Splitting, Confusion, and Hope

What happens to us psychologically when an event in the social or political world appears to divide us starkly into opposing camps? We’ve all experienced them: those explosive family dinners, acrimonious encounters with companions and friends that bloom suddenly, sweep us up like a tornado and dump us in a wasteland. How do the bonds that tie us together unravel so dramatically?

Sara and I have worked in various settings together for years - long enough for us to have lived through a number of world-order shifts and rumbles, including a pandemic, global conflicts, and our continuing landscape of trauma and violence. It seemed that we had built a shared set of assumptions of the broad political position to which we both belonged. Occasionally our engagement would turn to what is often referred to as another apartheid: Palestine. Sara is a health worker from two generations of activists, both Jewish and Moslem, joined together decades before in struggle against the South African apartheid regime. She traverses the lines of heritage easily, political cohesion being the cement, the forever architecture.

Then the catastrophe: the one we have lived day after day in our media, our hearts and our nightmares. October 7^th. The invasion of Gaza.

Soon after, Sara and I got blown apart. It all came down to me asking a question about a petition when she wanted me to be at one with her anguish about the rising death toll in Gaza. My query landed with her as implying that her view and mine might differ in some way, although this was absolutely not my intention. It carried for her the suggestion that her horror might be open to interpretation. All she wanted from me was a visceral and authentic response that would contain her anguish. In that instant I became an enemy. Devastation and helplessness about Israel and the events in Gaza confronted her with the disintegration of the very foundations of the disorderly order with which she had battled her whole life. Splitting became a form o