Belonging and Its Discontents

ABSTRACT

For a long time, I have been interested in belonging: in how we are forced but also need to belong in communities, in how collective identifications form our subjective identities, in how belonging is the subject-matter of our very sense of self. I have also been interested in un-belonging, in what happens to us when we are refused or choose to refuse a collective affiliation, in the dynamic of alienation, betrayal and freedom that ensues. The paper delves into these themes by journeying through the landscape of my own difficult belonging in the land where I was born: Israel-Palestine, sunk these days in a state of catastrophic war; my experience of belonging as it is being negotiated in my own analysis, carried over the phone between Tel Aviv and New York. It is a personal-theoretical postcard from a place of existential crisis but also hope.

This article refers to:

Embracing Complexity and the Need for Inclusive Belongings

Beyond Discontent: Dialogues on Subjectivity and Belonging

Militant Fields and Freedom in Israel-Palestine

Dear Eyal

Affiliation vs. Alienation

But a terrible loneliness throughout life, is simply the plankton on which Leviathan feeds.

Saul Bellow, Herzog (1965, p. 338)

Prologue

This paper has two parts. I started writing it wishing to say something about belonging – belonging in general, and my own sense of belonging and un-belonging – especially to the territory that I was born in, the ideological-emotional battlefield that is Palestine-Israel. I was about half done when October 7th happened, and a terrible war begun – a war that as I write these lines continues, so horrifyingly cruel and destructive that it vacates (again) the notion of “human” or adds to it another shade of darkness. And so the first part of the paper is about what it means to belong, the second is about what happens when where you belong is on fire.

And a request: We are all on edge these days; we have existential passions and anxieties; we want to be able to tell a friend from an enemy; we don’t feel safe. I know that everything I write will be interpreted from this place of hopeful and hostile unrest. Am I supporting or denying something that’s important to you? Can you trust me in what feels to you a life-defining struggle? Do we belong together, should we keep away? But note: I am writing from within my own turmoil, as someone who is deeply implicated, someone who feels his own existence is at stake. I am taking myself as a case study in order for all of us to be able to think something together, especially these days. And so I ask you, even as the temptation is strong to patrol one’s ideological borders, to assess me as kindred spirit or foe – try instead to feel your own way into the landscape I am searching to open here. Look into yourself.

Before October 7th, 2023

My analyst lives in Tel Aviv. His house stands on the edge of a neighborhood that was built in the 1950s as a socialist utopia: two story buildings with small apartments, placed along tree lined alleys and gardens, like an urban Kibbutz. It is close to where Tel Aviv University was built at the same time, on the ruins of an Arab village called Sheik Munis. The inhabitants of Sheik Munis fled during the war that erupted when the British left Palestine – for the Jews a successful war for national independence, for the Palestinians a catastrophe that is still unfolding. They were not allowed to return. I was born in a similar housing project, about 15 miles away. This once modest neighborhood has since become affluent. The houses expanded into compact villas. But the bucolic feel remains. The trees have grown, the gardens are lush. There are nannies strolling with babies, children playing, and parents sitting on benches.

On the other side of the road sits a vast government compound. It houses the public relations arm of the Israeli army, the foreign intelligence agency (the famous Mosad), and the internal security force, responsible for surveilling and policing the occupied Palestinian territories (the Shabak).

My analyst and I do our work on the phone, but when I’m there, we meet in person. It is a curious thing – as I get close to his place my American phone stops working, on its own. This is because the government agencies across the road operate under a cyber-cloud of protection. Israeli phones are open to its surveillance, but foreign ones are not. And so when they breach a certain radius, they are disconnected from the network. My Israeli phone continues to operate as usual. This is a constant reminder of what goes on behind the tall trees on the East side of Lebanon street.

It is a center of state surveillance and violence, a place where clandestine operations are initiated and justified by an Orwellian apparatus, where people are imprisoned without legal protection, and tortured. It is a massive organ of the state-of-exception (Agamben, 2003/2005) that rules the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan river, the heart of what many of us consider an apartheid regime. The proximity between these tree-lined alleys full of children and that bio-political people-breaking machine, between the room where I come to lay my heart bare and the heart of so much darkness, is a condition of my analytic setup.

Even more so, since we are on the phone, my analyst often goes out during our sessions. Sometimes he walks into a park inside that government compound. The thing is, because of the intense cellular activity taking place there, the connection can be interrupted. We are meeting in the most vulnerable territory that is psychoanalysis, but the government is present in the air between us, and its presence is literally breaking us up.

