Avigail disassembles the core deceit of Israeli-style settler-colonialism and indeed all its previous incarnations. In the not so distant past, Protestant Unionists in the occupied six counties of Ireland justified hurling abuse and threats at young catholic children on their way to primary school in Belfast by citing their perceived status as victims of a Catholic conspiracy to annihilate their culture and religion. I have always been astonished, during trips to the Occupied West Bank, at the genuine lack of bitterness towards Israelis from most Palestinians I spoke with. Contrast this with the casual bigotry and violence of the Settlers and most of Israeli society towards their victims. Unfortunately, you cannot defeat these criminals via harsh language. Broad spectrum economic sanctions designed to literally destroy the Israeli economy is the only lever these miserable excuses for human beings will ever understand.
Thank you Avigail for another thought provoking and enlightening post and for sharing your exchange with Katie Halper. It seems that many critics of zionism in North America like Katie base their stance on honouring the victims of two millennia of European anti-semitism and its culmination in the Holocaust, and thus find it important to maintain a type of Jewish identity that separates itself from a racist and violent apartheid state that uses these historical tragedies as cover. However I do agree that the current genocide in Palestine is not primarily an Israeli or even Jewish issue, but the issue of our time that should be a concern all of humanity. I have to admit I am getting a lot from your posts and thanks for not putting up a paywall.
Thank you Malcolm. As I say to Katie and also in the article, I can see both viewpoints completely (that of the Rabbi’s and Katie’s). I have chosen my own path for my own reasons. As I explained, I have no idea what supposedly makes me Jewish except Israel’s archaic and false racial definition borrowed from those who hated Jews throughout history. People choose their identity, or should choose it and that is what Katie and the Rabbi are doing as well, which is absolutely fine. I have two issues with identity. One, is that I do not need to have a label to support suffering human beings, and two, I am quite allergic to Israel’s claims for ‘specialness’ which is shared by many Jewish communities around the world. I always want to bring to the fore the idea that nothing and no one is special in humanity. We are each unique, but no one is more ‘special’ than anyone else, and no one deserves special treatment than anyone else. This specialness complex is taken straight out of the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder and humanity has long been a slave to this (monarchies, class or cast systems, economic inequality, etc.). I have an article on my page about narcissism. You might find it interesting. Thank you for reading and for your kind comment.
Thanks for sharing your epiphany with us Avigail, the one that enabled you to stand against your pro-Israel brainwashing once in Australia. Your comments tally perfectly with those made/implied in a film I came across on X about a year ago made by an Israeli Jew on the ‘conditioning’ of the Jewish population in Israel. There were trips to Dachau for the teenagers, a constant repetition of the ‘everyone hates us’ mantra and a total blindness towards the Palestinians.
But it isn’t only in Israel where this pathological mentality has taken hold: it prevails throughout the West, anywhere in fact where there is a Jewish diaspora. But why? Why has it been so successful here too? Have we been brainwashed too by all that Jewish-inspired storytelling from Hollywood and elsewhere? Or are we now just so fearful of what the likes of the ADL and its sympathizers will do to us if we dare to stand up to Israeli bullying? Or maybe a bit of both?
If we are to stop the horrors in Palestine we need to change public opinion both inside and outside Israel.
And I’m afraid I just can’t see that happening any time soon.
As usual, many thanks for your words. I will probably read a shortened form of this at today's peace demo (pointing people to your newsletter for the full thing), as our shared humanity is the main topic I raise at them. Have a lovely weekend!
Even if every last Palestinian were shown to hate Jews, as Jews (they haven't), while I recognize that it is wrong as a matter of principle to lump all of a group of humans together, I am sure that in 1946, plenty of Jewish people didn't exactly have warm fuzzies for Germans as a whole and I don't exactly blame them.
I can assure you it was not just in 1946. As a child I was instructed that if I ever meet a person from Germany to ask them what their father did during the war. Of course people generalise. It is a normal human instinct. If a dog bit you when you were five your brain would tell you to be wary of all fury creatures on four legs. Humans survived as a species because we generalised and learned from threat. But it does not serve us now.
