This is the text of a talk I gave as part of the Socialist Alliance Public Forum held at the Griffin Centre, Canberra City, on the evening of 23rd October 2002. (November 2002)

I am grateful to have been invited by the Socialist Alliance to speak to you tonight about the possibility of war against Iraq. I consider it a great privilege to speak publicly, and I hope that my talk will make a worthwhile contribution to you. I am aware that I am probably speaking to the converted but I think that it is important for us to talk to each other for support even if we agree on most things. The road to social change is a difficult one, and we all need all the support and strength that we can have.

I work in private practice as a psychotherapist, and in addition to peace activism and public speaking, I am also involved in committee work in my profession. I studied Politics, Sociology and Economics as well as Psychotherapy. I am married and have the privilege of sharing in the upbringing of my 12 year old stepdaughter.

I speak here tonight as a former Israeli, as a psychotherapist and as a concerned human being.

First I am going to share with you some of my personal experiences of war, and later I will share some of my views on the topic.

I was born in Israel in September 1964. Between 1964 and when I left Israel in November 1991, I lived through five wars. I was even a minor participant in the Lebanon war in 1982. I was a soldier doing my compulsory military service with the Israeli army at the time. (Incidentally, I don’t like calling it the Israeli Defence Force because I consider the phrase ‘defence force’ for any army to be a euphemism.) I worked as a military draftsperson drawing up training plans for the whole army. At the time our section was also in charge of the training of the South Lebanese Militia. This is the same militia that later with Israel’s endorsement and assistance committed the Sabra and Shatila massacres. I remember having trouble understanding what that war was all about and my unit was actually doing. I shudder now as I realise what I participated in. A year and a half ago I gave up my Israeli citizenship in protest against Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, but I must admit that despite that I still live with a great deal of guilt.

Most of the wars I lived through including the Lebanon war were taking place far from the centre of Israel, where I lived and worked. We could see the sights and hear the sounds of war through our television sets but no bombs were falling in our streets. All the action was always somewhere else far away. To the best of my knowledge I was never in any physical danger, although like many others I did experience a deep sense of anxiety, fear and uncertainty. I also remember feeling excitement as a child particularly during the 1973 war, which in Israel is called the Yom Kippur war.

The one exception was the Gulf war. This is where my experience of war changed for ever. To the best of my knowledge Israel was not an active participant in that war but it was the target of several Iraqi Scud missile attacks. At the time of the war I lived in Ramat-Gan, a suburb of Tel-Aviv, right on the missile flight path from Iraq to the Israeli Central Military Headquarters at the centre of the city. From what I observed, it was that headquarters that the Iraqi army was trying to hit.

For a while there, almost every night, missiles were falling in neighbourhoods and suburbs on both sides of us. The media was not allowed to report the location where the missiles hit in order not to give the Iraqis a better idea of how to fine tune their aim. So we never knew for sure where the missiles fell but we could hear most of them, and we could also hear the Patriot missiles that were tying to catch the Scuds in mid-air. Despite any propaganda you may have heard at the time the Patriots had a 100% failure rate. At the time most of the neighbours who lived in our building left Ramat-Gan for more remote areas and our building was almost deserted.

My former husband was a Captain in the army and was on duty all the time because of the war, so he was not home a lot. I was left by myself in an almost empty building. It was an unpleasant experience. It was frightening to leave home after dark as we were expecting attacks in the evenings. The otherwise busy and active city of Tel-Aviv would turn into an empty ghost town after 5pm. I was a full-time university student then, but the universities were closed because of the war. I had nothing to do and nowhere in particular to go to. I remember trying to challenge my fear by staying out in the street for as long as I could bear. Life was disrupted and the feeling of helplessness was overwhelming. I could leave Ramat-Gan and go somewhere safer but I didn’t want to leave my home. I suddenly developed a particularly strong attachment to my possessions and our apartment. I did not want to just abandon them and I also did not want to be away from my husband. I suppose I was holding on to the safety of what I knew.

Then one night the sirens started again. It was after midnight. The routine was to go to our sealed room that we were meant to prepare in advance, place a wet towel under the door put our gas masks on and wait.

In Israel every building has a bomb shelter in the basement but the authorities did not want us to go into our shelters. They expected the Iraqi missiles to contain chemical warheads and considered it more important to take steps to protect the civilian population against a chemical attack. I never really put my gas mask on. I knew from the chemical warfare training I had in the army that a gas mask would not help me against any serious chemical. Gas masks offer protection only against chemicals that hurt people by inhalation, such as tear gas. They cannot protect you if the attackers use nerve gas as this kind of gas penetrates through the skin. The gas masks, I thought, were distributed mostly to try and give the civilian population some sense of security and safety.

At that stage of the war we knew we had exactly 9 minutes between the start of the sirens and the moment the missile hit. I was sitting there shivering uncontrollably all over — this was a natural reaction according to the doctors that kept giving us advice through the media. I don’t remember thinking or feeling much but my body was responding to a deep sense of terror. For some reason I had a bad feeling about that particular night.

