You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In less than a decade, in the 1940s, the world witnessed the incalculable horrors of the Holocaust perpetrated against the Jewish people, and a few years later, the Palestinians' loss of their homeland - or the naqba, the Catastrophe. And, as we are acutely aware, the consequences of these events - almost 60 years ago, live on in the as yet unresolved Palestinian-Israeli conflict and its world-wide reverberations.
Those of us who work for peace in the area are acutely aware that any peace requires an in-depth understanding of the Israeli-Jewish fear of annhilation and the suffering of the Palestinian people. As psychoanalysts, we know that massive group trauma is transmitted intergenerationally (consciously) and transgenerationally (unconsciously e.g. through psychological mechanisms such as identification with the traumatized aspects of the parents' psyches/personalities).
We also know that massive trauma involves experiencing unbearably painful emotions, such as helplessness, intense fear, and terror (especially of annhilation), humiliation, and overwhelming loss, and the reactive rage that all these beget - which expresses itself in hate and violence, in virulent, malignant prejudice, and in the thirst for revenge - all of which are enacted in a seemingly endless cycle of violence and war.
Rage - and its emotional expression in hate - which, in turn, fuels violence - functions as the psychological defense, par excellence, against unbearably painful feelings and memories.
In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict we are dealing with two traumatized peoples: peoples who are both dealing with overwhelmingly painful feelings and the rage which inevitably is the reaction to these, and the protection against them.
Again, through our clinical work, psychoanalysts know that such traumatic feelings and memories tend to be discharged through action, for example in violence and aggression, as in war, rather than mastered through verbalization and the experiencing of unbearable feeling