At some point, I made a joke that we are probably being listened to. I imagined the listener. She is a soldier in active duty, somewhere between 18 and 20. She listens to conversations between local and foreign numbers. She was reassigned from listening to Palestinian phones, looking for conversations that could compromise people, (because, say, they are gay), and so make them a target for blackmail and collaboration with the occupation forces. It is already close to the end of her shift when my analyst and I speak. She is impatient. When we finish, so does she. She takes the bus to the city center, the same bus that I take. We must have stood right next to each other. Her name is Tal. I know what she looks like. I know what her parents look like. She could be the daughter of beloved friends. She has a boyfriend. They go on trips together. They have sex. She is a lovely young person with big plans for the future.

Sometimes we even speak to her! “I wonder what you think, Tal” I might say … Jokingly, of course. But it is not just funny. We really do think we might be listened to. There were quite a few times when I wanted to tell my analyst something I knew from Israeli connections; I have friends and patients who know and do things that cannot be made public. But I didn’t, or I hinted. I was afraid. It has become the case even more so since the beginning of 2023, since a new government has been trying to destroy the last traces of democracy that Israel still has, and there has been a massive resistance movement. It is obvious that the security apparatus has been tapping the organizers, even as the resistance is increasing among its own members. I simply could not trust that our conversation was safe.

I have been wondering whether our work suffers from our unavoidable consciousness of its setting, the geo-political territory that is Israel-Palestine, in its soul-crushingly violent, religious-nationalist present – a territory whose current state we both deplore, and yet matters to us deeply. Can we create the delicate, suspended space that analysis requires in the midst of so much trouble?

Or to ask the question in more general terms: is reality a detriment to psychoanalysis?

There is clearly a strong current that thinks that it is, that the world outside draws away from the depths we can reach if we keep looking inwards, those who emulate that famous Bionian dictum: no memory, no desire (Bion, 1988). Some of us, however, have come to believe that the notion of a separate inside is a delusion, that when you go all the way in, you find otherness as both Laplanche (1995/1999) and Levinas (1961/1969) meant it, you find that, as Lacan (1967) puts it: the unconscious is politics. When you go all the way in, you find the social-historical-ideological narratives that hold the subject in place and give him meaning, you find, in the words of the year’s Oscar winner: everything, everywhere, all at once.

In our case, there is signal interference, the potential of eavesdropping, and one imaginary person called Tal. There is a prosperous city in the center of a warring, borderless territory, where many beautiful things are weaved into spectacular manifestations of evil. There are people, in communities, with their histories, and ideologies, all condensed into a small, mostly arid piece of land. And reflecting them all, there are all kinds of selfhoods, of unconsciouses and transitional spaces, pertaining to this territory, these communities, these histories and ideologies, and our complex and precarious relations with them.

There is a psycho-social register that is fundamental to our subjectivities and to our social relations, including our relations as patient and analyst.

What’s in play in this psycho-social register, is our attachments to groups. Strong, ambivalent, conflicted, passionate, forced and voluntary, but always also anxious attachments to groups: the ethnic groups, the religious groups, the ideological and political and national groups that we participate in – our collective attachments, our collective identifications – the threads that combine into what we feel as our place in the world, as our very selfhoods.

Or to put it in other words – what’s in play is belonging: belonging in the communities that give us our identities, belonging as perhaps the most essential aspect of being human among humans.

Belonging and its discontents

I have been thinking about the relations between subjectivity and collectivity through the prism of belonging, because belonging captures their dual nature: attachment, affiliation, emotional involvement, identification, but also ownership and responsibility and rights and debts. To belong means to feel something and also to have something, and further, to owe something to the group that allows you that feeling: allegiance at least, a sense of mutual responsibility, and in more extreme situations sacrifice – like in risking one’s own life or the life of one’s children in fighting the collective’s wars. Belonging is a precious and costly feeling. Sometimes so costly that we cannot afford it. And yet, being without can be worse. Because belonging is identity. Belonging is the foundation of who I am.

We say in love songs: you belong to me. A parent tells you, you are my child, and you answer back, you are my parent. Groups and collectives claim us too: you are mine, they tell us, we want you. We are yours we answer, we want you too.

But sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we work hard to escape the groups that claim us, we refuse old identifications, we transition, we lose our religion, we immigrate. We try to detach, to dis-identify, to defy the many pulls of our affiliations and loyalties. We try to shed our belongings, to un-belong.

And sometimes they don’t want us. There are always and everywhere groups that reject, or abandon, or even deny our existence. Or they try to control us, or change us, or make us into scapegoats. And too often they declare us their enemies, and try to erase us from the face of the earth.

We are all in relations, haunted, uneasy relations, with the groups that define us, as they hold us in balance between taking us in, and driving us away. The social links that keep us in place may seem strong, but in fact they are tenuous. And for that reason, our identities are uncertain and frail. We are all constantly locating and articulating the selves that we form vis-à-vis the matrix of our belonging and un-belonging. And this ongoing process of finding and expressing ourselves in these terms, is how we know who we are, what we identify as our selves.

That sense that we each have, this is me, is an ongoing project: a search for a focal point in a web of subjective-collective fluctuations, of longing and being claimed, of attaching and being taken hold of, of rejecting and being ejected, of abandoning and being expelled; a web of bodies and minds that has been holding us, words and sensations, pleasures and pains, like that holding environment that Winnicott (1971) imagined. It has been so, since the moment we appeared in our ancestors’ imaginations. Since then, we’ve been dreamed up, played with, and told who we are to them. In this sense, our lives are an infinite conversation, negotiation, resistance to, and desire for all of these voices, as they echo across the space where we are looking for ourselves.

A transitional space, to borrow further from Winnicott, a space of persistently questionable agency, where the self itself is a transitional object: part sensed, part imagined, part owned, part given on loan by the world around; somehow me, but also driven by unconscious forces, enigmatic, uncanny, mythic, demonic. A space that is both inspiring and creepy, both exciting and scary, both enlivening and deadly. A self constructed by trans-personal, collective matrices whose foreignness draws the entire periodic table out of which its molecules are made. A transitional space, a transitional self, a transitional space-self continuum where we are in permanent search.

And so I’d like us to think, contrary to the individualistic current in which we all swim, the current where psychoanalysis emerged in the minds of people who made it their destiny to overcome the constraints of their socio-historical origins – for the most part Jews from the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian empire, re-located to Vienna and then escaping genocide to the UK and the Americas. I’d like us to think against the grain of this psychoanalysis, and its investment in the premise of a singular, separating-individuating subject. I’d like us to think, parting with this heritage, about how we all strive to belong, seek attachment and affiliation, desire that feeling that communities give us when they pull us into their bosom.

And for that reason so afraid of being rejected, ex-communicated, exiled, that we spend most of our life’s energy trying to make sure that we’re not.

And for that reason also, so tormented when we let ourselves see the forces that bind us, and begin questioning our collective anchors.

Most of us waver, mostly unconsciously, because to doubt one’s belonging is to flirt with betrayal: the betrayal of loved ones who are bound together with us in our communities of origin; the betrayal of loyalties that have been instilled in the very grammar we use to tell ourselves. And sometimes, or in some ways, the betrayal of a covenant that makes our actual lives possible. Because our communities are not only a matter of feeling, and they are not only imagined (as per Benedict Anderson, 1983). We actually do need each other to survive.

Belonging is a matter of troubled attachments and identifications: the vehemence of its expression, such as in certain national or ethnic or religious sentiment, is proof of the potency of what makes it difficult. The heavy burden on the self for one, but also the inherent, internal violence of societies. Girard (1961/1966) argued that we are always on the verge of killing each other, because, in a nutshell, we learn what we want by copying the desire of others, and so we always want what they have. For Girard it is the figure of the scapegoat and the rituals of sacrifice that keep us together. We take our competitive murderousness out on a designated other and having gotten rid of it, temporarily, we can stay together.

What I’d like to add to that picture is the psycho-social forces that bind us, that make it so that, from the inside of our selves and the gravitational centers of our social arrangements, most of the time our murderousness is tucked away, or sublimated. Our communities hold us not only through power and the fear of death. They hold us also through love – that complicated, self-signifying, identificatory force of belonging, that gravity that pulls us to each other, that drive that makes us seek each other, not only one person to another, as in the kinds of desire that psychoanalysis has been emphasizing, but also subject to group. And these two pulls or drives, let’s call them collective desire and collective violence, or the drive to belong and the destructiveness of belonging – at best they live in tension, and at worst, they annihilate the subject.

