Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine

On Monday, October 21, 2024, ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action released a recording of a conversation between psychoanalysts Eyal Rozmarin (Israeli) and Karim Dajani (Palestinian), moderated by ROOM's Editor in Chief, Hattie Myers. With an urgent focus on Israel-Palestine, these two psychoanalysts engaged in a powerful and tender conversation showing how unconscious process underlies political-cultural realities and individual misunderstandings. This is a curated transcript of the event which was recorded at the Psychology & the Other conference on July 14, 2024, hosted by Boston College and Northeastern University in London. It is available to view at analytic-room.com/speakingofhome.

I'm a psychoanalyst from New York and the editor in chief of ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action. We are grateful to Psychology & the Other for giving us this opportunity to be with you today. In this symposium, we want to think with you about how history suffuses us, between the river and the sea, between what we know and what lies outside of our conscious awareness. Our hope is that by looking at impact of the unconscious during political violence and over generations of trauma, we will find some common ground. The hardest lift, as Karim and Eyal have found, is finding empathic connection. We'll begin with each of them sharing with us what Eyal calls their “milk stories”—where they each have come from.

Karim Dajani

For centuries my ancestors lived in Palestine. During the War of 1948, when Israel became a state, my parents, Naida and Khanum, were expelled from Jaffa. Psychologically, they were stateless and dispossessed from their land and place of origin. They lived among a large group of diaspora Palestinian intellectuals in Beirut. On June 5, 1967, another fateful war erupted. Israel attacked Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. For the first five days of the war, Arab media broadcasted an imminent victory. M