The Israeli Mind by Alon Gratch

Author:Alon Gratch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466882010
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

FIVE

ANATOMY OF A CLICHÉ: SABRAS AT WAR

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF DEATH

The patient, an Israeli professional in his thirties, mentioned for the first time in his psychotherapy that when he was about twelve he had “a secret sexual relationship with another boy.” Clearly struggling with feelings of shame and guilt over this relationship, he avoided my gaze. He seemed unsure, as in “Should I avoid these feelings and change the subject, or should I confront them head-on?” But then, in an apparent compromise between the two options, he looked up at me, smiled, and volunteered the following story:

“I was in seventh grade, so it must have been 1972 or early ’73, a relatively quiet period with not much terrorism or anything like that going on. But one afternoon we heard in school that earlier in the day a Katyusha rocket fell somewhere in Jerusalem. Walking home from school, this boy and I—the same one I had the sexual thing with—got into an argument about the death penalty for terrorists. I was for it, he was opposed. At some point I challenged him, saying, ‘How would you feel if it were your house that was hit by this Katyusha?!’ Well, when I got home, I found out that it was his house, and that the rocket had punctured a wall in his room. My mother thoughtfully suggested that I invite him to spend the night in our house. ‘There’s an extra bed in your room,’ she said. If she only knew…”

This took place in my New York City office around the time of the first Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein showered Israeli cities and suburbs with Scud missiles. While Israelis in general were panicking that these missiles could be armed with chemical warheads, Israeli psychologists were also worrying about the “transference implications” of having to interrupt a session during a Scud attack. How would the therapeutic relationship be affected by having to put on a gas mask and spend the afternoon together with the patient in a small, sealed room?

War permeates the most personal and private of realms. Like addiction, it is often a secondary process, the result of preexisting conditions of significant magnitude. But it takes over and metastasizes, obscuring the original pathology, becoming the cause of new and pervasive afflictions. In a country so small, with a society of such permeable social boundaries, as Israel, what’s public often turns private and back again. Probably nothing reflects more tragically and poignantly this nexus of public and private worlds than the art and life of Israeli author David Grossman. In 2003, Grossman published a collection of articles he’d written in the preceding ten years, since the signing of the Oslo Accords. Grossman titled this volume Death as a Way of Life. Writing about Israeli-Palestinian relations in the preface, Grossman noted, “Sometimes, viewing the atrocities that these two peoples inflict on each other, a person loses not only his desire to live in this region, but his desire to live at all.”1 In

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