My analyst and I, we are constantly expressing and testing our belonging together. We feel our affiliation through political discussions. We articulate our intimacy in the language of our shared geo-politics. Especially when the news is disturbing, or when we hear Tal fidgeting in her seat. When I think about all the work that I’ve done, both as patient and analyst, I think that the good often transpired in negotiating our ability to belong together, and the failures were always related to refusing such negotiation, and therefore assigning these tensions to an unconscious that will never speak. We don’t always need to belong together. Sometimes it’s better to see that we can’t. But we do need to locate our encounters in these terms. We need to explore the social-historical-political fields that we map ourselves on, and bring them in contact, or we cannot find each other. And if we cannot find each other, we are destined to remain in a world of fantasy, which is always the fantasy, (or ideology), of someone else.

It might be true, that beyond a certain threshold we would not be able to stay together. Yet, as we linger on the threshold, I am finding who I am. I realize how much I am willing to expend in order to retain a sense of belonging, how much I need to choose, to sometimes un-belong to feel a sense of freedom, and how fundamental it is for me to understand myself this way.

I think we need to realize how important this is for everyone, and experiment with a notion of psychoanalysis that begins there.

After 10.7.23

1.

I was trying to think on the threshold, but on October 7th, the threshold became a fault line. Lingering was no longer possible. Now we were clawing, not to fall into an abyss. On October 7th, Hamas fighters entered Israel and killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians. 200 or so were taken hostage. There were massive atrocities, protracted, cruel scenes of torture and rape and murder. Israel’s army failed miserably in protecting its citizens. But it then launched a counterattack that, it was clear from the start, would be more brutal than ever.

In our first session after the war had started, my analyst and I found ourselves wondering which is better, Hiroshima or Auschwitz. Is it better if a murder is perpetrated from a distance, from the air, from a far away control center? Is it somehow better than a murder committed at close range and slowly, facing the people you kill, flesh, blood, and terror? And is it better for the victim to have their house toppled down on their heads without warning, or to see the killer’s eyes as they come for them? Of course, we are talking about the Israeli air force bombing Gaza vs. the Hamas killing people at close range, pilots flying fighter jets vs. on the ground assassins. This is the ethical calculus we are engaged in as the war begins to rage.

Absurd perhaps, but this is what we found ourselves discussing. Which is really the question of what killing we can identify with, what killers we are consenting to be. War makes you deliberate such questions. Who am I willing, who am I wishing to see killed, how, and for what purpose. All this talk about “destroy the Hamas” or “Resistance by all means” - this is the underlying question: Whose life we are willing to sacrifice for our cause, which might be to exist. At a time such as this, identity is cast as a matter of bare life (Agamben, 2003/2005), of actual existence. And sometimes it really is. You might be killed for who you are. The Hamas assassins did not stop to inquire about people’s political positions, the Israeli bombardments neither. Who you are and also simply where you are. Dozens of the victims inside Israel on October 7th were field workers from Thailand and aid workers from the Philippines.

From the point of view of collectivity, there is no subject that is not a political subject: affiliated, identified, recruited – implicated by the political systems that control his conditions of life. The bombs and the missiles and guns are always political, but how about the bodies destroyed and the souls that inhabit them? Yes, of course, they were placed there by political constellations, which also reside, with more or less conflict, inside each of these bodies and minds. But is there such thing as just bare human life, before the collective identifications, before the political machinations, before the webs of belonging that cut and bind it into political subjects?

And how do we, as psychoanalysts, keep the relation between the bare-human and the political in mind?

A west-bank settler leader whose son is held hostage in Gaza is interviewed on Israeli television. He says he is willing to see his son die for the cause, which in his case is a Jewish theocracy over the land promised to his people in the Bible. This is the Jewish-Israeli version of the Hamas. An opinion article written in response in the newspaper Haaretz is titled: “Your son does not belong to you, you have no right to sacrifice his life.” I hope the son survives, and never speaks again to his father. I hope the father suffers the torment of being orphaned by his son. But this man is saying what many parents feel, or at least consent to. Perhaps not for the sake of a messianic hell, but almost always for the sake of collective survival. No Israeli parents I know of, are rushing to the border these days to pull their children out of the tanks that are entering Gaza, although I do hear about parents whose reserve-age children are abroad, begging them not to come back. This is the power of being bound together in a collective. There is a very steep price, an assumption that when a certain threshold is breached, there is total responsibility. And when we are made to believe that we are collectively threatened, many of us will consent to paying this price.

