Two days ago, I posted an essay, “The Fever,” in which I detailed what I see as the mechanism undergirding at least some of the genocidal fervor that is evidently present in Israeli society.
I still think the extant element is Zionism and the peculiar emphases that belief system imposes or inculcates among its adherents. I say that because, unfortunately, many different peoples have been the recipients of genocidal actions, and the intergenerational trauma elicited does not make those people go out and commit genocide to others. (There have been what's known as subaltern genocides, where the oppressed peoples rise up and slaughter their oppressors, but that doesn't happen often, and it doesn't fit what we're seeing in Gaza. If anything, there's a displacement of animus, from the original perpetrator, the Nazis, to this group that more mirrors the powerlessness and statelessness of Jewish people in the '40s than they ever did the Nazis, a point that genocide scholar Raz Segal has highlighted elsewhere.)
Take, for example, the people of Rwanda. There was a truth and reconciliation process, and there was as well a policy of concerted community mending so as to overcome the wounds of that time period. The efficacy of those efforts is still being debated, but from this vantage point it seems to be at least a qualified success, as the rancor between the Hutus and Tutsis has greatly abated compared to the high tide in 1994.
But your point of the underlying trauma is important insofar as that trauma is easily tapped into by Israeli leaders who are so inclined to utilize it for their own purposes. These are the politics of memory, and they are a tool of statecraft as any other. In the essay that preceded this, I ended with a clip of Jerusalem Day, where the Israeli flag is extolled and it's a day of celebration. But we see that this annual commemoration has been seized by right-wing forces to spread a toxic unity, that of us-and-them; and this year we saw the participatory violence of the crowd against journalists, Palestinian and non-Palestinian alike. It was, simply, mob action. But it was engendered by the likes of Israeli Finance Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a notorious extremist (some would call him a fascist). This is the manipulation of memory and identity for noxious causes.
The unresolved issues from intergenerational trauma is something that Vamik Volkan examines in his political and psychological writings. I got a lot out of his "Large-group psychodynamics and massive violence" (2006, at https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=63011209). For example, he said,
"A chosen trauma is the shared mental representation of an event in a large group’s history in which the group suffered a catastrophic loss, humiliation, and helplessness at the hands of enemies. When members of a victim group are unable to mourn such losses and reverse their humiliation and helplessness, they pass on to their offspring the images of their injured selves and psychological tasks that need to be completed. This process is known as the 'transgenerational transmission of trauma.' . . . Political leaders may initiate the reactivation of chosen traumas in order to fuel entitlement ideologies." (p. 307)
And, if there's anything upon which most can agree, it's that Zionism is an entitlement ideology.
I certainly don't think that generational trauma is the only reason, and agree with what you've just said. I believe the trauma is being weaponized and used as a powerful tool for some Israelis.
Some Jewish people talk at length about the indoctrination of being pro-Israel, and that it's a difficult process to get beyond that conditioning, and keeping the trauma alive is a big part of that.
There are lots of factors, and I think the whole Israeli project was imperialist, colonialist and highly racist and injust.
I try to understand what it’s like for those “on the inside,” as it were. I learned a great deal from the film Israelism, and there are other voices besides. Their accounts are invaluable in terms of getting a sense of what it’s like to be snug in that cultural framework.
Thanks for bearing with me. I hold court sometimes; I’m trying to rein in that tendency!
This “being snug in a cultural framework” is close to some sort of addiction. Maybe it requires more and more cruelty to maintain the sense of feeling snug. As people try to stay in the comfort zone, they get cognitively weaker meanwhile the levels of cruelty have to be escalated in order to get that sense of feeling snug, comfortable, safe. Going with the flow, seems like the best option once the mob has a certain level of strength and power.
I think there are different levels to a genocidal society; forgive me if I have been too broad in my application of analysis.
I'd mentioned before that, in both Christopher Browning's observation of the SS and in Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, the groups involved broke into thirds. One segment grew into absolute sadists; one segment didn't rock the boat and generally maintained the status quo (which, unfortunately, was being set by the sadists); and the last either did small favors for the prisoners while no one was looking or did the very least they could do, even asking for reassignment to demeaning duties so that they did not have to participate in sadistic activities. And this is significant, because in both populations of regimented people, people who already came to table displaying sadism were excluded. So the segment that ultimately did adopt these practices truly grew into them. Their behaviors became a part of them.
