On Being Against the Genocide

First off, transparency - I tend to reject psychological analysis based on remote diagnosis, without personally knowing celebrities and public figures or segments of the population. Still, I wish to use this column in order to sketch out the image of the anti-genocide minority of which I am a part. Usually, this kind of branding is used in deprecation and undervaluing, emphasizing its being a minority, or in deprecators’ terms – misery of the few. However, by using it, I wish to fortify this group and alleviate its loneliness, even a little. We are a minority, indeed, but still important enough.

Let us begin with a few words about loneliness: we are disconnected from Palestinians in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank because we do not experience hell itself. We are disconnected from the majority of Israelis who wish to continue what we wish to end. We are disconnected from progressive leftists abroad for they live in theory what we experience in practice. And above it all, we are split and disconnected among ourselves, because the range of opinions does not enable crowding under a single umbrella. This is why I recognize the need for internal dialogue.

On social media we voice our common, so-called marginal experience. Thus, we express not only our rage and grief, but also the fact that we are isolated, and in conversations we mention the lack of that voice. Our tiny, fragile, scattered and missing discourse is worthy. Without it, I doubt whether we could continue to present an anti-genocide position. The general isolation imposed on us by Israeli society is powerful, and we need someone to speak to it and hear it. This is no solidarity privilege - it is a psychological need.

By the way, what is the price of being exposed to such hellish horrors: Soon after the Black Sabbath (October 7th), one spoke about the need for proportionality and balancing news input. I have no intention of repeating words worn thin, but we – like most of the public – are inside a sterile news bubble, clear of anything actually taking place in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Thus, we need to search, peek outside this bubble, and be exposed to information followed by the risk of mental harm.

We are very few, less than one percent of the Jewish population, and what we do have is scant, but still a lot. Scant ability to do, to stop the horrors, and much – a lot of information to which we can be exposed, long feeds that float parts of bodies, screams and destruction – brutal assault prints.

The voices accompanying this situation are probably familiar to most of us: “I shall know for this is my basic commitment as a human being”, “but still I need to speak of the blood of my comrades”, “perhaps I’ll say something”, “but to what end?” “better be isolated – it’s only wearing down my soul”, “I am forbidden from isolating myself – if I do, my soul will die of shame”. We fluctuate among these contradictory voices. We alternately disappear and emerge. Find a temporary place, at times permanent, or perhaps even one that has been destroyed by reality’s bulldozers. And we are surrounded by the roaring silence of the Israeli public.

The society from which we come is caught by contradiction, by absurdity. On the hand, “we shall win together” and the need for revenge, and the on other hand “everyone home n-o-w!” and the call to have all hostages freed from the tunnels in which they are held. These two wishes cannot exist in the same space, they annul each other. But the Israeli public denies this by holding on to the lie of military pressure, for example, which is being defeated by reality.

In this sense, radical leftists, like radical rightists, have always been sober about the secret of basic contradiction. Kahane people, like Matzpen (extreme left) members, always knew that both together are a no-no. That one cannot eat Jewish Supremacy and leave one’s soul whole. It must all be separated, split. Between sectors, inside sectors, in the family, in couples, finally inside the soul itself. Split or be polarized. Or both.

And where is the anti-genocide minority? At times on one side of this secret and simply avoiding the talk – resting, ‘snailing’, remaining burnt on the margins. At times on the other side – shouting, talking on the internet, at times tired, worn down, living inside the void itself. The soul of this group has always had to cope frontally with the tendency to split, so inherent in Israeli society – and all the more so since that Black Sabbath. It does not have the radical right-wing’s privilege to have chosen violence and Jewish Supremacy. It does not even have the privilege of the majority that could always get support simply by being the majority.

I find three psychological components in myself and in my fellow minority members:

First – loneliness and its miscreants;

Second – Israeli society’s tendency to split, echoing inside the soul;

Third – moving between connection and disconnection from reality, looking for the place that neither ignores nor disappears.

The implications of these components are fear, anxiety, depression, confusion and disassociation.

I shall conclude on a personal note, concrete, mundane. These days, whatever had remained here from the upper purer air has simply vanished. Everything is now placed in our lives’ material aspects – family, money and the like. At the beginning of this assault, I was loud. I saw the numbers of unburied corpses mount. I like to write so I did, and from post to post I lost more and more friends and acquaintances. I am no different. Many of you have gone through this. I got anxious. I have food, but how long will this last? What if I find myself without clients, unemployed? How will I manage to feed my family? How will I defend my decision to exchange economic certainty for useless posts?

From a conversation with an American leftist colleague, I realized that my situation – undecided among the various vectors and tensions, torn between the different possibilities and the perspective of this neo-fascist wave that has swept the world – this situation will accompany me for many years to come. Even if I run far away.

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Itay Kander, Social Worker, teaches dialogical approaches to therapy, therapist, blogger on mental health issues, and co-founder of Open Dialogue Israel.