As I sit down to write, news comes in that an Arab citizen of Jerusalem has rammed a car into a group of his Jewish compatriots, killing six. My heart sinks. A violent response to this is inevitable – the Israeli authorities, whose no-tolerance attitude to attacks on “its” citizens is well known, have already promised to hit back hard. And then there will no doubt be a violent backlash. With this battle going on in the background, how is it possible to find a space for quiet reflection and thought on Israel-Palestine?

It has been like this for months now. I had originally intended to write this paper in the summer, but the kidnap and subsequent killing of three yeshiva students in the West Bank effectively put paid to that. In no time an Arab youth was kidnapped and murdered in East Jerusalem in an act of reprisal from the other side. More ominously, when Israel publicly held Hamas responsible, one knew that it would be only a matter of time before “we”, the Israelis, would get “them”, “the Hamas” – where else but in Hamas-land, Gaza? As the airwaves filled with sounds and images of that brutal war (Rothchild, 2014) – of bombings and buildings being reduced to dust, of streets filled with the blood of the dead and wounded and the agony, pain, distress, grief and rage of the survivors – and of politicians fighting a propaganda war, it became just about impossible to think. At a time like that how could one turn off the news in order to write about Palestine-Israel? Yet, how can one have the news on and think?

Polarisation and Identification

A clear psychoanalytic inference can be drawn from the above dilemma: for one to be so powerfully immobilised by external events implies that one must, in some way, be emotionally implicated in them. One is identified with one or more element in that situation of conflict. I think this emotional involvement is far more pervasive in the psychoanalytic world than is immediately apparent, and accounts in part for our profession’s relative silence on matters pertaining to the Israel-Palestine situation. Our natural inclination is then to leave it to the politicians.

At a recent talk at the Tavistock Clinic on “The survival and well-being of the Palestinian people”, arranged as part of the Clinic’s Thinking Space programme (Lowe, 2013) and delivered by a Palestinian psychiatrist, the first questioner from the audience launched into a spirited objection to what he saw as political bias and a lack of even-handedness on the part of the presenter. However, the questioner was not content simply to make this observation – an opinion to which he had every right – but launched into a lengthy exposition of his own, designed to put right the matter of the perceived bias in a concrete way. Interventions from the Chair, to the effect that the speaker’s point had been made and noted, were ignored and, after several further minutes and attempts by the Chair to move things on, he was eventually cut short only when another audience member literally took the microphone from him. However, he – and a number of others he appeared to be speaking for – clearly felt aggrieved and victimised on account of being unfairly silenced.

The presence of a Palestinian speaker seemed in itself to have been the stimulus for bringing into the room the war between Israel and the Palestinians, something commented on by later speakers. In this atmosphere, there was very limited possibility of a proper discussion that might bring together a meeting of minds, let alone minds that acknowledged their differences. Instead the atmosphere was one of opposition and battle, of taking sides: one was either for Israel or for the Palestinians. The prospect of a thinking space where two sides in a debate might be properly aired, away from the heat of the front line, had been successfully subverted.

A second example of the polarised mindset as far as Israel-Palestine is concerned occurred when, some years ago, the editors of the major psychoanalytic journals jointly condemned, in a special editorial, a decision by two (non-psychoanalytic) UK-based journals to dismiss Israeli academics from their editorial boards. The special editorial sought to uphold academic freedom and deplored the fact that the academics were excluded purely on the grounds of their “nationality”. What was surprising was that no mention was made of the fact that the dismissals were part of an academic boycott of Israel – this was receiving some publicity in the popular press at the time – and thus the merit, or otherwise, of this case was not considered at all. Instead the action of the journals concerned was portrayed as blatantly racist (anti-Semitic): the academics had been dismissed quite simply because they were Israeli.

The complex question of the academic boycott – the central matter in the original action to which exception was being taken – was indeed raised by two respondents to the editorial (Chiesa, 2002; Kemp, 2005), but a third (Poland, 2005) rounded on Kemp’s view that “Zionism is a racist ideology”, branding it as “vilely destructive…passionate prejudice” (p. 903). This prompted the editors, who had hitherto maintained a silence on the issues raised, to express regret at publishing Kemp’s letter on account of its “partisan hatefulness” and promptly to draw the discussion to an end. For Poland, the view that Zionism is racist reflects an anti-Israel/Semitic prejudice, and he condemns Kemp’s “intemperate partisanship” and “incendiary provocativeness” on account of it. Though he notes the latter’s acknowledgement that a brief letter responding to an editorial is but a “condensed response”, a poor “substitute for a reasoned analysis of the original editorial”, he gives him no leeway on account of it. To him there is no possibility that Kemp may indeed have a reasoned view – the rest of us may or may not agree with it – as to why he sees Zionism in this way. Instead, Kemp is dismissed as quite simply prejudiced. It is not difficult to see that, were the discussion not closed, Kemp may in turn have pointed out that Poland’s letter itself reveals a powerful, if not intemperate, emotional reaction; he may have gone on to question whether this reflects an identification with Israel, the counterpart to his perceived identification against Israel and with the Palestinians.

