Israel/Palestine and the Politics of Trauma

How partisans on both sides have lost their moorings.

1.

Part of the origin story of this newsletter is that, for twenty years, I’ve had parallel careers in meditation/religion/spirituality on the one hand and journalism/law/activism on the other.  (Yes, I realize those are six careers, not two; I do not recommend this.)  For a while, the joke was that I’d stress people out in my journalism work, then relax them in my meditation work.  These parts of my work did seem quite distinct from each other – sometimes diametrically opposed.

But during the (first?) Trump administration, I began to experience an unexpected convergence.  On the one hand, the American populist phenomenon could not be adequately explained without recourse to psychology, sociology, religion, and the collection of deep human needs and yearnings that are often collected in the term ‘spirituality.’  Obviously, there are also economic and cultural factors that drive almost half of America to follow a pathologically lying con man, but, as is now well-understood, the fear, rage, resentment, and religiosity of Trump’s base are at least equally important.

At the same time, I increasingly saw how the tumult of our political lives (2016 now seems quaint by comparison) was affecting our emotional, religious, psychological, and spiritual lives.  (Arguably, this has always been true for Black people, poor people, queer people, and others who have been systematically disadvantaged for generations, which is one reason why a lot of conventional spirituality seems so privileged.  Indeed, sometimes it’s part of the problem: as Marx observed a long time ago, spirituality can imply that one’s  salvation/wellness/worth depends on individual faith or actions, rather than societal change.) People felt terrified, vulnerable, and anxious in a way they hadn’t before.  Political instability, technological change, and the degradation of our public discourse was creating new kinds of emotional, spiritual, and psychological suffering.  And that was before Covid, whose four-year anniversary we “celebrate” this week.

So, I began to realize, maybe my two career paths weren’t as divergent as I thought.

2.

In the last few months, I’ve seen this convergence anew in the context of Israel/Palestine. Across the political spectrum, folks are speaking and acting out of trauma, rage, fear and quasi-Manichean moral binarism.  We seem to have lost our emotional centers of gravity, and become unmoored. 

Rather than speak in general terms, I’m going to look at one tempest in a teapot as a microcosm of the mess: the otherwise obscure literary magazine called Guernica.

Recently, Guernica published a critical-of-Israel piece by a left-wing Israeli activist-writer named Joanna Chen. On the spectrum of American public opinion, Chen’s piece is surely in the most liberal 20%.  She is a longtime peace activist who refused to serve in the Israeli army (her family moved from the United Kingdom to Israel when she was 16) and works on various coexistence efforts.  She volunteers for a nonprofit that helps Palestinians access healthcare – and wrote movingly of continuing to do this work in the shadow of a war she passionately opposes.

The response?  Resignations of the journal’s editorial staff and bitter denunciations of the piece – for being too right-wing.  Co-publisher Madhuri Sastry called it “an apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”  It fails “the only metric we have agreed to abide by: it attempts to soften the violence of colonialism and genocide.”  Another (former) editor called the magazine itself “a pillar of eugenicist white colonialism masquerading as goodness.”

The piece was subsequently taken down, replaced by an editorial note that states the journal “regrets having published” it in the first place.

Now, Guernica is not an ordinary literary journal; as its name implies and its tagline states, it is “a magazine of global arts and politics.”  This is the Left of the Left.  Still, to condemn an anti-war personal essay that expresses hope for coexistence is a sign of profound derangement. (Also, eugenicist white colonialism?  Israeli Jews are 68% non-white, and the eugenics charge is simply insane.)  It has an internal logic. So completely has the polar, black/white rhetoric of genocide been ingested that — as I predicted five months ago as the term was beginning to be mainstreamed on the Left — anyone who has anything other than a full-throated denunciation of Israel (let alone the war) is, by definition, an apologist for evil.  So of course there can be no compromise or coexistence with such a person. There’s no such thing as a good colonizer or genocider, and since the highly specious claims that Zionism is colonialism and the Gaza war is genocide are now axioms whose truth is assumed, reasonable people cannot disagree, because disagreeing means defending the indefensible.

But what planet do these leftists think they are living on?   Are all of us who have a different perspective on 150-year-old conflict malevolent liars who rationalize pure evil?  And is there any alternative to coexistence?  One-statism on the Jewish or Palestinian side is utter delusion. You’d think Israelis would see by now that Palestinians cannot be bludgeoned into submission, but apparently not. Meanwhile, what would Guernica’s anti-coexistence editors propose we do with the seven million Jews who live between the river and the sea, most of whom will never accept (except at gunpoint) becoming an ethnic minority in what was once the only Jewish state in the world?  Should there be a war of ethnic cleansing (also known as genocide)?  A population transfer?  Or are we to believe that these seven million Jews will be persuaded somehow by eloquent anti-colonialist essays in Guernica?

Surely the only hope for the five million Palestinians who also live between the river and the sea is some form of coexistence: if not two states, then at least some kind of confederation, or one democratic state, or some solution that involves people like Joanna Chen building bridges of reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.  If there is no space for Joanna Chen in the world that Guernica imagines, that world is purely imaginary.

The seething anger, the white-hot rage, the old-fashioned radical purity politics that can admit no diversity of opinion – this is a politics of trauma.  The horrors of the Gaza war, and of decades of occupation before it, have colonized minds and hearts.  There is no space within them for a nuanced view of the Zionist enemy, or for reasoning.  There is no good Israeli, no one on the “other side” who is not evil.  Damn right we’re angry.

