Israel on the Couch: The Psychology of the Peace Process

3 The Story We Tell Ourselves,and the World, about Ourselves

3 The Story We Tell Ourselves, and the World, about Ourselves The National Anthem F rom the start of the anthem, with the words “As long as the Jewish heart yearns,” it is clear that it is focused on Jewish feelings. It raises the question of how a non-Jewish Israeli feels about his national anthem . Israeli Arabs wish we had a more universal anthem, which would reflect the yearnings of the Arabs who live in Israel. Giving Israeli Arabs full recognition is very hard, because it requires us to change from a Jewish state to an Israeli state. That change touches our deepest strata as a people, our right to exist, our drive to prevail and survive, and so on. That change is a very hard developmental crisis for us, which I discussed in the chapter “from religion to state.” If we liken the nation to an individual, the anthem is one of the deepest recesses of the national unconscious, which is hard to change, because it is essentially primal, instinctive, and egocentric, and can only endure very slow changes. Indeed, the egocentricity of our anthem, which reflects our developmental stage and our mental state as a nation, does not let us, as of today, see the possibility of any other anthem. In that way we say, unconsciously, that there is no space for two peoples here. We cannot conceive of creating an anthem with which Israeli Arabs would feel comfortable. We could do that by adding one line about members of other nations, for instance. But it is hard to 63 argue with instincts. We will only reconsider when reality slaps us in the face. And it will. The anthem begins with anxieties and fears: As long as the Jewish heart yearns. Indeed, the music also begins quietly. The Jewish heart is aroused and yearning. Then: “Toward the East, the eye beholds Zion.” This is about the streaming of Jews to Israel from all corners of the earth. To the sounds of a magical tune, everyone is drawn, after years of exile, to Zion, which is Jerusalem . Then comes the most important part of the anthem: We have not lost our hope of two thousand years / To be a free people in our land, the land of Zion, Jerusalem . The main feeling conveyed in the anthem is that we are wretched, weak, and hurt, but we have not lost hope of being a free people in our land. Are we not free today? That is what children ask at the Passover seder, when everyone sings: “This year we are slaves; next year we will be free.” We have not been slaves for so many years, but we still feel like slaves, poor persecuted victims, and that someone else controls us. Our anthem is the anthem of a paranoid nation. The paranoid personality feels that it is the poor victim of an evil and cruel world. There is a clear accusation of some abstract entity that is causing our suffering, which is preventing the realization of our two-thousand-year-old dream. That undefined other can be anybody, and actually means the whole world. What is missing here is the emotional position that realizes that we are not alone in the world, and that we make others suffer too, an emotional position that recognizes that we are not the most despondent in the world, and must consider the feelings of others as well. According to our anthem, nobody is as righteous as we are, and no nation suffers more than we do. Of course there is not the slightest mention of all the help we received from other nations. It’s as if nothing happened since the anthem was composed more than one hundred years ago, and as if we did not grow from the stage when we did not have a state and independence. The truth is, the anthem should be changed. We need a new anthem that contains a more open vision than the vision of an adolescent who is victimized and deserves everything. A vision that includes the foreign minorities that live with us, a vision that recognizes that there is room for everyone, and that we can live together as good neighbors. In other words, an anthem upon which we can raise generations of children with a more complex and correct view of reality, not an anthem that shouts, “I am a victim” and nothing more. The truth is that we are...