These brief examples show how difficult it is to engage psychoanalytically with matters pertaining to Israel-Palestine (here, on the psychological condition of Palestinians – as “second class” citizens within Israel, or “under occupation”Footnote 1 in the West Bank and Gaza – or a proposed academic boycott of Israel). Instead, a polarised us-them mindset is mobilised, which in turn places proper dialogue beyond reach. Indeed, Poland, who blames Kemp for bringing a partisan mindset into the proceedings, states explicitly that an engagement with the us-them dynamic is beyond our proper “academic concern”, belonging instead to the “polemics of international events”. This seems to mean, “let the politicians fight it out – we are above such ugly hostility”. The fact that we are powerfully drawn in, however, demonstrates the opposite, namely that we are not above the hostilities involved in this situation.

Nor are these difficulties restricted to psychoanalysts, or confined to events related exclusively to Israel-Palestine. Schonfield (2016) reports on two interdisciplinary conferences addressing the Holocaust where similar polarised dynamics were mobilised, interfering with the process of trying to engage creatively and critically with the task of locating an understanding of that atrocity within a wider historical context relevant to the present. He focuses on powerful forces of compliance and political correctness that held sway, and notes his own silence on these matters, up to the time of giving voice to his observations by writing the paper some twenty years later. The elements he describes – polarisation and powerful forces of political correctness, including pressure not to step out of line and, if one does, finding oneself in a psychological minefield – are similar to those I described above, and raise the question of whether the Holocaust itself may be implicated in the difficulty with bringing proper thoughtfulness to the Israel-Palestine situation. Or, whether it is the fact that the Holocaust is now inevitably embedded in the latter context that makes it so difficult to find an optimal distance from which to permit objective reflection.

Either way, we may conclude that the battle between the two sides pulls us in, the supposedly neutral parties, in a way that is unexpected. Does the Palestine-Israel situation serve as a magnet for feelings of such intensity that they lead inevitably to polarisation? Martin Kemp (2011) has recently suggested that guilt over the Holocaust is a powerful factor, operating unconsciously at a societal level in the West, that plays a part in a polarisation of this sort. This leads to overcompensation in the form of a reluctance to criticise Israel openly, insofar as doing so risks attracting the accusation of anti-Semitism; hence, any thinking that might lead in that direction is avoided. (One might add that the same could well apply to non-Westerners, but the other way round.) For those from Third World (including the Arab and Muslim world) backgrounds, the alliance – perceived or real – between Israel and the West may also attract to Israel powerful feelings that belong to the reality of having been colonised and oppressed by Western powers.Footnote 2 This, in turn, draws the accusation of racism on the part of those from the Third World (e.g. the view that Zionism is a form of racism). Such emotional factors may account for why the situation becomes so polarised that dialogue and discussion are out of the question, and we end up in different and opposing camps.

Enmity and War

There is a further psychoanalytic element that may also be playing a part in the problem of engaging properly with the Palestine-Israel situation. It may be that in our ordinary discourse about Israel-Palestine anxieties are generated that touch on an unconscious conviction that war, including its incarnation as a polarised mindset, is inevitable. Why should this be so?

The state of Israel was established in 1948 in the midst of a territorial war. However, war after war has failed to resolve a situation that has today reached a stalemate widely regarded as one of the most deep-seated and intractable that our world has known. Seemingly unending cycles of violence and destructiveness produce ever more suffering, fuelling further hatred and enmity, time after time reigniting the fires of revenge. To a neutral observer, it is inexplicable that a peaceful accommodation, involving compromise on both sides, should prove so elusive. The protagonists, however, remain locked into a cycle of violence and to them such a step remains out of reach as each seems content to settle for blaming the other and justifying its own position. Meaningful dialogue seems impossible and the sense of hopelessness is palpable as attempt after attempt to address the situation is derailed, almost inevitably, by a violent backlash. The state of war between Israel and the Palestinians seems here to stay.

