 percent of Israelis sup-ported the atrocities committed against Palestinian civilians, explaining their stance on the basis of fear of annihilation by the Hamas rockets. The public and



the media rallied around and watched the massive destruction of the Gaza strip with a justifi ed sense of gratifi cation and joy. Tragically, it seems that many Israelis jump with enthusiasm as the tanks attack and fi re upon Palestinian civilians including children and women. Then they want to provide heart-breaking accounts about their suffering and run to the media to white wash their atrocities.

After 19 years of dead-end negotiations and bloody skirmishes, there is an increasing sense among Palestinians and Israelis alike of losing belief in the power of both peace and war to solve the Palestinian–Israeli confl ict. They seem blocked. The Palestinians doubt if the international community will truly have an impact in their favor. The Israelis are loathe to relinquish their domination and control while keeping talk of peace. Both sides are in a state of disillusion-ment in which nationalism, socialism, religious fundamentalism and other ide-ologies have betrayed the faith people had put into efforts for a better life. The daily life of Palestinians has deteriorated with more check-points, and more than double the number of Israeli settlers from 100,000 to 500,000 in the occupied Palestinian territories. Further confi scations of Palestinian land and the putting of facts on the ground into irreversible reality, e.g., the settlements, have increased the despair and rage of all Palestinians. This painful process has culminated in the notorious siege of the Gaza Strip since 2007, and the collective punishment imposed by Israel with brutal consequences to the well being of Palestinians. However, Israel has enjoyed economic growth by the return of foreign investors and the development of the tourism industry, while still suffering from a lack of safety and national security.

Palestinian citizens of Israel are also suffering increasingly. A recent annual report by the Israeli Association for Civil Rights (2007) reveals that racist inci-dents against Arab citizens by Israeli Jews rose 26 percent in 2006. The change of attitudes (from 2005 to 2006) of Israeli Jews toward their fellow Palestinian citizens on a number of issues is frightening. An increase of hatred is reported in 7 issues: from 39.5 percent in 2005 to 51 percent in 2006 of Israelis support transfer of Palestinian citizens outside Israel; from 26 percent to 42 percent support denying Palestinians their right to vote; from 17.5 percent to 30.7 percent feel hatred toward the Arabic language; from 59 percent to 75 percent are dis-gusted to hear Arabic; from 40.6 percent to 55.6 percent support segregation of Arabs and Jews in entertainment places like bars, and restaurants; from 32.3 percent to 50.4 percent are not ready to allow Arabs to visit their homes; and from 67.6 percent to 75.3 percent of Israelis object to Arabs living in the same building with them. Poverty rates are four times higher among the state’s Palestinian citizens in comparison to Israeli Jews. According to Mossawa (“equal-ity” in Arabic), a Palestinian advocacy group in Israel, Palestinian citizens are discriminated against in all spheres of life, except paying taxes. The group cited a recent Israeli civil service report that had indicated that less than 8 percent of the country’s civil service workforce is made up of Palestinians who make up 20 percent of the total population of Israel.

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THE DESTRUCTION OF MEMORIES

Not only did the Israelis carry out a campaign of ethnic cleansing, they did all they could to erase the memories of the Palestinians in their own country. According to the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe (2005),

One of them is physical and has to do with place names. In the original ethnic cleans-ing of Palestinians that took place in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled, the names of towns were changed. Towns were physically wiped out and reduced to rubble, and then planted over with European pine trees. The idea was at once to wipe out the past, to make it like it never existed, and simultaneously to change a Mediterranean, Arab village into a European forest. It was the Jewish National Fund (JNF) that planted these pine trees, to wipe out the memory of the place and Europeanize it. (p. 1)

This process of erasing the memory of Palestinians reached a climax during and after the 1948 war but it continues till this day. Palestinians fl ed in fear, were expelled, or as some people would say, “ethnically cleansed” (Khalidi, 1984; Pappe, 2006). This process was widely researched and documented by Palestinian and Arab scholars such as Khalidi and many others. However, it was not acknowledged nor received legitimacy either in Israel nor the West until the new Israeli historian, Benny Morris (1987) presented a thorough account of the Palestinian exodus based on declassifi ed Israeli, British, and American archives. Nevertheless, the gap between the two narratives remains wide. While Israelis claim the Palestinian refugee problem was born out of war and not by design, Palestinians categorically refute this version, asserting that this was the inevi-table outcome of the plan to evacuate the country of its native people in order to create the state of Israel (Said, 1979; Khalidi, 1984; Khalidi, 1992; Pappe, 2005; Pappe, 2006). Supporting the Palestinian position is the fact that Israel has always refused the return of the refugees in spite of a number of United Nations (UN) resolutions. This raises an interesting question: Who defi nes truth and reality testing? Does an event happen when it occurs in actuality? Or does it happen only when an Israeli or a Westerner records it? (Awad, 2007). And if so, does this not constitute a refl ection of racism and continued colonial supremacy?

