The traumatized hold particular sway in the cultural imaginary. The category is almost interchangeable with that of the victim, though we also can entertain how the victimizer/oppressor/occupier can be traumatized as well. Ari Folman’s 2008 highly acclaimed Waltz with Bashir is a case in point. In this animated docu-film, Folman takes up the trauma of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres, exemplifying the “shoot and weep” Israeli film genre. An Israeli’s personal trauma at having abetted the collective trauma visited on the Palestinian refugees massacred in the Sabra and Shatila camps is alchemically transformed into a meditation on Jewish moral depth and complexity, obfuscating the distinction between victim and victimizer, announcing a Zionist move to innocence while affirming the complexity and moral turpitude of the Israeli military.
Serving as a soldier in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Folman suffers from amnesia, unable to recollect his behavior during Sabra and Shatila massacres before concluding that his participation in the tragic event was marginal—he only sent up flares so that the Phalangists—the Christian militia enraged by the death of their president Bashir Gemayel—could commit their slaughter. Folman accepts that he wasn’t responsible and then ends up forgiving himself. This realization is somewhat prefigured earlier in the film when his psychologist friend Uri Sivan observes that Folman’s psychic problems are anterior to the massacres, residing, as it were, in the collective unconscious of the Shoah: “You were engaged with the massacre a long time before it happened, through your parents’ Auschwitz memory.” Without denying the reality of transgenerational trauma, we can track its ideological deployment in the film. The actual Palestinian victims are deprived of their political relevance and provocation—the turn at the end of the film to actual footage of Palestinian misery is Folman’s appeal to pathos (as if to indicate the the Real of the Palestinians, a presence ungentrified by the imaginary-symbolic animation of the film). This dubious gesture of empowerment works instead to further reify Palestinians in their bare life, cementing their otherness and inaccessibility. By displacing the victimization of the Palestinians (how did they become refugees in the first place? Why didn’t he interview any of the survivors?), Folman’s film attests not only to his trauma, but to his victimization by the war, securing acclaim from the director’s liberal audience who enjoyed feasting on this “anti-war” film (political Zionists were not fans of it).
The “shoot and weep” narrative enables and sustains liberal Zionists’ fetishist disavowal: I know very well that Israel’s right-winger prime ministers (Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, among others) are horrible to Palestinians, but all the same I believe that our soldiers (who come from the most moral army in the world, after all) can redeem the state of Israel. Sabra and Shatila is not who we are. We were in the streets in Tel Aviv three hundred thousand strong, condemning our government’s moral failure. Israelis are complex beings; give us a chance to explain ourselves; our trauma begins in Auschwitz…
Today, Israel is back in Lebanon while still intensifying its carnage in Gaza. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose? Yes and no. Yes, Israel continues to present itself as victim to itself and the Western world, but now “shoot” is replaced with “enact genocide,” and “weep” with “enjoy.” In the original dynamic, an Israeli soldier shoots, but his self-consciousness enables him to scrutinize his actions, triggering his weeping for the harm done to Palestinians. Now, there is no public weeping for the Palestinians, but there is a great deal of sorrow for the victims of the Hamas attack. Naomi Klein has documented the cultification of trauma in Israel following the horror of that day. Dark tourism, with the full support of the Zionist state, enables or rather manufactures empathic identifications with the Jewish victims. Visitors plunging into immersive installations and film dramatizations vicariously become figural victims themselves, thereby immunizing themselves, consciously or unconsciously, from any complicity in Israel’s war crimes—its crimes against humanity and the crime of crimes, genocide. I know very well that the world is lamenting Palestinian suffering, but all the same I believe that we are defending ourselves against global antisemitism. From Gaza to South Africa, in the streets of the Global South and the hallways of the United Nations, on college campus across the world, antisemitism is the presumed to be the new normal, an existential threat against which any and all means of resistance must be justified.
