Ordinary Violence
As a Jew who writes on psychedelics and ancestral trauma, I feel like I’m supposed to have an opinion on the current conflict. Instead I feel numb; would telling people to "feel their feelings" help?
The sound wasn’t particularly loud; a low-toned whistle passing far overhead; easy to miss amidst the conversations burbling throughout the vineyard. But as we admired the ripening grapes and clipped a few to bring back to the apartment, I couldn’t tune out the zipperlike whoosh.
It was the sound of Israeli artillery shells, inbound to Gaza.
That was back was in 2006, during an epic family visit to Israel that took us to every corner of the country. Then, midway through our trip, Palestinian militants attacked an IDF position; soon the conflict had engulfed both Gaza in the south and Lebanon in the north.
What I remember about it now was its seeming normalcy, the way intimations of violence—highway traffic grinding to a halt so police could blow up a child’s backpack by the side of the road; teenaged girls in school uniforms carrying American-made semi-automatic rifles—seemed woven into day-to-day life. Just another war.
A number of you have reached out over the last week to ask how I’m doing. Each time I wonder, slightly guiltily, if I’m supposed to have an opinion about the current conflict. The fact is that I don’t, other than that I want it to stop. What would a meaningful opinion look like, at this point?
Instead, I find myself remembering moments from that trip to Israel, and afterwards. How the first morning, an older relative took us to a former Arab village. When I asked with a smile “where did the Arabs go?” he gave me a hard look. “They left,” he said, in a tone that didn’t invite follow-ups.
Or the Israeli woman I met at a kids’ soccer game, back home a few weeks later. When I said “oh, I just got back from Israel; it was an interesting trip,” in a deliberately mild tone, she erupted into a furious, five-minute stream-of-consciousness rant about the rest of the world’s lack of understanding. Five minutes is a long time to wonder if someone is about to start punching you in the face. And no, I’m not exaggerating.
Most of all, I’m thinking of a friend who was in Israel last week. He was slated to leave the night of the attack, but had to wait to catch a ride on a chartered military flight. In the intervening days, he learned that a childhood friend of his had been abducted and killed.
My friend’s back home now, though his responses to my texts have become even more monosyllabic than usual. He’s hurting, but I don’t know how to reach him. In truth, we’ve been growing apart for years, I suspect because the path I’ve embarked on—identifying and unearthing the ancestral trauma that’s defined my worldview—is incompatible with his determination not to identify and unearth it. Subjected to the ordinary violence of life as an Israeli, he’s become the embodiment of a sabra, a term for the archetypal cactus pear of Israel that’s often applied to its people as well: Thorny on the outside, tender and hard to reach within.
What the experience of the last years tell me is that there is no way out but through. That until each of us, regardless of our cultural background or affiliation, decide to feel the unacknowledged wounds that drive this and all of Israel’s other conflicts, no amount of guns, tanks, rockets, or “impenetrable” Iron Dome defences will make any bit of difference.
Therein, I suppose, lies the rub. I can’t know what living under that kind of fear and pressure feels like. I can’t picture myself approaching parents who’ve just watched their terrified daughter being taken hostage on TV—or dug their child’s body, grey-faced and broken, from the rubble of a bomb site—to ask them to “feel their feelings.” Considering the relative safety and ease I enjoy, it’s embarrassing to even contemplate.
Still, I know a little bit about trauma, and if you’re reading this, I suspect you do too. And I know there is no way out but through.
The story of modern-day Israel and Palestine is an unbroken seventy-five-year cycle of conflict, wary pause, and rearmament. Hemmed in between rage and an unwillingness to imagine a different future, the power structures that undergird each side refuse to relinquish their current ways of doing business (and believe me, this is very much a business).
The cultural tenets of this conflict—Arab against Israeli; Muslim versus Jew—are meaningless from all but the narrowest perspectives, and yet we insist that they are not like us, that they must be punished and contained. Meanwhile, in Gaza, the news cycle is dominated by stories of the catastrophic destruction at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital. Underneath stories of the atrocity, it’s hard to ignore the undercurrent of barely suppressed glee as both sides present evidence showing the other’s culpability.
What my experiences of the last years—psychedelic and otherwise—have shown me is that once we acknowledge the trauma that’s brought us to this brink, we start to release it. In my own case, my lifelong sense of persecution began to drop away, and it became impossible not to acknowledge and understand others’ trauma. The process engendered compassion, removing the sword of self-righteousness from my hands. Knowing what I knew, how could I possibly inflict my pain on others?
So, is asking the combatants to “explore their grief” really so silly? I’ll say this:
Maybe feeling our feelings isn’t the solution. But until we do, there is no solution
(All photos by the author.)