Militant Fields and Freedom in Israel-Palestine

ABSTRACT

This response to Eyal Rozmarin’s thoughtful and timely essay about Israel-Palestine attempts to take the conversation to its foundation: how do we hold a psychoanalytic conversation about Israel-Palestine? This question betrays our heretofore failure as psychoanalysts to engage psychoanalytically with Israel-Palestine. Drawing on her lived history with Israel-Palestine and her experience as a psychoanalyst, the author explores the obstacles to such engagement, in particular the impingement on the freedom to know, to think and to speak about Israel-Palestine historically and at present. The author also explores the detrimental role of militarization on this freedom, and how a militarized state and a militant resistance create what she terms “a militant field,” which is antiethical, antipsychoanalytic and deadly.

This article is referred to by:

Belonging and Its Discontents

This article responds to:

Belonging on the Edge

I feel honored to think with Eyal Rozmarin about the pressing and timely questions he poses in his paper Belonging and its Discontents. I am grateful to the editors for providing us this platform. Rozmarin begins his essay by alerting us to the emotionally charged topic of Israel-Palestine. I take his warning as a call to focus our attention to our collective failure so far in creating a psychoanalytic thinking space about Israel-Palestine. What does it mean to engage in this conversation from within a psychoanalytic thinking space? For a Bionian, it might mean to enter this text (and Rozmarin’s), with no memory or desire. I hear Bion’s call as evidence for, not dismissal of, the fact that our ideologies and theories inform or distort our observations. To enter without memory or desire means to avoid enforcing one’s preconceived thoughts and instead to let them emerge unbidden. It means to enter the text without the pressure of needing to know whether the author condemns/condones Hamas, calls for a ceasefire, or values Israel’s right to defend itself at all costs. If such a thought emerges in the process of reading, then let it be and wonder about what makes it emerge right at that moment, what function it might be serving, where it might lead you? Is there something you just read that makes you want to stop reading? What might you need to be able to resume? For a Kleinian, a thinking space might mean to maintain a depressive mode or position, and if the analyst finds herself slipping into thinking “they made us kill these children [whoever the killer is],” then she needs to realize that she is in a paranoid-schizoid mode where one thinks and speaks without a sense of ownership or responsibility. No matter how “justifiable” one thinks the killings are, they have to be owned as one’s responsible doing. No matter how understandable and expected it is at a traumatic moment like this to inhabit a paranoid-schizoid mode, it is not a thinking mode. For a self psychologist, this means to be curious about the experience of the other no matter how outrageous it feels or how much one condemns it. For a Winnicottian, it is to be able to think about, and relate to, the other as not merely “a bundle of projections.” If the analyst finds herself making a statement such as “well they all are … ,” then she may need to realize that she is in the land of projection because no racial, ethnic or religious group can be characterized by “they all are … ” For a relational analyst, it means the ability to create an intersubjective space or a third. If she finds herself in a field dominated by a doer and done to, she may need to know that in this space thinking is undone. For a field theorist, it means to find what the field is, who its co-creators are, and what they are co-creating at both the conscious and unconscious levels.

In my view, a psychoanalytic thinking space is not about moderation, neutrality, rationality or compromise. Neither is it about “both sides are at fault, let’s love each other, peace to all.” Rather, a psychoanalytic space represents our capacity to feel and reflect on what is happening in the individual, interpersonal and collective; and to be able to do so both at the conscious and unconscious planes, always holding that dialectic. These psychoanalytic stances are impossible to maintain all the time. In moments of overwhelming horror or despair, our capacity to mentalize may, understandably, fail, and I find it important to acknowledge that when our capacity to mentalize fails, so does our psychoanalytic function and our ability to speak as psychoanalysts. There are plenty of reasons why many of us feel passionate about, and unsettled by, Israel-Palestine. This is perhaps true now more than ever, since the events of October 7 when Hamas fighters slaughtered 1,139 people (nationals and 71 foreigners) of whom 695 were civilians, including 36 children (AFP news, 2023). Also, 240 individuals, including 33 children, were taken hostages. These atrocities unleashed an Israeli slaughter campaign in Gaza, with the explicit goal, in the words of its leaders, to raze it and create “a Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948” (McGreal, 2023). At the time of submitting this essay 29,514 Palestinians have been reported killed, including at least 11,500 children, in addition to 10,000 children who lost both parents (Levy, 2024), and more are still missing under rubble.

As I read Rozmarin’s essay, I feel a sense of haunting that runs through it, best captured in his opening scene: ghosts of Palestinians who were killed, expelled or had to flee in terror in 1948 to make room for the incoming Jews from Europe, some of them also ghostly figures escaping centuries-old persecutions; a governmental factory of terror and violence; and a surveillance machinery, the eyes and ears of the State of Israel. Although this system is claimed to have as its purpose the control of the comings and goings of Palestinians, Rozmarin (2024) describes with sensitivity how such system inevitably constrains everyone, everywhere, in Israel-Palestine, including those it was meant to “protect.” For many years, scholars, investigative journalists, and political activists have emphasized the interconnection between security, democracy, and social justice for all, Jews and Palestinians, citizens and non-citizens, in Israel-Palestine (Barnett et al., 2023, Beinart, 2020). The struggles for equality, peace, and social justice are seen as inseparable. Rozmarin (2024) interweaves the psychological as another essential dimension in this struggle when he shows us how the State terror machine invades the Jewish citizens’ privacy of their own minds, creating an invasive internal object, which censors the unallowable, on behalf of the State. This machine is most effective when it looks ordinary, banal as Hannah Arendt might call it, dressed up in Tal, a lovely Israeli young woman. Those of us who have lived in the Middle East know very well the dangers of State surveillance and censorship. The Syrian mukhabarat (intelligence) is notorious for silencing and crushing the souls of ordinary Syrians by asking – or rather coercing – them to become informants for the regime. Tal might in fact be a bridge that unites supposed enemies.