It is a volcanic borderland where collective pressures melt together the political and the ethical, making a mass that has more gravity than kinship and love. Our loyalty to the collective supersedes our loyalty to our children. We are made to feel, and we do feel, that it is our moral duty to sacrifice them. The territory of Israel-Palestine is now drowning in this kind of political-ethical lava.

At times like this, I think that the Freudian psychoanalysis of drives, of life and destruction, of Eros and Thanatos, accounts for something that our more recent, relational-attachment frameworks miss, or perhaps deny. The levels of hate and revenge we are capable of may be explained by all sorts of abandonment, but I don’t think the abandonment – of loved ones, of love itself – of which we are capable of itself. How do you explain a father who is willing to sacrifice his son? An attachment to myth, to ideology, to fantasy, that is stronger than one’s attachment to one’s own flesh and blood? And those myths themselves: how do you explain a story like Abraham and Isaac, or Samson, or Jesus, or a political agenda like the reestablishing at all costs of the biblical Judaic Temple or a Koranic Muslim Caliphate? At times like this, we encounter the bare fact that the power our communities exert on us can be more commanding than the adhesiveness of our love relations, that our association with collective narratives can be stronger than our attachment to our own lives.

I think of the leaders of Hamas who launched their attack knowing full well that Israel’s reaction would cost many innocent lives and went with it anyways. Now that Israel has invaded Gaza, soldiers are dying, the hostages are clearly in danger. There is always a justification. The political order is always ready to sacrifice its subjects. As Agamben (2003/2005) and Schmitt (1923/2007) before him argued, it is anchored on the ability to determine, hold on, and sometimes discard of human life. But why are we willing to die?

At times such as this, the question “Who I belong with” takes on the full weight of its consequences and obligations. There is an immense pressure to choose, to coagulate, to declare loyalties. But this kind of pressure works on us always. We feel it sharply when the collective neural network is triggered, when it shoots through us like the pain of a knife cutting through our common flesh. But in the subjective-collective unconscious that we all inhabit, we feel its grip and fear its doxxing every waking moment, and in our nightmares. The charge of collective allegiances, of collective desires and rage – it is prominent in our psyches as what Freud called the super-ego. It is the super-ego – that grip of the social on our bodies and minds.

And this superego knows that social life is a trade-off between freedom and safety, a trade-off that in the extreme could become lethal. We just hope, and do our best, so that it is someone else who bears the brunt of this paradox: that our safety requires structural violence of which we are subjects, but could become casualties; that belonging is paradoxical, that to belong might mean to die.

Freud was right to insist that we have in us the capacity for great cruelty, the cruelty of killing and the cruelty of accepting violence as a condition of life. But he was wrong to conceive of it as a biological drive. We are capable of cruelty, including the cruelty of sacrifice, because it is demanded of us as a condition of belonging, it is demanded of us as political subjects, as creatures who cannot survive outside human communities and their paradoxical command over our lives.

I think we need a psychoanalysis that begins with this realization, that what Freud conceived of as the death drive is in fact the effect of our submission to collective power, of our fundamental existence as communal creatures and political subjects. We need a psychoanalysis that begins with the premise that death does not motivate us from within – rather, that it is instilled in us as a condition of our belonging in societies.

2.

It has been 10 days. Bodies are amassing. The extent of the atrocities on the Israeli side is becoming clearer. There are videos of the carnage distributed by the perpetrators to celebrate their achievements and demoralize the Zionist enemy. People are watching and caving in despair and rage. My parents, my siblings and their families, my friends – a few times a day the sirens go off and they run for shelter. Everyone knows of someone who’s been killed, or is missing. A massive collective trauma is in the making, and a deep unsettling of premises – of safety certainly, but for many of us a crisis of faith as well. Especially those of us who keep arguing for mutual recognition, for trust, for peace, both Jews and Palestinians.

The counterattack brings to Gaza immense death and destruction, and a displacement of 1 m people that cannot but correspond with the Nakba, of which many Gazans descend. I am watching the carnage unfold on the Instagram feeds of local reporters, running between streets in rabble and hospitals and shelters that then get bombed as well. It is unbearable. I feel so ashamed.

There are calls for a terrible, once and for all war, to raze Gaza to the ground, to free Palestine from the colonizing Jewish settlers, to be done with the people on the other side of the fence. Calls to end the war also, to save lives and the hope for a nonviolent resolution. But these voices are drowned by the endless march of retired generals on 24 hours television broadcasts, by the funerals that keep taking place, by the missiles and bombs that keep coming.

