Tag Archives: memory

Israel-Palestine Problem Exhibits Wound Of PTSD

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At Forward, Leonard Fine puts his finger on the emotional trauma underlying the intellectual and political impasse in the Middle East:

“From time to time in this space, I’ve made passing reference to the post-traumatic stress disorder that afflicts Israelis (and the Palestinians, too). It may be a bit of a stretch, but there is a growing literature that suggests that not only individuals, but social institutions, can suffer from PTSD. Thus, for example, Loren and Barbara Cobb, in an article entitled “The Persistence of War,” argue that “specific symptoms of untreated PTSD are particularly troublesome for the social institutions of a society suffering from epidemic levels of these disorders. These symptoms are: hypervigilance, emotional numbing, denial and avoidance, seeing the world in black and white, magical thinking, and apocalyptic thinking.”

They go on to quote Dr. Jonathan Shay, widely regarded as among the giants in the study of PTSD: “Democratic process entails debate, persuasion, and compromise. These presuppose the trustworthiness of words. The moral dimension of severe trauma, the betrayal of ‘what’s right,’ obliterates the capacity for trust. The customary meanings of words are exchanged for new ones; fair offers from opponents are scrutinized for traps; every smile conceals a dagger.”

In the American military experience, PTSD most often arises when a soldier has witnessed the deaths or terrible wounds of his or her comrades. That happens in Israel, too, of course.

But in Israel, whole societies are the witnesses, and the word “post” is, alas, premature. The traumas are very much ongoing, and we do not yet have the clinical vocabulary to comprehend them.

For Jews, the great trauma is, of course, the Holocaust itself, the systematic and ultimately incomprehensible slaughter of one-third of world Jewry. That left a wound that will never quite heal, but that might by now have formed a bearable scab.

But mini-traumas ever since have picked at that scab, rendered the wound ever-raw. The excruciatingly painful list of suicide attacks, the hateful rhetoric, Sderot and the entire aftermath of the withdrawal from Gaza, and now, around the corner, Iran.

And then there have been and are the politicians who whether out of conviction or for purposes of dreadful exploitation pick at the scab and refresh the trauma. For Menachem Begin, Beirut was Berlin and Yasser Arafat was Adolf Hitler; for Benjamin Netanyahu, this is 1938, Tehran is Berlin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is Hitler. It was ever thus, it will ever be thus, hence it is here, now: They hate us. “Never again” may be our common oath, but “always, everywhere” is our common belief. The wound will not heal.

And the Palestinians? Betrayed by the corruption of their own leadership, theirs is not only the Nakba of defeat and displacement in 1948 and again in 1967; it is daily humiliation both thoughtless and intended, new bypass highways for the Jewish settlers in their midst, still more than 500 checkpoints and barriers to clog or block their own roads and travel, a security fence that slices and snakes through their fields and their farms and their villages and their cities, reminding, reminding, insulting.

Over Gaza, a sky from which at any moment death may be launched; in the streets of the West Bank, raids and roundups. Ongoing trauma, ongoing disorder. The wounds will not heal.

The Palestinians say: Without justice, there will be no peace. The Israelis say: Without peace, there will be no justice. Both sides are stuck with their wounds and their traumas; they need not only diplomacy, they need therapy. Their empathic capacity has been battered. They cannot place themselves in the shoes of the other, nor can they see themselves as the other sees them.”

Speaking Blogistani….

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Thanks to all readers who write in to correct my frequent typos.
You will have to forgive me for speaking blogistani.

For years, I taught spelling, grammar, punctuation, and the rest. I corrected fine distinctions of meaning. I forced captive student to rewrite words.

But it turned out that I was more captive than they were.

Blogistani is now my native language and I speak it like any transplant, picking up the rules as I go along.

One rule of blogs is that corrections should appear as corrections.

But for minor matters of grammar and spelling, that would create a fine mess and be more confusing than useful most of the time. So I simply rewrite mistakes as I spot them. And the same goes for changes in style, or additions of non-essential detail (although I’ll make note of an update and time, if the information is more critical).

Of course, for any important details, or for citations or quotes where other people are affected, or for breaking news, I cross out and insert an apology as well.

There are also some physical reasons.

The charm of blogistani is that you can speak it as you go along and so I rarely reread my posts before posting. I like the feeling of writing on the run. That has its upside – I catch all those fleeting thoughts. But it also has its down side – typos.

Another thing. I rarely wear my glasses and sometimes don’t see errors until I (or you) reread a post.
This isn’t vanity (since I lead a reclusive life). It’s my fixation with the thesis that crutches make muscles weaker. And glasses are crutches. I got that notion into my head as a child when I read a copy of the “Bates’ Method,” which is a system of natural corrective exercises for myopia. Whether they work or not, I don’t know. But after a lifetime of squinting at piano scores, exam papers, manuscripts, and pixels, in all sorts of light, without my glasses, my eyesight hasn’t got any worse than the original prescription. I see this as something of a vindication of a pet crank of mine, and naturally I hang on to it by going without my glasses.

The third reason for my blindness is my way of reading. I either read at lightning speed, absorbing big chunks of reading matter at a glance….or I take forever to get through a paragraph.

Both styles of reading suit me and have their uses.

I use the slow method for philosophy and fiction.

I use the fast method for getting through the news on the net.

Fast reading is also partly a bad habit left over from exams in India, where we had to extract the salient facts from reams of overwritten material. My eye sometimes doesn’t actually see the individual phrases but gets the information out of the writing holistically. People who sight-read music a lot use the same technique. They can get through and synthesize a lot of information this way very fast. But it also means they need to proof their writing more than most people.

I’ll post more on this subject, because I’ve thought about it a lot over the years – how we absorb information, how we remember it and reuse it, how we process our sensory input.

And I come at this not from the point of view of a specialist in cognitive research (although I’m familiar with some of it), but from the point of view of pedagogical theory….