It was a helpless and horrible feeling sitting there, knowing that this thing was probably flying right above our heads, and wondering where it was going to fall. It could fall right on top of us and there was nothing we could do to stop it. My husband had his M-16 with him but felt completely useless. A few seconds before the end of the 9 minute count, I heard two Patriot missiles going up. I knew that there was a battery not far from us. At that point two thoughts flashed through my mind. I knew that the Patriots were too late to intercept the Scud, and I also knew that the Scud was right above our heads. Then, after a moment of silence we heard a most powerful blast, the likes of which I had never experienced before. I still remember the feeling of the the shock wave coming through the walls of our small apartment.

Then the lights went out, and we could hear the sirens of ambulances and fire engines, and see their flashing red and blue lights through the windows. I was in a terrible state. It was clear that a missile fell very close to our building but we didn’t know how close. I was paralysed with terror and confusion. Cutting off the electricity supply to an area that was hit was a preventive measure against fires. This confirmed that this time the missile hit very close indeed.

A short time after the all clear siren, my husband suggested we go to sleep. There was nothing else to do. I tried to sleep but I couldn’t. Around 2.30am I heard loud bangs on the door of our neighbours half a floor up from us. They were an elderly couple and I knew that the husband had serious heart problems. I thought that the blast might have frightened him and that something might have happened to him, and so I wanted to see if I could help. I got up and opened the apartment door, and what I saw shocked me to the core. The roof of the building was scattered all over the shattered staircase, apartments were badly damaged all around us. Everything was in rubble. Because our apartment seemed unharmed from what I could observe in the darkness a part of me did not believe that the blast was really so close, and I didn’t expect to see so much damage all around me. As it turned out later by some strange miracle our apartment, which was on the second floor, was the only one without even a scratch. It was so strange that the landlord did not believe me when I told him. He actually came a few days later to inspect for himself, and did not conceal his disappointment that he was going to miss out on government compensation… Many of our neighbours had to move out of their apartments until the damage was repaired.

I couldn’t bring myself to leave the apartment for several days after this. I was in a state of shock and too scared to move. The missile hit only a few metres away from the entrance to the building, and did substantial damage to the whole street. Other residential buildings were all but destroyed and cars that were close to the site of the blast were wrecked. Several shops at the bottom of the street were badly damaged too. It turned out that the Scud that hit us was old and unsophisticated, and certainly did not contain a chemical warhead. But this experience has taught me that you do not need sophisticated weapons of mass destruction to cause enormous devastation in urban areas. Old fashioned explosives work just fine. The damage of a blast like this in a city is unpredictable. The shockwave can go in many directions and it can cause extensive damage. Events like this can bring the worst out of some people, and a whole company of paratroopers were sent to our street and positioned right in front of our building. Apparently this was to prevent looting! The sight of soldiers is common in Israel but this was different and disconcerting. It is as if our otherwise quiet street suddenly became the front.

Israeli existence has been marked by war and I myself have attended enough military drills to have some idea of what tanks, bullets and bombs look and sound like, and yet nothing had prepared me for the emotional and physical impact of bombs falling in the midst of our city.

I left Israel nine months after the war. To this day I get a physical reaction whenever I hear fireworks or any sound that resembles a siren or an explosive. I no longer spin into panic and my reaction now is relatively mild but I know that I still suffer from the effects of Post Traumatic Stress.

Knowing how this relatively small event has affected me, I cannot even begin to imagine how the Iraqi people will be affected if the United States and its future allies go to war on Iraq. A war on Iraq is a war on civilians. It will hit cities and and will lead to unspeakable trauma, the effects of which will be felt for generations. As a therapist I know that we will face a mental health catastrophe.

Such consequences are not consistent with the goals of peace and safety that our Western leaders talk about so much these days. War will create more trauma and traumatised people cannot make peace. Most live in quiet desperation and turn their suffering against themselves. Some pass on their traumas to their children even if they don’t mean to. And a small number of others end up so angry that they feel compelled to lash out either through small-scale violence or through what is called ‘terrorist attacks’.

To me the question of war is not about politics but rather about emotional health and wellbeing. I believe that it is the nature of our collective emotional health that shapes our politics! And of course, the nature of our politics in turn will affect our emotional health. War is waged by people who are emotionally unhealthy and in turn it causes emotional suffering and damage to others. It is a never ending cycle.

Every therapist knows that the first condition for working with trauma victims is safety. Traumatised people cannot begin to heal until they experience a long enough period of safety. I needed to spend several years here in Australia in safety before I could even begin to recover from my own traumas. It is therefore obvious to me that a war on Iraq would produce consequences that are the exact opposite of what Bush, Howard and Blair say that they want. The question of whether or not to go to war is not a question about right or wrong - it is a matter of consequences and we have to ask ourselves and our leaders what consequences we want to live with. The consequence of a war on Iraq is more suffering, more trauma, more people angry with the US and the West, more terrorism, and who knows for how long this cycle will continue. As a therapist I can tell you that it is not looking good.