But liberal Zionists are not dupes. They know very well that Netanyahu is a self-serving, megalomaniac politician, but all the same, they believe that Israel must be defended. A Manichean logic quickly sets in, as Klein’s describes it:
“It’s a simple fable of good and evil, in which Israel is unblemished in its innocence, deserving unquestioning support, while its enemies are all monsters, deserving of violence unbounded by laws or borders, whether in Gaza, Jenin, Beirut, Damascus or Tehran. It’s a story in which Israel’s very identity as a nation is forever fused with the terror it suffered on 7 October, an event that, in Netanyahu’s telling, will be seamlessly merged both with the Nazi Holocaust and a battle for the soul of western civilization.”
We are no longer dealing with a “clash of civilizations.” Ontologically demoted even further than before, Palestinians are now a different species; it is about civilization versus animal barbarism.
In making his case, Netanyahu manufactures a storyline in which two opposing logics—traumatophilia and traumatophobia—are strangely entangled. The desire to be traumatized, to repeat the experiences of those who died or were injured and/or taken hostage on October 7, is matched with the phobic desire to stave off any future traumatic experiences, to interpret and enforce the motto “Never Again” in the most myopic and hermeneutically ungenerous way. Traumatophobia propagates uncaring for your racialized enemy, of the sort witnessed in what Shannon Sullivan describes as the “white habit of untrauma,” a practice fostering “white ignorance and white affective numbness towards people of color.”[1] Zionist untrauma preaches a muscular vision of Jewishness (we will never march again to our slaughter—the Zionist rallying cry for the creation of a “new Jew” in the land of Israel), actively promoting both ignorance of the Palestinian people’s history and struggle and a generalized hostility or indifference toward Palestinian bodies and desires.
The ideal and appeal of Zionist untrauma gains more traction in light of Israeli disappointment with the so-called peace process. Israelis gave peace a chance, and they got the Second Intifada, so goes the story. They must resign themselves to the fact that Palestinians are dangerous and unwilling to make peace with them. They lack a Palestinian Ghandi or Mandela. Still, before October 7, 2023, one could still find liberal Zionists who wished that the state’s treatment of Palestinians were more humane, that Palestinian citizens of Israel (who are classified as Arab Israelis or Arab citizens of Israel) were better integrated in society. Not all the Arabs want to harm us, they would tell themselves; there are some who just want to co-exist. Israel must deal with its ’67 problem. The Occupied Territories are an embarrassment. Liberals would also get angry at their government when they “mowed the lawn” in Gaza every few years. This is not who we are; Netanyahu must go. But, let’s be honest, their world was never turned upside down by Palestinian suffering. Their ontological core remained intact, and their sense of time was not subject to any profound disruption. Jewish-Israeliness could still take priority over Palestinianness unchallenged.
After October 7, many liberal Zionists, we’re told, sobered up. Matters intensified drastically, and the two attitudes toward trauma began to converge in disastrous ways, laying the ideological grounds for Israel’s genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip. Dark tourism—which can be explained as a form of survivor guilt, a desire to experience the horror of those you lost—finds its obscene counterpart in Israeli society’s delegitimation of Palestinian tragedy. Witness the ways Israeli children and soldiers, in conformity to the Zionist superego, mock Palestinian civilians with “Arab face,” which “involves veils, monobrows and even a blacked-out tooth to represent the lack of dental hygiene among the Gazan population.” These are not private, forbidden thrills to share with a creepy few; no, they are eagerly uploaded to TikTok and other social media platforms for instantaneous validation.
The “weep” in the narrative “shoot and weep” becomes “enjoy,” completing the transformation to “enact genocide and enjoy.” This is a continuation of Zionist delight or jouissance in Palestinian erasure, in casting Gazans as “human animals,” derealizing their deaths (as seen in allegations that the casualty numbers are bloated or purely invented by Hamas), and in sadistically ridiculing Palestinian pain and enjoying untrauma when consuming “atrocity porn,” stripping Palestinians of their rights to dignity and safety. Zionism’s traumatophobia (which dictates that no relationality with the Palestinian/enemy can be extended) and traumatophilia (through which empathetic identification with my kin becomes constitutive of my own victimized/victimizing identity) work hand in hand in projecting the Israeli Jew as an irreproachable victim. Zionist authority can discredit Palestinian pain because it posits itself as the highest court over matters of Jewish trauma and victimhood; it credits Jewish pain as the basis for a righteous revenge, and discredits the pain of Palestinians as fabricated and self-generated (they voted for Hamas; no one is innocent in Gaza). This is the cruel grammar of Zionism: for Jews to matter, Palestinians must un-matter.
