This is a talk I gave at forum organised by the Queanbeyan People for Peace, on the topic of Peace and Justice. It was held in Queanbeyan on 26 May 2004. (June 2004)


Ivan Bozormenyi-Nagy (1984), was a major contributor to the field of family therapy. After long term research with hundreds of families he concluded that any real attempt to deal with problems in a family system must take into account each individual’s need for justice. He believed that avoiding this is “…just as destructive as a rigid authoritarian definition of order, and enforcement of a dogmatic point of view.”

If we attempt to enforce a compromise on members of a group without addressing injustices, the very act of coercion will cause a further sense of injustice that will continue to resonate through the generations.

Justice is a fundamental concept in families and in societies. It seems to be a part of our human nature. Few of us are able to just get on with things when someone wrongs us without feeling anger, hurt and a sense of unfairness. Whether we can evolve beyond this is an interesting question, but the reality is that injustice does hurt us and does leave serious emotional and physical scars.

I left Israel 12 years ago because I experienced life there as deeply oppressive and suffocating. The moment I set foot in Australia I found myself in a completely different and far better environment. I will never forget the thought that hit me soon after arriving in Sydney: that simply by changing my physical location I have changed my entire life!

That thought has troubled me ever since. Why should one’s physical location in the world be so important? Wouldn’t it be more fair and just if anyone, anywhere could be guaranteed a few basic and fundamental needs, such as healthy nutritious food, good quality health care, good quality education, safety and a sense of belonging and acceptance in a loving community? Why should our physical location on this planet make such a big difference to any of these? And yet it does. If you happen to be born in a refugee camp in Palestine, in a shanty town in Brazil, in a village in the Sudan, in a black community in South Africa in the time of Apartheid, your destiny and your life challenges are very different to those of someone born to a middle-class suburban Australian family.

I do not believe that a ‘supreme being’ is responsible for our suffering. We are! We have constructed our world on the basis of fundamental injustices. We have an economy that takes exploitation for granted, and that accepts a gap between rich and poor as a necessary, almost natural reality. Our society discriminates in various ways against people with disabilities, people of different races, women, the elderly and young people. We fail to protect our children from sexual abuse and other forms of abuse because the agencies that are appointed to protect them are always under-funded. We fail to protect and care for the mentally ill. Ands these are just a few examples.

Since we, not a supreme being, have constructed our world this way, we also have the ability and the power to change it. We cannot guarantee that all forms of suffering will be abolished. We cannot control the weather, volcanoes, earthquakes or other natural phenomena but we can at least minimise man-made suffering, which I believe is the bigger share of suffering in this world.

Just like in families, if injustices are not addressed in society, peace is nothing more than a superficial arrangement. Underneath it, the feelings of resentment and injustice will continue to fester. The danger is that they will eventually erupt and throw the group into another cycle of violence and unhappiness, which then generates more injustice and so on. Peace that is not based on justice is therefore only a flimsy, temporary measure.

As a former Israeli from Jewish background and an activist for Palestinian rights, the ideas of peace and justice are very close to my heart. The on-going and escalating Palestinian/Israeli conflict is a good example of what happens when the need for justice is being ignored. The Israeli Left, international peace brokers and even some Palestinians, approach the idea of peace between Israel and the Palestinians without addressing the fundamental injustices committed against the Palestinian people in 1948 and since. These injustices are felt deeply by all Palestinians even those who have never set foot in Palestine. (You’ll notice that I didn’t mention Sharon and the Israeli Right. That’s because the kind of peace they seem to want to achieve is through genocide or ethnic cleansing.)

To give you an idea of what the Palestinian people feel, imagine that one day someone enters your house and declares that he has been homeless and abused and that he desperately needs a place to live. He is now therefore going to live in your house together with you. Apparently one of his ancestors lived there several generations back and this is why he chose your house. You are never asked whether it is OK with you, and the person never asks for an invitation. He simply moves in. Then imagine that this person brings in a few more family members. When you try to appeal to the authorities they not only turn a blind eye, but in fact actively support the invaders by offering them money and resources. They feel sorry for the invaders because they had such a hard time, and they refuse to listen to your story and to your complaints.

