(September 2004)

In the last few months I received a number of comments from readers who are concerned and sometimes even angry about my trauma hypothesis. In a nutshell I am suggesting that Jewish trauma is behind the aggression of Zionist ideology, the colonisation of Palestine, the ethnic cleansing of 1948 and the way Israel has been treating the Palestinian people in the last 56 years. My critics argue that I am providing an excuse for what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and that my suggestion that Israel society is traumatised constitutes the ‘insanity defence’. I would like to offer a few clarifications in order to address these concerns.

First, it is important to distinguish between an explanation and an excuse. Offering an explanation to a perpetrator's behaviour is not the same as saying that the perpetrator's behaviour is therefore excused. Understanding the reasons for someone's actions is not the same as condoning them. A perpetrator's behaviour can teach us a great deal about the nature of the system in which the perpetrator exists. It can teach us about humanity and about the kind of reactions that we are likely to have in certain situations. For example, saying that a criminal had been abused in childhood does not say that what he does is therefore OK. But it does tell us that some people who have been abused might end up repeating their abuse on others. An explanation teaches us about ourselves and can help us think about preventive actions and solutions that address causes rather than symptoms. As a psychotherapist one of my fundamental principles is that we all need to assume responsibility for all of our actions, particularly for those actions that have an effect on others.

As for the argument that I use the ‘insanity defence’, I have to stress that trauma is not a mental illness. It is a condition to which we are all vulnerable. People who have been under severe threat once or on an ongoing basis, (e.g. childhood sexual abuse, neglect, a loveless childhood, political persecution, torture, social discrimination, etc.) that caused them to fear for their survival, can become trapped in the ‘flight or fight’ mode. Nature has given us the flight or fight response as a way of dealing with a threat to our existence. We all have it and we share it with the animal world. In our distant past when a caveman faced a sabre tooth tiger, he would go into flight or fight mode and either flee or fight.

It is crucial to understand the flight or fight response if we want to understand many of our behaviours and emotional reactions. It is particularly important if we want to understand the dynamic of trauma. The flight or fight response causes all our body and brain functions to become completely focused on survival. When we are under threat adrenaline shoots to either the top (fight response) or the bottom of the body (flight), which can cause symptoms that are now identified with anxiety. In the case of the flight response our leg muscles become alert and our bowels attempt to empty so that we can be as light on our feet as possible when we flee. In the fight response energy will be focused in the upper arms, chest and shoulders making us ready to fight. Our vision becomes tunnelled, our breath becomes shallow and fast and so on. The sole purpose of this is to help us save our lives (our bodies).

When a person suffers ongoing abuse or a one-off but really serious threat (e.g. a rape, a hold-up) their brain literally becomes locked in survival functioning. What then happens is that it becomes harder to engage higher brain functions (empathy, reason, high level spirituality, creativity, grasping the consequences of our actions, etc.). People who suffer from trauma can be seen as people who are stuck permanently in the flight or fight mode. Since they live in constant fear it is easy to see how hard it would be for them to empathise or care about whether or not they hurt people. When you are in flight or fight mode you don't stop to think about how the tiger feels, how you feel or how your friends are feeling. You either fight or you get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. Under normal circumstances when the danger is over our brain is supposed to relax and go back to normal functioning. However, in situations when the fear is ongoing or is sufficiently acute, the brain never goes back to normal and what you get is trauma (or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). People who suffer from trauma feel that they can never relax because they feel that danger is lurking behind every corner.

People who commit torture know that it is possible to traumatise almost any individual if you put them under the right conditions. The physiological changes in the brain have been proven in research and they are hard to avoid.

Trauma has an enormous effect on people's identity, their perception of the world and their philosophy of life (as well as their religions, their economic philosophy etc). Where you find societies or individuals whose view of life is negative, who focus on the 'half empty', who always expect bad things to happen or negative outcomes, whose view of humanity is adversarial, who believe that people are essentially evil, who are aggressive and who believe that only force gets results, who believe that it's all about competition and 'dog eat dog', who are rigid, racist and judgemental, who are self-righteous and lack compassion, who have an aversion to reflection and who prefer to focus on the flaws in others, who believe that they are somehow more special than others, who are narcissistically self-centred, who believe that only their group provides a safe place from the big 'bad' world out there, and who believe that survival is all that matters in life and that they are entitled to do anything for their own survival (basically anything that has been identified by spiritual masters as fear-based) -- I believe you are dealing with trauma psychology or as I like to call it in relation to societies, trauma politics. I believe that any politics that is based on fear is trauma politics.