There is still a fetishist disavowal at work in Israel’s cultural imaginary; there is still a refusal to let in new knowledge, a knowledge of Israeli apartheid and genocide. I know very well about these reports, but all the same I believe that we must begin with Jewish trauma—and everything that follows stems from this singular and absolute vulnerability. The unsatiable drive to see oneself as a victim confirms the veracity of the claim. The occupier’s right to self-defense need not be enshrined in international law; it is biblically authorized: the Palestinians are Amalek, the new Nazis. Disagreeing with that interpretation provokes anger and consternation, making you a candidate for the charge of antisemitism. Zionism’s antidote to woke college cancel-culture (which, in this instance, means listing compelling arguments about Israel’s structure as a racist settler-colonial state, the illegality of the Occupation, the presence of an apartheid logic operative inside and outside the Green Line, and the plausibility that the Israeli military is committing genocide in Gaza) is ironically an example of what is actually bad with cancel-culture: cancelling without presenting arguments. The instrumentalized charge of antisemitism targets a seemingly endless and eclectic list: Hamas, Jewish Voice for Peace, Iran, IfNotNow, Hezbollah, neo-Nazis, the Global Left, and so on. The weaponization of trauma, which turns Israeli Jews into pure victims, clears the ground for the world-cancelling accusation of antisemitism: your failure to bear witness to my suffering can (must) only mean that you hate me, or that you sympathize with the Palestinians who do.
The problem however is not merely that the Israeli government is shamelessly monopolizing trauma (which it is), but that Palestinians are structurally prevented from working through their trauma. Post-traumatic stress disorder(PTSD), bizarre as it might sound, entails a kind of privilege, in that it requires post-ness, a basic temporal separation between the traumatic event and your present. The work of morning may very well be interminable, but it cannot even begin until you are temporally positioned to wrestle with the traces as traces, as recurring effects of a past on your present life. Palestinians in Gaza, especially the children, have no such luxury. As Slavoj Žižek avers:
“Children in Gaza, who are continuously exposed to brutal events, very rarely show signs of post-traumatic stress. Why? Because they live in a permanent traumatic situation: they don’t have time to experience a traumatic event as a horror that occurred to them. In order to survive, they have to just go on with their lives, paying attention to dangers. Post-traumatic stress is already a form of relaxation.”
Engulfed in a Fanonian zone of nonbeing, Palestinians need to partially exit this hellish zone before coping with their PTSD and collectively reckoning with the reality of having been ethnically cleansed, de-worlded or “cut off” from the world, as the Israeli Human Rights organization B’Tselem starkly put it. Some Israeli soldiers do suffer from PTSD—caused either by their witnessing or direct involvement in the carnage in Gaza. The brutal mass murders of Palestinians affect them, and they experience “ruptures” in their everyday existence (Sullivan, 287), even pushing some to commit suicide. How the Israeli military deals with the problem of PTSD is also telling. Counseling from military psychologists reorients the debilitated, traumatized soldiers back to the paradigm of October 7, upholding the right context, reminding them of the true evil of Hamas, in an effort to restore the habit or programmatic experience of Zionist untrauma, counter-balancing the trauma of war (their position as perpetrators) with the trauma of their kin (positioning them as victims who are defending themselves/Israel). The latter serves to nullify the unsettling potential of the former, to stave off any disruption of the sanctioned “affective numbness” toward Palestinians: remember that your military mission is noble. As with Ari Folman, the individual trauma of the Israeli soldiers, once again, sidelines the trauma of Palestinians. Consequently, prosthetic or vicarious victimhood normalizes the commission of genocide, the abnormal par excellence.