And on the horizon American aircraft carriers, a British navy, and a fleet of geo-political business machines sailing in to secure foreign interests. The west vs. Russia and China, The Sunnis vs. the Shia, and of course fortunes can be made … A patient who listens to Jared Kushner’s podcast (Yes, there is one), reports to me that there are already calculations made and contracts imagined for when Gaza is rebuilt. Apparently, it will cost less than we imagine. The American president flies to the scenes and promises 14 billion dollars in weapons. As if we did not have enough Angelo-American violence in the region, as if the military-industrial-financial complex is not already making enough money off the middle east. Are the generals and money managers going for Iran? I attend a meeting of combatants for peace. One Israeli guy says: we are drowning here, and all you can do is pour on us more water? Yet, I admit that I feel some relief knowing that the western Armada is there. It might prevent the Hezbollah from joining. Unless of course it is there to coax Hezbollah and Iran. Meanwhile, my 85 year old mother has given up on running for shelter. Her physiotherapist told her that she has a greater risk of falling than being hit by a missile. So now she stays on the couch, watching TV.

Back in the US: I have never seen so many white people with big salaries and thick make-up froth in the name of justice and against antisemitism. I’ve never seen such association of de-colonizing, human rights progressives and religious fanatics either. Almost everyone seems to know right from wrong with such clarity. And people everywhere pleading, arguing, threatening each other, canceling each other. An American festival where none of us really matters.

Everyone’s righteousness has a target painted on one of our foreheads. Between Fox News and Art Forum, between the calls to bomb democracy onto the Arabs, and the counter-calls to decolonize Palestine from the Jews, we are all sacrificeable. Thank you America for pitting us against each other, while pumping up your money muscles and polishing your sense of moral purity. Thank you Hamas for setting us on fire.

The piling wreckage upon wreckage of history that Walter Benjamin (1969) speaks of (in his “Theses on the philosophy of history”) – we now have a front seat. It is for me, and for many people around me, the worst thing we’ve ever experienced in this register. We are all struggling to find a footing, to sense and articulate for ourselves what we feel, what we believe in, who we are with.

I am not one of you Teflon people,” writes to me an Israeli friend. “I know who I am, I chose,” he says. “I hope you enjoy the wave of antisemitism that is coming. I don’t need friends like you.

With my Palestinian friend I find myself in a contorted position, repeating that awful “but” … ”Yes, a genocidal occupation, yes, apartheid, yes, justified rage, the right to resist, armed resistance, yes, but. shooting old ladies in a bus stop? Kidnapping babies? Yes, I know the Israeli army kills innocent civilians every day in the occupied territories, I know Israel keeps there two legal systems, a military regime for Palestinians, full citizenship plus a license to kill for the Jewish settlers. The only thing I do on Facebook is post reports on these crimes … but … but I am losing the will to use these “buts.”

The truth is, I am stuck. That visceral, colonizing and colonized, pre-verbal/bio-political reality anchored in the territory of Israel/Palestine – I feel it is mine to deal with, although I have not lived there since shortly after one of those rolling American wars, “Desert Storm” it was called, the first Bush vs. Iraq war, that made scud missiles rain on my city. I feel I belong to it, and I feel responsible for what’s happening. It is not only the pressure from everywhere to declare myself, it is not only the storm of warring interpellations. It is also my own self, my very being, that is drawn in. And I have no resistance to this draw. It feels genuine, even though I have spent my entire thinking life investigating the political forces that work on, and in me, to make me have this feeling.

This is no superego, this is Id, this is libido. Between life and death there is a drive that cathects the subject to the collective, that keeps me bound to Israel-Palestine. If the superego is social, the Id is tribal. I feel it stirring inside me, grabbing, urging toward, but I don’t know who is my tribe.

The Superego says: this is your responsibility; the Id pulls you into the fire. It is only the ego that says RUN! But the ego, we know, is for the most part useless.

3.

It has been almost 30 days. Gaza is being decimated. Israel is still under daily barrages of missiles. The border with Lebanon is warming up. The Americans are sending more troops, they have just bombed Iranian targets in Syria. A nightmare of war-making, where every party can claim some reason but the overall is mad. And the madness is gushing through the body-politic and through our own minds and bodies. It is a paranoid-schizoid tremor, a tsunami, that is moving across the world.

