Nation as Trauma

About six months ago, Jodi linked to a great interview with Jacqueline Rose.  She was discussing her latest book, "The Question of Zion," which takes a psychoanalytic approach to Zionism and the Isreali-Palestinian conflict.  What reminded me of this work has been the recent discussion of Zizek's new book, and the role of psychoanalysis in general, as an approach to socio-political conflict.  Rose asserts that in its current form, Zionism represents the "militarization of suffering," where any sign of passivity or weakness is regarded as a national disgrace.

Jacqueline Rose: I do believe...that the consequence of the shame at the passivity felt by the Jews in the face of their Nazi oppressor has been a hardening and militarisation of their identity which is indeed explicable in terms of Jewish history...

But that rigidification of identity which the state justifies in terms of such a history, ensures that every catastrophe that happens to Israel becomes a confirmation of its view of itself. It leads to a fortification of the soul. This distressing overlap between the need to feel safe as a nation and the need to believe in yourself takes on the form of a repetition of trauma.

Here you really need a psychoanalytic distinction. Israel is now the fourth most militarily powerful nation in the world. It is a nuclear power. It is not in danger. The fear that Israel will be destroyed is groundless. But that does not mean that it isn’t real. The fear is real and it is understandable. This is the difficult territory: you have to say both things at once. But...when the fear becomes an identity that justifies itself by a violence that cannot acknowledge itself as violence, something has gone terribly wrong.

The best example in my book is the commandant in Gaza who steels himself in the battle against Palestinian children by remembering as he says, “the flames of the Holocaust”. This fortress mentality that Israel cannot relinquish means that it cannot see itself as the agent of violence. That is one of the effects of trauma: you can’t then see what you are capable of doing. You are always repeating a situation in which you are threatened and potentially destroyed.

Comments

[s0metim3s]

On a related note, and in less psychoanalytic terms, there's also Roberto Esposito's discussion of immunity, or immunisation.

[Alain]

Thank you for the link, Angela. The review of Balibar's book looks interesting also. In the past I had always been reluctant to apply concepts like trauma and sublimation to discussions of community. But reading Rose's book, and discussions at Long Sunday, have shown me that there is alot to be gained from reading the archives of a collective in terms of memory traces, disavowed pain, and repitition compulsion. Of course, Zionism is unusual in that it was a nationalist response of both the oppressor and the oppressed. Anti-semites and Jews both desired an answer to "the Jewish Question," and neither considered the displacement of an indigenous population to be an impediment or a concern. What is great about Rose's book is that she retrieves alternative voices within the jewish tradition, voices like Buber, Arendt, Lazarre, and Sholem - all of whom saw the injustice being done to the Arabs and dire consequences for the Jews themselves.

[chabert]

"ensures that every catastrophe that happens to Israel becomes a confirmation of its view of itself."

Thanks for this post, Alain. I don't have this book yet...must get it.

I'm wondering though:

"The fear that Israel will be destroyed is groundless. But that does not mean that it isn’t real. The fear is real"

For whom is this fear real, does she say? Is the contention that the expansionist policy is made and/or carried out by people who fear this? If so, what's that assertion based on?

[Alain]

Thanks chabert. If you follow the link from the quote, it is goes to a review she did of books on suicide bombing. So I think her point is twofold: there is a "real" fear produced from the historical cycle of violence against the Jews and there is a concern for safety relative to suicide bombing. She is quite clear that such attacks are not a threat to Isreal's existence as a nation-state, but I think her point is that they trigger a knee jerk reaction that feeds upon past historical suffering. Thus many Isreali's are uable (or unwilling) to see the bombings as a response to an oppressive and humiliating occupation - they simply see is as part of the larger historical narrative of Jews being persecuted, this time by evil, fanatical "savages," etc.. Any sign of weakness reminds Isreali's of the humiliation of the holocaust - Jews "passively" being lead to slaughter. She has a great quote from Ben Gurion saying that he does not want to be identified with "those Jews," meaning those who did not resist the Nazis. It is really a fascinating book.

