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One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals — justice or progress or the happiness of future generations, or the sacred mission or emancipation of a nation or race or class, or even liberty itself, which demands the sacrifice of individuals for the freedom or society. This is the belief that somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heart of an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution. This ancient faith rests on the conviction that all the positive values in which men have believed must, in the end, be compatible, and perhaps even entail one another. “Nature binds truth, happiness and virtue together as by an indissoluble chain”. (Berlin, 1958, p. 167)
The voice of reason is a soft one, but it does not rest till it gains a hearing. (Sigmund Freud, 1927)
Let me begin this paper with a reminiscence of George Awad, whom this issue commemorates. George and I appeared on several occasions at international conferences discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a psychoanalytic point of view, meetings skillfully and humanely chaired by Dr Nadia Ramzy, founder of “Psychoanalysts for Peace” and organizer of these panels.
George, who had to flee the city of his birth, Acre, as a child, would have had every reason and justification to retreat into self-righteousness, but he never did. Instead his life's work was guided by his tremendous ability to contain conflicting feelings, by human empathy almost beyond comprehension and his deep commitment to rational analysis of complexity even under condition of mental pain.
I experienced this personally, because, as an Israeli, I am always in a conundrum: I have been an outspoken critic of Israel's policies since 1967 for many years. But outside of Israel, I often find this position difficult, since i