Letter: Gaza–Israel Conflict

I write in response to Shmuel Erlich’s recent article “Is Psychoanalysis Relevant to the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict?” (International Journal of Psychoanalysis 106: 165–173) and subsequent letters, questioning whether psychoanalysis has anything to say about the Israel–Gaza conflict. His reminder of the long Jewish tradition of respect for “the intellect and morality” is valuable, but he claims more than Freud did for the introduction by the Jewish people of “abstract spirituality, or Geistigkeit, to mankind that heretofore knew only animism and paganism”.

Edward Said, the Palestinian academic, activist and literary and music critic, examined Freud’s sense of what it was to be Jewish in the lecture “Freud and the Non-European” (Said 2003). Like Erlich, he looked to Moses and Monotheism, which he places in the same category as Beethoven’s late works: “bristlingly difficult”, with “a willingness to let irreconcilable elements … remain as they are” (28). He quotes Freud on Jewish monotheism: “it is honour enough for the Jewish people that it kept alive such a tradition and produced men who lent it their voice, even if the stimulus had first come from the outside, from a great stranger” (31). The “great stranger” Freud referred to was Moses the Egyptian, but he also acknowledged the Egyptian Pharaohs who were his predecessors in establishing a monotheistic religion: Freud acknowledges that he is denying the Jewish people the man they praise as the greatest of their sons, but says he does so in the service of a truth far more important than their supposed national interests (Said 2003, 32). This positions monotheism as evolutionary, cross-cultural rather than nationalistic. But that goes entirely against the Zionist project.

There are several reasons for my deep concern over the plight of Gaza and Palestine. There is the historic part played by Britain. There is the impunity with which a right-wing government is slaughtering thousands of innocent people and reducing other