[Alain]

Chabert, I just realized I did not really address your last question. Rose seems to believe that many in the leadership actually believe the rhetoric of self-defense, even as they also evoke the messianic dream of a "greater Isreal." I know she quotes extensively for Netanyahu's books, and points out that he lost his brother in the Raid on Antebe. So I do not think she discounts economic and geo- political motivations, but she is exploring the psyche of historical zionism, particularly as expressed in the writings of early leaders like Herzl and thnkers like Jabotinski.

[Alain]

Interesting discussion of "which Isreal" is to be recognized by Hamas:

http://alertandalarmed.blogspot.com/2006/03/recognise-which-israel.html

[chabert]

i'd buy that for jabotinsky but its a pretty ugly apology for Netanyahu, who is into bankrupting the Israeli population, whose book was checked and rechecked and tweeked and written doubtless by dozens of pr people very well acquainted with fascist apologies and their liberal psychoanalytic complements, probably as well acquainted with this discourse as Rose if not better.

the formula is very familiar- the volk (germans, jews, americans) suffer a collective humiliating trauma (WWI, holocaust, take your pick for americans) at the hands of a real aggressor (british capital, german capital, american capital) which the military state, the volk's embodiment and expression of their general will and mishigas, avenges (on a third party and the volk itself). If the last thing is noble, you've got fascist dogma; if its ignoble, you've got the left glove to go with the right, the liberal
psychoanalytic 'critique' of fascist dogma.

I've seen bits of the vbook, and some lectures of hers... Israel is the Volk (including you and me) in the first usage in the quote above; in the second it is the military State, there is no distinction. It's conceding the essential point to fascism, don't you think? And fails to account for the curious underrepresentation of real survivors of the trauma - as opposed to their self appointed proxies and surrogates - in the mishigas the trauma is supposed to incite.

[chabert]

I read a bio of Edmond de Rothschild a few weeks ago - the first crop of Zionists were horrified by Jews turning up in Ethiopia. We really don't need to go looking for more Jews, writes one of Rothschild's Alliance guys, there are too many Jews, layabouts and meshuggeners in Ottoman territory and eastern europe, embarassing us already. If any more Jews turn up in the world, unless they are rich, let us just disown them, or the whole thing of trying to get them living decently is going to get too expensive...

Certainly by the 30s, intellectuals, many Jewish, whom the Zionists were disputing with, had already applied Rose's formula to explain Nazism; Zionism is a propaganda miracle, and partly it was from paying attention to how fascists succeeded with theirs and replicating it. Cynicism really can't be counted out like this- just about every leading Zionist (besides Jabotinsky, who was a zealot, the genuine article) was openly a cynic and openly talked about how to use this fear of extermination to control and manipulate Jewish populations, even before the death camps. To treat Netanyahu as a naif who has never been to a shrink or known one...whose editor is equally a bumpkin oblivious to how the public statements of this Israeli clique leader will go over with American Jewish academics...it's very childish I think, strangely condescending to people clearly more powerful, better informed and wilier than the author, and the results can't be helpful. One cannot put a Military State on the couch, at least not before one establishes how this insitution, or nexus of institutions, resembles a person. As an explanation of how people, especially soldiers, are kind of won over to policies which are horrible for them and others - clearly we saw this with the US population really feeling persecuted by Sadam Hussein and everyone in the middle east and ready for a war of a extermination recently - it seems pretty obvious, but as an explanatgion of the policies of the State - she sets out to explain Israeli policy - and the deliberate manipulation of those people's whipped up fears and paranoia, it seems pretty lame and maybe something very much worse.

I don't mean to sound snippy, but it is anothe rexample of this trend of dehumanization, of transferring to abstractions, to arrangements of blocs of capital, what is human, and depriving human beings of what is human, such as trememndous variety of responses to things like the Volk's Collective Humiliation. The 'militarization of suffering' was of course the avowed programme of fascism in Germany - I think Alfred Rosenberg used this very phrase (maybe Rose cites him) - but the mystical nature of this makes it problematic as an angle of approach to political analysis. As an explanation, it compares badly with others, because it can't account for Israeli policy outside the middle east - in South Africa, Central America, Yugoslavia for example - and it can't account for the perfect harmony between those making Israeli foreign policy globally (gentiles in London, Paris and Washington) and the traumatized volkmembers carrying it out in the limelight.