Midjourney didn’t understand the prompt - “Picasso’s Guernica but in the style of Delacroix” - but I’m still satisfied with the result.

3.

The response to this scuffle from much of the Jewish mainstream has been similarly based in trauma, reactivity, and fear.  And predictable: it’s antisemitism.

For example, the Guernica editors’ decision was said to be “unquestionably antisemitic” said one writer, because “to demonize anyone as murderous and oppressive, simply because they live in Israel, is textbook antisemitism.”

It is?  In what textbook?  As noted above, if Zionism is colonialism, then anyone who participates in it (and does not work for it to be ended) is supporting colonialism, and shouldn’t be in a left-wing literary magazine.  That isn’t antisemitism; it’s having a set of (misguided) principles.  Chen isn’t being demonized because she is Jewish or because she lives in Israel; she’s being demonized because she is supposedly defending some version of the state of Israel, which this benighted editorial board sees as akin to defending genocide and colonialism.

This mislabeling happens again and again and again.  In the Daily Beast this week, I wrote about Jonathan Glazer’s speech at the Oscars, in which he condemned “hijacking” the Holocaust to justify the occupation and the war.  Needless to say, Glazer has been excoriated for antisemitism.  It’s always antisemitism.  Claudine Gay answering a trick question designed to trap her – antisemitism.  (She was not asked to condemn calls for genocide against Jews; she was asked if they violated a harassment policy.)  An Anti-Zionist protest – antisemitic, according to the ADL.  Not mentioning the hostages held by Hamas – antisemitic.  Calling Israel ‘colonialist’ – antisemitic. 

But here is the reality: words and actions can upset Jewish people without being antisemitic.

And now, two longform essays in the Atlantic announcing that antisemitism is everywhere, and has always been everywhere, and there’s nothing we can do about it, because this isn’t an overzealous response to a brutal war in which at least 20,000 civilians have died but really just another eruption of a timeless, horrifying reality that all Jews know in our kishkes to be true: the goyim hate us and want us dead.

In a Forward article that (hopefully) will appear next week, I will address the factual and conceptual errors in those two Atlantic essays, both of which I think are profoundly misguided, and both of which make the same mistake of labeling extremist, offensive political protests that upset Jewish people as antisemitism.  (For the record, both exist and sometimes coexist.)

For now, I want to dwell on what this wave of over-diagnosis is really about: trauma, pain, and fear.  In a narrow sense, as Jews are still traumatized by October 7 (and the continued plight of Israeli hostages) and progressives’ muted or outrageous responses to it. And in a wider sense, Jews, especially Ashkenazic Jews, just carry a whole lot of trauma, intergenerational and otherwise, in our bones. That doesn’t make our judgments right, but it can explain why they’re wrong.

Right now, we are hurting so much that many in my community have lost their minds.  We are in a moral panic, and I can say firsthand that many Jews are terrified, when in fact the vast majority of incidents of “antisemitism” are actually mostly anti-Zionism, or, indeed, actual bigotry that is layered upon it and would not be erupting were it not for the war.  (Islamophobia increased after 9/11; anti-Asian hate increased during Covid; the prevalence of hate is situational.)    Of course, there are many real incidents of antisemitism.  But not everything that is upsetting to a Jewish person is antisemitic.  It might just be a really stupid piece of radical chic garbage.

And there is plenty of trauma and rage on the pro-Palestine side too.  Watch a single video of the horrors of Gaza, and you will feel it too, as I have.  Look at the images of starving children and innocent civilians made into hopeless refugees. And all this with American tax dollars and political support.  Of course people are enraged – how could they not be?

I’m not judging these reactions.  What I am observing is how these powerful emotions are leading many people to react in ways that make no sense and make everything worse.  It’s even gotten to the point where rage, fear, tribalism, and reductive moral absolutism are praised as goods in themselves.

I won’t end on the trite suggestion that we can all mindfulness our way to more compassion and openness.  But a little spaciousness of mind, patience, and empathy wouldn’t hurt. Is it possible to notice when we’re filled with fear, rage, or pain? Can we inhabit a world of multiple narratives, cultivating some understanding of how the “other side” sees itself, even if we disagree?

There are good people on all sides of this conflict, including ones who hold views you find to be reprehensible.  There are also genociders, thugs, and murderers on all sides, because the line between right and wrong is not one of ethnicoity or national boundary. It is the one that we choose each day, in deciding which parts of our souls will determine how we live in the world.

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Here’s that piece in the Daily Beast about Jonathan Glazer. When the Forward piece is up, I’ll add a link to the web version of this one.

Happen to be in New Orleans next weekend? I’ll be presenting at the Saints & Sinners LGBTQ Literary Festival. That will be the last stop on my book tour for The Secret that is Not a Secret, unless you bring me to your town to do something.

I keep meaning to do one of those “what am I reading this week” lists but somehow never track the articles while I’m reading them. One exception is the recent post from

Sasha Chapin

on what has made him ten times more happy. This is a fascinating and badly-subtitled (on purpose) post that really got me thinking about how much happier I am than, say, 20 years ago and what went into that transformation. Is it 10x? 5x? Much to consider.

The only other media I’ll mention is I finally got round to seeing Perfect Days and I consider it one of the best dharma movies ever made. I love slow, quiet films and this is definitely one of those. I was moved and inspired and I am so glad I saw it.

Happy Coviderversary.