\u201cWhat\u2019s the right thing for Israel to do? If they can dismantle the Hamas apparatus in and\/or under the hospital perhaps they can do so with a minimum of carnage to the innocent. How to fight barbaric terrorists who fight among innocent humans is a terrible dilemma. However, I and my family and many friends are Jewish. I believe that despite the dreadful Netanyahu and his even more dreadful cohort, Israel is fighting for all Jews everywhere. And I am afraid for all of us.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n There is a lot to be said about this statement. Two weeks after the attack, it is still unclear what the alleged \u201cHamas apparatus\u201d beneath the hospital consisted of. The idea of \u201cminimizing carnage\u201d of the innocent has already proved to be a pipe dream; the massacre has taken more than 13,000 Palestinian lives, some 5,000 of whom were children. \u201cBarbaric terrorists\u201d seems a fair enough description of the Hamas fighters who butchered civilians; calling the murder of Israeli children \u201cresistance\u201d is no more justifiable than calling the murder of Palestinian children \u201cjustice.\u201d Hamas forces do shelter among the civilians of Gaza \u2013 but one wonders what they are supposed to do instead. Armed rebels throughout history have seldom committed mass suicide by exposing themselves to destruction by occupying regimes. And those regimes (like the French in Algeria) almost always accuse them of using \u201ccivilian shields.\u201d<\/p>\n All this said, however, the heart of my friend\u2019s statement are his concluding punch lines: \u201cIsrael is fighting for all Jews everywhere. And I am afraid for all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n Why does he say this, when he also understands that the war in Gaza pits an ultra-nationalist Israeli regime dedicated to the permanent suppression, if not outright expulsion, of resident Palestinians, against an ultra-violent movement of Palestinian rebels? What does this ghastly local conflict have to do with \u201call Jews everywhere?\u201d And why would my friend, ordinarily a liberal egalitarian, believe that it Jewish lives are more worthy to be protected and saved than the lives of other peoples?<\/p>\n To answer these questions, we will want to look more closely at two questions: the role of historical trauma in shaping group consciousness and the question of the Jewish State.<\/p>\n Antisemitism and Chosen Traumas<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Because of its savagery and especially because of its wide range and number of civilian victims, the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, is seen by many Israelis and other Jews as the possible start of a new Holocaust \u2013 an attempt to exterminate Jews en masse <\/em>because they are Jews. Considering the Jewish experience, particularly in the twentieth century, this perception is entirely understandable. At the same time, it is dangerously out of touch with present realities.<\/p>\n Psychologists like Dr. Vamik Volkan of the University of Virginia explain that when ethnic or religious groups feel they are under attack, not only does their sense of group identity become more intense and \u201ctotal,\u201d but present violence against them can awaken excruciating memories of past disasters involving extreme violence. Volkan calls these disasters \u201cchosen traumas\u201d to indicate that they have become an integral part of the story, handed down from generation to generation, that constitutes the group\u2019s cultural and political identity. \u00a0Following Freud, he argues that these reawakened memories make it difficult, sometimes impossible, for members of formerly victimized groups to distinguish between past and present threats. Those once threatened with extermination and reminded of this horror by current events effectively live in the past. Even if the past and present threats are not comparable, the victims of trauma tend to equate the new enemy with the old, believing that if they are to survive as a people, they must obliterate the threatening force. \u00a0(For examples drawn from many cultures, see Volkan\u2019s book, Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism<\/em>, Basic Books, 1998).<\/p>\n Many Jews around the world view Israel\u2019s war against Hamas as a replay of World War II and the struggle against the Nazis. Some 300,000 people demonstrated recently in Washington, D.C. to give voice to this fear. Any type of antisemitism can be dangerous to Jews, of course, as the horrific attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh showed in 2018. But the identification of current assaults on Jews with the Nazis\u2019 \u201cfinal solution\u201d occludes the fact that Jew-hatred in modern politics is not comparable with the antisemitism that produced the Holocaust.<\/p>\n In older days the Jewish people, mainly concentrated in Russia, Eastern Europe, and later in the United States, were a highly vulnerable group subjected to a wide range of legal, social, and political disabilities. Although a small number were successful in business or in cultural pursuits, most Jews were poor or near-poor workers and shopkeepers. Long considered pariahs in Christian Europe, they were often distrusted and brutalized by their neighbors and used as scapegoats by rulers anxious to divert attention from their own regimes\u2019 failings.