I would hazard that the same rough breakdown of numbers occurs in the general population, where a leading 1/3 become warmongers and actively genocidal, whereas the middle third just want to go along to get along. However, what we're actually seeing in Israel, if polls are to be believed, is that (at least of a handful of months ago) upwards of 90% of the population felt that just enough or more firepower needed to be brought to bear in Gaza. So I can't account for that, other than to say that conformity is a strong social force.
The conformity there is also being artificially maintained, with people being jailed and otherwise ostracized for even showing the least bit of sympathy for what people in Gaza are enduring. (And, I hasten to add, the same dynamic is starting to take shape here in the United States, this effort at absolutely silencing those who would humanize the people of Gaza.) That's one of the reasons I brought up the "rule of three" in my previous essay, where the illusion of unanimity amplifies this sense of needing to conform to majority opinion. Nonconformists are needed in order to break that illusion, but those people right now are not able to speak.
Being neither Israeli nor part of the Jewish Diaspora, I don't know if I can correctly characterize the type of tight bonding that goes on between and among the folks in those communities. But I have read others speak about the need to "not air dirty laundry," to keep intra-community criticism of Israel away from non-Jews; and then there is the phenomenon of excommunicating Jewish critics who _do_ voice their opposition to outside channels -- it's those people who seem to come in for the deprecating label "self-hating Jew."
So there seem to be multiple layers of policing of internal communities in order to enforce conformity to the given norm.
I think, for those who grow into sadism, there probably does come with that an insatiability, especially over time, once the pattern gets established in the personality. For those going along to get along, I think most of them are enacting a performance that they would gladly discard once the moment is over. But, to draw a parallel closer to home, I would say that many nationalists, such as the Christian nationalists here in the States, draw strength and comfort, just as you say, from feeling part of a whole, especially a whole that is ascending. I'm sure that's quite intoxicating.
What I've read by other Jewish people is that the holocaust during WW2 does a lot to fuel this attitude.
I read that the trauma experienced then is perpetuated instead of the lesson that 'Never again, should mean never again for anyone'.
Unhealed trauma can be rocket fuel for the genocide Israel is committing, I think.
Thanks for reading and engaging, Diana.
I still think the extant element is Zionism and the peculiar emphases that belief system imposes or inculcates among its adherents. I say that because, unfortunately, many different peoples have been the recipients of genocidal actions, and the intergenerational trauma elicited does not make those people go out and commit genocide to others. (There have been what's known as subaltern genocides, where the oppressed peoples rise up and slaughter their oppressors, but that doesn't happen often, and it doesn't fit what we're seeing in Gaza. If anything, there's a displacement of animus, from the original perpetrator, the Nazis, to this group that more mirrors the powerlessness and statelessness of Jewish people in the '40s than they ever did the Nazis, a point that genocide scholar Raz Segal has highlighted elsewhere.)
Take, for example, the people of Rwanda. There was a truth and reconciliation process, and there was as well a policy of concerted community mending so as to overcome the wounds of that time period. The efficacy of those efforts is still being debated, but from this vantage point it seems to be at least a qualified success, as the rancor between the Hutus and Tutsis has greatly abated compared to the high tide in 1994.
But your point of the underlying trauma is important insofar as that trauma is easily tapped into by Israeli leaders who are so inclined to utilize it for their own purposes. These are the politics of memory, and they are a tool of statecraft as any other. In the essay that preceded this, I ended with a clip of Jerusalem Day, where the Israeli flag is extolled and it's a day of celebration. But we see that this annual commemoration has been seized by right-wing forces to spread a toxic unity, that of us-and-them; and this year we saw the participatory violence of the crowd against journalists, Palestinian and non-Palestinian alike. It was, simply, mob action. But it was engendered by the likes of Israeli Finance Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a notorious extremist (some would call him a fascist). This is the manipulation of memory and identity for noxious causes.