How can we hold a psychoanalytic conversation about Israel-Palestine within networks of domination which control information about what’s happening on the ground? How do we speak freely about Israel-Palestine, as psychoanalytic conversations ought to be, when speaking freely carries a real, sometimes serious, risk? Rozmarin (2024) calls the State of Israel an “apartheid” regime. This alone has been used to justify arrests, job firing and accusations of antisemitism¹ in Europe and here in the U.S., accusations which, even when proven false, engender serious harm for the accused. To question the liberatory and ethical functions in Hamas’ atrocities has also drawn, in some quarters, accusations of harboring colonialist, traitor mentality (in Arabic: takhween). In my commentary, I examine these and other obstacles to open, genuine dialogue; and in this process, some themes will emerge that intersect with those in Rozmarin’s essay, in particular the themes of belonging, violence, resistance and the liberatory.

Before I embark on this exploration, a word or two about my relationship with Israel-Palestine, which inevitably informs my observations and analysis. What Rozmarin (2024) describes in his paper has been for the most part familiar to me because my hometown, Khiam, a village in South Lebanon, stretches along the northern border of Israel. It is hard to know for how many centuries my ancestors have lived there; in that part of the world people tend not to keep records. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and their Lebanese Christian militia proxies invaded Khiam in 1977. I was a child at the time, and my family had to flee along with many townspeople. Khiam was later forcibly emptied out in 1978 when the IDF occupied it. Israel occupied Khiam and other Lebanese border towns on the premise of creating a “buffer zone” because the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) was launching attacks from South Lebanon into Israel in the 1970s. These attacks were much debated among Southerners, who were at the time mostly poor farmers suffering from decades of extensive governmental neglect. Although Southerners by and large felt deeply for the plight of the Palestinians and supported their cause, many felt apprehensive about the PLO using their fields to launch attacks which would not liberate Palestine but might guarantee a brutal Israeli response. As a result of the Israeli assault of 1978, called Operation Litani, around 1,000 civilians were killed and 200,000 became displaced.

When the IDF invaded, it so happened that my father was out of town for work, and my mother had to manage five children on her own without a car. We were among the last ones to leave town, on a field tractor, with my mother carrying my younger brother and following us on foot. I imagine this to be an infinitely small sample of the many immensely nightmarish deliberations that parents in Gaza have had to make every night since October 7. Around seventy elderly men and women decided to stay behind in Khiam, unable to leave or, I imagine, unwilling; they were rounded up and slaughtered by Christian Lebanese militias sponsored by the IDF, what came to be known as the “Khiam massacre.” Following our exodus, we, the town inhabitants, were not allowed to return to our hometown at all until 1982, when the IDF occupied all of South Lebanon and reached all the way to Beirut. You may be familiar with the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacre which took place that summer in Beirut. This time, the State of Israel was bent on driving the PLO completely out of Lebanon, which it did. Yet, the IDF continued its occupation of South Lebanon, with the new justification that it had now to fight Lebanese fighters who resisted the occupation and launched attacks on the IDF in South Lebanon. Although in 1982 we were allowed to return, in order to visit Khiam, we had to obtain a “permit” issued by the IDF or its allied Lebanese militia in occupied South Lebanon.

The “permit,” which might get denied, was not permanent; every time you visited, you had to get one. Once you received the “permit,” you had to go through a check point, a process which might take you a full day, though it only takes about two-three hours to go straight from Beirut to Khiam by car. The checkpoint was not open 24 hours; you had to time your visit so that you go through long waiting lines before the checkpoint closed. Otherwise, you risked getting stranded or having to come back another day. At the check point, an Israeli soldier (or an IDF surrogate Lebanese militiaman) would check your “permit” and belongings, and if you had in your possession anything deemed “suspicious,” – a friend of mine was held because she had in her possession a photo of herself with a poster of Che Guevara in the background – this could be grounds for detention in which case they might arrest you and send you to the infamous Khiam concentration camp. There, they would interrogate you, often under torture of all kinds imaginable and unimaginable. They might keep you there, without any legal representation, from days to years, depending on the reason for your detention—– if, for instance, you were in the resistance movement and were caught during an attack against an IDF military post; there were no Israeli civilians in Lebanon. Some detainees never made it out. Sometimes, they would come for your siblings and demolish your parental home, even if your parents had no idea of your involvement (because the Lebanese resistance movement was underground).