Why does war have such a hold over us? Freud (1933) suggested that it provides an opportunity for aggression – for him a primary inner drive – to be directed outwards, as violence against an enemy. This solves our problem of living with a death instinct that is opposed to the life instincts and that strives constantly and silently against them, in pursuit of a quiescent, inanimate state. Paradoxically, war’s destructiveness in the outside world is therefore life-enhancing at the level of individual psychology.

Freud (1913, 1921) draws on his metapsychological account of the primal horde – a mythic prehistoric event in which sons unite to kill a tyrannical father, guilt over which results in the father being symbolically installed in the mind as a superego that creates inner pressure against such violent excesses – to account for the pull within each of us towards war and violent conflict. In this narrative the murderous primal horde battle predates guilt, upon which the building of a more civilised world depends. These are, therefore, later and more tenuously established developments that, in the warring mindset, give way almost inevitably to mankind’s earlier and more innate nature: ontogeny repeats phylogeny. War thus has a regressive pull on us. Avoiding war, on the other hand, requires something more – we must resist open aggression and engage the other in negotiation and dialogue, both of which are later achievements that depend on the superego. The regressive pull tugs at our more primitive nature, hence is more powerful.

Subsequent generations of clinicians have supplemented Freud’s picture with more detail from the consulting room. We now have a fuller account of the earliest pre-Oedipal stages of development, which tends to supplement how we see the regressive pull within the mind. For example, drawing on different frames of reference, Volkan’s (1988) discussion of our need for enemies emphasises the primitive roots of the warring mindset and stresses especially the ways in which primitive (narcissistic) vulnerability is externalised in group conflicts, mobilising in the process large group dynamics that sweep us in. In the Kleinian tradition, we think of the enemy as a current version of the bad object first encountered in infancy when paranoid-schizoid functioning prevailed (e.g. Rustin, 1991); that the mechanisms of splitting and projective identification are central; and that psychotic level defences such as omnipotence and mania are mobilised to protect us from a warring situation that is feared as catastrophic.

Despite our increasing clinical and theoretical sophistication, however, Freud’s idea that there is a primitive pull towards war continues to colour our thinking, translating today into a regressive pull attributed to the paranoid mindset. In my view we should think of that mindset as the psychological concomitant of being at war rather than causing war, and note that this renders the depressive position and secondary process functioning practically inaccessible – as I have illustrated above, it is difficult to think under fire. However, what primary aggression did for Freud, a primitive need for enemies – primitive developmentally rather than because ontogeny repeats phylogeny as it did for Freud – now does for us (see Grotstein, 1982). Our overall attitude to the inevitability of war and, by extension, the polarised mindset that prevails with respect to the conflict between Israel and Palestine remains very much in line with the Freud of 1933.

However, I think this approach is overly reductive and obscures another more hopeful aspect of the psychoanalytic project, in which Freud places psychoanalysis firmly on the side of more “civilised” and progressive ways of dealing with primitive aspects of our inner life – the very aspects that are subject to the pull of regression. Psychoanalysis does so by engaging, rather than avoiding, these aspects of the mind, but its aim is certainly not a hedonistic surrender to the instincts or, as we might say today, the primitive aspects of our nature. On the contrary, the act of bringing them into the light of awareness is seen as a superior and a more adaptive way of living with our inherent animal nature, a direction of travel captured well by the Freudian dictum, “where id is let ego be”. When we give ourselves over to a polarised mindset as far as Israel-Palestine is concerned, I think we sell our discipline short. Moreover, when we leave it to the politicians, for whom the lure of operating in a polarised world holds out the prospect of cheap political gain, we may be complicit in encouraging the mindset of conflict and war – the most primitive aspects of our psychological makeup – to hold sway.