[bat020]

FYI: Socialist Worker interview with Jacqueline Rose re The Question of Zion

[Alain]

Chabert, I appreciate what you are saying. I do not think Netanyahu, or any of the other members of the leadership, are naive or necessarily acting out of some personal trauma. And one ought to be careful not to be too loose in applying psycho-analytic concepts to "communal motivations."

But my personal experience with Jews in the United states, including survivors like my own father, leads me to believe that there is something useful about Rose's approach, even if it does not explain the motivations of most of those in power. I have had countless conversations with Jews who say the dumbest things, like "arabs cannot be trusted," they "weren't doing anything with the land (Palestine)," or even the classic "arabs are primitive savages that must be dealt with as such." Of course all that is anecdotal and is not the equivalent of an indepth political or economic analysis of the situation. But it cannot be denied that many Isreali's and diaspora Jews think that Isreal can do no wrong, that it can never be unjust, and certainly can never be publicly questioned. It is this experience that I think Rose effectively reveals and analyzes. The fact that the ruling elite in Isreal and elsewhere cynically exploit this common mentality does not make the mentality less effective or important.

Chabert, I know we have had similar discussions in the past, and you are right to point out the tendency of leftists to over analyze or abstract from basic power politics. I am actually closer to your view than you might think. But I still find it useful to talk in psycho-analytic terms when it comes to revealing the passionate ideological commitment of Jews to zionism as a concept and a reality.

Respectfully, I do have one question about your comment - In what way do you think Rose's approach concedes too much to fascism? Do you mean that this view of Zionism reduces it too neatly into another form of fasism? If so, you might be right.

Thanks, as always, for the thoughtful response.

[Alain]

Thank you bat020 for the link. I will check it out.

[chabert]

"But it cannot be denied that many Isreali's and diaspora Jews think that Isreal can do no wrong, that it can never be unjust, and certainly can never be publicly questioned"

Yeah, true, and Rose is not introducing anything new with regard to this, the explanation for this is persuasive (and common, and respectable); but I think they would think this if Israel's policies were not so malevolent. I think most would be even quicker to support Israel if Israel was not a colonial expansionist genocidal military dictatorship. To blame these people for the policies of the state - to suggest the state is merely acing out their mishigas - is wrong.

There is something very dicey, with an ugly pedigree, about diagnosing The Jewish Neurosis as the cause of capitalist policies worldover, and it seems this is what Rose is doing. Trauma is not normally heritable in the human component of the Neurotic Entity. The Netanyahu clique has been expert at perpetually traumatizing the Israeli population, Jewish and Gentile, and pointing the fingert at a scapegoat: it does this well, but so does the US.

she seems to be saying has not a state eyes? does not a state bleed? If you wrong a state will it not revenge? no and no and not exactly. Perhaps the thing that disturbs me is putting this kind of established truism - righteous victimhood is inculcated in aggressor nation populations, its a science - to the use of what appears to me a standard apology for the Military State coupled to old fashioned antisemitism of the philosemetic type, associated with Buber among others....

[chabert]

"Do you mean that this view of Zionism reduces it too neatly into another form of fasism?"

Well in what I have seen, her description of the relationship of the Military State's policies to the volk's trauma is precisely the description given by Nazi ideologues of the relations of their volk trauma to their military dictatorship's policies, only Rose is saying the result is irrational and deluded and bad and the nazi ideologues were saying the results were good and noble. Here is the Military State, embodiment of the volk, mystic democracy...in quest for spiritual renewal in Rosenberg's account and relief of psychic pain in Rose's.