So either these leaders do not understand this point or they pretend not to. There is also the possibility that they are lying about wanting peace and in fact, the consequences I mentioned are precisely what they want.

The word ‘evil’ has been used a lot since the 11th of September attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Our leaders seem to absolutely love using it whenever they get the opportunity. In his book People of the Lie, Scott Peck argues that evil is about concealing the truth; about going to great lengths to cover up true intentions and actions. My husband told me a couple of weeks ago that he heard that 69% of the American public said in a recent poll, that they would prefer their government to concentrate more on the economy. I wonder what would have happened if Bush told his people the truth, that he is in fact concentrating on the economy when he goes to war on Iraq. But he is not likely to do this because then the American people would have to admit to themselves the truth of what they have been doing for a long time — that they are causing a great deal of suffering to others so that they can continue to consume.

Would Bush then have the support of his people? Will they choose consciously to do what they are doing anyway? As long as the truth is not told and US actions are dressed in the costume of fighting for “freedom”, “peace” and “democracy”, the American people will buy it. If the truth is told I would like to believe that many won’t go along with it.

A war on Iraq is nothing more than one more link in a long chain of consistent American actions. US foreign policy was designed to increase control over oil- producing nations, and over other resources necessary for the monster of the US economy to continue to exist. US rhetoric talks about wanting to create democracies but in fact it is obvious that capitalist dictatorships are more suitable for US interests than democracies. In a capitalist dictatorship there are no laws that protect labourers and the environment. This allows US companies to continue to exploit workers and use environmental practices that in the US itself are not allowed or are at least limited. The US wants to maintain its way of life, but this way of life is unsustainable. It is a way of life based on the anti-humanistic principle that it is OK for one person or group to exploit another, and even whole societies for one’s own gains. It is the ‘dog eat dog’ mentality followed by those who are so survival-focused that they cannot feel compassion or empathy.

I wonder if the US government experiences some degree of guilt about what it does, otherwise why would it be so keen on recruiting collaborators? It is much easier to do a wrong thing if you know that there are others who are doing it too. Then you don’t have to carry the burden of guilt alone. Children in the playground know this principle well. An individual can always hide in a crowd and so can a whole nation.

I believe that (like Israel) peace and security are the last thing the US government really wants. US actions in fact are consistent with a desire to maintain anxiety and insecurity among their own people and in the world at large. If the world enjoyed peace and security US society might actually have time and space to look into itself and its own problems. The pile of problems they have to deal with is so big and probably so overwhelming that it is possible that US foreign policy is simply a way of avoiding. In fact, I believe that we are witnessing the last days of a crumbling and disintegrating second Roman empire. Going to war on Iraq may well be an attempt to put off the inevitable.

Governments have a lot to gain from keeping people in a permanent state of anxiety. People are so much more easily controlled when their survival buttons are pressed. They are exhausted and frightened, they find it difficult to feel empathy for others and they are more likely to allow their government to appropriate much more power than they otherwise would. This state of perpetual anxiety poses a serious threat to democracy (not to mention to our long term wellbeing), and we must be suspicious of any government that beats the drums of war.

Terrorist actions in the world are a symptom of something. They are indicating that the way of life that we have grown accustomed to in the West is not working. The Third World and anyone who has been hurt by our way of life are fighting back. They are telling us that we cannot eat the cake and keep it whole. We cannot live our wasteful, consumption-focused lifestyle and also expect peace and security while more than half the world is starving, and while people in our own countries live in poverty, desperation and deprivation.

It is time to acknowledge the obvious, and take the difficult path that starts with admitting to ourselves the truth of what we are doing. Then we need to decide whether this is what we want to be doing and then choose the actions that are consistent with our decision. If what we want is to exploit and not care about others, let us at least say so openly. Our leaders ask us if we want a growing economy. They do not ask us whether we want to exploit workers and the environment in Third World countries. I told you my Gulf War story to make the point that this is what we can expect from a war on Iraq. When Bush, Blair and Howard talk about a war I want them to tell the truth. Instead of saying that they are going to depose an “evil dictator” they need to say that they are going to bomb cities, kill and maim who knows how many people, traumatise the survivors for life, destroy whole communities and their culture, and devastate the environment, and all that so that the US can control oil. There is nothing heroic or noble about war. It is simply a means for destroying other people, their property and their environment for reasons of convenience, and our leaders should acknowledge this.

I am suspicious of the US government and I am suspicious of the Australian government for the same reasons. We must not provide any support for the US in its plan to go to war on Iraq, and I am not interested in what the United Nations’ Security Council will decide. Giving a seal of approval to a wrong action does not turn it into a right action.

I believe that any war is immoral, but for those for whom the moral reason is not convincing, I would say that going to war on Iraq is simply inconsistent with the desire to live peacefully and securely.

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