And so “immersive experience,” such as in the Israeli October 7 trauma industry, does act as support for new ideas, even when the latter are not explicitly articulated. The foreclosing of the possibility of recognizing the trauma of the Palestinian neighbor is just one dimension of the new Zionist ideology being produced. For this new arrangement doesn’t simply stage the incommensurability of the traumatic as such: the substitution of the trauma of war with historical Jewish trauma, on which the denial of mass murder of Palestinians is predicated, actually has its exception as its base—trauma becomes implicitly substitutable or exchangeable in this schema, the very act of pure Imaginary immersion symbolically appropriates the incommensurability of trauma, as if giving in to the full truth of such incommensurability, only to enact unconsciously precisely its opposite: to affirm the substitution of one trauma (the Jewish one) for another (the Palestinian one).
A clear casualty here is of course criticism itself. One of the clear results of traumatic immersion is the radicalization of what has already been dubbed the “Zionist blackmail,” which presents us with a false choice: either you support Israel, or you’re an antisemite. If you haven’t stopped criticizing Israel, even in this (ongoing) moment, so goes the logic, you are refusing to internalize absolutely the horrors of anti-Jewish Evil—and this refusal is antisemitic. Campaigns in the last few years to label criticism of Israel as antisemitic in US academia and elsewhere, directed at both students and faculty, were already underway before October 7, 2023, but they have greatly intensified in the last year. The increasing adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism has contributed to this trend.
To this forced choice—either support Israel or be an antisemite—we say “no, thanks!” The only appropriate response to it must be to demonstrate, again and again, that the true test of Israel being a country “like any other,” which was the ambition of Zionists themselves, has to do precisely with allowing space for uncompromising criticism: it is the very space of the political that is foreclosed when we silence such critiques. One thus must remain ruthlessly critical of Israel, and reject antisemitism completely, wherever it appears.
And we can take this one step further: today, uncompromising criticism of Israel does not contradict a commitment to Jewish safety but is actually an inseparable part of it. And here we touch on another valence of the encounter with trauma, one which goes beyond the repression of the genocide of Palestinians, and the traumatic memory of antisemitic eliminationism. Several post- and anti-Zionist commentators have suggested recently that Zionism or Israel will soon come to an end, for a variety of reasons, political, social and economic. What we can add to these recent projections of Israel’s imminentdeath, is that Israel, in a sense, is already dead, and is currently “between two deaths” to invoke a Lacanian formulation: Israel has already died in the Real, and its Symbolic death is still to come. This is not to say, of course, that the Palestinian struggle against Israel is misdirected and useless. The opposite is the case. To add Antonio Gramsci’s notion of interregnum to Lacan here, the time “between two deaths” is “the time of monsters”—it is the time in which the worst violence of the crumbling order erupts inthestrongest manner—which is exactly what Palestiniansare struggling against. When we say that Israel is already dead, we simply mean that it has ceased to be a collective project that works toward a better future for any part of Israeli society, except for the short-term benefit of Israeli dominant elite. The current Israeli leadership, in its combination of fascist tendencies and laissezfaire capitalism, only delivers Israelis towards radical insecurity, impoverishment, and permanent war with no other future in sight. It is this traumatic Real of Israel that was also encountered by Israelis on October 7, 2023 and the fear generated by this traumaticencounter has generated the worst genocidalresponse imaginable. Thus, criticism of Israel—one that exposes the different forms of oppression and exploitation that exist in Palestine/Israel—is precisely where Jewish safety is affirmed; or, in other words, such criticism is a necessary part of being anti-antisemitic.