<\/p>\n Antisemitic narratives in this environment constituted a direct threat to Jews and a danger to their collective survival.\u00a0 In medieval times, they were massacred by Crusaders as \u201cChrist-killers\u201d and set upon by peasant mobs persuaded that they used black magic to cause plagues and famines. During the upheavals of the industrial revolution, antisemites accused them of controlling the banks and plotting economic crises, and, simultaneously, of controlling the labor movement and plotting working-class revolutions. And less than a century ago, Adolf Hitler and his minions combined a famous antisemitic forgery (\u201cthe Protocols of the Elders of Zion\u201d) with pseudo-scientific race theory to convince Germans and other Europeans that Jews were conspiring to dominate the world politically and corrupt it biologically.<\/p>\n The genocidal consequences of these evil fantasies are well known \u2013 and the Holocaust, for many Jews, is a live memory, not \u201cancient history.\u201d I learned about Nazi antisemitism as a boy when my father, convinced that a campaign to exterminate European Jewry was under way, joined the Anti-Defamation League of B\u2019nai B\u2019rith and tried to awaken other Americans to the truth about Hitler\u2019s death camps. Later, to provide a haven for the survivors, he helped launch the transport ship known as the Exodus from Baltimore and ran guns to the Haganah, the fledgling Israeli army. He and my mother also worked as activists to end American antisemitism, which from the 1920s until the 1950s involved multiple forms of discrimination against Jews. Later in life I heard eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust from my mother and father-in-law, two survivors of the Auschwitz death camp who first met each other after the war in Chicago.<\/p>\n Antisemitism seemed a real threat to all of us. But these events took place in the shadow of World War II, when Hitler almost succeeded in solving his \u201cJewish Problem.\u201d\u00a0 Over the past 80 years, by contrast, it has become clear that, despite pockets of poverty, on a global scale the Jewish people now rank among the world\u2019s most privileged groups. In terms of wealth and income levels, education, marketable skills, cultural achievements, social acceptance, and political influence they rank high on any comparative listing of ethnic and religious groups. This is particularly clear in the U.S., where AIPAC, the chief pro-Israel lobbying group, has been a very powerful influence on American foreign policy.<\/p>\n As soon as one talks about Jewish influence, of course, some critics will cry \u201cantisemitism!\u201d It is perfectly true that there are \u201cantisemitic tropes\u201d that falsely credit Jews with power that they do not possess, such as control of the banking system and the news media. But it is not antisemitic to recognize the power of organizations like AIPAC, or to note that the Jewish community in the U.S., which traditionally solidarized with poor and working-class groups at home and abroad, has developed an influential conservative wing that now makes common cause with billionaires and advocates an imperialist foreign policy.<\/p>\n At present, in my view, the most serious threat to the Jewish community is not that posed by Palestinian rebels, militant Islamists, or local antisemites. The far more potent danger is that a privileged position used to dominate less fortunate and powerful groups will over the long run generate mass hatred of Jews, along with other elite formations. Progressives in the U.S. Congress such as Barbara Lee, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Ilhan Omar, and others understand this well, but because they are not sufficiently pro-Israel for the conservatives, they are called antisemites and opposed in primaries by AIPAC-funded rivals.<\/p>\n Political Post-Traumatic Stress: Costs and Cures<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The antidote to living in the shadow of past trauma is a healthy dose of present social reality.\u00a0 Living in the present, it is possible to recognize the dangers of elitism and the need to affirm one\u2019s human kinship with less favored groups. \u201cVictim consciousness,\u201d by contrast, perpetuates a purely ethnic or \u201ctribal\u201d consciousness. What else but ethnic tribalism could justify the position that it is perfectly acceptable to kill 13,000 or more Palestinians in order to destroy the organization responsible for 1,200 Israeli deaths? The unspoken justifications for this position, which would otherwise seem grossly disproportionate and immoral on its face, are, first, that the enemy aims to annihilate us completely and has a chance to do so, and second, that \u201cour\u201d people are worth more than other people.<\/p>\n The first justification, we have seen, is understandable but false. The second \u2013 the supreme worth of our people, compared with others \u2013 is the unspoken major premise that supports the rest of the argument for killing alien civilians and soldiers. The German troops occupying Western Europe in the early 1940s had something like this in mind when they declared that they would kill 10 civilian hostages for every German gunned down by the Resistance. When in 2011 the Israeli regime released 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the return of one IDF hostage, many considered this a noble gesture. But decoding the action reveals a hidden ratio \u2013 one of us is worth a thousand of them. In calculating the extent of permissible \u201ccollateral damage\u201d in a struggle like the war in Gaza, this sort of equation represents a fatal plunge into the most murderous type of ethno-nationalism.