At seventeen, I stopped visiting Khiam. It felt too humiliating and dangerous to make it worth my interest. The IDF left South Lebanon eighteen years later, in 2000, after sustaining heavy casualties inflicted by the Lebanese resistance movement, originally a diverse movement (communists, nationalists and Islamists), which evolved in the early 1990s as it increasingly came under Hezbollah’s control. At the beginning, Hezbollah gathered popular support across religious sects for its involvement in the resistance movement against what was felt to be an unbeatable Israeli State, because it made economic provisions for its marginalized constituents and because its leadership was considered less corrupt than the other Lebanese warlords. Under the banner “protecting the Resistance and fighting Imperialism,” Hezbollah and its allies, however, squashed dissent – by intimidation or assassination, joined Bashar Al Assad in crushing the Syrian people, fought against desperately needed social reforms, and helped maintain an immensely corrupt government which ultimately drove the country to a total economic and political collapse in 2020. This dialectic between freedom and oppression in which oppressor and oppressed can easily change roles informs my thinking about Israel-Palestine.

Psychoanalytic dialogues about Israel-Palestine and the freedom to know

In order to engage in a meaningful conversation, we need open and free access to trusted information about the subject matter we are discussing. We could not engage in a meaningful conversation about climate change, for instance, without some accurate knowledge of the science underlying this phenomenon. Of course, our knowledge about a topic does not guarantee that we take what we have learned seriously; we may twist what we hear and see to fit our theories or ideologies. For some, to see “proof” of dead children may not matter when killing children feels justified because anyway they were going to grow-up to become Hamas fighters or Israeli soldiers. Nonetheless, access to trusted information remains an essential element in any serious dialogue. This information gap, a hallmark of our contemporary times, is striking when it comes to Israel-Palestine. Tamar Hermann, an Israeli professor at the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), describes how “the [Israeli] media is not bringing to our living rooms the same images as people see in Europe or other states in the world … Unlike in previous military operations, the civilians [in Gaza] are not perceived here as innocent bystanders, the sympathy is quite low” (Knell, 2024). This echoes the sentiments of Israeli president Isaac Herzog: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true” (McGreal, 2023). According to a poll by IDI, two thirds of Israelis support the IDF in its war on Gaza (Knell, 2024). One wonders whether these Israelis have actually seen what the IDF has been doing in Gaza. Similarly, an in-depth survey of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, carried during the truce in November 2023, showed that 85% of Palestinians did not see videos of Hamas killing Israeli civilians, and 89% did not believe that Hamas committed war crimes, although almost 80% said that attacking women and children was against international law and would constitute a war crime (Shikaki, 2023). Those who saw the videos were much more likely to think that Hamas committed atrocities than those who did not see them.² This schism is obvious when one compares the news in the Arab world to what is shown on American and European media. In the Arab world, Al-Jazeera and other networks have exclusively focused on Gaza and Hamas since October 7. The scenes of Hamas militants’ carnage (the close-range killings and celebrations which Rozmarin refers to) were not shown. While videos of Hamas committing atrocities were front page on all American media platforms, images from Gaza were very slow to emerge even on the most liberal media outlets. For me to observe what the IDF was doing in Gaza in the first few weeks after October 7, I had to follow footage from Palestinian freelance journalists on social media or Arabic news channels.

This gap in information poses a serious problem for us to consider. Many health professional organizations, psychoanalytic, psychiatric and medical, issued statements condemning Hamas’s deliberate killing of Israeli civilians without any mention of the Gazan civilians at a time when they were being decimated in full view. One prominent international psychoanalytic organization referred to Palestinian civilians as “non-terrorist Palestinians.” How do we, as psychoanalysts, understand this? As I read these statements, I wondered whether the people issuing them had really seen the horrifying images coming out of Gaza, or read the words of Ben Gvir and Netanyahu; these people were dead serious. If they had seen the images or read the words and still did not consider the plight of the Palestinian children, I wondered what a Palestinian child meant to them, and how/why that child was different from his Israeli neighbor beyond the wall? Some Associations changed their statements only after pressure from Arab and other immigrant members; they were concerned for these members’ “sensitivities.” I wondered what it means to care about Palestinian children only so as not to offend Arab colleagues? Should an organization’s ethics be contingent on whether or not they offend some members or constituents? If an Association honors gender equality, should this support be withdrawn if a particular contingent finds it offensive or contradictory to its religious or ideological beliefs?

In this digital age, it is not hard to find information online, though one has to want to look for it. Curiosity being the first mental casualty at the height of a traumatic event, I find it understandable that it might not have been possible to process the onslaught of traumatic information from October 7 and onward (on both sides), and that some analysts might have wanted to limit their exposure to the news. Our tendency to gravitate to the communities we belong to, in particular during moments of distress, might have made it more difficult to seek information from outside one’s comfortable bubble and to empathize with “the other side.” But, why rush to make professional statements about a traumatic event at a time when our psychoanalytic function is collapsed? Would it not be prudent at these times to work first on reestablishing our collective psychoanalytic function so that we might truly understand, as psychoanalysts, what just happened and examine how to protect our emotional suffering from being weaponized by politicians and ideologues who wish to justify committing further atrocities? I do not aim to offer answers which are beyond the scope of a commentary, but rather to raise questions for all of us to consider, and to explore what might get in the way of raising such questions. These questions address the ethical foundations of our profession, which at its core is first and foremost, in my view, an ethical endeavor.

