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The adults do not acknowledge that the stories are upsettin

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The adults do not acknowledge that the stories are upsetting and frightening to children. ... At this age blinding equals castration and punishment. ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: The adults do not acknowledge that the stories are upsettin


1
Psychoanalytic Thoughts on Israel and the Siege
of GazaThe Exploitation of Childrenby Judith
Deutsch

2
The Problem Understanding Israeli Aggression
and Impunity
  • Although much information is easily accessible
    about Israels many violations of international
    law, Israels abuses continue unabated. What lies
    behind the paralysis to stop this cruelty, and
    what does it mean to know when this does not
    guide behavior?
  • How is reality reversed into its opposite so that
    most Israelis and their supporters believe that
    Israel is under siege, not Gaza?
  • Psychologically, it is predictable that
    brutalizing, impoverishing, and humiliating
    people will lead to violence. Yet Israel is seen
    as the victim.
  • All violence is entirely preventable by putting
    an end to humiliation and to impoverishment (see
    Gilligan).
  • Humiliating parents in front of their children is
    psychologically the most devastating experience
    for children and will often evoke vengeful
    feelings. This is described by Dr. El-Sarraj,
    Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, and by Sigmund Freud.

3
Psychoanalytic Insights
  • The psychological factors examined here are
    cruelty, humiliation, hypocrisy, and the absence
    of conscience.
  • Psychoanalysis distinguishes between reality and
    illusion.
  • Two documentaries show how Jewish adults exploit
    youth by provoking the specific anxieties of each
    phase of childhood and adolescence.
  • When Israeli youth are in a state of anxiety,
    adults offer an excitedly violent solution to
    deeply held fears.
  • In this state of fear, there is an unquestioning
    acceptance of exciting distortions of reality and
    a pull to identify with the aggressor.
  • When adults do not acknowledge childrens
    feelings, it is difficult for children to develop
    the capacity to be introspective and to empathize
    with others.
  • From early childhood, there is interference with
    the mastery of essential psychological tasks
    that make for citizenship in a democracy the
    capacity for individual responsibility, for
    repairing wrongdoing and shameful acts, for
    feeling concern for others.

4
Film 1 Avi Mograbis Avenge But One of My Two
Eyes
  • Youth in Israel are taught the Samson and Masada
    suicide myths. The adults do not acknowledge
    that the stories are upsetting and frightening to
    children. Children learn from early childhood to
    not notice their own feelings or those of others.
  • Early childhood a father tells of Samson
    mutilating a lion, stealing the honey from inside
    the lion, and killing 10,000 people. At this age
    children fear bodily injury and loss of control,
    especially of oral impulses.
  • Oedipal age parents repeatedly tell their son
    that Samson was blinded. At this age blinding
    equals castration and punishment. The only way
    to not feel vulnerable is to identify with the
    aggressor.
  • School age a teacher enacts Samson heroically
    committing suicide terrorism. The children say
    that suicide terrorism is heroic. Aggression is
    exciting and pleasurable. Interference in
    individual conscience development.

5
Mograbi Samson and Masada myths Developmental
Anxieties and Tasks, continued
  • Adolescence An adult guide tells adolescents to
    empathize with the victims of siege at Masada.
    He repeatedly instructs them to merge with the
    group, to not think for themselves. They talk of
    separation wall, watchtowers, and choose
    suicide terrorism as a solution, yet they make no
    connection with the present.
  • Adolescence other adults express seductive,
    intense excitement about revenge, suicide
    terrorism. They distort reality, breach incest
    barriers, demand obedience to charismatic
    authority.
  • Guides press loyalty to the group at a time when
    adolescents waver between finding their own
    identity vs. conforming to others.
  • Adults are overtly seductive when adolescents
    need to distance themselves from incestuous
    wishes.

6
Psychological Mechanisms Documentary about
Masada and Samson myths
  • Using children in these ways to satisfy adult
    needs is a fundamental aspect of abuse. By
    stirring up anxiety and then coupling it with
    exciting fantasy solutions, adults and children
    collude in not acknowledging reality, in
    supporting identification with the aggressor, and
    in seducing youth into excited and pleasurable
    aggression.
  • This documentary indicates that Israelis know
    exactly what conditions produce violence, namely
    hopelessness, rage, and humiliation.
  • The mechanism of projective identification is
    used to provoke violence in Palestinian people.
    In this way Israelis minimize their own anxiety
    and justify their own grandiosity and
    aggressiveness while feeling entitled as victims
    to be violent.
  • This mechanism is how parents directly induce
    their children to behave in delinquent and
    forbidden ways to satisfy their own wishes and to
    feel powerful and in control (Johnson and
    Szurek).