[Alain]

Chabert, I follow you until the last point -I do not think Rose is making an apology for the military state, or attributing the Jewish Neurosis as the cause of capitalist policies worldwide. I realize that economics is the primary motivation for Isreal's barbarism - but that is not the point Rose is making. To the degree that she is focusing on psychological motivations of particular zionists, and zionism in general, perhaps she is obscuring the true this basic fact. And I do realize she is not the first to makes these arguments - but I do not see how her argument is antisemitic. And my knowledge of Buber is limited, so I did not realize he was an apologist for Isreali militarism.

[c]

No Buber was very anti militaristic but he did argue about The Problem Of Jews in these usual terms...an Oriental displaced in Europe and become basically decadent and a mess because of it, because of nbot being at home, because of a history of persecution...from this arises a Jewish problem, something really wrong with Jews, to be solved by (spiritual) nationalism, renewal....

I haven't read most of the Rose book, and I assume she explains the relationship between the State and Jewish people which the sections I have read assume...

But is not her argument that Israeli policy itself - in the Occupied Territories, Lebanon and Iraq, if not in Bosnia, Angola or Nicaragua - can be explained in terms of this trauma and neurosis? Not simply that support among ordinary people, basically bystanders, is achieved through an appeal to this sense of victimhood, but that the actual policy making is an expression of this trauma?

"This fortress mentality that Israel cannot relinquish means that it cannot see itself as the agent of violence. That is one of the effects of trauma: you can’t then see what you are capable of doing. You are always repeating a situation in which you are threatened and potentially destroyed."

What is the referent of 'Israel' in this paragraph? Are you and I a part of it? Is she saying the military dictatorship in the OT is motivated by the excuse this guy, a member of the most pr-handled military ever, gives to a reporter? If not, what is she saying about this (vicarious) trauma? That it is perpetuated and exploited, deftly, for the manufacture of consent and obedience? No one would disagree. But she seems to have sparked 'controversy' for saying something more - for saying this trauma is somehow related to Israeli policy making and the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, (which is actually determined in Washington, mainly by gentiles). That the policy is an expression of this (Jewish) neurosis resulting from (inherited) trauma. Or do I misread?

[chabert]

"hat Israeli policy engendered suicide bombing was acknowledged by Rabin. Having originally promoted indiscriminate bombing of South Lebanon 'until there's nobody left there' - he was defence minister at the time - he finally came to the view that 'terror cannot be finished by one war; it's total nonsense.' By replacing 'PLO terrorism' with 'Shia terrorism', he acknowledged, Israel had done 'the worst thing' in the struggle against terrorism: 'Not one PLO terrorist,' he said, 'has ever made himself into a live bomb.'"

This is from the piece about suicide bombers. What Rose neglects to mention was that Rabin's mission was precisely to evade a peaceful negotiation, among other things by destroying the PLO and fostering Palestinian groups who used terrorism; this was how Israel was to achieve its geopolitcal and economic ends. It was not a silly plan; as we see it has worked. In the quest to exhibit her Jewish neurotic Rabin, shooting himself in foot due to trauma, Rose has done a clever edit which erases the rational, able statemen performing according to the logic d'état of capitalist nations.

here's finklestein giving a different picture:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/14/1518230

"Mr. Rabin says, ‘Let's throw Arafat a life preserver, but on condition.’ And Dr. Ben-Ami puts it excellently, that “the P.L.O. will be Israel's subcontractor and collaborator in the Occupied Territories,” and I’m quoting Dr. Ben-Ami, "in order to suppress the genuinely democratic tendencies of the Palestinians.""

...

"As Dr. Ben-Ami's colleague, Avner Yaniv, put it in a very excellent book, Dilemmas of Security, he said, “The main problem for Israel was,” and now I’m quoting him, "the P.L.O.'s peace offensive. They wanted a two-state settlement. Israel did not.” And so Israel decides to crush the P.L.O. in Lebanon. It successfully did so."