It does not have to be like this. Today our discipline has evolved sufficiently for us to consider that even the most primitive aspects of our minds are not so fearful and intense as to place them beyond the reach of psychoanalysis. However, to reach these levels, the clinician must abandon the stance of the neutral observer, who comments on the analytic process from above the fray, as it were, and accept instead that, contrary to Freud’s original assertion, the profoundly disturbed patient does indeed have a transference, but one that is quite different from the more familiar neurotic version of it (Bion, 1957). Whilst the latter’s transference is symbolic and can be inferred from verbal material, dreams, and associations etc., the disturbed patient’s transference consists of intense and concrete projections forced into the analyst. This alters profoundly how the analyst is perceived and experienced. Such projections are concrete – for the patient, the analyst is literally the way s/he is shaped by the (unconscious) projection, and the transference lacks the as-if quality characteristic of neurotics. To be caught up in this state of affairs is deeply disturbing, but the analyst’s ability to tolerate the process allows the most primitive aspects of the patient’s mind to come to life in the room, and through these enactments to become known. This lived experience deepens the patient’s contact with the most feared contents of their mind (see Segal, 1964; Rosenfeld, 1965, 1987; Stewart, 1991), thereby containing them. Negative capability – the willingness to allow the deepest and most frightening aspects of a patient’s inner world to emerge, without prejudice (Bion, 1967) – plays a key role, and the process aims, simply, to deepen the engagement with whatever is in the patient’s mind.

Returning to the theme of our identification with warring parties, the “Nazareth conferences” – a series of group relations events devised originally to address the psychological aftermath of the Holocaust – have applied these principles directly to this problem. Taking as a starting point the fact that descendants of victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust are powerfully identified with the enmity of the previous generation, the organisers aimed not at talks and reconciliation, but set out instead to create a setting that would deepen the engagement with whatever each carried within in relation to the other. Identification with warring parties thus lay at the core of this work.

The Nazareth Project

When invited to join the staff of these events several years ago I had two interests. First, to gain first-hand exposure to the complex field of the transgenerational transmission of trauma (of the Holocaust) (e.g. Kestenberg, 1993; Kogan, 1995). Second, I was aware of an assertion often made publicly, namely that Palestinian suffering at the hands of Israel is, in some way, a consequence of the persecution suffered by Jews at the hands of the Nazis. At root, there is an aspect to this formulation that we might expect psychoanalytic inquiry to illuminate, namely, was the trauma inflicted on Jews collectively so powerful that it could not be processed, and was its violence therefore destined to be repeated (Freud, 1914; Schonfield, 2016)?

When this assertion is made, usually in the public domain, it suffers the same fate that I described earlier in relation to all matters pertaining to Israel-Palestine. It becomes a signal for polarisation and a digging in of heels – one is either on one side or the other, and the possibility of engaging meaningfully with the question is placed beyond reach. Would a more containing setting such as the Nazareth one, with its specific focus on the aftermath of that atrocity, be able to facilitate a proper psychoanalytic engagement with this question?

The Nazareth project – named after the venue of the first event in what has become a series – began in 1984 when a group of German and Israeli psychoanalysts recognised that they carried within themselves a legacy of the Holocaust that marred their relationship. Working with other colleagues, they sought a means whereby this problem might be investigated psychoanalytically, and settled on the group relations approach, adapting it to work with the psychological aftermath of the Holocaust (Erlich, 2009; Miller, 2009).

The group relations model was developed originally at the Tavistock Institute in the UK to address issues of authority and leadership in the work setting (see Hayden and Molenkamp, 2002). It is built on Bion’s (1961) conceptualisation of the group as an entity in its own right, rather than as the sum of its individual members. A group has a primary task – its raison d’être – and an emotional life centred around grappling with it. When a group succeeds in working at this task the group ego dominates and it is in “work group” mode, but when defences against doing so predominate, it is in the grip of “basic assumptions” that protect it from anxieties generated by the task. As in analysis, interpreting these anxieties and defences appropriately can help the group to recover its capacity to face what might otherwise be avoided altogether, and the process as a whole can yield important insights into unconscious forces involved in the task.

A group relations “conference” is usually residential and takes place over several (5-14) days, making it an intensive emotional experience. There are several settings – Large and Small Study Groups, Review Groups and System Event – each of which involves a different level of dependency and intimacy, which enables them to generate differing levels of anxiety in relation to the task. In each setting, what unfolds is observed and made available for reflection and study and, from across the system as a whole, a nuanced and variegated understanding of different dimensions of the problem at hand emerges, deepening our appreciation of the issues involved. Members are not addressed individually. Instead, their contributions are seen as giving voice to the group mind, where interventions are also addressed. Nevertheless, their active engagement means that they are powerfully identified with the work, and this deepens their individual emotional experience and learning.

