Israel through the eyes of a psychotherapist

Avigail Abarbanel is an Israeli-born psychotherapist who migrated to Australia in 1991. A few months ago, she and her husband moved to the Scottish Highlands where they plan to set up their counseling practice. I spoke with Avigail from her home near Inverness. (The full interview is available as a podcast.)

I found it refreshing and interesting to talk to a psychotherapist about a subject—Israel—that I find increasingly confusing. Along with more and more people it seems, I am asking: Why do the Israelis do what they do? Why do they keep on doing it? Can’t they see what damage they are doing to themselves, to the Palestinians, to us all? I asked Avigail if she would diagnose Israel as if the nation were a client of hers and then suggest an appropriate treatment regimen.

Here, summarized as succinctly as I can, are the main threads of Avigail’s response along with her emphatic assertion that underlying everything she says is a clear distinction between explanation and excuse. (I do urge you to listen to the podcast and listen to her compelling, fluid presentation. Sometimes an mp3 is worth thousands of words of text!)

Trauma and its ramifications lie at the heart of the Israeli nation:

it is the organizing principle of the Israeli people and the psychology that has shaped its national character. But not just because of the Holocaust of World War II; rather, the seeds are already there, in the culture, the biblical stories (see Joshua, see Deuteronomy, Numbers, Exodus) and through centuries of history, including the Zionist movement in the late 19^th century. The roots of victimhood and persecution go back to a long time ago. The roots of victimhood and persecution go back to a long time ago.

Unfortunately, one of the characteristics of trauma is that it is passed on, through the generations and proliferates within the generations.

Trauma, as we know from PTSD, is a clinically-established phenomenon that can manifest whenever the suffering individual perceives existential threat. The problem is that this threat may or may not be real today. Objectively Israel, with its military might and nuclear power is one of the most formidable forces in the world; however, the irrational aspects of insecurity persist, nourished rather than managed, treated and healed, amplified now to include Iran.

With an identity forged by its enemies and reinforced by the state’s religious, education, military and cultural institutions along with the trauma narrative, Israelis are not open to seeing themselves in new ways.

Those who suggest such alternatives—you, me, liberal Jews, Judge Goldstone--are dismissed as hostile to Israel and included among the expanding number of enemies. As George W. Bush put i: “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.”

Protective isolation against what is perceived as a highly dangerous world and against anyone perceived as an enemy is a natural consequence of trauma.

The huge dimensions of the wall and fence complex built by Israel in the West Bank speak clearly to just how dangerous every Palestinian man, woman and child is seen to be.

On her blog in the extensive section about Palestine/Israel, Abarbanel writes: “the story of Israel and the Palestinian people is the story of trauma being transmitted from one generation to the next” and “my people…have allowed the quality of their life and their identity to be determined by those who hated them and committed crimes against them.” But, she continues: ”Healing is a risky business that requires a willingness to change one’s identity” and not, as she puts it, an endeavor for the faint-hearted.

Abarbanel draws on the work of the American psychiatrist Murray Bowen, and the “close relationship between trauma and persecution, and a tendency to emphasize the force of togetherness. When togetherness is emphasized, those those who do not feel, think, agree, act in the way that the group does, can be seen as traitors.” Citing Bowen’s theory of differentiation, she believes Israel is a “culture of consensus” and a “very poorly differentiated society …with the sense of self very, very meshed and entangled with the sense of the group.”

Based on this analysis, Avigail Abarbanel believes “Israel cannot be reasoned with”, that it “is a traumatised society and it is therefore very dangerous.” Applying family therapy models, she compares Israel to the abusive husband, the Palestinians to the abused wife and the United States to the enabling neighbor;.

She advocates for a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict but warns that the coexistence of two traumatized people will require a great deal of imagination and intelligence.

She suggests that there are enough good and skilled and spiritual people in the world whose energies can be mobilized to do the work of healing and reconciliation when the time comes. “It can be great, you know!” she adds.

The interview ends with Avigail reflecting on the ‘secondary traumatization’ that can affect volunteers and human rights workers who are dealing with traumatized populations all over the world. “Look after yourself first,” she counsels, since “you have to be well to help other people…The only way I am able to work sustainably without burning out…is because I do put myself first.”

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To hear more about this provocative and thoughtful interview, please turn to the podcast.

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To become more familiar with the body of Avigail Abarbanel’s work, here are her writings and her professional website.

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My interview with Avigail Abarbanel will be broadcast on Tidings from Hazel Kahan, a monthly program on WPKN radio on May 12, 2010 and is also available as a podcast. Tidings is produced by Tony Ernst.

The interview is also available in German.

ZIONISM UNDER ATTACK

Background In November 1947, Palestine was partitioned by the United Nations into a Jewish state and an Arab state with Jerusalem administered by the UN. Following its independence and subsequent war with Jordan and Egypt, 78% of Palestine was now in Israel's hands. Following the war of 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem and continues to do so today.While the concept of Zionism, of a Jewish state for Jews, had its detractors before the foundation of Israel, these objections were rooted in philosophy rather than in practice. The actualization of Zionism over the last 61 years has been another matter altogether.Definitions of anti-Zionism range from the religious to the political, an inflammable debate not likely to be resolved any time soon. My own definition of anti-Zionism is neither anti-semitic nor does it call for the destruction or elimination of the state of Israel. It simply asserts that it is impossible for a Jewish state to be democratic. If Israel is a democratic state, then it belongs to all its citizens, at least 20% of whom are not Jews. A democratic state does not withhold equal rights from those of its citizens who are not Jewish.

The tide is turning American Jews could turn a blind eye to the Occupation, and they did—for forty years—but Gaza, a tipping point, was much more difficult to ignore. American Jews have been forced into rethinking the unthinking, ingrained support of Israel which in turn is loosening the iron grip that AIPAC, the powerful Jewish lobby, has had on Congress and on Jewish institutions in this country. Recently, young Jews came together in New York for a program calledLove, Hate and the Jewish State, sponsored by several leading Jewish organizations, to facilitate discussions about the alienation and pain that Israel’s behavior is causing this younger generation, discussions that arguably will lead many of them to resolve their dilemmas by replacing their Zionism with anti-Zionism, or at least with non-Zionism. Where might these “new” Jews find solidarity if they do make that transition?

Anti-Zionism can produce strange bedfellows. My guests for this Tidings radio program (July 2, 2009) are both Jewish, curiously both with the family name Weiss and both self-described anti-Zionists. They have arrived at this self-description from two radically distinct starting points--one secular and one deeply religious.

Philip Weiss Philip Weiss is a 53-year old New York journalist, author of two books and articles in several leading magazines. For the past three and a half years he has blogged on the Middle East and Jewish identity on Mondoweiss, his increasingly influential blog not least because it provides a gathering place, a safe haven for "secret sharing," for Jews who are struggling with the tension between the image of Israel as a special place for Jews that they grew up with and the image of the militaristic, brutal occupier that Israel increasingly presents to the world.

It is in part a generational tension, a conflict between the tribal elders and the more integrated, assimilated younger generations. What we are seeing is American Jewish identity in transition as the insular, introspective orientation of "What is good for the Jews?" gives way to a more modern, humanistic, international question: "What is good for everyone?"It is a transition that is causing consternation and even panic among the tribal elders, especially within the powerful Israel lobby AIPAC. An interregnum tumult that is complex and often opaque, we are witnessing a reframing of Zionism, the blogsphere alive and unleashed with vitriol and scholarship, as events in Washington and Tel-Aviv are minutely and obsessively observed and analysed, with Mondoweiss and Jewish Peace News invaluable, authoritative sources of such reporting and commentary.It is easier now for American Jews, confused by the conundrum of being a PEP, ("progressive except on Palestine") to find solidarity with others who demand the same human rights for Palestinians as they would for any minority in the United States, or elsewhere in the world. Philip Weiss articulates his own personal role as one that includes responsibility for the Jews and Israelis:

It’s caused a cycle of brutalization…I am able and many Israeli Jews in the United States are able and should display leadership toward Israelis who have no concept of minority rights and no window at all on what they have done to their society…it’s a human rights disaster that they have had the largest power in creating…and they don’t know what to do about it.

I felt some degree of Jewish responsibility (after visiting Gaza) I can work as a writer and work on my country but I also need to work for my people to wake them up to what’s happening.