(You are also dealing with trauma when you deal with self-destructive behaviours, and self-loathing for example. It's just that this type of behaviour (internalised trauma) does not lend itself to hurting others as the externalised trauma that I described above does. It is therefore less interesting to society and the media. For some reason (it'll be interesting to find out why) we tend to focus on those who hurt others, not those who live in quiet desperation but are just as traumatised!)

Societies can be traumatised fairly quickly by brutal military regimes, dictatorial regimes, or more slowly by democratic regimes who spend a great deal of effort trying to frighten the population as is happening in the US and in Israel and also right here in Australia at the moment. Here the government has been trying to create fear about terrorism and fear about the country being overtaken by asylum seekers. So much so that their policy for dealing with asylum seekers is named 'border protection'! Trauma can also be perpetuated through the culture, its stories and rituals as I believe is the situation in Israel (see my talk Jewish Trauma and the Palestinian Israeli Conflict). All you need is a sufficient amount of fear and various levels of trauma will set in. None of us is immune because it is extremely difficult to train ourselves out of our innate survival instinct.

My analysis of mainstream Jewish religion and culture as well as the philosophy of Zionism leads me to believe that we are dealing with trauma. I don't know what trauma the original Hebrews suffered from. Modern archaeology suggests now that Jews were never really slaves in Egypt, for example. So I don't know what it is that the story of the Exodus is really all about. Nonetheless, Jewish foundational myths show very clearly that we, the Jews, have always been thinking and acting out of trauma. The Jewish people have indeed been scapegoats throughout their history and I believe that this persecution served to perpetuate and reinforce their pre-existing trauma-based world view.

I am trained systemically, so I tend to not simply put blame on this that or the other. As humans we all interact with each other and are all contributing to the general state of things (in couple relationships, families and society at large). Traumatised people can create a self-fulfilling prophecy for themselves because of their expectation that things will go badly for them (which is another fundamental feature of trauma). Their behaviour (whether sheepish or aggressive) is likely to invite the wrong kind of people to interact with them. It is common for people who have been abused in childhood to engage in more abusive relationships as adults either as victims or as perpetrators. Trauma tends to draw more trauma to itself and traumatised people tend to attract and are attracted to traumatised people.

My argument is far from the insanity defence. I believe that people who know that they have been hurt have a duty to heal themselves so that they do not hurt others. I in fact place a great deal of responsibility on traumatised people. Trauma begets trauma. Even if they do not intend to, traumatised parents pass on their trauma to their children. Once someone has become a victim they are potentially harmful to others. This is one of the reasons that trauma runs in families sometimes for generations. The cycle only stops when someone decides to take responsibility and heal themselves. I have had the privilege of meeting a number of clients over the years who told me that the only reason they came to therapy is because they were abused in their childhood and they do not want to pass the abuse on to their children.

My argument about Israeli society being traumatised has three purposes:

  1. To push Israelis to take responsibility for their actions and to get them to consider that perhaps the way they see the world is not quite how the world really is. I have intimate knowledge of how Israelis perceive the world, having been one myself.

  2. To let the Palestinians know that it is not their fault. Many Palestinians keep wondering why the Israelis are abusing them. I am trying to let them know that they are caught in a relationship with a traumatised bully. I think that understanding this might help create more effective policies for dealing with Israel. It is important to see that you cannot reason with someone when their worldview is affected by trauma. This is the reason why Israelis still believe that they are the victims in this story despite the fact that Israel committed a brutal and premeditated ethnic cleansing in 1948, despite the fact that Israel is a regional superpower, and despite the fact that Israel is carrying out one of the most brutal occupations in modern history and is still dispossessing the Palestinians of their land and their culture.

  3. I am trying to let the world know that Israel cannot be reasoned with and therefore there needs to be international intervention in Palestine to protect the Palestinian people from a possible expulsion. I believe that this is extremely urgent. As long as the world thinks that you can debate, reason or negotiate with Israel, the world is sacrificing 6 million Palestinians. Israeli society is a traumatised society and it is therefore dangerous. Any policy concerning Israel needs to take this into account.

Page content last modified: 11 June 2006