This knowledge gap about Israel-Palestine predates the events of October 7 and involves conflicting understandings and misunderstandings about its nature and history. For a long time, the State of Israel has often been perceived in the West as a democracy except for its occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem (though, of course, democracy and occupation do not belong together). This view is focused on the brutal treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories: check points which operate like daily factories of humiliation; restriction of movements, imprisonment without legal representation, just to cite a few examples. The State of Israel and Jewish settlers regularly confiscate Palestinian property. Most importantly, rampant expansions of settlements, in the last two-three decades in particular, have devoured so much of the West Bank that the call for a Palestinian State has become a cruel joke: there is no contiguous land anymore on which to create that state.

This fragmentation of Palestinian communities and appropriation of their lands is not confined to the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza but extends to Palestinian areas inside Israel (within pre-1967 borders) where Palestinians, themselves Israeli citizens, make up about twenty percent of the population: the State of Israel has been building rabbinical seminaries in Palestinian neighborhoods, seizing Palestinian lands in the Negev/Naqab and reducing public space for Palestinians everywhere (Mustafa & Ghanem, 2023). The State of Israel controls not only every piece of property and land but also every policy and resource that impact day-to-day life for each citizen and non-citizen from the river to the sea, and it exercises this control through a hierarchical system with Ashkenazi Jews on top, non-citizen Palestinians at the bottom, and Mizrahi Jews and Arab Israeli citizens somewhere in between (Barnett et al., 2023).

This reality on the ground has led many scholars on the Middle East to shift their way of perceiving Israel-Palestine from a paradigm of military occupation to one of a “de facto one state reality” (Lynch, 2023, p. 297).³ “Israelis and Palestinians today exist in an unacknowledged one state reality defined by systematic structures of domination and control imposed by one identity group over another in varying degrees based on location and legal status. These systems of control have deeply shaped every institution within both Israel and the Palestinian territories in ways that defy any possibility of easy partition. But recognition of that reality has been stymied by the inability to formulate any workable alternative political formula. And so the wheels have spun, even as Israel relentlessly expands its settlements and builds the infrastructure of exclusion and control” (Lynch, p. 294). It is this reality that has led Rozmarin (2024) and many activists, and scholars to label Israel an apartheid state, though I agree with Lynch (2023) that “no analogy is needed to recognize the injustice of this political order” (p. 298).

While people disagree on their interpretation and naming of the contemporary reality of Israel-Palestine (whether to call it occupation, apartheid, or simply Eretz Israel – for Israeli religious Zionists, including the current Israeli government,⁴ Palestinians do not even have rights to the land), a much more heated disagreement exists about the founding of the State of Israel and its dismissal of the Palestinian experience of Al Nakba (The Catastrophe). In my view, this is perhaps the major obstacle to an honest conversation about Israel-Palestine.

It is easy now after decades of so much bloodshed and suffering to look back at 1948 and genuinely wish that the Arabs had agreed to partition Mandate Palestine (this term refers to Palestine under British occupation). But I invite you as psychoanalysts to also approach this question in its historical context: what would it be like to be a Palestinian living in Mandate Palestine under British occupation and be asked by your British occupier to partition the land which your community has inhabited for centuries and where you are now the two-third majority, in order to accommodate Jews escaping centuries old persecution in Europe?⁵ What would it be like to be informed by the international community that a decision was made for you? Could we imagine that it might be possible for you as a Palestinian under British Mandate to feel sympathy for Jewish suffering in Europe, to perceive the justice in the idea of a safe haven for them, and to feel the injustice of how that idea was proposed, imposed, and facilitated by the British occupier, and by some Zionist settlers who themselves from early on spoke about “transfer” of the Palestinians out of their land (Morris, 2004, pp. 41–42), inspired by the German Colonization Commission (Ansiedlungskommission) set up by von Bismarck in the nineteenth century (Hazkani, 2021, p. 6)? In his thorough research on the “idea of ‘transfer’ in Zionist thinking before 1948,” Israeli historian Benny Morris quotes Theodor Herzl's diary entry from June 12, 1895: “We must expropriate gently … We shall try to spirit the penniless [Palestinian] population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country … Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly” (p. 41). In his letter to Hannah Arendt in 1936, Heinrich Blücher spoke to that context: “But you can’t just be given a country … To want a country, a whole country, as a present from a gangster who first of all has to steal it? To end up as a fence for an English plunderer?” (Arendt & Blücher, 2000, pp. 16–17).