<\/p>\n Of course, the Holocaust is not the only trauma operative in the context of the Gaza war. The Palestinians have their own \u201cchosen trauma,\u201d the Nakba or Catastrophe, which refers to the process by which some 700,000 of their people lost their homes and lands during and after the Israel-Arab War of 1948, with more than 200,000 forced to live in other nations.\u00a0 Like the Jews who perceive the Hamas assault of October 7 as a potential restart of the Holocaust, many Palestinians (including the residents of Gaza, almost all of whose families fled or were driven out of pre-1948 Palestine) see the massive Israeli attack on Gaza as the start of a new Nakba.\u00a0 The similarities in the traumatized parties\u2019 thinking and emotions are striking; while Israelis were re-traumatized by Hamas\u2019s personal violence and statements of enmity toward Jews, Palestinians were terrorized anew by the IDF\u2019s unprecedented bombings and by statements by Israeli officials describing the Gaza residents as \u201canimals\u201d and favoring their mass expulsion.<\/p>\n How, then, faced with such serious provocations, does one learn from a trauma, keep its memory fresh, and yet learn to live in the actual present?\u00a0 In Killing in the Name of Identity: A Study of Bloody Conflicts <\/em>(Pitchstone Press, 2006), Vamik Volkan describes a form of therapeutic dialogue between group representatives that he found useful in nations plagued by serious ethnic struggles.\u00a0 Other forms of trauma healing have also been attempted, sometimes with promising results. But there seems to be no substitute for a campaign of mass education waged by political movement dedicated to making clear the nature and extent of the destruction propagated by oppressive elite groups and the possibility of constructing a more just and peaceful system.<\/p>\n Zionism and Antisemitism<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n There are forms of antisemitism that are perfectly obvious either because they rest on well- known falsifications, malicious exaggerations, or the attribution of evil intentions to Jews. \u00a0Far more problematic is the charge that criticism of the State of Israel or its behavior that allegedly goes too far is antisemitic, since it masks hostility towards Jews or denies them the same rights that are universally recognized when claimed by other groups. \u00a0Simply to criticize Israel is OK; very few people would consider criticism of Israeli policies concerning settlements in the West Bank an expression of antisemitism, since international law does not recognize a right of those occupying conquered territory to settle or annex it, and most international organizations consider Palestinians a people who have national rights, including rights of some sort to the lands conquered by Israel in 1967.<\/p>\n Things get more complicated, however, when pro-Palestinian advocates (including groups like Jewish Voice for Peace) declare that the \u201cJewish State,\u201d at least as defined and operated by successive Israeli governments, is illegitimate and needs to be replaced by a more pluralistic and democratic form of governance. Many anti-Zionists argue that, while the Jewish community has a right to a secure existence in the Middle East, the form of state in which it exists must recognize the injustice of the Nakba, the right of Palestinians (or at least some of them) to return to the land taken from them (or at least some of it), the right of Palestinians to have a capital in East Jerusalem, and the equal rights and status of Palestinians and Israelis, Muslims and Jews.<\/p>\n \u201cJewish State\u201d could, of course, mean many things; the Church of England is the established church in pluralistic, democratic Great Britain, which could choose, if its people wished, to call itself an Anglican State. But what might be called the orthodox view of the Jewish State was recently expressed by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who stated that Israel is \u201cthe national state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people.\u201d<\/p>\n Presumably, this means that questions regarding crucial issues involving religion and civil life, such as the right of return, the law applicable to marriage, divorce, and matters of civil status, and the exemption of religious scholars from military duty, must be decided by Jews, not Muslims or others.\u00a0 It also means that the security interests of the Jewish community take precedence over those of non-Jews, so that if Jews feel that they are threatened, they have a right (if not a duty) to establish checkpoints, build walls, outlaw weapons in the hands of non-Jews, and so forth. \u00a0An apparent implication of this principle is that the Jewish State must have a permanent Jewish electoral majority, thus making illegitimate any sort of \u201cone-state\u201d solution that threatens to produce a non-Jewish majority. (Even a two-state solution that denies the alleged right to sovereignty over the West Bank (\u201cJudea\u201d and \u201cSamaria\u201d) could in some scenarios be determined to be illegitimate.)