Many people, not only Jews, did not have warm fuzzies for Germans if they were Nazis. It is difficult to understand how many of those same people are dredging up sympathies for Zionists who seem to have many views similar to Nazis. As with the Zionist/Jewish issue, I think it is important to keep in mind that not all Germans were Nazis.
Everyone is human. I have written about why we are so messed up in other essays. My issue is not with how we are and how we have evolved to what we are, but what we can do about it, and there is a great deal we can do. If there wasn’t, there would be absolutely not point to my work as a psychotherapist.
I met two young Germans who visited Auschwitz when I was in Krakow. They were really distraught by it partly because they read all the letters that were in German. They were not Jewish, but they were victims too. I couldn't bring myself to even go to Auschwitz.
I have worked with many (non-Jewish) clients from Germany over the years. Their families went through hell beyond what you can imagine during WWII. The suffering Hitler inflicted on his own people was horrendous, and the trauma reverberates through the generations. Trauma begets trauma. We are all human, and respond to trauma and hurt in predictable ways. It is time we transcend our fearful, primitive, limited self, and started growing towards our potential. It is very doable.
I couldn't agree more. We could start with trying to deal with our problems through therapy, meditation, negotiation or anything but dropping bombs and killing each other.
Hear hear. But I think humanity is addicted to destruction. I wrote an article precisely on this a while ago. It’s here on Substack but I can’t remember the title of the top of my head It’s late and I am going to bed now Thank you so much for reading, for your comments and for your humanity.
Yet again Avigail you have given us so much to chew on, review and try and understand. Thanks for all your insightful words.
“Our shared humanity provides all the moral guidance we need. It is the most trustworthy anchor, more reliable than any religion, philosophy, or group identity, no mater how benign.”
This needs to be the our human constitution. We probably do not need any more words than this to create shared peace for all.
I see everything through our shared humanity.
In our most basic functions we last 3 minutes without air, 3 days without water and 3 weeks without food.
We are literally all the same, everywhere, well almost. Women do grow us and birth us all. That is a very significant difference.
As you summarise so well -
“I have a human body, a brain, sensations, and emotions.”
I am however, not so sure about your statements -
“It requires little imagination to connect with what it feels like to be wet, cold and hungry.”
I often lament that my fellow brothers and sisters do not have very good imaginations at all and cannot connect or do not want to connect with the pain and misery of others.
Many people in my society may never have gone without adequate food or water and never feared sleeping rough or being wet and cold.
For me, I see and feel it deeply. I can imagine it easily.
“I can viscerally relate to the terror of human beings like me who are bombed out of their homes…”
I move around my community and society and imagine seeing everything bombed and destroyed like Gaza and like Ukraine. How easy it is to wreak and destroy.
I literally spend years building large buildings and they can be ruined in a split second by the right bomb as the IDF have aptly demonstrated in our live streamed genocide for 470 days.
I am not sure others can see just how precarious everything is and can be? Change a few things and Gaza/Ukraine can be us.
“I can comprehend the psychological devastation of witnessing, or experiencing abuse by barbaric Israeli soldiers.”
I am not sure I can, the horror, the brutality, the depravity, the violence of the destruction, the cruelty on display is beyond words. Its insane.
I can only draw parallels with the cruelty and depravity I have read about from first hand accounts of Nazi war crimes. And I never ever want to lightly draw any parallels with abominable Nazi crimes but in some ways the 100 year war on Palestine is worse and what we have been witnessing of 470 days live streamed genocide of a trapped besieged people, is a holocaust, an insanity and a tragedy beyond words.
“I understand what loss feels like, and the bewildering pain of not understanding why it’s happening, or why the world stands by and does nothing to stop it.”
The whole massive cruel mess of all the insane destruction and death is bewildering and it’s not stopping anytime soon as there will be many BS excuses to recommence the offical killing with the phased ceasefire.