For decades, and to this day, the Israeli State has promoted the myth that Palestine was an empty land for a people without a land, that the 750,000 Palestinians (two-third of the population) who fled their homes in 1948 did so on their own accord following orders by their incompetent Arab leaders, and that the war took place between an Israeli David and an Arab Goliath. While the events of 1948 have remained etched in Palestinian memories and oral history (Allan & Sayigh, 2021), it took until the late 1980s for a group of Israeli historians to start debunking Israel’s foundational myths. These “new,” “revisionist,” historians (Simha Flapan, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Tom Segev, and Avi Shlaim)⁶ have shown that in 1948 close to 500 Palestinian villages were “cleansed” of their Palestinian inhabitants to make room for the newcomers from Europe. Palestinians fled not only because of the natural course of war but also because they were systematically expelled or terrorized to leave. And yet, the State of Israel has continued to conceal historical and archival information and to undermine research about the events of 1948 which might validate Palestinian accounts of ethnic cleansing (Hazkani, 2021; Pappé, 2018; Schwarz, 2022).⁷ Some Israeli officials and citizens even went to the extent of protesting and attacking Netflix for streaming a Palestinian-Jordanian film Farha (2021) which chronicles the events of 1948 through the eyes of an adolescent Palestinian girl when her village gets sacked by Haganah militants (Healy, 2023).

The Israeli documentary film Tantura (Alon Schwarz, 2022) exposes these dynamics as it investigates the 1948 depopulation of Tantura, a Palestinian coastal town between Haifa and Tel Aviv. Schwarz, the director, interviews Palestinians who were expelled from Tantura, IDF soldiers who witnessed the killing of Palestinians, and several Israeli historians who reference archival material supporting the oral history. Using the soldiers’ and scholars’ statements and archival material quoted in the film, one can trace back the chain of events starting with Ben Gurion’s oral command to “drive the people out,” “we have to do everything so that Arabs flee the Galilee,” and a written statement “to destroy the enemy like vermin.” The IDF soldiers followed the command: “They [the Palestinians] were driven out, it became standard, automatic,” “the village [Tantura] was irradicated.” Then came the prohibition, Ben Gurion’s second command in the 1950s: “I want a study written that will prove that the Arabs left on their own accord and weren’t driven out by the IDF.” The soldiers got the message: “[Tantura’s massacre] was hushed, it’s forbidden to tell, I’m not going to talk about it because it could cause a huge scandal.” Then came the soldiers’ hesitations and retractions after telling the story: “It didn’t happen,” “maybe I saw, but I don’t remember,” “Erase it,” “no, no don’t write that,” “I encountered things, let’s move on,” “leave it,” “this [massacre] can’t be, we are a pure nation.” When the evidence of violence became undeniable, the moral gymnastics followed: “this fate – they [the Palestinians] brought upon themselves.” An Israeli historian declares “oral evidence … is good for folklore but not for history.” And for Teddy Katz, himself a Zionist, who had written his dissertation on this topic and insisted on telling the story: death threats, ex-communication, “you feel like the country is against you.”

Every country has foundational myths. A myth is not a falsehood but “a workable story based on truth” as playwright Ron Milner says (quoted by Frances Lang, 1974). The Israeli foundational myths, however, are based on falsehoods. As psychoanalysts, what do we make of these distortions about Israel’s foundation? What psychological meanings might have they held for the founders and the first generation of Jewish settlers? In what ways have they impacted Jewish collective identity and belonging? What do we think of the psychological impact of the oppressive militarized efforts which the Israeli State has used to create and maintain these falsehoods? What was disavowed? What had to be expelled with the Palestinians? How might have all of this influenced Palestinian collective identity and belonging? What effect did all of this have on the Europeans who facilitated these tragedies? Some psychoanalysts might believe that the atrocities committed by the founders were necessary as self-defense to create a much-needed homeland for the Jews. In fact, Benny Morris, one of the New Historians, who himself uncovered the Israeli State’s massacres and organized “transfer” in 1948, later justified them as necessary brutality (Shavit, 2004). “There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing … A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads … Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians” (Shavit, 2004). He even bemoaned that Ben Gurion did not finish the job of expelling all Palestinians (Shavit, 2004). For psychoanalysts who consider the events of 1948 to have been necessary for self-defense, at what point self-defense itself, like any psychological defense, becomes a burden or a serious threat to individual and collective selves? If self-defense, no matter how legitimate it might feel, is contingent on so much killing, what has to be killed inside oneself so that one might go on living – and what kind of living? What do we need as a psychoanalytic community in order to be able to face and explore these questions? It seems to me that facing these questions requires a serious look at how the militarization machinery⁸ of the State of Israel might impact collective ethical thinking and honest dialogue about Israel-Palestine. Equally important is how this State militarization becomes reinforced by a militant resistance creating what I call a “militant field.”

The “Militant Field”

When a State conceals important unethical aspects of its foundational history, when it attacks investigations and imaginative renderings of this history, as in the creation of a film, it collapses that space which Rozmarin (2024) refers to: the potential space in which one creates one’s own way of belonging or unbelonging to that State. The only way to belong is to become an extension of the State, to allow the State to think on our behalf. When a State cages four million people and requires its citizens to participate in an oppressive machination, including a two-year compulsory military service, it collapses that potential space even further by making its citizens complicit participants in a collective crime. This dynamic, in my view, creates the sacrificial belonging that Rozmarin (2024) describes. While belonging to any community risks devolving into a sacrificial pact – for example, when the community faces an overwhelming adversity or threat – certain structures, as in totalitarian or militarized regimes, create more pervasive conditions for this kind of belonging, in which the citizen is not really a “citizen” but a subject that belongs to the State. A militarized milieu also creates a collective dynamic vulnerable to extremist propaganda, right-wing fundamentalism and totalitarian rule. The fact that Netanyahu has ruled for fifteen years should give us pause to wonder.