The unresolved issues from intergenerational trauma is something that Vamik Volkan examines in his political and psychological writings. I got a lot out of his "Large-group psychodynamics and massive violence" (2006, at https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=63011209). For example, he said,
"A chosen trauma is the shared mental representation of an event in a large group’s history in which the group suffered a catastrophic loss, humiliation, and helplessness at the hands of enemies. When members of a victim group are unable to mourn such losses and reverse their humiliation and helplessness, they pass on to their offspring the images of their injured selves and psychological tasks that need to be completed. This process is known as the 'transgenerational transmission of trauma.' . . . Political leaders may initiate the reactivation of chosen traumas in order to fuel entitlement ideologies." (p. 307)
And, if there's anything upon which most can agree, it's that Zionism is an entitlement ideology.
Hi,
I certainly don't think that generational trauma is the only reason, and agree with what you've just said. I believe the trauma is being weaponized and used as a powerful tool for some Israelis.
Some Jewish people talk at length about the indoctrination of being pro-Israel, and that it's a difficult process to get beyond that conditioning, and keeping the trauma alive is a big part of that.
There are lots of factors, and I think the whole Israeli project was imperialist, colonialist and highly racist and injust.
I agree!
I try to understand what it’s like for those “on the inside,” as it were. I learned a great deal from the film Israelism, and there are other voices besides. Their accounts are invaluable in terms of getting a sense of what it’s like to be snug in that cultural framework.
Thanks for bearing with me. I hold court sometimes; I’m trying to rein in that tendency!
This “being snug in a cultural framework” is close to some sort of addiction. Maybe it requires more and more cruelty to maintain the sense of feeling snug. As people try to stay in the comfort zone, they get cognitively weaker meanwhile the levels of cruelty have to be escalated in order to get that sense of feeling snug, comfortable, safe. Going with the flow, seems like the best option once the mob has a certain level of strength and power.
I think there are different levels to a genocidal society; forgive me if I have been too broad in my application of analysis.
I'd mentioned before that, in both Christopher Browning's observation of the SS and in Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, the groups involved broke into thirds. One segment grew into absolute sadists; one segment didn't rock the boat and generally maintained the status quo (which, unfortunately, was being set by the sadists); and the last either did small favors for the prisoners while no one was looking or did the very least they could do, even asking for reassignment to demeaning duties so that they did not have to participate in sadistic activities. And this is significant, because in both populations of regimented people, people who already came to table displaying sadism were excluded. So the segment that ultimately did adopt these practices truly grew into them. Their behaviors became a part of them.
I would hazard that the same rough breakdown of numbers occurs in the general population, where a leading 1/3 become warmongers and actively genocidal, whereas the middle third just want to go along to get along. However, what we're actually seeing in Israel, if polls are to be believed, is that (at least of a handful of months ago) upwards of 90% of the population felt that just enough or more firepower needed to be brought to bear in Gaza. So I can't account for that, other than to say that conformity is a strong social force.
The conformity there is also being artificially maintained, with people being jailed and otherwise ostracized for even showing the least bit of sympathy for what people in Gaza are enduring. (And, I hasten to add, the same dynamic is starting to take shape here in the United States, this effort at absolutely silencing those who would humanize the people of Gaza.) That's one of the reasons I brought up the "rule of three" in my previous essay, where the illusion of unanimity amplifies this sense of needing to conform to majority opinion. Nonconformists are needed in order to break that illusion, but those people right now are not able to speak.
Being neither Israeli nor part of the Jewish Diaspora, I don't know if I can correctly characterize the type of tight bonding that goes on between and among the folks in those communities. But I have read others speak about the need to "not air dirty laundry," to keep intra-community criticism of Israel away from non-Jews; and then there is the phenomenon of excommunicating Jewish critics who _do_ voice their opposition to outside channels -- it's those people who seem to come in for the deprecating label "self-hating Jew."
So there seem to be multiple layers of policing of internal communities in order to enforce conformity to the given norm.
I think, for those who grow into sadism, there probably does come with that an insatiability, especially over time, once the pattern gets established in the personality. For those going along to get along, I think most of them are enacting a performance that they would gladly discard once the moment is over. But, to draw a parallel closer to home, I would say that many nationalists, such as the Christian nationalists here in the States, draw strength and comfort, just as you say, from feeling part of a whole, especially a whole that is ascending. I'm sure that's quite intoxicating.