The adapted form of the group relations approach proved helpful in bringing to the fore anxieties and defences, together with the projections that lay behind these, that allowed a deeper engagement with the problematic German-Israeli relationship and made these dynamics available for work (Erlich et al, 2009). Participants in that series felt that the depth of involvement achieved bore testimony to the fact the inner German-Israeli relationship had indeed been accessed in a real way. The physical presence of the other had brought issues powerfully to the fore, which enabled this setting to do work that could not otherwise be properly accessed (e.g. in individual analyses).

Across the Nazareth series as a whole the need to involve groups affected by the Holocaust other than Germans and Israelis had gradually emerged. By the time I joined (the fourth conference) these “affected others” were included in the working title of the conference. Consciously, this made room for those who were neither German nor Israeli/Jewish, yet who were profoundly impacted by the events of the Holocaust (e.g. children evacuated on the Kindertransporten and raised as Gentiles, children of mixed Jewish and “native” European heritage, etc). However, the designation “affected others” also opened the way for exploring the question I raised above regarding a possible connection between the Holocaust and the situation vis-à-vis the Palestinians, as the opening sequence I report below shows.

Before proceeding I want to emphasise that in this paper I shall be presenting selected observations that are relevant to my theme of the Israel-Palestine situation. As I have indicated, this is a strand of work that drew me personally to that project. Likewise, every conference participant comes to do his/her own work, encompassed within the primary task, and the conference aims to deepen participants’ engagement with the issues they bring as they emerge. Each person could therefore write a personal narrative like mine, and each would be different. In addition to these personal journeys, work also takes place at the group level that reveals preoccupations in the group unconscious relevant to the task, together with group-level defences against them. This creates a complex, interweaving web of personal and group dynamics, to which no one narrative can do justice. The narrative that follows should be viewed in this light.

Bringing in the Third

Where are the Palestinians?

At the outset I was aware that, unlike the colleagues I was joining, I had no personal connection with the Holocaust. I shared this with my colleagues, saying that I was raised in a Muslim community in South Africa, which was part of the larger blackFootnote 3 population targeted by the apartheid system. The apartheid doctrine shared a racist core with the Nazi doctrine of Aryan supremacy, and it was often said that, were it not for blacks, Jews would probably have been the targets of apartheid. Moreover, a number of Jews were prominent in the struggle against that system. Relations with Jews were, therefore, on the whole cordial, helped by the fact that Jews have a special status in Islam as earlier recipients of the message of monotheism. However, when the injustices against the Palestinians came to the fore, a schism opened up between Muslim and Jew. I was interested in whether a psychoanalytic light could be shone on this phenomenon.

From the outset, bringing a third party into the established equilibrium of working at the German-Jew/Israeli interface proved difficult. In the opening plenary of my first conference (the fourth in the series), a member asked directly why, given that the conference was to address “others” affected by the Holocaust, there was no Palestinian on the staff. I suggested that we now knew that Palestinians were indeed present – not as participants in the flesh, but in the mind. As it does in plenaries, the discussion moved on to other matters, but across the conference as a whole there was no return to the question of how the Palestinians may be present in the mind.

In that conference I was a consultant to a Small Group (SG), where there was some initial interest in how my first name – readily recognised by Israeli members as Arabic – came to co-exist with an apparently Jewish surname. At the time I interpreted this interest as a resistance to real work on their part: as a transference object I was to contain two opposing polarities within my own person, relieving them of responsibility for identifying and working with the polarised, oppositional identities – Arab and Jew respectively – present in their inner worlds and thus in the group. This incident shows how I used a perfectly good here-and-now interpretation to steer the group away from a deeper exploration of the meaning of the Arab/Muslim-Israeli/Jew dimension as it was present in the group at that moment, i.e. between myself and them, a group of Jews/Israelis and Germans.

Later there was a flashpoint, on this same theme, that occurred within the staff system. In one discussion (during the System Event) when the entire staff team was present, the point was made that genocide is usually secondary to some other aim (such as the conquest of land), but the Holocaust was different in that it was Hitler’s explicit aim to exterminate the Jews as a people. The staff group had been working together for three days by now and this was not the first time the Holocaust had been discussed among us. On earlier occasions my colleagues responded to my self-confessed ignorance of the Holocaust by letting me, gradually and in a three-dimensional way, into the meaning of this event and its impact on both Germans and Jews. It is one thing to learn about the Holocaust from written materials, where it is embedded in historical and political discourses; to hear directly from descendants of the parties involved is a very different emotional experience that permits a new kind of reflection. I think, for example, of an aged Jewish woman in my small group who, in understated tones, recounted how her liberal parents had resisted fleeing from Europe – on account of their identification as citizens of a plural, secular Europe – until it was too late, and only she, their teenage daughter, could escape to Palestine. Her entire family were to perish in the concentration camps. This was the culmination of a long history of experiencing anti-Semitism in Europe, which her father resisted in the name of a common humanity, only for that aspiration to be crushed in the cruellest way possible. Vignettes like these, which also emerged in the staff team, bring depth to one’s appreciation of what is involved; they make one reflect, think and learn. Thus, for example, I came to see the inadequacy of a Muslim/Arab response that states baldly, “We did not do this to you – Hitler did”. That would be quite simply a failure to engage fully, on a human level, with the dimensions of an atrocity that is now part of the history of our shared world. One could see how such a response would retraumatise the traumatised, and this learning was important for me.