In a militarized climate, even resistance movements that aim for liberation run the risk of becoming themselves militarized and oppressive. This militant resistance might get usurped to become the raison d’être for the militarized regime, creating what might be called a “militant field,” maintained and reinforced by militant, even though highly asymmetrical, opposing poles. A lot has been said lately about the Netanyahu-Hamas alliance and the Israeli State’s investment in keeping a corrupt Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and a militant group in Gaza to justify its claim of not having “a good partner for peace” (Raz, 2023). What I am suggesting here is not only that violence begets violence but also I need your violence to justify and sustain my (violent) existence. To my mind, this is much more formulaic, more strategic, and more dangerous.

The power differential between an oppressive regime/occupier and the oppressed opposition is always asymmetrical, even when the opposition becomes militant. To begin with, the tyrannical regime/occupying force is responsible for creating the oppressive environment in which a militant opposition emerges. This asymmetry on the political, conscious level, however, needs to be considered in dialectic with a bidirectional emotional and unconscious level of engagement between the oppressor and oppressed. What I mean by an unconscious plane of engagement is how the two poles impact each other and what kind of field they co-create unconsciously (a field is larger than the summation of its participants’ contributions). What I am suggesting, in regards to the oppressor/oppressed, is to keep in mind the dialectic of the asymmetrical consciousness (power differential) along with the bidirectionality of influence at the emotional, unconscious, more symmetrical, and shared level. The awareness of this bidirectional unconscious impact might help inform ways of resisting the oppression without being usurped by its oppressive mentality and reinforcing the militant field. To take the events of October 7^th as an example, aside from the ethical dimension of the attack which I address later, what does it mean for a resistance movement to take the bidirectional emotional impact of its liberatory act into consideration? It means to realize that such a massive attack on Israeli civilians creates immense terror, which shuts down empathy even in those who support a two-state or one-state solution, and more importantly, how traumatized communities are vulnerable to propaganda, a most precious gift to Netanyahu and his ministers, eager to manipulate Jewish suffering. Also, terror being the principal currency of a militarized regime/state, resistance attacks that create terror amplify the militant field. And the asymmetrical power dynamic in Israel-Palestine is such that an amplification of this militant field guarantees an immense Palestinian toll. This is not meant to absolve Jewish Israelis from their responsibility of ensuring that their emotional pain does not get weaponized to commit another Catastrophe.

Psychoanalytic freedom, political freedom, Fanon, and Israel-Palestine

In this context, I find it important to explore our contemporary psychoanalytic theories of resistance or “the liberatory,” which have played an important role in expanding our attention to the voiceless and marginalized (see for example, Gaztambide, 2021; Sheehi & Sheehi, 2020; Swartz, 2022). In this section, I examine aspects of these theories which emphasize violence as an essential tool for emancipation, stress the particular against the universal, and reject universal humanism as a discourse of white colonialists. These contemporary perspectives consider the work of Frantz Fanon to be central to their conceptualization. While Fanon’s writings on racism and colonialism are undeniably valuable, his thoughts, in particular on violence and universalism, have drawn controversy. Some academics emphasize the fragmentation in some of Fanon’s arguments and in the scholars and activists’ interpretations of them (Hall, 1996). Fanon’s “incomplete oscillations” (Hall, 1996, p. 34) perhaps explain how scholars of opposing views could nonetheless claim the same Fanonian text to support their views. Scholars and activists who claim, or critique Fanon, for highlighting violence as liberatory often cite this statement (from the Wretched of the Earth): “The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence. This praxis enlightens the militant because it shows him the means and the end” (Fanon, 2004, p. 44). Scholars who interpret Fanon as not endorsing violence, but rather warning against it even when considered legitimate, cite this statement (from the Wretched of the Earth): “Racism, hatred, resentment and the ‘legitimate desire for revenge’ alone cannot nurture a war of liberation … Of course the countless abuses perpetrated by the colonialist forces reintroduce emotional factors into the struggle, give the militant further cause to hate and new reasons to set off in search of a ‘colonist to kill.’ But, day by day, leaders will come to realize that hatred is not an agenda” (Fanon, 2004, p. 89). Still other Fanon scholars suggest that we read his texts on violence and universalism “as if they constituted a dialectical dramatic narrative” rather than “self-enclosed propositions stamped on each and every occasion with the author’s discrete assent and unmistakable imprimatur” (Sekyi-Otu, 1997, p. 5 & 236). This reading of Fanon’s thoughts on violence seems to me closer to a psychoanalytic conceptualization of destructiveness as always dialectical: a mental state (or action) whose outcome might oscillate between aliveness/zest/emancipation and deadness/annihilation (of self and/or other). Stuart Hall (1996), a Jamaican-British cultural theorist, suggests that we “live with a much more radically incomplete Fanon; a Fanon who is somehow more ‘Other’ to us than we would like, who is bound to unsettle us from whichever direction we read him” (p. 35).