Thank you for your heartfelt comment. I too walk around and imagine destruction everywhere. I had a tiny taste of it in 1991 when a scud missile from northern Iraq hit about five meters from the front of the apartment block I used to live in near the centre of Tel Aviv. This was my first and only experience of war arriving in the centre of the city I lived in.
There is no comparison, but I saw the level of destruction one low-tech, primitive missile can do. It is beyond my comprehension what the Palestinians have been experiencing, not just since 10/2023 but for decades. Back in 1991 I was so shocked by the experience, the sound of the missile hitting the ground, the sound of the patriot missiles that failed to intercept it, the shockwave through the walls and then the rubble everywhere. By some strange miracle the flat I lived in with my ex husband was the only one in our block that did not suffer even a scratch. The rest of the building suffered considerable damage. I couldn’t leave the flat for two weeks. It was years later, in Australia, that I finally got over the visceral trauma reaction I developed which was triggered by the sound of fireworks, which sound very much like missiles. Every child in Gaza has been through a million times worse than this.
I served in the military and was no stranger to the sounds of live ammunition, artillery, the sound of shells fired from tanks, or sonic booms from fighter-jets. But seeing your street flattened, buildings, shops, destroyed by a missile is a real shock.
The buildings you helped build, the streets they line, feel so permanent to us, and as you describe, in minutes they can be brought down into a pile of rubble. A home that meant so much more than just a shelter to those who lived in it, suddenly disappearing, is beyond comprehension. Israel knows precisely the psychological harm it is doing to the Palestinians. This genocide was never intended just to destroy infrastructure and kill people, It is intended to hurt them emotionally. Israel is vile.
You said you were not sure about my comment on imagination because you think people don’t imagine and basically avoid. I agree with you. I guess my writing is sometimes a combination of wishful thinking and an appeal perhaps. I do know that those who avoid are not likely to read my articles or anything on the topic except the manicured, predigested crap the mainstream media feed people. People read and research when they already have the openness and willingness to find out. I am not depressed, just deeply disappointed in our species. We have such potential, and this is what we are doing…
Thank you so much for taking the time to read my essays and comment. It means a lot to me. It reminds me also that there are so many good, empathetic human beings among us too.
Crikey, a scud missile very, very close. That and having served do give you much greater insight than the majority of us in the “western” world.
The closet I have been is firing rifles and I imagine the lightening strikes that shake the house must be something like air strikes and artillery landing. One is nature letting fly randomly, the other deliberate cruel sadistic military murder by man.
Agreed, we can do SO much better… and yet we don’t.
Much of it I see as our entrenched unaccountable manipulated by the elite power structures. Ha, a rant for another day.
“Israel is vile” certainly is a profound statement, when placed just the context of reading all your other essays.
I think your first hand experience of literally everything in and your experience out of Israel places you in a unique position to help guide us all.
I urge you use your first hand experience examples, just like scud missile story, to really show just how deep and far at a human level you really do seem to see and understand the vile Israel cult.
Wow, quite a statement to make, but you know far more than I to be able to make it. Chow and peace.
It is OK to differ and it is not difference itself that is the problem. What I have a problem with is the destructiveness, the killings and the psychopathic exploitation, discrimination and torture. Differing can be a source of enrichment and deeper relationships, but it is not the choice humanity is making. Humanity is choosing to use difference as an excuse for cruelty.
And, to add a small twist to this whole article that mentioned Rabbi Shapiro and his comments, I first heard Rabbi Shapiro say exactly that while being interviewed on The Katie Halper Show, sometime earlier last year.
Avigail disassembles the core deceit of Israeli-style settler-colonialism and indeed all its previous incarnations. In the not so distant past, Protestant Unionists in the occupied six counties of Ireland justified hurling abuse and threats at young catholic children on their way to primary school in Belfast by citing their perceived status as victims of a Catholic conspiracy to annihilate their culture and religion. I have always been astonished, during trips to the Occupied West Bank, at the genuine lack of bitterness towards Israelis from most Palestinians I spoke with. Contrast this with the casual bigotry and violence of the Settlers and most of Israeli society towards their victims. Unfortunately, you cannot defeat these criminals via harsh language. Broad spectrum economic sanctions designed to literally destroy the Israeli economy is the only lever these miserable excuses for human beings will ever understand.