The process of erasing the memory of Palestinians’ existence on their own land, did not remain limited to places, properties, mosques, and churches of the living but expanded to include the dead, by destroying many Muslim cemeteries. Currently, for example, Israeli authorities, with the fi nancial cooperation of the renowned Simon Wiesenthal Center, are planning the construction of the Museum of Tolerance on the historic 12th century Mamilla Muslim cemetery in the holy city of Jerusalem. Mounting some international opposition and the stark irony of celebrating tolerance while destroying others’ culture does little to stop the process. Descendants of individuals buried in the Mamilla Cemetery have mobilized a public petition against the disinterring of thousands of Muslim



ancient graves and removal of hundreds of human remains from part of the important and historic Muslim Cemetery and Palestinian cultural heritage site in order to construct a Museum of “Tolerance”.

This cemetery has been a Muslim burial ground and holy site since as early as the 7th century ad, when companions of the Prophet Muhammad were reput-edly buried there. In addition, numerous Sufi saints and thousands of other offi cials, scholars, notables, and Jerusalemite families have been buried there over the last 1000 years. The cemetery was an active burial ground until 1948, when the new State of Israel seized the Western part of Jerusalem and the cemetery fell under Israeli control.

Through the past nineteen years of futile negotiation of what is wrongly called the “Peace Process”, since the Madrid conference of 1991, Palestinians have been facing Israeli greed and deception with a sense of abject helplessness and frustration. Since the 1980s, they have shown a willingness to accept that their Palestine could be in less than 22 percent of their historic land; and that, too, would happen provided Israel withdrew to the pre-1967 borders. They worked to establish an independent and viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital (Said, 1994, 1995). This is on top of the daily humiliations and aggression by Israeli soldiers, offi cials and settlers in the occupied territories. For example, in the Gaza strip, 1.5 million Palestinians, half of whom are under the age of 15 years old, live in dense refugee camps where they have repeatedly experienced curfews, night raids by Israeli soldiers, house demolishing, bombardments, and being beaten, injured, maimed, imprisoned, and killed.

There are a number of factors that have contributed to the lack of resolu-tion of the Palestinian–Israeli confl ict and to the continuous cycle of hatred and violence, including the destructive role of the seemingly involved “bystand-ers” who proclaim good intentions that actually mask their selfi sh interests. The international community, in addition to Israel, bears a signifi cant respon-sibility for the con tinuing suffering of Palestinians by not putting its political and economic weight towards transforming reality for better lives both for Palestinians and Israelis.

Remembering is one side of the coin; being remembered is the other. For the fi rst two decades after the Nakba, Palestinians were forgotten, ignored, marginal-ized and not considered as part of the core of the problems in the Middle East. To the Israelis and to the US in particular, the Palestinians are the “ignored, and denied” Others. The Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, is known to have declared that “There are no such people as Palestinians.” Their lack of political presence and effi cacy were misinterpreted as the actual loss of their identity (Awad, 2007).

In spite of their dispersion in light of the Nakba of 1948, Palestinians have maintained their unique identity in which the Nakba and the refugee experience mark a signifi cant part. In his memoir, Said (1999) defi nes being a refugee to go beyond the physical and political sense and to include the psychological aspect

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of identity formation regardless of economic and professional prosperity and stability.

THE IDIOMS OF RESISTANCE

Until 1965, Palestinians unsuccessfully appealed to the conscience and good will of the world to reverse their fate. Finally, they reverted to violent resistance and radical praxis as the only way for them to make their presence known. A number of parallel processes took place among the Palestinians in order to transform their own fate; these have met with no major success so far. Resistance to the occupation is one aspect of their long struggle whether through political action or strategic violence; either way, they are steadfastly refusing to be victims of humiliation in the psychological sense. Pragmatism and adapting to a less than “an average expectable environment” (Hartmann, 1939) is another form of survival. Even apathy and a sense of helplessness might constitute useful “psychic retreats” (Steiner, 1993). Under such circumstances, fatalism by accept-ing God’s will while praying for His mercy and justice is a powerful form of surviving the harsh reality and mobilizing resistance.

The position of the leaders of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) since 1994 has, however, become an obstacle by itself; they have fallen in a trap of justifying their deeds and “strategies” which they cannot get out of and all that they need now is to save their own humiliation and lack of respect by most of their own people. With massive fi nancial and political support to the PNA and its current leadership, mostly by the US and the EU, a strategy of develop-ment of infra-structure and autonomous economy is underway. However, Israel continues to exploit every aspect of Palestinian life including its water resources. Under these circumstances it is diffi cult to build relationships based on trust, confi dence and openness that facilitate a healthy and meaningful dialogue. Meanwhile, the plight of the Palestinians for partial justice and full fairness goes unheard by the world by not pushing Israel to transform this vicious and unbear-able reality.

THE SILENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY

The international community displays a double standard that, at its most char-itable interpretation, can be called provocative. While it celebrated the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, it turned a blind eye to the apartheid walls surround-ing the West Bank and East Jerusalem which intensify the humiliation and misery of Palestinian lives. While the Israelis claim that they need these walls for security reasons, in reality they have further erected internal psychological walls between both sides and have increased mutual hatred that makes any dialogue diffi cult. With the Other representing an oppressor, Palestinians have



diffi culty embracing or incorporating Israelis in any meaningful relationship. Israelis, on their part, have developed a sort of defensive apathy and detach-ment to avoid acknowledging the guilt and shame at their oppression of the Other. They buttress their psychological immunity to criticism (inner or outer) by claiming “anyway, the world is against us” and emphasizing their “eternal” victimhood and persecuted status. Constantly expressing a fear of annihilation at the hands of the Palestinians and Arabs or Muslims (despite the fact that, at the time of this writing, July, 2010, there has been no Israeli fatality over the last 18 months), Israelis keep the attention directed outwards. This position gets more entrenched due to the world’s guilt about the Nazi Holocaust (“Shoa”) or its empathy with the victims of the past, who became today’s perpetrators against innocent Palestinian civilians. The fact is that the international com-munity (particularly the United States and its infl uential American Jewish lobby) bears a moral responsibility to help Israelis get out of such psychological imprisonment in their long history of suffering and to save them from their collective self-destruction. The fact is that the inter national community (par-ticularly the United States and its infl uential American Jewish lobby) bears a moral responsibility to save the Israelis from themselves.

Norman Finkelstein (2000) has documented the Jewish exploitation of their history for political and fi nancial purposes in his superb book The Holocaust Industry. The domination of right-wing politics too seems derived from the monetary benefi ts it assures due to the continuing occupation of Palestinian lands. Regrettably, the politically left-wing movement which stren-uously objected to the Israeli occupation and advocated for peace and mutual respect has shrunk over the last decade. Like Finkelstein, I believe that the time is ripe for Israeli scholars to challenge this psychological dimension of the Jewish-Israeli core identity and the place of and learning from the Shoah in their lives in order to help heal their tormented identity of deep injuries and understandable fears from the past. Having said that, some hold the notion I disagree with, that Israelis suffer from a traumatized and “psychotic” state of denying reality and sense of time. Consequently, this position exempts Israelis from moral and psyche responsibilities. Although I have full empathy for their pain, resulted from a long historical suffering and repetitive traumas and pogroms out of established anti-Semitic ideology mostly in Europe, I believe that their deeds, choices, and actions are insane. I argue that Israelis are well aware of what they do and the risks involved but they “prefer” living in apathy to the Palestinian suffering and benefi ting from exploiting and oppressing them. I also believe that most Israelis refuse to be in touch with their dark and ugly side of oppression, instead, they project into others hatred and preju-dice. As such, it is not surprising that the Israeli establishment, including aca-demia, and its allies in the West, invest enormous effort and money in international public relation campaigns, emphasizing the myth of Israel being the only “enlightened oasis democracy” in the midst of the vast desert of the dark Arab world.

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THE POISONING OF CHILDHOOD

A number of research studies conducted by the Gaza Community Mental Health Program (Qouta and El-Sarraj, 2004; Qouta and Odeh, 2004) delineate the impact of the Israeli–Palestinian confl ict on the mental health of Palestinian children. Violence permeates all parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Since the onset of the Palestinian Second Intifada (Palestinian uprising), between September 2000 and October 2003, more than 51,000 Palestinians have been injured and 2,700 have been killed. These injuries and fatalities have destroyed families and profoundly affected the lives of children. They suffer from signifi -cant mental health problems, including post- traumatic stress disorder (33 percent with acute, 49 percent with moderate, and 15.6 percent with low level symptom-atology). In areas greatly affected by the Israeli military incursions, 55 percent of the Palestinian children have acute levels of post-traumatic stress disorder symptomatology. Children who showed the greatest signs of distress were those who had witnessed funerals (94.6 percent), witnessed shooting (83.2 percent), saw injured or dead who were not relatives (66.9 percent), and saw family members injured or killed (61.6 percent). Besides these war-related stresses, Palestinian children (and adults) are also affected by the Israeli blockade of necessary supplies. Consequently, more than ten percent of Palestinian children suffer from moderate to severe malnutrition.

