Fratricide in the Holy Land: A Psychoanalytic View of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

7 Denial Is Not a River in Egypt

7 Denial Is Not a River in Egypt The Americans, who have made psychoanalytic terms part of their language , often say, “I am in denial.” Back in 1935 the American comedian Jimmy Durante (1893–1980) stopped the show in Billy Rose’s popular stage musical Jumbo with a blatant example of denial. Playing a bankrupt circus owner who tries to escape his creditors, Durante was leading a live elephant away from the circus when he was stopped by a policeman . “Where are you going with that elephant?” demanded the cop. Durante looked askance and bellowed, “What elephant?” This blatant denial of reality struck a deep chord in the unconscious emotions of his delighted viewers. Unconscious denial is common in everyday life. We often deny the painful aspects of both our outer reality and our inner feelings. In interethnic conflict, we deny the humanity and suffering of our enemies and demonize them. This makes it easier for us to fight them, hurt them, or kill them as part of the conflict, which we rationalize in terms of the public good and sublime ideals. This chapter analyzes the development of unconscious denial in our very early lives and its evolution into massive , large-scale denial in interethnic conflict. People unconsciously tend to deny both their outer reality and their inner reality—their own emotions—especially when these are painful or scary. In 1983 an Austrian-born Israeli psychiatrist and his two American colleagues organized an international conference on denial in Jerusalem , the best papers from which they later published (Edelstein, Nathanson , and Stone 1989). Reality, however, is not a clear-cut matter. We have seen the enormous differences between the psychological realities of the Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Each side seems to live in its own reality, to deny the reality of the other, to be unable to see the world 112 from the other’s viewpoint, and to be able to see it only from his own. The history of the conflict from the late nineteenth century to the present day indicates that this was due to a massive and continual denial of reality on both sides. Let us examine some instances of this denial. The early Jewish Zionists in the 1890s did not take seriously the Arab question in Ottoman Palestine. Most of them denied the reality of the Arab population of Palestine. The favorite Zionist catch phrase was “a land without a people for a people without a land” (Zangwill 1901, p. 627). Like their ancestors for many centuries, they regarded the neglected backwater of Palestine, which was part of the Ottoman province of Syria, as the Land of the Jews, calling it by the Hebrew name of Erets Yisrael (the Land of Israel). This name implied that Palestine was the ancient Land of the Jews, that it did not harbor hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Arabs. The early Zionists were astonishingly blind to the existence of the Arabs. Eager to see Palestine as the promised Jewish homeland, they did not wish to see its demographic realities. Even today, some Israeli maps show the West Bank and Gaza as part of the territory of the state of Israel (Laqueur 1972, pp. 209–210). On the other side of the fence, as the PalestinianArabs initially denied the political and demographic danger that Jewish immigration to Palestine posed to them, they have similarly denied the political existence of Israel and its military might since it became a state in 1948. To this day, most maps of Palestine in Arab schools, libraries, and government of- fices do not show Israel at all. The name Palestine is written across the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Most Arab governments refer to the Israeli government in Jerusalem as “the Zionist government of Tel-Aviv.” The massive denial of Israel’s military power and the wishful thinking that Israel is a transitory state has cost the Arabs many military defeats, losses, and humiliations. Denial is an unconscious defense that we develop in our infancy. The baby shuts its eyes to anything unpleasant that it does not wish to see. It imagines that what it does not see does not exist. This process persists into adulthood. The denial of reality was current not only among the early Jewish Zionists but also among some nineteenth-century Christian Zionists. For example, the English pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) visited Palestine in 1854 and 1855 to...