And the only thing that might eventually stop Israel’s settler-colonialist expansion and genocide.
Thank you for sharing this. I learn something new from your essays every time
Thank you. It’s so nice to hear and I am so grateful to you for reading.
Thank you Avigail for another thought provoking and enlightening post and for sharing your exchange with Katie Halper. It seems that many critics of zionism in North America like Katie base their stance on honouring the victims of two millennia of European anti-semitism and its culmination in the Holocaust, and thus find it important to maintain a type of Jewish identity that separates itself from a racist and violent apartheid state that uses these historical tragedies as cover. However I do agree that the current genocide in Palestine is not primarily an Israeli or even Jewish issue, but the issue of our time that should be a concern all of humanity. I have to admit I am getting a lot from your posts and thanks for not putting up a paywall.
Thank you Malcolm. As I say to Katie and also in the article, I can see both viewpoints completely (that of the Rabbi’s and Katie’s). I have chosen my own path for my own reasons. As I explained, I have no idea what supposedly makes me Jewish except Israel’s archaic and false racial definition borrowed from those who hated Jews throughout history. People choose their identity, or should choose it and that is what Katie and the Rabbi are doing as well, which is absolutely fine. I have two issues with identity. One, is that I do not need to have a label to support suffering human beings, and two, I am quite allergic to Israel’s claims for ‘specialness’ which is shared by many Jewish communities around the world. I always want to bring to the fore the idea that nothing and no one is special in humanity. We are each unique, but no one is more ‘special’ than anyone else, and no one deserves special treatment than anyone else. This specialness complex is taken straight out of the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder and humanity has long been a slave to this (monarchies, class or cast systems, economic inequality, etc.). I have an article on my page about narcissism. You might find it interesting. Thank you for reading and for your kind comment.
I love your writing. You raise a lot of questions and ways of looking at ourselves that I find helpful and informative.
Thank you Susan. It means a lot.
Thanks for sharing your epiphany with us Avigail, the one that enabled you to stand against your pro-Israel brainwashing once in Australia. Your comments tally perfectly with those made/implied in a film I came across on X about a year ago made by an Israeli Jew on the ‘conditioning’ of the Jewish population in Israel. There were trips to Dachau for the teenagers, a constant repetition of the ‘everyone hates us’ mantra and a total blindness towards the Palestinians.
But it isn’t only in Israel where this pathological mentality has taken hold: it prevails throughout the West, anywhere in fact where there is a Jewish diaspora. But why? Why has it been so successful here too? Have we been brainwashed too by all that Jewish-inspired storytelling from Hollywood and elsewhere? Or are we now just so fearful of what the likes of the ADL and its sympathizers will do to us if we dare to stand up to Israeli bullying? Or maybe a bit of both?
If we are to stop the horrors in Palestine we need to change public opinion both inside and outside Israel.
And I’m afraid I just can’t see that happening any time soon.
We need to stop living in fear. Thank you for reading and for your thoughtful comment. It’s late here, so until next time.
As usual, many thanks for your words. I will probably read a shortened form of this at today's peace demo (pointing people to your newsletter for the full thing), as our shared humanity is the main topic I raise at them. Have a lovely weekend!
Thank you Karl, and I am honoured that you think some of my words have a place in your peace demo. Hope you have a good weekend too.
Another excellent article.
Multiple perspectives, thought provoking, yet remains laser-sharp and clear.
Thank you Samer. Your feedback means a lot to me.
Excellent 👌👍
Even if every last Palestinian were shown to hate Jews, as Jews (they haven't), while I recognize that it is wrong as a matter of principle to lump all of a group of humans together, I am sure that in 1946, plenty of Jewish people didn't exactly have warm fuzzies for Germans as a whole and I don't exactly blame them.