On this occasion, however, there was a new element – the distinction between the Holocaust and genocide secondary to territorial conquest. Was this an attempt to bring in the emerging accounts of the “new historians” who spoke of ethnic cleansing involved in the creation of the state of Israel (e.g. Pappe, 2006; Shlaim, 2009)? I thought it might be helpful to bring in an idea that enjoyed wide currency within the Arab/Muslim world, and suggested that a case could be made that Golda Meir’s much publicised assertion that Israel was a land without a people for a people without a land contained an explicitly genocidal idea in that it necessarily obliterated the existing Palestinian population of the land.Footnote 4 At that moment our conversation was interrupted by a knock on the door requesting a colleague and myself to consult to an inter-group meeting.

We returned with time for only a brief report back on our consultation, but later, in passing along a corridor, I was told that my remark had sparked a heated furore where I was accused of minimising the Holocaust by equating it with events involved in the creation of the state of Israel. This was a serious accusation associated with Holocaust denial – a crime in much of Europe. However, we did not return to this emergence of a nascent conflict between a Muslim/Palestinian and a Jewish/Israeli perspective. It underwent repression, together with awareness of the aspect of my identity involved in it.

Return of the repressed

In the dying moments of the closing plenary of that conference, an Israeli colleague noted that there had been no comment on the fact that a staff member had an Arabic name (it had been raised in the relatively “private” setting of my own Small Study Group). Did this silence have a meaning? This was the first public mention of this part of my identity, which had not been worked on in the staff group, and it left me completely paralysed. As the gaze of the entire membership settled on me, an Israeli voice asked, “What has it been like for you to be here?” My numbness eventually gave way to a shrug and the words, “What can I say?”

I felt disowned as a colleague and instead held up like a specimen – someone from another world. That single act left me feeling that all my work at the conference had been completely rubbished. I experienced my colleague as telling me that for him I was, after all, “only a Muslim” – not an ordinary colleague but present solely as a representative from the Palestinian-Muslim world. That identity and how it relates to being German or Israeli had not been properly explored at all within the staff group, so that its appearance in this way, at the eleventh hour, felt hollow and token rather than real. I felt that the staff member wanted to be given credit for taking the courageous step of letting in a third, but without having done the emotional work involved in this by engaging with the meaning of that difference. This would have brought depth to his statement. Instead, in that final plenary, I was placed in an impossible position: on the one hand I could hardly deny my difference as described; on the other, if I accepted his statement at face value, I was colluding with a lie – I had not been properly let in to the staff group as a Muslim. Words on a page cannot convey the depth of emotion that I felt at this attempt to make of me an “other”. I resolved not to do any further work with this group. We were in effect at war and this was one battle in which I had no investment.

With hindsight it is possible to see that my stance at the time was partly defensive: quite early on I had taken refuge in my identity as a professional in order to avoid the powerful emotions involved in being present as a very particular other – Muslim, felt to be in sympathy with the Palestinians, and unwanted. Several years later, when we had long moved on from this difficult struggle, my colleagues acknowledged the reality of what I represented at that first conference.

A Moment of Transition

Some time before this conference I had signed up to a visit to Auschwitz organised by a group of colleagues in London. Although we were fully aware of what we were letting ourselves in for, trudging through the death camp with its macabre exhibits nonetheless completely overwhelmed our minds. Six decades had failed to extinguish the emotional impact of the terrible atrocities committed on that soil – their incomprehensibility, the complete triumph of the death instinct, and the industrial scale of an undertaking that made the notion of a “final solution” sound banal and inadequate: how could it possibly capture the inconceivable cruelty that single-mindedly and systematically stripped its victims of every ounce of dignity before finally killing them in the most degrading way possible? One could glimpse why the atrocity was described as a crime against humanity itself, and the sheer horror of exposure to it left us completely numbed.