Be that as it may – and even if Fanon indeed considers violence to be necessary and only emancipatory – I find it important as psychoanalysts to evaluate the function of violence in liberatory struggles by examining the outcome of militant liberatory movements in former colonies. Along a similar vein, the Ghanaian political philosopher Ato Sekyi-Otu (1997) calls for a rereading of Fanon informed not only by the experiences of the minority diaspora in the West but also by “the disasters of the postindependence experiences in Africa” (p. 2). It is very common during militant liberation struggles to hear the need to unite the fronts and wait until liberation to address domestic fractures and local/indigenous oppression. “No voice should rise above the voice of the battle” has been a common refrain in Palestinian armed struggle. If we look at liberation movements over the past several decades across the Arab world, and many non-Arab countries, this strategy, however, did not seem to have boded well. As soon as a liberation movement succeeded in booting out the colonizer, militarization persisted: dissenters were assassinated or thrown in prison, women’s rights and other civil rights reforms were crushed, and the country was ruled by the boot. Even worse, some post-colonial regimes have usurped “fighting Imperialism and colonialism” to crush their own people. Frantz Fanon’s beloved Algeria is no exception. In fact, after witnessing the Algerian army kill 600 young peaceful protesters on the streets of Algiers in October 1988, Fanon’s widow, Josie Fanon exclaimed: “Once more, O Frantz, the ‘wretched of the earth!” (quoted by Assia Djebar, 1995, p. 92), “and so the filthy beast returns, the tortured of yesterday are the torturers today” (Djebar, 1995, p. 167).

Keeping this historical context in mind, as psychoanalysts, how might we conceptualize the liberatory? Should we be concerned when a liberatory movement aims to replace a foreign colonizer with an indigenous one? Should our theory of the liberatory reconcile liberation from foreign occupation with liberation of the mind: the freedom to establish loving bonds, feel one’s own feelings, and think one’s own thoughts, all jeopardized in the presence of a terrorizing inner critic (harsh superego), in turn more likely to develop under terrorizing regimes?⁹ Also, as our psychoanalytic stance is grounded first and foremost in ethics, how do we locate the ethical in our theory of resistance and the liberatory?

In my view, it is one thing to understand, as we psychoanalysts ought to, the context which leads to reactionary/resistant violence and another thing to consider those who commit it above ethical responsibility. We can understand that Hamas fighters who broke the wall and committed their atrocities were doing so in the context of having had their souls crushed for decades with no hope in sight. I found it worth noting that in committing these atrocities, some Hamas militants were able to leave Gaza for the first time in their lives, and that the towns which they decimated most likely had been their grandparents’ homes in 1948. Yet, understanding this brutal context does not justify the atrocities. We need to ask, does this brutal history absolve Hamas militants from the ethical responsibility which they, rightly, demand their Israeli oppressor to own, the ethical responsibility to spare civilians and respect the land? What would it have been like if Hamas fighters broke the wall and attacked only Israeli soldiers? The refrain, “Yes, Hamas killed civilians, but Israel kills Palestinian civilians every day,” although true, shifts the moral compass to the State of Israel, which is not a liberatory moral compass. The other refrain which I sometimes hear – “But these Israeli kids sooner or later will grow up and become Israeli soldiers because of the compulsory military conscription” – also resembles the moral compass of the State of Israel for which Palestinian children are not innocent but rather “indoctrinated future terrorists.” On the Israeli/Jewish side, justifying the killing of Palestinian children – “Well, Israel doesn’t have a choice because Hamas doesn’t care about its people and uses them as a human shield” – also shifts the moral compass to Hamas and undoes the Israeli State’s claim of moral virtue even for self-defense. These moral gymnastics do not create liberatory ethics. They are features of a militant field in which the autonomy of the subject is denied, and the past, present and future are collapsed. In this collapsed time-space, a past solider, basically any Israeli civilian – for example, the elderly woman Rozmarin (2024) refers to – is always a soldier, and a potential soldier – a child who was killed or abducted—is a solider.

The ethical responsibility of liberatory movement, in my view, extends beyond its treatment of the “other,” enemy and otherwise; it concerns first and foremost its own people who it aims to liberate. In a recent commentary on October 7^th and the Catastrophe in Gaza, Palestinian writer and journalist Majed Kayali (2023) considers that a resistance movement’s essential ethical responsibility is to protect its own civilian community. This responsibility needs to inform whatever liberatory political or military decision the movement makes: the responsibility to balance legitimate needs with possible means, the emotional and physical toll on the community with political gains, and the community’s capacity to bear with what might be unbearable (Ghanem, 2024; Kayali, 2023). It is hard to know what the final outcome is going to be for Gazans and other Palestinians in Israel-Palestine; the political outcome notwithstanding, the emotional toll is immense, perhaps too immense for any outcome to feel meaningful for a very long time. In an interview on October 27, 2023 on Russia Today TV, Hamas leader Moussa Abu Marzouk was asked “Since you built 500 kilometers (310 miles) of tunnels, why haven’t you built bomb shelters where civilians can hide during bombardment?” He replied, “We have built these tunnels because we [militants] have no other way to protect ourselves from being targeted and killed … Everyone knows that seventy-five per cent (75%) of Gazans are refugees, and it’s the responsibility of the United Nations to protect them and it’s the responsibility of the occupiers to provide them with services” (Kayali, 2024; YouTube, 2023). To imply that Gazans should be protected by the State of Israel, which for seventy-five years has turned their lives into hell, is not only irresponsible but also cruel. This reality, being trapped between brutal occupation and a cruel militant resistance, does not seem to be lost on Gazans, judging from their posts on social media. A Gazan woman recently posted on Facebook, “we can’t say our true opinion about Hamas … but our silence does not mean that we agree or like [what they’ve done].” All of this does not in any way absolve the State of Israel from its direct responsibility in committing another Nakba/Catastrophe in Gaza, under the banner of protecting Jewish identity and security.