<\/p>\n With these issues in mind, anti-Zionists argue that a Jewish State, as currently conceived, is not analogous to a French or Polish state, but is something closer to Iran\u2019s Islamic Republic, which is a theocracy, and therefore an illegitimate form of governance in the post-Enlightenment world.<\/p>\n In any case, just as it is not \u201canti-Shia\u201d to call for the replacement of the Iranian regime by something more pluralistic and democratic, it should not be considered antisemitic to level the same sort of criticism against the Jewish State. Furthermore, it is fallacious to affirm that each people on earth have a right to a country in which their own ethnic or religious interests are institutionalized and considered supreme. Hundreds of peoples in the modern world have no such country, and many of these groups do not want one.<\/p>\n On a deeper level than these legal and political arguments, however, is the perceived crisis of security that drives the members of certain groups such as religious Zionists to demand a state that they believe will protect them against the members of hostile groups and peoples. This was, after all, the original motivation that gave birth to the Jewish State, and a defense of that State by arguments accusing its opponents of antisemitism identifies these new adversaries with the older enemies that produced the original crisis of security.\u00a0 This returns us to the first theme of this editorial \u2013 the idea that very serious traumas which threaten a group\u2019s survival are re-lived when new threats are experienced, even if the new threats are not comparable to the older ones.<\/p>\n Those who defend the current Israeli government\u2019s massive retaliation against the residents of Gaza often declare that critics of the war are \u201cpro-Hamas\u201d \u2013 a canard that, by washing away the distinction between Zionism and Judaism also obliterates the distinction between critics of the Jewish State and anti-Israel terrorists. Ironically, some leaders of Hamas (not all of them) have been more discriminating than this.\u00a0 In 2006, Ismail Hanieh declared, \u201cHamas is not hostile to Jews because they are Jews. We are hostile to them because they occupied our land and expelled our people.\u201d<\/p>\n Clearly, the Hamas murderers of October 7 did not distinguish between Zionists and Jews. But the self-declared apostles of the Jewish State do their constituents no favors by confirming this equation. U.S. polls confirm<\/a> that support for the Jewish State among is declining rapidly, particularly among younger Americans.<\/p>\n Charges that the loss of support for continued Israeli violence against Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank indicate a rise in antisemitism seem based in part on a mass neurosis that involves reliving the trauma of the Holocaust, and in part on a religious-nationalist ideology embraced by the Zionist right wing but, under great political pressure, now accepted by many centrists and leftists as well.\u00a0 At bottom, the drastic insecurity among Israeli Jews and many Jews in Europe and America awakened by the Hamas attack underpins this ideology.\u00a0 By contrast, younger people who do not experience the same trans-generational insecurity tend to reject both the equation of Zionism with Judaism and the legitimacy of the Jewish country.<\/p>\n At this writing, a truce has been declared in Gaza to permit the release of hostages held by Hamas and female and young prisoners held by Israel. The Netanyahu regime has promised an early return to the violent retaliation against Gazans perpetrated, with U.S. support, by the Israeli Defense Forces.\u00a0 It will not be considered antisemitic, I trust, to pray that the \u201cpause\u201d in hostilities becomes permanent and that all the hostages and all the prisoners will be returned alive to their home communities and their families.<\/p>\n __________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n Two weeks after the attack, it is still unclear what the alleged \u201cHamas apparatus\u201d beneath the al-Shifa hospital consisted of. \u201cMinimizing carnage\u201d of the innocent has proved to be a pipe dream; the massacre has taken more than 13,000 Palestinian lives, some 5,000 of whom were children.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1668,87,865,1029,3183,88,715,427,965,886],"class_list":["post-249051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","tag-antisemitism","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-hamas","tag-infanticide","tag-israel","tag-massacre","tag-palestine","tag-war-crimes","tag-zionism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249051"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":249055,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249051\/revisions\/249055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/Richard-Rubenstein-scaled-e1592126260707.jpg\")
<\/a> Richard E. Rubenstein is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/em><\/a> and a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University\u2019s Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution. A graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), and Harvard Law School, Rubenstein is the author of nine books on analyzing and resolving violent social conflicts. His most recent book is <\/em>Resolving Structural Conflicts: How Violent Systems Can Be Transformed (Routledge, 2017).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"