If the State and its leaders really did want 'security' and not expansion and land acquisition, indeed we would have to conclude they are neurotic as Rose suggests, or incompetent, the other mainstream option. But they're not interested in security, and insecurity - for ordinary Israelis and Palestinians and Nicaraguans and Angolans - has always been of great service to their ends. To accept the trauma as the explanation is to disguise the motives and capabilities of Rose's analysands at a distance, and its not surprising she tends to consider all their press releases to be as candid as utterances under hypnotism...Believing that Israeli policymakers want Israeli citiznes to feel secure requires ignoring the logic of Israeli policy, which includes an economic war on the citizenry, Jewish and Genitle alike, aided by and aiding the ruling clique's aggressions abroad.

But in the end, we can't know. Maybe Sharon really was neurotic. An analysis like theweleit's suggests that all such men are afraid of very fundamental dissolution. Sitll people with the very same fears do different things; not everyone runs a military dictatorship. A political analysis can't ignore the political problem.

[Alain]

Chabert, thank you for the link. I will read the entire debate. You are probably right that the analysis only works on those who are "at a distance" from the real actors and decission makers. And by focusing on this, it detracts from the what is really going on. I am not as certain as you are but I definitely see your point.

But isn't it possible that someone like Rabin wants his cake and eat it too? He wants expansion of the territories to further economic interests, and he wants peace. And he may want to further the messianic vision of a greater Isreal? Who knows. Your suggestion is this would either makes him neurotic or incompetent - both alternatives not as likely as he and the ruling clique simply acting out of self-interest. Again, you are probably right.

I suspect our basic disagreement is that I think Rose's sort of analysis still has merrit because it points to the self understanding of many jews (myself included) regarding a visceral attachment to Isreal - one that cannot always be explained rationally. I completely agree with you that "A political analysis can't ignore the political problem" but I think that still leaves room for exploring psychological motivations. Edward Said was among those who recognized the importance of understanding the emotional power of Zionism - how it has been able to command so much loyality from so many for so long.

And I appreciate the dialogue because you always bring things back to what is actually happening in the lives of flesh and blood people everyday. Psychological explanations should never be used as an excuse, or in place of atttributing responsibility to those who perpetrate violence.

[chabert]

I think actually it is certainly 'The State' she is speaking of as psychopathic, because none of these individuals are violent personally, right? They can see their own violence; they're not above average domestic abusers or brawlers or rapists. That's a very convenient trauma, to exhibit itself only in politically and economically rewarding cases involving impunity, no? At least one would have to acknowledge the involvement of rationality at work there in deciding what is the most advantageous way to exhibit the effects of the trauma, and being able to instrumentalize the trauma's unwilled effects optimally in their calculated self interest, and control it completely in cases where exhibiting it would involve risk.

[Alain]

Chabert, I guess I am not certain that the rulers optimally "instrumentalize the trauma's unwilled effects" to further their self interest but, again, your point is well taken. I think this touches on the larger issues (not specific to Isreal) of nationalism and the willingness to kill (or die) for one's country. I have known individuals who have killed people in combat - it is not something that leaves you unaffected. Of these individuals, only one regretted having "served his country." It seems to me that it would have to be something more than delusions that motivate these people. But I do not know. Its hard to put myself in their place.

I only bring this up because, unlike the United States, most (if not all) of the ruling clique in Isreal must have served in the military, right? Many of them may in fact know what it is like to have a killed a man, or at least been shot at. Someone like Dick Cheney can only simulate such carnage by firing upon a hunting partner. Presumably, a Rabin or a Sharon have killed and tortured "the enemy" - perhaps even savoring it. Who knows. But its hard to imagine in that situation, where your life is on the line, that it is only economic interests that are at stake.

And I realize I could be overly sentimental, naive or, even worse, "humanistic" in my outlook. But it seems that money and power are not the only reasons individuals or states act the way they do. Whether imposing a term like "psyche" on a collective is a good idea is certainly debatable - but it does seem safe to say that humans do at times act irrationally, even against their own self-interest. But I would like to read the debate you linked to before making further comments because it does seem so directly pertinent to our discussion. Thanks again.