Rabbi Weiss Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss is a member of the Neturei Karta organization, a world-wide group of deeply orthodox Jews who believe that Zionism is "a terrible stain on Judaism", a corruption of the fundamental tenets of the Jewish religion. I met the rabbi in Brooklyn at a large Palestinian rally. Walking single file into a hall packed with young, educated flag-waving Palestinians, a group of black-garbed, bearded, orthodox Jewish men made a dramatic entry. Intrigued, I approached them to ask why they had come. Was it to support the Palestinians or to demonstrate against them?

Rabbi Weiss told me why his people oppose Zionism, starting with Theodore Herzl and the Zionist movement as rejecting and belittling Judaism, rebelling against God, replacing religion with nationalism and the metaphysical with the material:Further, he explained, it is written that God made the Jews swear three oaths binding them during their exile, all of which have been flouted by Zionism: not to return en masse to the Holy Land, not to rebel against the nations of the world and not to attempt ending the exile, that is returning to Israel, by their own actions, rather than as decreed by God.

Where Phil Weiss' articulates his secular mission as helping Israelis by "waking them up to what's happening", the deeply orthodox religion solution from Neturei Karta, as told to me by Rabbi Weiss, is contrition and restitution:

Being that the land of Palestine was inhabited, you’re going to destroy those people, destroy their lives… This in itself, the Torah says you’re not allowed to steal even half a penny from another human being. This flies in the face of the Torah. Every concept of the Torah gets breached by stealing this land from the Palestinian people.

What does the Rabbi want Israel to do?

It has to be one state but the speedy and total dismantlement, total dissolution of the state of Israel... The course is to approach the leadership of the Palestinian people, whoever their leaders are, to profusely apologize for the wrongs done to them, to work on a course of restitution of paying back the damages, returning the property and the houses, and ask them humbly if they would allow the Jewish people to live among them.

If Zionism is the problem, then any solution will require a profound reframing of the proposition that is Israel. Who is up to this task?

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Zionism Under Attack is also available as a podcast. In the radio series Tidings from Hazel Kahan, it was produced by Tony Ernst and broadcast on WPKN on July 2, 2009 Tidings can be heard streaming live on the first Thursday of every month at 12 noon EST on WPKN.org, broadcasting from 89.5 Bridgeport, CT and WPKM 88.7 Montauk, NY. WPKN is an entirely listener-supported community radio station. Hazel Kahan is also the creator of leafages.

What makes an activist?

Summary based on a Tidings from Hazel Kahan program first heard on WPKN on January 1, 2009.

Lately, I’ve been curious about why some people become activists while others look on from the sidelines, unmoved by situations that a committed activist finds intolerable.

We’re all against oppression and injustice and we all believe human rights are hugely important and must be defended at all cost—but not necessarily by us.. Others however hear a call that the rest of us don’t and they respond, believing that their presence is required elsewhere, sometimes on foreign soil. Somehow it’s the ‘foreign soil’ part that seems of particular significance to me. What makes such people different from you and me? Are they fearless? Grandiose? Risk-takers? Adventure seekers? Or is it something more personal? More in touch with their conscience? Perhaps they have less to lose back home? Do we each have a tipping point?

For Bill McNulty, well-known for his non-violent civil disobedience opposition to the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia for which he served six months in federal prison, activism has been a progression as he came to understand that it’s is a lonely quest without the camaraderie, support and learning of community.

You never know when somebody will take the next step, increase the risk he or she is willing to take. Bill relates the story he heard first from Daniel Berrigan, the poet, activist and Roman Catholic priest whose voice and actions spearheaded the Vietnam anti-war movement:

"A river runs through a village and everyday bodies float down stream. The villagers are good people and they remove the bodies, healing those who are still alive, burying the corpses. One day, one villager realizes this is not enough. He goes to the head of the river, the place where the bodies come from, where the people who create the policy reside, where the brutality originates. The closer you get to that place, the more intense the experience becomes.”

Going to the head of the river, the place where the bodies come from, where the risk is greatest. It’s a powerful image and an apt description of the work done by IWPS, the International Women’s Peace Service in the occupied West Bank. Located in the village of Haris in the Salfit region, their regularly emailed Human Rights Reports provide witness accounts of Israeli violations and abuses. So far, they have produced 391 reports.

Why do these women activists do it? “A concern about human rights and the rule of international law,” one of them told me. Sometimes it’s risky, sometimes it’s scary but it’s also “a deep experience”: daily life in a Palestinian village, experiencing the Palestinian people and their legendary hospitality and strength, experiencing the Occupation, “being able to contribute toward solidarity with Palestinian people...peace and reconciliation in the Middle East,” experiences that “helps to do solidarity work in our own countries.”