7
Film 2 Juliano Mer-Khamis Arnas Children
  • Arna Mers children are Palestinian children in
    Jenin who were students at her theatre school.
    The programme was designed to enhance self-esteem
    and hopefulness by inviting children to express
    their anger about the Occupation.
  • Arna received the Right Livelihood Award for her
    contributions to peace. She is a Jewish woman
    who fought in the Palmach in 1948 and who married
    a Palestinian man.
  • Even as an old woman, she defiantly protests a
    checkpoint closure and energetically leads the
    children in songs about peace and freedom.
  • She talks of her own background but does not take
    responsibility for her involvement in the
    Palmach. She does not feel uncomfortable about
    her excited and sexualized army experience.
  • There are many scenes in the movie about the
    children being invited to express anger, often in
    a sadistic way. Arna invites the children to hit
    her. One boy is invited to enact his sadistic
    teacher. A child is instructed to enact an angry
    dog. Children do not speak in their own words
    and do not verbalize feelings other than anger.

8
Psychological Mechanisms Arnas Children
  • The ideal of being a fighter is explicitly
    promoted, albeit with the aim of lifting
    self-esteem through being active rather than
    passive.
  • Control comes from the outside, from adults, at
    an age when the psychological task is forming
    ones own inside voice (conscience) to monitor
    and guide individual feelings and actions.
  • Excited fantasies and play acting that involve
    excited aggression replaces a reality orientation
    that prepares children for the serious choices
    they will eventually need to make. Three of
    these boys later die fighting in the Israeli
    invasion of Jenin.
  • Generational boundaries are breached when adults
    use children as part of their own psychological
    functioning, disrupting mastery of essential
    developmental tasks.
  • It is shocking that the director, and Israeli
    Peace Now leader Uri Avnery, compare these boys
    tragic sacrifice with Masada and Samson, admiring
    these youth for fulfilling the Israeli ideal of
    suicide.

9
The Application of these Observations
  • Ibdaa Cultural Center at Dheisheh Refugee Camp

10
The Inner Psychological World andOuter
Socio-Political Pathology
  • For individual mental health, people need to be
    able to express themselves in their own words and
    to be listened to. In these documentaries,
    children were actively invited to be vengeful and
    aggressive words were given to the children in
    the form of songs, stories, scripts.
  • At the GCMHP, the mediation program at public
    schools allows youth to speak for themselves and
    to speak with each other.
  • In clinical work, it is important to distinguish
    between inner psychological pathology and outer
    social pathology to diminish the pressure to
    collude and comply with a disturbed social
    environment.
  • Helping youth to understand Israeli pathology may
    diminish personal feelings of humiliation and the
    pull to identify with the aggressor.
  • In these documentaries, people in authority
    distort psychological and social reality. The
    adults do not see that admiration of extreme
    aggression can cause anxiety in youth they do
    not acknowledge Israels separation wall and
    siege only the wall and siege at Masada they
    show no discomfort about idealizing mass murder
    they do not hesitate to alter facts (e.g. one
    adult substitutes Palestine for Philistine).
    Children learn not to think and to notice
    feelings.
  • An alternative education system developed in
    post-war Germany. In addition to learning about
    the Holocaust, children learned about individual
    responsibility and about challenging authority.

11
Peace or War?
  • Two hundred two Israelis signed the Olga
    Document If we muster within ourselves the
    appropriate honesty and requisite courage, we
    will be able to take the first step in the long
    journey that can extricate us from the tangle of
    denial, repression, distortion of reality, loss
    of direction and forsaking of conscience. We are
    united in the belief that peace and
    reconciliation are contingent on Israels
    recognition of its responsibility for the
    injustices done to the indigenous people, the
    Palestinians, and on willingness to redress them.
    The State of Israel was supposed to tear down
    the walls of the ghetto it is now constructing
    the biggest ghetto in the entire history of the
    Jews.
  • The Samson Option Israel has the fourth largest
    military and the fourth largest nuclear arsenal
    in the world. Eminent journalist Seymour Hersh
    states that it is conceivable that Israel would
    use its nuclear weapons.
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