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Dear Editor
The letters in response to Martin Kemp's article ‘Dehumanization, Guilt and Large Group Dynamics’ (BJP 27(4): 383-406) confirm and repeat the deficiencies of his analysis. His article is academically lopsided with selective opinions and references that render it more polemical than scholarly. This is regrettable as an opportunity was lost to bring a fresh intellectual field of view to this problem.
Kemp completely omits the psychological impact on Israeli Jews of their total exclusion and dehumanization by the majority of the Arab world. It is the Israelis who are, in fact, subject to an apartheid exclusion by their neighbours in Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.
It is not that Israelis lack empathy and compassion towards the Palestinians. The quotations from Israeli authorities that Kemp cites in the article, confirm the agonizing debates that occur in Israel about the destructive effects that persisting Israeli rule of a large Palestinian population has on both Palestinian and Israeli national identity and consciousness.
As Golda Meir said: ‘We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.’
What is completely missing from Kemp's analysis as a British psychotherapist is the unconscious conflict within the British psyche that leads to the projection of such hatred by so many in the British media and academia towards Israel. The British after all have ultimate responsibility for the Israel-Palestine conflict, and it is the British who may harbour unconscious guilt about this. The same unconscious guilt stems from the long history of British colonialism with its grievous manifestations in India and Ireland, just to name two other examples.
It is this guilt that is unconsciously projected onto the Jewish Israeli populace. As psychotherapists we must be mindful of the countertransference.
Alan B. Eppel
Dep