Bloodied Honey
A personall reflection on the role of collective trauma in the Israel Palestine conflict
Every 7 years the cells in the body completely regenerate. I am therefore, in theory, capable of being an entirely new person to who I was this day 7 years ago. I know its not that simple, but as a mythic poetic frame of reference, I would like to journey back in time to the version of me 7 years ago in order to gain clarity on what is occurring right now. This is not always a useful practice, but when done well, it can shift a lot of unconscious programming and even release trauma.
Life also occurs in cycles so it is not supposing to me that seven years ago, I was on route to Israel, via Birth Right, a free 10 day trip for Jewish youth, and now there is now a bloody conflict occurring, as there was a few weeks after I returned to Canada back in 2014.
This is bringing my awareness back to the places within myself that was influenced by that trip. I recall the regret that I felt going to Israel when innocent Palestians were being brutally murdered. I felt guilty for my complacency by participating in a program that perpetuates Zionism. I recall getting into arguments over the internet with the young Israeli soldiers who were apart of the trip and feeling hopeless.
Their mindset was so rigid and I was made to feel that I had no right to weigh in or have a voice unless I was ‘on their side’. I actually became pretty depressed and apathetic after that for some time, and even now, as I am cycling back into those places, I can feel the grip of fear over my throat. I have done a lot of work to reclaim my voice and feel empowered enough at this stage to offer my humble perspective.
From what I experienced first hand, on top of my political science background, I am confident in saying that Israel is an authoritarian police state that actively uses propaganda to brainwash its citizenry, and outsiders such as myself, to conform to the Zionist agenda. Zionism is a spectrum. As is anti-zionism. My Zaidy was a Zionist, but he did not support state violence. I am an anti-zionist, but I do not believe that Israeli’s should have to leave their ancestral homeland. State Zionism has become ubiquitous with violence for a reason, because it has become the primary tactic to defend against perceived and real hostility.
Hostility towards the Jewish people is real, yes. But much of the justification of Israeli’s Zionist policies, comes from a false perception based in unprocessed collective trauma.
I believe that Zionism’s violent tactics, which includes settler occupation of Palestinian territories, as all tactics of war and hostility are, an unconscious reenactment of unprocessed this collective trauma which lives through the policies and practices of the government. From this standpoint, and as a Jew, I have empathy for the Israeli people (not the government) who are also victims of the perpetual trauma cycle that their own government advances. They have been living between states of extreme fear for a thousand years.
Following mass atrocities and tragedies, generations of Israeli’s continue to be born into that scar tissue of war and genocide. We see this behaviour as symptoms, which are sometimes overt, sometimes subtle. Right now we are seeing the overt, the extreme, yet in the years between conflicts, when the rest of the world is looking away, many of these symptoms and manifestations of collective trauma are hidden under the guise of “that’s how life is.”
If left unattended, says collective trauma expert Thomas Hübhl, these cold collective traumas fester into new “hot” traumas, such as we are seeing now.
We are on the brink of many cold traumas turning into raging wars, which is why we choose not to look at them until they become volcanic flares in the night sky that we cannot ignore. If the Israeli people do not heal the impact of the collective trauma’s they have been holding as a people, they will continue to perpetuate the same violence inflicted upon them.
When one has the privilege to visit Israel, it is undeniable how sacred that land is. It changed me to my core in ways that I am still learning about. Although I am not an educated or practicing Jew, I do know that the Jewish culture believes in repairing the world. I wonder where in the scripture and cultural practices, the emphasis is placed upon repairing oneself?
If the Israeli people could be supported by their own government to go within and to heal the wounds of genocide and displacement, I believe that the empathy and compassion would emerge to see the Palestinian people as true brothers and sisters.
I highly doubt that the Israeli government has any interest in such a strategy so it is therefore upon the people of Israel to object to break the current trauma cycle by what ever means necessary as the violence will persist. No other intervention, sanctions, boycotts, public shaming, replaces the absolute necessity of the Israeli people to heal the wounds of the past. This will take many, many generations.
Settler occupation is a hard beast to bury, as we know well here in Canada. The Israeli people deserve a safe and secure home but not at the expense of the Palestinians. Learning how to trust one another through our collective pain bodies is going to be so important to model for the future generations who will be the ones to bring about peace and harmony. To trust we need to see how we are operating from a collective trauma response and that the anger and aggression being expressed be held compassionately as the basic human need to feel safe.
The wars of the past do not go away, they simply repeat and repeat. The memory lives on until the pain of the past is felt and released. This will take a lot of courage and a lot of time but it can be done. We need global leaders who are not afraid to advocate for a compassionate approach to ending the cycle of violence.
Seven years ago I exposed my nervous system to the pressure chamber reality that Israeli’s live within. On one of the first nights, after a pretty intense brainwashing session in which we were driven to a settler farm on the border to Lebanon and was told a variety of traumatic stories of the enemy on the other side, some fireworks went off in celebration of some sort of sports victory. They other women I was sharing a room with legitimately believed we were under attack and we all dove under our beds in a state of panic.
Stories of violence perpetuate fear within the nervous system and this is one of the ways that trauma is passed down intergenerationally. And this was my experience for 10 straight days. It was so intense that it triggered a dissociative disorder that I am still healing. Only seven years later, after a lot of healing, am I even able to make sense what was occurring. Living in that environment perpetually makes it almost impossible to see from a different perspective.
I offer this story and perspective because I was gifted, through my bloodline, the opportunity to walk the streets of Jerusalem, to swim in the Dead Sea, to pray at the Western Wall, to stand at Masada. These are incredible places on the earth that offer so much power because of the human stories of survival and spirit that live within them. It is a complex history that unless you have been there it is almost impossible to fully comprehend.
Ending this violence, will not be easy. It will take a type of leadership that I am not sure we have really seen on the world stage before. I believe it is possible and I hope one day I get to be a guest on my ancestral homeland in such a way that breaks the curse of genocide within the human cycle of living and dying.