In our article we argued that the Occupation has a direct and destructive impact on the mental health of Palestinians (and perhaps of Israelis too); and, in addition, we briefly intimated that our discipline might contribute to understanding the unconscious dynamics behind the conflict. Do views like this have a place in Therapy Today? We think so, alongside corrections, rebuttals and alternative analyses – from different Palestinian as well as Israeli perspectives. We are not sure why every view has to appear ‘at the same time’: there is surely opportunity for an ongoing discussion.

In our professional practice we avoid ‘taking sides’. The point of clinical neutrality is to ensure that all aspects of the personality, or relationship, are heard and valued. In Israel it may be that the experience of the Palestinians and the views of non-Zionist Israelis are heard and valued, but in Britain this is not the case.

Israeli analyst Emanuel Berman, profiled in an earlier edition of Therapy Today, has argued that the collusion of psychoanalysts with repressive regimes in Germany and South America rested on ‘a belief in “neutrality” [that] allowed these analysts to collaborate with a most destructive and fanatical force...’ He continued: ‘The lessons from Germany... and from Chile... point... to the need for analysts in all countries to confront openly major issues in their country’s history... Israeli society, and more specifically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which it is engulfed, is a case in point...’1 A similar suggestion is made by Barbara Kane in her important article ‘Transforming trauma into tragedy: Oedipus/Israel and the psychoanalyst as messenger’.² 

Critics of our article refer to the suffering of the people of Sderot. Each child in Sderot is of course worthy of our concern, as is each Palestinian child. Beyond compassion and anger, we need to consider why all these children suffer so much. One correspondent was clear that responsibility lies with Hamas and its ‘culture of pure evil and hatred’. This was perhaps the analysis that justified the assault on Gaza and the ‘brainwashed’ people who voted Hamas into power – another twist in the ever-continuing cycle of violence that seems, from the outside, to ensure only further bereavement and unimaginable pain. Ofer Grosbard, Israeli clinical psychologist, has wondered why it is that Israeli Jews cannot use the experience of their own historical fight for survival to empathise with the Palestinians in theirs.³

Israeli historian Ilan Pappé says this of Najd, the Palestinian village upon whose ruins Sderot is built: ‘By the beginning of June [1948] the list of villages obliterated included many that had until then been protected by nearby kibbutzim.
This was the fate of several villages in the Gaza district: Najd, Burays... Their destruction appeared to have come as a genuine shock to nearby kibbutzim when they learned how these friendly villages had been savagely assaulted, their houses destroyed and all their people expelled.’⁴

The correspondent who thinks Jeff Halper’s views are ‘notorious’ would no doubt dismiss Professor Pappé’s research in the same way: but if debate is limited to those whose basic assumptions are homogenized, what is the way forward?

The point is that the people of Sderot and the people of Gaza share a long history. To repeat a statement made by Sam Bahour, ‘What is needed is to go back to the spirit of the original U.N. partition resolution, which was about two communities who had equal and just claims and who need to find a way to live together.’

Though the mental health of Israelis was not the main focus of our brief tour, we did cite Dr Marton’s opinion that the Occupation has contributed to the rise of violence in Israeli society. This has been challenged. Crime is a complex phenomenon, and its causes open to interpretation. An article that echoes Dr Marton’s view is ‘A soul searching mission’ by Arthur Neslen,⁵ in which the reasons for a dramatic rise in rape and domestic violence in Israel is considered.

Another respondent said that visits to the West Bank had revealed nothing of what we had written. Of course, walking through the streets of London will reveal neither domestic violence nor sexual abuse, but they exist nonetheless. A perusal of the videos on the websites of groups like Machsom Watch, and the British group Jews for Justice for Palestinians provide evidence of the conditions we portray.⁶ Some of the video footage derives from the ‘Shooting Back’ project organised by Israeli Human Rights organisation B’Tselem. Camcorders have been distributed to vulnerable Palestinian families who record the abuse to which they have been subjected.⁷ 

Chana Ullman, an Israeli psychoanalyst who volunteered for Machsom Watch, has described Israel as a society living in denial: ‘At the checkpoints I am suddenly faced with the concrete human meaning of life without hope, life without any semblance of the autonomy that I completely take for granted. The facts were available to me but I did not imagine the humiliating routine, the helpless submission and fear that this routine breeds in the other; I did not imagine the arbitrariness, numbness, and cruel automatic functioning that it breeds in us. All those become concrete and undeniable at the checkpoints. As in the return of the repressed: I now know that until now I knew nothing.’⁸ 

Meanwhile the land grabs, with all their psychological and other consequences, continue, and not only in the Occupied Territories. We did not have space in our article to describe a visit to the Negev, inside Israel. In one ‘unrecognised’ village, so-called because the Israelis want the Bedouin inhabitants to abandon their land, there was no sanitation, power or piped water. But there was a medical post, because Physicians for Human Rights had taken the Ministry of Health to court, it having a legal responsibility to provide health care to all Israeli citizens. A couple of weeks after our return to Britain, the Israeli army arrived early in the morning and flattened every building. A recent report by Billy Briggs, ‘The unwanted tribe of Israel’,⁹ confirms that this is an ongoing policy of the Israeli State. 

We believe that the evidence for systematic, traumatising brutality unrelated to any security issue – to Hamas rockets, for example – is overwhelming. We would like to thank the editors, not for being ‘one-sided’, which they weren’t, but for ‘staying with’ what must have been a difficult and uncharacteristic moment, and in so doing allowing our article, and the many interesting and important reactions to it, to find their expression in this public space. 

Martin Kemp and Eliana Pinto

1. Berman E. Beyond analytic anonymity: on the political involvement of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in Israel, in Bunzl J, Beit-Hallahmi B (eds) Psychoanalysis, identity and ideology: critical essays on the Israel/Palestine case. Boston: Kluwer; 2002.
2. Kane B. Transforming trauma into tragedy: Oedipus/Israel and the psychoanalyst as messenger. Psychoanalytic Review. 2005;
92:929-956.
3. Gosbard E. Israel on the couch: the psychology of the peace process. Albany: SUNY Press; 2003.
4. Pappé I. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld;
2006: 46
5. Neslen A. A soul searching mission. The Guardian. 19/10/2006.
6. All the organisations mentioned in our article, both Israeli and Palestinian, have websites which provide a wealth of information not readily available to us.
7. The B’Tselem website also has statistics on both Israeli and Palestinian casualties through the conflict.
8. Ullman C. Bearing witness: across the barriers in society and in the clinic. Psychoanalytic Dialogues. 2006; 16:181-198.
9. Briggs B. The unwanted tribe of Israel. The New Zealand Herald. 28/03/2009.