That night, as I was dropping off to sleep, I had a “dream” where I saw, beside my bed, row upon row of people stretching out as far as the eye could see. I knew instantly that they were the people of the death camp. They did not threaten, but looked at me directly and expectantly, without saying a single word. A chill went down my spine. What could they possibly want? As the realisation hit me I reached instinctively for the light switch and, in an instant, they were all gone.

In the shadow of the death camp it was impossible to find a meaning beyond the manifest content of the dream: Hitler’s victims, silenced by death, needed us, the living, to speak for them. In the fullness of time, however, I came to see its latent content. The dream used day residues from our visit to the camp to address a very personal connection of mine with the aftermath of the Holocaust, namely the Nazareth work. By walking out, I had silenced the many viewpoints I might bring to the proceedings; this was one meaning of the many silent voices. Another related to the location of the dream – it was the scene of a crime against humanity. This stood for an accusation that walking out was a crime against the human attempt to bring a meeting of minds where otherwise only polarisation and enmity would prevail. Walking out was a final solution. A third meaning related to the chill that woke me. It was disapproval from a superego, which had to be fragmented into many little figures in an attempt to dilute the power of its rebuke. Seemingly non-threatening, the collective presence of these superego figures was nonetheless so spine-chilling as to disrupt my sleep. This meaning of the dream helped me to understand that I should revisit my decision to leave. I did, and resolved to continue with the work, of which I will now give a brief account.

Nazareth: Containment

The comment that had such a violent impact on me could be considered as a symptom of a larger systemic difficulty. In the Nazareth model, detailed work among the staff group, on issues relevant to the conference theme, is essential in order to prepare emotionally for what lies ahead: Israelis and Germans had done this over several years in preparation for the first series. By comparison our work on issues relevant to bringing in a third, especially in the form of a Muslim with its link to the Palestinians, had been at most perfunctory. We agreed therefore to make substantial time available prior to the start of the next members’ conference, as well as after its end, for this purpose. From a psychoanalytic point of view this can be understood as the work of containment.

That was a fortuitous decision, for the next conference took place just after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006. The staff group’s work began with the unfinished business from the last conference, two aspects of which I will discuss here: first, the perceived relevance of the Palestinian problem and second, the intense feeling generated by my Golda Meir comment. We also considered in some detail the meaning of the Lebanon invasion from our differing perspectives.

Palestinians

It turned out that the idea that the Palestinians were included among the others affected by the Holocaust, and thus relevant to the work of the previous conference (and the current one, which worked under the same general title, “Germans, Jews and Affected Others”), was not shared across the staff group. The need to include groups other than Germans and Israelis had grown organically through the presence of individuals (such as Norwegian Jews) with clear Holocaust-related emotional work to do, but whose presence was not properly incorporated in the conference title. The decision to include these groupings was not an a priori, “political” one. My view, stated above, that the Palestinians were indeed present in phantasy was but one possible explanation of why that grouping was mentioned in the opening plenary. They could have been invoked as a way of avoiding real work with the “affected others” present in that conference. On its own, the reference to Palestinians in the opening plenary could not therefore be taken as evidence that the Palestinians were indeed, in the unconscious, among the “others” affected by the Holocaust. By this time, therefore, the Nazareth process had not established any link between the Holocaust and the Palestinian situation.

Specificity of the Holocaust

My comment on the statement attributed to Golda Meir now received a good deal of heated discussion. Two interlinked issues were raised. First, the idea that the establishment of a state defined as Jewish involves an obliteration of Palestinians, as a people who are legitimate inhabitants of that land, was unacceptable. There was considerable discussion of this, with traditional historical accounts brought as evidence of a free choice allegedly made by Arabs to abandon their lands etc., which was contrasted with the different narrative described by the so-called new Israeli historians that appear to validate Palestinian accounts of their displacement. These accounts, of course, remain controversial within Israeli society. The two views of the situation were aired, with no attempt to resolve the differences between them.