Some scholars, psychoanalysts and activists argue that the oppressed should not be bound by the same ethical principles as those of the oppressor. This stance, informed by a post-Foucauldian rejection of the enlightenment and its humanistic universals, emphasizes the particularity and difference of the oppressed, the ethnic other (Sekyi-Otu, 1997). By doing so, it also relativizes ethics. Does this stance not collude with the colonizer who views the oppressed/indigenous/colonized only as different and denies their shared humanity? Does this stance not also collude with the Israeli State’s claim of exceptionalism when it comes to its ethics of self-defense? According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, “If the threat to Israel is existential, expulsion will be justified … We are the greater victims in the course of history and we are also the greater potential victim. Even though we are oppressing the Palestinians, we are the weaker side here” (Shavit, 2004). Should the response to this victim exceptionalism be met with another victim exceptionalism? In keeping with the psychoanalytic essence of the dialectical relationship between an asymmetrical consciousness and symmetrical/bidirectional/shared unconscious, shouldn’t we consider an ethical stance to be also dialectical: oscillating between the particular (different/other) and the universal (shared)?

To my mind, creating an approach that is ethical and liberatory in every way, to break out of this dangerous militant field, without being usurped as citizens and psychoanalysts into its militancy is the urgent task of the day. A militant field is not only unethical, it is also antiethical and antipsychoanalytic. It is a concrete field in which the space between symbol and symbolized has collapsed, thus a kufieh – a symbol for Palestinian culture, steadfastness, and resistance of all kinds including armed struggle—itself becomes the armed struggle. It is an action field in which the space between feelings, thoughts and actions has collapsed, thus a social media post which supports or critiques the atrocities of October 7 itself becomes the atrocity. It is a cruel field in which mistakes, foolishness of youth, innocence, and ignorance are brutally punished. It has no room for mercy. A militant field is an infanticidal field, literally and metaphorically. It kills our infants – the UNICEF spokesperson aptly called the war on Gaza “a war on children.” It kills our future. It kills our creativity. It kills our imagination. It kills our hope. It kills life.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Frances Lang for her careful reading of my paper and for her thoughtful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Noha Sadek

Noha Sadek, M.D., is a child psychiatrist and adult psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City, faculty at Brown Medical School, Department of Child Psychiatry, and member of the Program Committee at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is also a member of APsaA and the IPA. She has presented and published psychoanalytic essays on wealth shame, anti-black racism in psychoanalytic communities, and the psychodynamics of Islamophobia and its impact on both Islamic and American cultural identities. Her paper, The phenomenology and dynamics of wealth shame: between moral responsibility and moral masochism, was awarded JAPA’s New Author Prize in 2020.

Notes

¹ About a third of Jewish Americans believe that it is anti-Semitic to say “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians” or “Israel is an apartheid state,” while 20% think it is anti-Semitic to say “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the U.S” (Jewish Electorate Institute, 2021).

² It is interesting to note here that Palestinians in Gaza were a lot more likely to have watched the videos of October 7 than those in the West Bank (25% in Gaza versus 8% in WB). Of those who watched the videos, Gazans were more likely, than those from the West Bank, to think that Hamas committed war crimes (16% versus 1%).

³ This one state reality is different from “the one state solution,” though the latter might be informed by the former (see Beinart, 2020).

⁴ “The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop the settlement of all parts of the Land of Israel – in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan and Judea and Samaria” (Keller-Lynn & Bachner, 2022).

⁵ On the eve of Zionist influx in the late nineteenth century (what was then Ottoman Palestine), the population had about 450,000 Arabs and 20,000 Jews (Morris, 2004). For more on Ottoman Palestine, see Doumani (1992).

⁶ For a thorough review of the Israeli “new historians” and their research findings, see Naziri (2023), Pappé (2007), and Shlaim (1995).

⁷ Commenting on his use of Israeli archives for his research on 1948, Israeli scholar Shay Hazkani (2021) writes: “The chief Israeli archivist even admitted as much in a rare moment of candor in January of 2018, noting that choices of what to declassify sometimes involve ‘an attempt to conceal part of the historical truth in order to build a more convenient narrative,’ particularly those materials that might ‘incite the Arab population’ or ‘be interpreted as Israeli war crimes’” (p. 24).

⁸ For a thorough exploration of the origins of Zionist militarism in the late nineteenth century and onward, see (Hazkani 2021; Gideon Reuveni, 2006; and Anita Shapira, 1992).

⁹ For psychoanalytic literature on oppressive regimes and oppressive/oppressed minds, see (Bollas, 2011; Frances Lang, 2017 & Šebek, 1996).