The Times Must Be Changing, Because Psychoanalysts are Talking about Palestine

Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

The title of my discussion of these three fine papers, each of which explicitly attempts to articulate Palestinian historical, political, and psychological perspectives to American psychoanalysts, suggests that something has occurred that now lets us speak somewhat more openly about a topic whose absence is one of its most notable features. As Lara Sheehi's presentation (2016) makes clear, whatever psychoanalytic scholars may think about Palestine, that intellectual labor is typically not part of the ordinary discourse at psychoanalytic professional meetings. In her case, even her wish to conjoin the words psychoanalysis and Palestine was discouraged.

So even though something may have changed, it is the more prevalent resistance to change that warrants our social psychoanalytic attention. What to me is one of the most obvious signs of that resistance, which shows up in all of this panel's presentations, is the difficulty many of us have in processing the unpleasant facts about Israel's treatment of Palestinians since the birth of the ethnic state of Israel. According to many Arab scholars (See, among others, Abunimah, 2014; Aruri, 1989, 2003; Khalidi, 1997; Makdisi, 2008; Said, 1969/2000; Samara, 1988; Zureik, 1979), and to an important group of Israeli Jewish historians and sociologists as well (Kimmerling, 1983a, 1983b; Morris, 2001, 2004; Piterberg, 2001; Ram, 1999; Rodinson, 1973; Segev, 2007; Shafir, 1999), the creation of the Jewish nation entailed the forcible expulsion of at least 750,000 Arabs whose families had lived in Palestine for centuries (Glazer, 1979; Vidal, 1997). Not only were their lands confiscated by the Israeli military, but also, once they were made refugees, the exiled Palestinians were forbidden from returning to their homeland. At least another 250,000 Arabs were forced to leave Israel during the 1967 war (Masal