Wounds of History: Reflections Upon Returning From Israel

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I am aware that the language to talk about this terrifying situation unfolding in Israel following the nightmare of October 7 and the impeding ground war in the Gaza Strip can be inflammatory. How do we even speak about the overlapping humanitarian crises we face without betraying unconscious biases or tendencies to favor some human suffering over others? If we don’t talk, at least to ourselves, about what we are trying to learn and struggling to feel, we betray the peoples we care about. But if we do engage, we are already in the historical soup and may tend to add to misunderstanding, hurt, and pain. There are ways to metabolize trans-generational trauma, but not when you are running for your life. 

Silence equals death. But perhaps not always does Action equal life.

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For anxious friends who have written to me, aware I was in Israel doing some work during civil strife, I wanted to note that I am home and safe. 

I cannot say the same for the people there who I have come to love and admire—terrified, hurt, fragmented, and beside themselves.

 The last time I had been in Israel was almost 50 years ago. In 1977, four years after the “Yom Kippur War,” I participated in a 6-week-long NYC exchange program where 30 borough kids who had never been on a plane met the former prime minister, Golda Meir. She talked to a mesmerized group of Black, Puerto Rican, Jewish, Asian, and Italian kids for about an hour. She mentioned why she, as an American, had felt the world was not safe for Jewish people and why she was moved to help create a “Jewish state.” 

 She also told us the story of what happened when she visited Haifa to visit the Arabs forced to leave their homes due to the 1947-1949 Palestine war that broke out after the establishment of the state. There, she witnessed an elderly Arab woman emerge from a destroyed house, clutching her belongings. When the two women made eye contact, they burst into tears. 

 Lacking historical context, we had no idea what to make of her tears. Golda’s handlers had her change the subject to something more upbeat: “What was your favorite experience in Israel?”

Many decades later, almost fifty years after the Yom Kippur War, as it is known for its surprise attack that shook the nation, I wished I had taken better notes of that encounter. What else did she say?

I had to wonder why I had not been back. I have not traveled much since my twenties for various good and bad reasons. But I had been to Europe and Mexico over the last few years. Why not Israel? Maybe because to be there is to implicate oneself in the still-open wounds of historical trauma, which, if repressed, as they often are, return like the nightmare from which we are trying to wake up.

I had heard about the weekly demonstrations on Saturday nights for the last 9 months in Tel Aviv, protesting the most right-wing and corrupt government in Israel’s history. I learned that the country was being torn apart by the election of Netanyahu as prime minister in December of last year to the most right-wing government in the country’s history made up of Jewish ultranationalist and religious parties; their strong-armed attempt to curb the independent Supreme Court judiciary through judicial overhaul; their promise to expand illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Concerted attacks on democracy brought thousands of people of different stripes to the streets weekly since January to tell themselves and the world that their Israel cannot be Netanyahu’s, that their country contains multiple factions, multiple religious approaches, multiple feelings about the Palestinians and should not be conflated with its politicians. 

I had wanted to see what was happening for myself. So I went there a few days before Yom Kippur, leaving just before the calamity.

While the streets felt safe, people knew the country was in crisis.

As a veteran activist for thirty years, I have been around the block regarding demonstrations. And yet, I had never been to one like this, filled with as many different kinds of people, mothers, grandmothers, soldiers, people of Palestinian descent, former Masad veterans, queers, people on the left, people on the right, people in wheelchairs—and so many kids. There was unity in the effort to safeguard democracy. Music. Drums. Hope. Singing. Speeches. Worry. The Hatikva. 

In addition, I spent time with and interviewed many people from different Israeli cultures (Sephardi, Ashkenazi, peace activists, immigrants and sabras, Arab citizens, gays, and lesbians) about their fears, concerns, and hopes for something else besides another war, that felt inevitable, but not in Gaza, which Netanyahu had been bolstering, but in the West Bank.

In terms of meeting more people of Palestinian descent, there was the old reliable Grindr, which does its lions for world peace.

At one Moroccan restaurant, Devorah, the husband and wife of different Jewish ethnicities disagreed about whether a Two-State Solution was viable or not, given the rightwards turn in Israel that seemed intractable, and one agreed and one did not; they did agree that a difference needed to get made between the Palestinian people and their ruthless, rulers. “There are mothers there,” the woman, herself a mother, said.

I had intended to share my learnings through writings here and elsewhere.

Since the news of the murderous assault by the Islamist nationalist phalangists from the strip that is Gaza, hostages being taken, and more gruesome stories coming out each day of rape and torture of civilians of barbarous retaliation, this is not the time to publish those more festive pieces.

Now I am sad, worried, brokenhearted, helpless.  What can we say about the impact of those feelings, likely in all of us, on how we move forward?" 

Who can have empathy for the Jewish people who have been persecuted for thousands of years and massacred—and worse?

Who can have empathy for those Palestinians who do not agree with violence but are trapped in the open-air prison of Gaza for no fault of their own and may perish?

Sarah Schulman, a Jewish queer lesbian, one of our most important voices, writes that seeing Palestinians as monolithic is inaccurate. “Palestine is,” she writes, “like every society in the world- a multi-dimensional society. Like Jews and Americans, Palestinians contain multiple factions, multiple religious approaches (Palestinians are wide spectrums of Muslim, Christian, and Druse), and various political visions. They would never act like a united block and all vote in the same way, for example,” and that to minimize their abject suffering will exacerbate not just their suffering but our own too. 

In reading Thomas Friedman and news from the Israeli Daily Haaretz, there is concern that Hamas wanted Israel to play into its hands to invade Gaza to undermine the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, which would simultaneously provoke Hezbollah in the North to attack in a larger conflagration. 

We also learn that Netanyahu received news from his intelligence that his disruptive juridical reforms would attract sabotage.

In reading Michele Goldberg, one hears of progressive Jews “profoundly shaken by the way some on the left are treating the terrorist mass murder of civilians as noble acts of anti-colonial resistance.”

The more I learn, the less I realize I understand about the diversity among the Israeli peoples, the Palestinian peoples, the historical layers, the wounds of history, traumas, rage, and hurt within the region—and the problem of the psyche, how one part is split off and put part on another.

I am holding space in my practice for patients of different faiths from the Middle East and elsewhere.  

One person, with tears in her eyes, suggested if what is happening is a collective dream and each of us is a player called to participate or not, would that change how we think, what we do, how we suffer, how does the individual psyche reflect the world psyche and vice versa as a new possibility?

I will share more of what I learn through others and my own grieving as time passes.