Second, my Israeli colleagues found the equation I implied between the Holocaust and the “genocide in phantasy” against the Palestinians completely unacceptable. Detailed arguments were advanced as to why the Holocaust was an event unique and unlike any other in history. I myself thought that one could concede the uniqueness of the Holocaust without precluding the possibility of it having aspects in common with other genocides, especially in the psychological realm. However, I came to appreciate that Israelis felt there was something unique in the Jews’ experience of the Holocaust to which I, an outsider to that experience, did not have access. This was of course entirely possible. Privately, I wondered whether, whatever the basis of the Israeli position, their stance might also be defensive – against guilt, say, for cruelty perpetrated against Palestinians.

Work on this matter was incomplete, and in the conference following this one (i.e. my third) it emerged that an Israeli colleague considered the Holocaust to be part of his very identity. There was considerable discussion of this issue. Accepting it made it possible for Israelis, when the time came, to consider that for Palestinians the experience of the NakbaFootnote 5 might equally be constitutive of their identity, without this implying equivalence between the two atrocities. The latter turned out to be a vexed issue with considerable power to divide.

The war in Lebanon

The war in Lebanon provided the staff group with an opportunity to bring in the very different ways in which that event was viewed in Israel and the West on the one hand, and in the Muslim world on the other. Israeli colleagues were convinced that there was an international Islamist conspiracy, with the Hamas-Hizbullah-Iran axis at its core, that threatened not only Israel, but was part of a global strategy that threatened the West itself. In this scenario Israel faced the prospect of a Holocaust all over again – indeed the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, explicitly denied the Holocaust, all the while openly vowing to wipe Israel off the map. Should Israel not defend herself – and, by extension, western civilisation – by whatever means possible, with questions of proportionality an academic luxury?

I myself put the view that a powerful current of Islamophobia coloured Western perceptions of the Middle East (Akhtar, 2010), which reduces a complex social-political reality into a simplified us-them, either-or duality. Thus deployed, we are drawn powerfully into stereotypes that make objective observation – let alone critical thinking – very difficult, as each side tends to justify its position and to demonise the other. This matters because it shapes how we perceive reality, so that a selective view is mistaken for the totality. For instance, when an Iranian politician makes an intolerant and racist statement, such as the one cited above, it is seen as reflecting an objective truth about what “Iran, or the Muslim world wants”, whilst a similarly intolerant and racist statement from a right-wing Israeli politician may more easily be contextualised and recognised for what it is – a means of appealing to a particular political constituency by playing the race card.

I do not want to give the impression that we came to an agreement with one another on these matters – we did not. However, we made space to hear the other’s views, to try to understand them as far as possible, and to be aware of our emotional responses, doing our best to put things into words. From an emotional point of view this work was extremely difficult. Think, for example, of a Jew whose relatives had perished in the Holocaust and who had resolved never again to run the risk of another one, having to listen to me suggest that he was wrong to take literally that very threat, especially when voiced against Israel by an Iranian president who, at that moment, had proxies on Israel’s borders. Or, of someone in my position – with a personal empathy with victims of injustice and oppression, and who has heard, first-hand, distressing accounts of the deep damage inflicted on Palestinians at the hands of Zionist militia in the past and the Israeli military in the present – having to witness Israelis’ refusal to entertain the idea that their state had brought cruel suffering on another people. It was our willingness to bear these very powerful emotions, to avoid political correctness, and to speak as truthfully as possible that created a containing setting. This is work that cannot be done but in the presence of the other, which brings feelings to life in a very real way, and is a central aspect of the Nazareth approach.

Conclusion

Towards the end of the above conference (my second), a significant development took place. In the System Event, where participants themselves decide which groups relevant to the task they will form and work in, a “group” of two emerged who could not find any existing group willing to accept them as members. In the end they asked to sit in on the work of the management (staff) group, where their role in the System Event became clear – they were the homeless group, the people without a territory, enacting a role that, in external reality, belonged to the Palestinians. This interpretation had the ring of an emotional truth; the Palestinians had arrived. In the unconscious they are indeed a group of “others” affected by the Holocaust.

The Palestinian presence had emerged organically within the process, and they were therefore formally included in the next conference. Their presence is a necessary first step that will enable us to study psychoanalytically the question I posed earlier: Is the suffering of Palestinians today connected with the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust? If so, how?

These matters usually produce division, polarisation and stalemate. However, we found that it was indeed possible to move things on by acknowledging explicitly our identifications within this polarised world, facing the powerful conflicts stirred up within, and deepening our engagement with them, partly through addressing them directly in the presence of the other. Whilst counter-intuitive – usually we give up and speak only to the like-minded about such delicate and divisive matters – the approach I have described is entirely in line with established psychoanalytic principles.