And we, the people of Israel-Palestine, we are objects of fantasy, of enactment, a Rorschach for anyone to experience their own troubled identities, their own frail social identification, their own anxious belonging. We are triggers. We are trapped in a kaleidoscope of projections. We are the subject-matter of a new wave of imperialism (or to lean on Edward Said (1978), Orientalism):, An American mainstream believing itself to be defending world order; an American evangelical right who sees the prophecies of Armageddon coming true; an American Jewry feeling in danger; an American left getting excited as if a Fanonian uprising is finally taking place … Europe is in the passenger seat, with the UK, France and Germany competing on who can put their leaders in the tailwind of Air Force One faster, and who can better suppress pro-Palestinian protest. And in an ongoing farcical twist of history, Germany continues to instill itself as an arbiter of antisemitism. It is all absurd.

Yes, everyone does have reason. It is also about democracy, it does involve the fate of the Jews in Israel-Palestine, and there is undebatable justification for a Palestinian uprising. The situation is awful and cannot stay this way. But it is a mix of all the above, deformed by an endless conflict and the almost always corrupt interference of external forces, economic forces, ideological forces, a geopolitics unfolding since the turn of the 19th century, since before the Ottomans lost the territory to the Brits who then left us in 1948 to sort it out by ourselves. And this mix is unique to our territory and its mangle of peoples. It cannot be captured by applying theoretical frameworks developed to account for Western liberalism, or European colonialism, or North American racism, or at least not simply.

Those who look at us from the hegemonic west must understand that we are caught in a different history than theirs, even though we have been subjects to their power: from how they sliced the middle east after WWI, through how they played us during the cold war, to how we ended up squeezed into an American protectorate of both incredible wealth and incredible oppression. Those who look at us with hegemonic eyes must understand that whether with their weapons or their curricula, they are still colonizers. If October 7th did not confuse you just a bit, you are operating in what Lacan called the imaginary, you are looking at yourself in the mirror.

For those of us who are conscious of how badly captured we are in Western discourse, in the debates of the Western right and left, we see an imperialism so blind, that the only way to survive it is to try to unlearn its language.

But what language instead?

4.

For the first time since the war began, I allow myself a break. I watch something on TV. When it’s over I realize that I’m in panic. I hear myself think: I’m scared that it is over. I am thinking of certain people, certain streets, certain days and evenings. The network of experiences of oneself in a place, memories that are like little movies. And I imagine them no longer possible to re-visit, because the places are ruined and the people are gone. I think that in my grandparents’ generation that’s what happened to all of them. That is, the lucky ones who left before the war began and the Nazis came. They had the luck of surviving with nowhere and no one to go back to. I think about the places that were destroyed on October 7th. And I think about the holocaust in Gaza.

An endless chain of traumas and injustices and efforts to survive them, sometimes triumphant, people’s passion for life beyond everything else, after everything has been lost, except for life itself. Life itself, but also joining in collectives that are gathering to re-invent themselves. Finding new ways to belong together.

But then collectives can become monsters. I skip through social media. There are videos of Israeli soldiers beating up and humiliating Palestinians, others show Jewish settlers shooting farmers tending to their fields. One Israeli TV channel has a ticker counting: 9,000 terrorists dead 25,000 injured, as if everyone in Gaza is a terrorist. A letter from 30 important settler rabbis encourages the army to bomb the hospitals of Gaza if they are shielding fighters. Jewish law allows it, they say. Although it’s not as if the army has been waiting. This collective sepsis too is part of the territory that is laced into my self.

In our most recent session, my analyst and I talk about our selves. Mine is torn to shreds. If you do not allow yourself to drift into one side of the map being projected on the territory, it is very hard to be anything that makes sense. The entire landscape is bloody and ashen. My practice is reeling. The words that come out of people’s mouths are different, but everyone who is close to what’s happening feels the earth being pulled from under their feet.

It is a thin layer that we walk on, thin ice on boiling waters. In one moment, a tense equilibrium can erupt and warships are on the move. We face what we know in the unconscious always, that this, too, is civilization. That, as Canetti (1960/1962) writes in “Crowds and Power:” “A murder shared with many others, which is not only safe and permitted, but indeed recommended, is irresistible to the majority of men. … The threat of death hangs over all men and, however disguised it may be, and even if it is sometimes forgotten, it affects them all the time and creates in them a need to deflect death onto others.” (p. 49)

The self is such a frail thing because it has this knowledge, because it is made by, and of the destructive forces that it tries to contain.