It is important in this regard to remember that the October 7 attack never had a chance of singlehandedly defeating Israel in any direct, military sense. The qualitative difference between these attacks and the Israeli response—aimed at complete domination—should be maintained. It is therefore not literal triumph or defeat that is the important aspect of October 7, but precisely the eruption of the Real into business as usual, the momentary rift in the symbolic order that it afforded. In this rift is inscribed not only the reminder of the failure of Israel to recognize its Palestinian Neighbor, with all of the alienation such recognition entails, as Žižek once wrote. But it also brings up the obscene other side of “Israeli unity”: the radical insecurity of life in the already-dead Israeli society. One must remember how these are materially tied together. Israeli social suffering, today, depends on the continued oppression of Palestinians: not only by using Palestinians as a reserve army of labor, to be tapped when needed, but also in using the theft of Palestinian land as a “spatial fix,”[2] as David Harvey called it, for the contradictions of capitalism in Israel: it is where a “welfare state” for impoverished Israelis still thrives, state subsidies and capitalist enterprise cooperating in essentially setting the stage for the Israeli lower classes being the physical agents of Palestinian oppression, and being its loudest supporters. Meanwhile, the Israeli elites today benefit from the unholy alliance between a thriving high-tech industry and the weapons industry, itself supported by the state, for which the continued oppression of Palestinians is the best laboratory.
Israel can be distinguished from other settler-colonial countries (such as the US or Australia) by the fact that it was never able to erase its founding violence, to absorb Palestinians fully into its social structure, and to make their oppression part of a naturalized status quo. But in the course of history, much as in the case of other so-called “failed states,” this failure has become a necessary condition for Israel’s integration into global capitalism: the continued fact of Palestinian oppression is not simply an ethical or legal failure, but the current condition of Israel’s existence within the world capitalist system.
To repress October 7 as a rift in the Symbolic, to sublimate this rift into genocidal celebration, is thus to repress the possibility of the true pursuit of desire. Or as Adorno and Horkheimer once wrote, “pleasure always means not to thinkabout anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown.Basically it is helplessness.It is flight;not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance.”[3] But how are we to make sese of this rift in the symbolic? How can resistance be transmuted into a political program? Maybe it is time to turn around the observation that Israel does not have a peace partner, that there is no Palestinian Ghandi or Mandela. We’re told the Palestinian commitment to violence must be abandoned if co-existence is to be secured. Israel’s objection is not to armed struggle, but to resistance as such. Moreover, while Ghandi and Mandela renounced armed struggle, they were by no means “not violent”—they helped to dismantle imperialist and apartheid regimes, respectively. Their non-violence was experienced as violent unsettling of the structures of dominations that existed in India and South Africa. We should look for such a change in Israel itself. We need a Jewish-Israeli Ghandi/Mandela, a figure capable of making the impossible possible. It starts with decolonizing the Zionist mind, short-circuiting a supremacist machinery that interpellates Jews as inherently more valuable than the Indigenous population of Palestine, that entertains a Greater Israel. Liberal Zionists can be convinced of the necessity of an expansionist Israel for security reasons: October 7 cannot be allowed to happen again. Zio-fascist Israelis, like finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, dream of a Greater Israel that goes beyond cannibalizing more Palestinian territory. In a 2024 documentary produced by Arte Reportage, Israel: Extremists in Power, Smotrich lays out a vision of an Israel that extends into neighboring Arab states, into Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. As he avers, “It is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus.”
Decolonizing the mind, however, is not limited to Israeli Jews, but must also involve Palestinians. Decolonization must radically touch both Palestinians and Israelis. Haidar Eid perspicuously ties the decolonization of the Palestinian mind with the process of de-Osloization. This anti-colonial intervention is much needed today. We are witnessing nostalgia for the two-state solution; this is the aspirational message that the United States is floating for the day after Israel pulls out of Gaza. Palestinians will be confronted with the following choice: accept a two-state solution or a one-state solution—meaning a Greater Israel. This is how the liberal West is framing the reality that Palestinians will be forced to face. On a first read, a two-state solution sounds attractive insofar as it would put an end to the settler movement’s territorial ambition, a firm obstacle against settlers seizing what they imagine/desire to be the annexation of Northern Gaza (as a springboard for the annexation of the rest of Gaza and, of course, that of the West Bank—Judea and Samaria, in Zionist tellings). The US’s manufacturing of hope should not fool us. Palestinians have experienced over thirty years of a cruel peace process. Edward Said prophetically announced the process’s demise at its inception. To put it bluntly, the peace process has been a process of dispossession. So when you hear about the two-state solution, make sure you read the fine print. If the past is any indication of what’s to come, committing to a two-state solution is to accept a Bantustan-styled two-state solution, premised on the denial on the right of return, a right that is actually enshrined in international law. South Africans flatly rejected the Bantustan partitionscheme, and so should the Palestinians.