Expressing a truly global perspective, one of the IWPS volunteers told me: “I think we as Europeans have responsibility in trying to solve the problem because we contributed to it. Besides," she added, "carrying the story beyond Palestine’s borders and the reporting by traditional media provides is also important."

So much commitment and yet no certainty that any of it will end up making a difference. The women at IWPS report not only no visible progress in the region but actual deterioration as the occupation becomes increasingly entrenched and institutionalized. Bill McNulty adds the perspective of a veteran activist: “I realize that no matter what you do, you do good because it is good. You’re not necessarily called on to be effective but to be faithful to the principles that govern what you do. You will lose friends in the process,” he warns “because you will be outside of the box of conventional wisdom.”

My friend Eleanor, who has volunteered in South America, Thailand and Burma tells me that having witnessed injustice and suffering first-hand, she must continue telling the story: “If you see it and do nothing, it’s such disrespect. They gave you their story and you have to honor them and look for ways to keep it alive.”

Perhaps that’s what it is then: motivated not by success but by conscience, activists are people of conscience and consciousness who, knowing what they know, have no alternative but to do what they do. Perhaps we’re all at different stages of that progression.

A podcast of these interviews is available on Tidings from Hazel Kahan. Tidings, produced by Tony Ernst, can be heard on the first Thursday of every month on WPKN 89.5 Bridgeport, WPKM 88.7 Montauk and wpkn.org.

Dark tourism--a good or a bad thing?

What is it and who are the dark tourists?

It seems that we humans are hardwired to leave our hearths and homes every now and then to discover what else lies beyond the horizon. So we turn into tourists or travelers, timid or intrepid, hewing to the known or smitten by the uncharted, more or less conscious of what we are seeing as we go. Perhaps the repetitive pressure of much contemporary life has stimulated our appetites for the authentic and the spectacular, allowing the emergence of a new genre-- dark tourism and the dark tourist, motivated by death and disaster and apocalypse rather than by sun and sea and sand and pastoral living, with even ecotourism and adventure travel no longer stimulating enough.

I came across the concept of dark tourism through Amanda Kendle, a travel writer for vagabondish, an Australia-based on-line travel zine and on her own blog,
I called her in Perth, Western Australia and she told me about grief tourism (the Paris tunnel where Diana died, Auschwitz, Pompeii, Ground Zero), disaster tourism (post-tsunami Thailand, post-Katrina New Orleans) doomsday tourism (Anarctic, Great Barrier Reef, rainforests) and, what I was most interested in, poverty tourism or ‘poorism’ (Soweto, flavelas of Brazil, slums of Mumbai and Delhi).

Some varieties of dark tourism focus on people, others on places; some focus on man-made, some on natural cataclysms; some are about living people, others about historical or recently dead people. (Dark tourism has captured the interest of academics, including at least one doctoral candidate.

Eco-tourism--dark or light?
On the face of it, eco-tourism is not dark at all but very much about the living, defined buy the Ecotourism Society as "responsible travel to natural areas which conserves the environment and improves the welfare of the local people". I include it here because it shares ethical issues with dark tourism and because some of its consequences could be very dark indeed.

Ten or so years ago I was an eco-tourist.

How noble and green and enlightened and adventurous of me, I thought, traveling to Ecuador’s rainforest and the Amazon to see nature under attack so that when I returned to New York City I could report on the fragility of it all, the poverty but also report on the wisdom of the jungle people. I would become an advocate and persuade others to go see for themselves and the world would then be a better place.

Wrong! Do not go, is what I would say now. Keep your feet and your footprints right here at home. Look at photographs others have brought back and listen to their stories. Support the efforts of the rain forest custodians or the Galapagos or the Alaskan wilderness by donating money but don’t add your presence—and the carbon footprints it will take to get there. Leave yourself at home. Let the native people and the flora and fauna be. It’s the enlightened thing to do.
But this is now and I’m talking about then. I joined a dozen or so other people on a trip offered by a New Age organization in New York City. It was the first group trip I had ever signed on for and, so far, it has also been my last. A well-known leader was going to lead us into the rain forest where we would stay with indigenous people, visit shamans, learn about the healing powers of plants and trees, do psycho-navigation, drumming and shape-shifting and, an implicit promise not verbalized in the brochure, we would be able to sample the ayahuasca drug in a country where the long arm of US law could never reach us.

Ecuador Diary
Here’s what my diary pages have to tell about one of my days as an eco-tourist:
We walked for about four hours ending up at the house of a shaman in a clearing by the river. The people were making a hammock out of palm trees and making yarn from the young leaves. It was very hot, no noonday covering. We sat around, I drained my canteen and then some of our New Age-niks went shopping. To my chagrin and deep shame, they bought the hammock, the stools and anything else that was movable. One woman walked around in her bra, another took off her jeans, as if they were in a Sheraton resort. The Indians, evangelized by the missionaries, are a very modest, prim people.
I discussed my feelings with one of the women, trying to make sense out of the fact that we were supposed to be on a spiritual journey, to learn from the Indians and instead, here we were, raping their homes, escalating their sense of materialism, shopping their homes, for God’s sake. The Jungle Mall. Nobody was interested in learning how they used certain parts of the palm tree for the hammock and others for brooms or baskets. The rush to buy continued when we went to another house to see their pottery and then went on unrestrained at the back of the settlement where we slept. Eventually the shaman intervened as what was left of headdresses, bowls, baskets, stools were being traded for sleeping bags, money, mosquito repellent, flashlights, watches and money.

If you were to ask D. (our Ecuadoran leader) why he encourages this crass behavior from his group, he would say he is trying to show them that ecotourism is profitable and that they need the money. He is on their side and doesn’t really care what we do or how we demean ourselves.

The ethics of it all
What are the ethics of offering misfortune as a commodity for sale, of paying to see poverty, of objectifying slum-dwellers and street children. not necessarily with an intent of remedying their condition? Is paying to see glue-sniffing street kids in the slums of Delhi any different from paying to see animals in the zoo? Is the “otherness” of the animals different from the otherness of the children? If you were such a child would you have any way of understanding why Western tourists come to look at you, snapping pictures and talking to each other about you? Surely there’s something slightly perverse in spending vacation time observing profound misery.

It’s not like that at all, says Chris Way, owner with his partner Krishna Poojari of Reality Tours and Travel in Mumbai. (I interviewed him in Mumbai a few hours before the attacks began on November 26.) Reality Tours who offer what they call slum tours of Dharavi, reportedly the largest slum in Asia, see it quite differently. Their objective is to counteract the negative image of slum dwellers by showing their productive and energetic sides along with their sense of community. Out of respect for the inhabitants, tours are small, no more than six people and photography is not allowed. Reality Tours and Travel also return some of the profits to the community. You can hear Chris Way point to a lack of understanding that leads journalists and others to condemn slum tourism.

Too complex for too many conclusions
It’s a complex subject and, altruism and greater good or not, it raises many provocative questions about voyeurism and exploitation. Perhaps it all boils down to intention: if you pay to go on a slum tour, what is it you expect to see and why? Will you be disappointed and feel you didn’t get your money’s worth if the slum dwellers are not as desperate or hungry or poor or dysfunctional as you’d expected? Do you wonder if the glue-sniffing children in the Brazilian favelas were instructed to play up their glue sniffing when the tourists come around? Do you wonder what would happen to the poorism business if poverty were eradicated one fine day?

Dark questions. Appropriate for dark tourism.

Perhaps that is where we draw the bright line—at intention and consciousness. And nobody knows your intention better than you. Perhaps paradoxically dark tourism contains its own light, the light of enlightenment. Know thyself and understand what it is that draws you to the dark side. And once there, understand what your actions may lead to. Whether you’re being perverse, morbid or a seeker of truth and knowledge—it’s all ok when consciousness makes it so.
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(Dec. 20: Just came across this blog post about 'weird tourism'.)

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Dark Tourism is also available as a podcast. In the radio series Tidings from Hazel Kahan, it was produced by Tony Ernst and broadcast on WPKN on December 4, 2008. Tidings can be heard streaming live on the first Thursday of every month at noo WPKN.org, broadcasting from 89.5 Bridgeport, CT and WPKM 88.7 Montauk, NY. WPKN is an entirely listener-supported community radio station. Hazel Kahan is also the creator of leafages.