And belonging is such a tenuous thing because it is a compromise formation of an unconscious conflict between this knowledge and its suppression, because it is born in submission to the destructive forces that it tries to restrain.

It might be then, that the language we need is a language where the self as we know it gives way. After all, our need to belong together has been harnessed by that modern form of collective organization: the identity-inventing, othering-dependent, warring-apparatus that is the nation-state. And the selves that we try so hard to maintain are a fiction created in the shadow of nationalism, a reflection of nationalism’s preoccupation with inside and outside, with sameness and otherness, with boundaries and borders, behind which we imprison ourselves and feel that eternal discontent.

We need a more self-fluid, trans-subjective, post-identity way to organize our lives as human creatures.

In this vein, I would like to conclude by quoting two humans that I am looking up to these days for inspiration.

The first is Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), who wrote the incredible theory-poetry book titled: “Borderland/La Frontera, the new mestiza.” Anzaldúa, who was a Mexican-American queer woman looking for a way to speak herself on her natal borderland between the US and Mexico, and between genders, realized that she could do so only as a creature of the frontier between languages and identities – a mestiza.

She writes:

The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality – nothing is thrust out, … , nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else. … The work takes place underground, unconsciously. It is work that the soul performs. … In attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts. The third element is a new consciousness – a mestiza consciousness - … its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspects of each new paradigm. (101-2)

I would also like to quote to you Maoz Inon. Maoz lost his elderly parents in the October 7th attack, a Hamas paraglider shot an RPG into their house in the Negev. After their funeral Maoz came on stage during a friends’ music performance. First, he quoted from a song of the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. He then said that now, after he lost his parents, there are 4 goals that he will pursue: “First, to achieve an immediate ceasefire; Second, to do whatever it takes to free the hostages; Third, to topple the government; forth, to achieve a future where everyone is free, from the river and the sea.”

5.

I have been wondering why “between the river and the sea” sounds so threatening to so many people, beyond the obvious, that if the slogan goes “Palestine will be free” without mentioning the anxious state that already exists there, the people who are invested in that state’s existence would feel threatened with annihilation, even if the intention is a very necessary political change, away from the ethnocracy that governs the land. Israel-Palestine is saturated with fears of annihilation, born in the holocaust of the Jews in Europe, the Nakba of the Palestinians, and the displacement of most Arab Jews after 1948; born in a violent negation of legitimacy, for Jews to be there, for Palestinians to remain as anything but subservient. We are all present/absent to each other in Israel-Palestine, although some of us have much more power, and a seemingly endless supply of money, weapons and legitimization from the still so blindly colonizing west. But there is something more: “between the river and the sea” sets aside the politics of sovereignty and borders, it is, at its post-nationalist best, about breaking down walls and mixing together beyond collective identifications, beyond the warring negations on which Leviathan feeds. It asks us to think outside our routine matrices of belonging, outside what feels as fundamental territories of our selves. Perhaps impossible to hear when one’s people are attacked, for being a people, and yet – what better choice do we have?

I am looking at a pile of books next to where I’m sitting. It is an arbitrary pile, unchanged for years. I am reading the titles: The Map and the Territory, The Sacred and the Profane, Life as a Parable, The Nation and Death, Modernity on Endless Trial, A History of Europe since 1945, The Invention of the Jewish People, The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, The Emigrants, Mercy of a Rude Stream, All Our Yesterdays, Don’t Apologize for What You Did.

I have been collecting these books, most I bought, one or two were given to me. But as I look at them I realize, these books have been collecting me. What’s written in them has settled in the depth of my psyche. The authors who wrote them have claimed me as I am now claiming you. There’s a choice to be made, a choice of both an economy and an ethics of being a subject: do I choose to define and patrol my borders, to delineate the little that is mine against the immense, admittedly sometimes hostile multitude that lies outside me, outside the besieged, fortified, terrified space that I call myself; or do I seek the infinite, borderless, often uncertain, sometimes dangerous conversation in which I live?

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Eyal Rozmarin

Eyal Rozmarin, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst and writer. He was born in Israel-Palestine and now lives and works in New York. He writes at the intersection of the psychological and the social, about subjects, collectives, and the forces that drive their relations. He is Co-Editor of the book series Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, and on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues.