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As I sit down to write, news comes in that an Arab citizen of Jerusalem has rammed a car into a group of his Jewish compatriots, killing six. My heart sinks. A violent response to this is inevitable - the Israeli authorities, whose no-tolerance attitude to attacks on "its" citizens is well known, have already promised to hit back hard. And then there will no doubt be a violent backlash. With this battle going on in the background, how is it possible to find a space for quiet reflection and thought on Israel-Palestine?
It has been like this for months now. I had originally intended to write this paper in the summer, but the kidnap and subsequent killing of three yeshiva students in the West Bank effectively put paid to that. In no time an Arab youth was kidnapped and murdered in East Jerusalem in an act of reprisal from the other side. More ominously, when Israel publicly held Hamas responsible, one knew that it would be only a matter of time before "we", the Israelis, would get "them", "the Hamas" - where else but in Hamas-land, Gaza? As the airwaves filled with sounds and images of that brutal war (Rothchild, 2014) - of bombings and buildings being reduced to dust, of streets filled with the blood of the dead and wounded and the agony, pain, distress, grief and rage of the survivors - and of politicians fighting a propaganda war, it became just about impossible to think. At a time like that how could one turn off the news in order to write about Palestine-Israel? Yet, how can one have the news on and think?
Polarisation and Identification
A clear psychoanalytic inference can be drawn from the above dilemma: for one to be so powerfully immobilised by external events implies that one must, in some way, be emotionally implicated in them. One is identified with one or more element in that situation of conflict. I think this emotional involvement is far more pervasive in the psychoanalytic world than is immediately apparent, and accounts in part for our profession's relative silence on matters pertaining to the Israel-Palestine situation. Our natural inclination is then to leave it to the politicians.
At a recent talk at...