What we find in the US’s manufacturing hope is a cynical plan to show the world that it is still a source of good in the world, in an effort to redeem its image after its genocidal assistance in the Gaza War. For the US, a two-states deal (that overwhelmingly acquiesces to Zionist demands) will restore its global image. Here we might draw a parallel with Derrick Bell’s critical assessment of racial progress. In a move that complicates a narrative where civil rights gains for racialized communities signals moral epiphany from whites, Bell introduces his “interest-convergence thesis.” Ending Jim Crow served the interests of the white elite. It was in the interests of the US government to challenge the perception in the global South that the nation was anti-Black, which the Soviet Union was exploiting in the Cold War. In the landmark decision Brownv. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial segregation and removed this card from the Soviet Union’s ideological arsenal, thus providing “immediate credibility to America’s struggle with Communist countries to win the hearts and minds of emerging third world peoples.”[4] This was a formal change in the law, not a change in the prevalent racial attitudes, in the ubiquity of anti-Blackness. And as the contemporary movement for Black lives makes abundantly clear, anti-Blackness is baked into America’s cultural DNA.
We see the “interest-convergence thesis” on the horizon. Arab petro-states are eager to normalize ties with Israel in order to fully tap the Middle East’s market. Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords and the Deal of the Century foregrounded economic interests, but formally never resolved the Palestinian question. A Bantustan-styled two-state solution is the missing piece in the realization of the “interest-convergence thesis.” A weakened—or rather delegitimized and ineffectual—Palestinian Authority (PA) will be confronted with this false choice: toothless sovereignty or permanent erasure. An undemocratic and compromised PA is likely to sell out Palestinian futurity. We, Palestinians and their leftist supporters in the struggle for a just world, must reject this fake proposal for peace. It is a peace erected on the backs and corpses of Palestinians. We must demand more of Western leaders, and indeed there is a moral awakening taking place across the world. The Zionist solution to the Palestinian problem is our problem. When Western powers turn to the world for support in their plans to formally de-unify Palestinians and legalize an unjust reality, we must see through their self-serving interests and predicate change in a qualitative transformation of the Palestinian condition. What the coerced choice between Swiss cheese sovereignty or ontological erasure leaves out is a just one-state solution, where Palestinians and Israelis both matter. My safety cannot be premised on your annihilation; my victimization is not any less painful when you’re dealt a greater blow. In such a state mattering must be decolonized and de-Zionized in the name of a universalist vision grounded in racial, economic, and political justice for both peoples.
Such a universal collective project only begins with the decolonization of the mind; it entails a prolonged struggle, one that transforms social institutions just as it transforms ideological attitudes. It must avoid the fate of 20th century anti-colonial struggles—in which anti-colonial resistance was eventually transformed into neo-imperialist situations. True decolonization is nothing if it doesn’t entail a confrontation with the capitalist social form that conditions Palestinian and Israeli immiseration today and do the hard work of establishing an institutional framework for this transformation. In other words, to turn the rift in business-as-usual to transformative potential, we must not substitute enjoyment for that rift; the real struggle for justice between the river and the sea is only now, potentially, beginning.
Notes:
[1] Shannon Sullivan, “The White Habit of Untrauma,” in The Routledge International Handbook of New Critical Race and Whiteness Studies,” ed. Rikke Andreassen, Catrin Lundström, Suvi Keskinen, Shirley Anne Tate (New York: Routledge, 2023), 285.
[2] David Harvey, “Globalization and the Spatial Fix,” Geographische Revue 2, no. 3 (2001): 23–31.
[3] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 2001), 144.
[4] Derrick A. Bell, “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review, 93, no. 3 (1980): 524.
