In June 2024, more than six months into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, a well known peer reviewed journal, publishes as series of articles addressing the topic of belonging in the context of Israel-Palestine. The lead article is written by a Jewish Israeli-born American analyst who “has chosen to emigrate”, and now divides his time between NYC and Tel Aviv. In his paper he feels compelled to take his biography as a “case study” for “all of us" (Palestinians included) "to think something together," asking the reader "to feel their own way into the landscape I'm searching to open here".
The shockingly insensitive choice of words prepares the reader for a text which can only be described as self-absorbed, intellectually shallow, and, most of all, disingenuous. An exercise in Israeli self-victimization. Seven discussants were selected to respond to the paper. The author then is given the final word. Needless to say, none of the discussants is Palestinian; and only one of them challenges the author's universalizing claims about belonging.
Why is it, I asked the editors in a written communication, that Palestinian views on belonging and un-belonging are not represented? Why is there no Palestinian companion piece alongside the paper from Israel? Why is none of the respondents from Palestine?
I received this as an answer:
“It was very important to us that [Eyal’s] paper be able to speak beyond borders. … True, we could have recruited a Palestinian author, but we would not have felt it were appropriate to ask that author to be a discussant, nor a comparison case.”
Appropriate to what? The silencing of Palestinians? I see nothing appropriate in "recruiting" a Jewish Israeli-American analyst to speak for both and all sides, to speak beyond and across borders, as it were. (Ironically, the articles are placed behind a paywall.) I see nothing appropriate in a dialogue in which Palestinians are being spoken to and for.
Another example: the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna organizes an on-going panel series called “Psychoanalysis under Conditions of War,” where panelists stubbornly avoid discussing Gaza and the occupied West Bank. It is the same institution which in 2001 disinvited Edward Said from giving that year’s “Freud Memorial Lecture” on the grounds that Said, on a recent visit to Lebanon meant to celebrate the (sadly only temporary) end of Israeli occupation, had thrown a pebble across the Blue Line. No Israeli was in sight; no one was hurt; no law was violated.
So I ask, is this really the path we want to continue on as a profession?
If psychoanalysis is to regain relevancy and respect in non-white, non-western communities, its practitioners must address the question of Palestine from the standpoint of Palestinians. (Thank you Edward Said.)
What would that mean?
It means regarding Palestinians as real people, as opposed to "terrorists" or "perfect victims" (Mohammed El-Kurds). It means abandoning the focus on the holocaust as universal template for transgenerational trauma as well as holding traumatized perpetrators accountable. It means seeing the ever present demand for mutual recognition for what it often is: an instrument of normalizing occupation and apartheid. It means, last not least, exploring the ways in which ‘neutrality’ in the consulting room (and outside of it) functions as disguise for clinical cowardice.
We wouldn’t have to re-invent the wheel. Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi’s Psychoanalysis under Occupation is one of the most significant psychoanalytic publications in recent years, and an excellent starting point for a respectful, non-coercive conversation about ending the occupation.