Philip Weiss reviews a panel held at the Nixon Center with Jacob Heilbrunn, who has written about the neoconservatives: Mondoweiss.
The author (Heilbrunn) spoke first. He said that the Holocaust is a "driving" force in the thinking of both neocons and liberal hawks on foreign policy. And he had a big "question mark" about that; he accused them of "sentimentalizing," i.e., reacting emotionally to events. He noted that Douglas Feith had told him that he had learned all about Israel and the Middle East from his father's experience as a Holocaust survivor. A bit of hysterical thinking that I don't think Heilbrunn mentioned in his book.
Alas, Heilbrunn doesn't take this analysis to the next stage, which is that the neocons projected their Holocaust fears on to the Arabs/Palestinians, and so have magnified sectarian struggles in the Middle East into a hoped-for World War IV in which the U.S. must defeat evil. Heilbrunn doesn't take it there because he has already broken taboos in his book, and there is a general air about his presence of--"Well, I have said enough, I will leave it at that" (as I wrote in the American Conservative).
Projecting Holocaust trauma onto the Arabs - that's what eighty percent of the Arab-Israeli conflict is about in my view. The other twenty percent is machinations of empire and oil, and garden-variety ethnic prejudice.
I sympathize with the trauma of those who survived the Holocaust - those who descend from survivors, those who watched from the safety of America but were traumatized, and survivors themselves. (As I sympathize with anyone who suffers trauma from being attacked). However, just because I sympathize with the pain, fear, confusion and heartbreak of trauma survivors does not mean that I give them a free pass to act out their miseries on the rest of us. Some of the most obnoxious women I have ever known have been incest survivors who cannot stop projecting their perpetrator's evil onto everyone they meet. I can sympathize with such a woman's wounds without accepting her mistaken belief that I or some other random person am an evil abuser out to crush her the way her perpetrator did.
We can pity the wounds without enabling the neurosis of the wounded. At a certain point you have to say: cut it out. Get clear. What is really happening here? Who are you really attacking? If someone is attacking you, who are they, really? Pay attention to what is real now, not to what your mind creates out of the past. This is not easy to do of course. We all have trouble seeing what is in front of us, since our minds constantly filter and project.
You could say that I incessantly replay a central drama of my childhood here on the internet: arguing with violent politics. I argued with the Israeli pilots bombing Ain-el-Helweh, summer 1974 - in my head of course, because they couldn't hear me. And I argued with people around me who thought armed revolution was the only way to resist those Israeli pilots. I am still arguing - even though I know I don't have "the answer" that will solve for peace and justice in this world.
In America post-9/11 the fantasy that Muslims are the new Nazis has become mainstream. This idea fuels the imagination of people still traumatized by the Holocaust, who are compelled to repeat their fears incessantly. Note the troll commenter in my previous George Habash thread. I let such ravings stand in comments because they reflect a neurotic (psychotic?) idea that infects the zeitgeist. It's fear and projection - sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Sadly, this neurosis has led America into a punishing, futile, endless war. And it causes endless pain to the Palestinians of Gaza, the Occupied West Bank and Lebanon.
Thank you to Philip Weiss.
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