CODA

In 1930, the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, stated

I do not think that Palestine could ever become a Jewish state, nor that the Christian and Islamic worlds would ever be prepared to have their holy places under Jewish care. It would have seemed more sensible to me to establish a Jewish homeland on a less his-torically-burdened land. But I know that such a rational viewpoint would never have gained the enthusiasm of the masses and the fi nancial support of the wealthy. I concede with sorrow that the baseless fanaticism of our people is in no part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust. I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of a Herodian wall into a national relic, thereby offending the feelings of the natives. (letter to Chaim Koffl er, cited in Loewenberg, 1995, p. 23)

Freud’s prescience was not heeded. However, one hopes the “rational viewpoint” he advocated would prevail in the long run. The current picture is grim but not entirely devoid of hope. The younger generations of Palestinians and Israelis are already tired of confl ict and tension; they have gradually developed a distaste for fi ghting and wish to focus upon enjoying life, consumption, entertainment and having fun which are all signs of life and vitality. Signifi cantly, in spite of the decades of hatred between the two peoples, a mutually unspoken language of appreciation of the other has begun to emerge. There is a private and shy recognition of the creativity and the goodness of the other. Palestinians appreci-ate and are envious of Israelis’ high standards of living, their impressive infra-



structure, academic, scientifi c and high-tech achievements, their medical and social security systems and their excellent hospitals. Israelis are envious and appreciative of Palestinian self-determination and not giving up, attachment to their land, economic initiatives and constructions, their social solidarity, strong family connections and support, their generosity, and Palestinian hospitality. These undercurrents have the potential of becoming a bridge between hatred and violence on the one hand, and hope and mutuality on the other. Unoffi cial Track II diplomacy (Volkan, 1997; Volkan et al., 1990) might prepare the ground for such a salutary move. Friendly exchanges between liberal groups on the two sides, poetry, and sports camps where Israeli and Palestinian children can play together might also help. However, this can take place only when the culture and policy of domination, control and oppression is transformed into a spirit of reconciliation and cooperation. While the process of negotiation is always painful, it forces the parties involved to face the humanity of the Other, his own needs, desires, fears, nightmares, hopes, dreams, constructiveness, and his destructiveness. Under these conditions, navigation between hatred, violence, hope and dreaming continues. If nego tiation goes too long with no tangible outcome but rather masks intended deception and painful illusion, as in the Palestinian-Israeli confl ict, it only re-increases hatred, further regression, vio-lence, constant anxiety and frustration.

The lack of visionary Israeli leadership, the destructive and racist policy of the current Netanyahu government and the lack of Palestinian national unity, resulting from the wide split between the PNA led by Fatah and Hamas, all these factors make the situation more gloomy. While Israelis are not ready yet voluntarily to relinquish supremacy, control and domination, Palestinians are determined not to give up on their legitimate rights for a decent and dignifi ed life and for an independent and viable Palestinian state after a century of suf-fering and pain. Israelis as a collective national entity, for their own sake as well, must confront the wisdom of their pathological and lengthy use of dissociation and denial as effective defense mechanisms to cover up their unconscious guilt and shame and to prevent them from taking responsibility for the suffering of Palestinians, mostly endured by them.

Therefore, with such a harsh reality, the possibility of ultimate peace would only be realized by a change in the ineffective position of the international community and a drastic alteration of the biased Middle East policies of the United States towards Israel. As such, the key to a lasting peace with security among Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab world is the end of Israel’s forty-three year long Occupation, the settlement of the Palestinian refugee tragedy since 1948, and the implementation of the right of return or compensations. This necessitates the radical transformation of the passive role of the international community, including the hesitation of the Europeans. Arab regimes will have to put in their political and fi nancial support as well by following instructions from Washington. This teaches us that just the way the unleashing of a war is multiply-determined, so is the achievement of peace.

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Adib Jarrar, DESS, MSc3 Boulevard Des Filles Du Calvaire.

Paris 75003, [email protected]

palestinian suffering: some personal, historical, and psychoanalytic reflections

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