At first you live in the hope that you will one day be allowed to use the rest of your house again, but as time goes by you and your family begin to realise that there is nothing that you can do. Hardly anyone is prepared to support you, and those who try are attacked and silenced by the invaders.

When you realise that you have no choice and try to resist the invaders by force, you are painted as the ‘bad guy’, labelled a criminal and a terrorist, and you and your family members are hunted down like animals. You are also accused of having a pathological and unreasonable hatred towards the invaders.

The invaders no longer allow you to enter or leave freely. You cannot enter other rooms in your house. You have to ask permission to use the kitchen or the bathroom and have to live by the invaders’ rules. Your possessions have been confiscated for the use of the invaders and their families, and they start to make changes to the house without asking your permission. More and more rooms are taken and you and your family are living in an ever diminishing area. Occasionally they come into your area, killing and beating up members of your family to try and intimidate you into leaving the house altogether and into stopping your resistance. When you resist peacefully they also beat you up. The invaders also demand that you recognise their right to be there. Because you have no choice and you just want to live in peace in your house even if you are forced to live in one small room, you agree. But now the invaders are escalating their efforts to drive you out of the house completely by any means possible. Essentially they are trying to make your life so unbearable, that you will have no choice but give up on your house completely and go find another home.

If we had time I would love to find out what feelings this story brings up in you.

This is the story of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. (The only thing that is missing in this analogy is the pre-meditated and systematic ethnic-cleansing committed by the Israeli forces under the cover of the 1948-1949 war. This involved a deliberate policy to drive as many Palestinians out of Palestine as possible through the destruction of around 500 Palestinian villages, and through massacres, rapes and other forms of intimidation).

If a home invasion like this happened here in Australia, there is no doubt whose side the authorities would take. No individual, no matter how persecuted or traumatised would be able to get away with taking someone else’s home. But when it comes to international relations we seem to live in a jungle with no laws, no morality and no justice.

Justice does not mean undoing a wrong. That is usually impossible. To satisfy a need for justice, an apology, an acknowledgement is a necessary first step. John Howard’s refusal to apologise to the Aboriginal people of Australia probably hurts them more than any social or economic problem they suffer from. The suffering of the Palestinians in our time does not come only from the fact that they are currently experiencing ethnic cleansing and all manner of oppression and torture. It also has to do with the fact that Israel and many in the West are still in denial about what Israel has originally done to them and what it is doing now, or alternatively they think it is justified because, the Jews (my people), have suffered so much. If you are a Palestinian today, not only are you the victim of terrible persecution, you are also being told that it is not happening to you and even worse, that what is happening is somehow your fault. As part of my Honours studies I studied Holocaust denial. And I know how hurtful it is to so many Jews that there are people out there that still deny that the Nazi genocide ever happened. In my field of psychotherapy we know that the denial of an injustice can be extremely traumatising. It is sometimes seen as worse than the original offence. Denial also takes us further away from any possibility of justice.

After an injustice has been committed and the trauma has ended, it is still the responsibility of the victim to heal, and at an individual level it is possible to achieve healing without acknowledgement or an apology from the perpetrator. I do not believe that it is true for groups or societies. In group or in society acknowledging an injustice is the first and most important step towards achieving a sense of peace. After this any practical measures that need to be taken to make amends are not only relatively simple but will be received much more willingly.

Sometimes people are prepared to take small paternalistic steps to make amends. But without an acknowledgement of the original injustice, such measures are likely to fail. This as true for the Australian Aborigines as it is for Israel and the Palestinians.

Such attempts to make amends fail because underneath them you would find either a denial of the original injustice or a profound lack of understanding of the emotional needs of the victims.

Acknowledgement is the right thing to do if you care about how other people feel. It also implies remorse and an awareness that can prevent a repetition of the offence. It can be difficult to admit a wrong that we perpetrated because it requires us to put someone else’s feelings ahead of our own. But being able to do this is vital for the well-being of the entire human race. By taking responsibility as individuals and as a community we have a better chance of preventing future injustices from occurring. A peace based on justice will be real rather than an externally imposed superficial and therefore fragile arrangement.

Page content last modified: 5 Jun 2004