I can assure you it was not just in 1946. As a child I was instructed that if I ever meet a person from Germany to ask them what their father did during the war. Of course people generalise. It is a normal human instinct. If a dog bit you when you were five your brain would tell you to be wary of all fury creatures on four legs. Humans survived as a species because we generalised and learned from threat. But it does not serve us now.
Many people, not only Jews, did not have warm fuzzies for Germans if they were Nazis. It is difficult to understand how many of those same people are dredging up sympathies for Zionists who seem to have many views similar to Nazis. As with the Zionist/Jewish issue, I think it is important to keep in mind that not all Germans were Nazis.
Absolutely. At the same time, the victims are also only human.
Everyone is human. I have written about why we are so messed up in other essays. My issue is not with how we are and how we have evolved to what we are, but what we can do about it, and there is a great deal we can do. If there wasn’t, there would be absolutely not point to my work as a psychotherapist.
I am a cat.
I know. I can see from your name and photo… 😊
I met two young Germans who visited Auschwitz when I was in Krakow. They were really distraught by it partly because they read all the letters that were in German. They were not Jewish, but they were victims too. I couldn't bring myself to even go to Auschwitz.
I have worked with many (non-Jewish) clients from Germany over the years. Their families went through hell beyond what you can imagine during WWII. The suffering Hitler inflicted on his own people was horrendous, and the trauma reverberates through the generations. Trauma begets trauma. We are all human, and respond to trauma and hurt in predictable ways. It is time we transcend our fearful, primitive, limited self, and started growing towards our potential. It is very doable.
I couldn't agree more. We could start with trying to deal with our problems through therapy, meditation, negotiation or anything but dropping bombs and killing each other.
Hear hear. But I think humanity is addicted to destruction. I wrote an article precisely on this a while ago. It’s here on Substack but I can’t remember the title of the top of my head It’s late and I am going to bed now Thank you so much for reading, for your comments and for your humanity.
Yet again Avigail you have given us so much to chew on, review and try and understand. Thanks for all your insightful words.
“Our shared humanity provides all the moral guidance we need. It is the most trustworthy anchor, more reliable than any religion, philosophy, or group identity, no mater how benign.”
This needs to be the our human constitution. We probably do not need any more words than this to create shared peace for all.
I see everything through our shared humanity.
In our most basic functions we last 3 minutes without air, 3 days without water and 3 weeks without food.
We are literally all the same, everywhere, well almost. Women do grow us and birth us all. That is a very significant difference.
As you summarise so well -
“I have a human body, a brain, sensations, and emotions.”
I am however, not so sure about your statements -
“It requires little imagination to connect with what it feels like to be wet, cold and hungry.”
I often lament that my fellow brothers and sisters do not have very good imaginations at all and cannot connect or do not want to connect with the pain and misery of others.
Many people in my society may never have gone without adequate food or water and never feared sleeping rough or being wet and cold.
For me, I see and feel it deeply. I can imagine it easily.
“I can viscerally relate to the terror of human beings like me who are bombed out of their homes…”
I move around my community and society and imagine seeing everything bombed and destroyed like Gaza and like Ukraine. How easy it is to wreak and destroy.
I literally spend years building large buildings and they can be ruined in a split second by the right bomb as the IDF have aptly demonstrated in our live streamed genocide for 470 days.
I am not sure others can see just how precarious everything is and can be? Change a few things and Gaza/Ukraine can be us.
“I can comprehend the psychological devastation of witnessing, or experiencing abuse by barbaric Israeli soldiers.”
I am not sure I can, the horror, the brutality, the depravity, the violence of the destruction, the cruelty on display is beyond words. Its insane.
I can only draw parallels with the cruelty and depravity I have read about from first hand accounts of Nazi war crimes. And I never ever want to lightly draw any parallels with abominable Nazi crimes but in some ways the 100 year war on Palestine is worse and what we have been witnessing of 470 days live streamed genocide of a trapped besieged people, is a holocaust, an insanity and a tragedy beyond words.
“I understand what loss feels like, and the bewildering pain of not understanding why it’s happening, or why the world stands by and does nothing to stop it.”
The whole massive cruel mess of all the insane destruction and death is bewildering and it’s not stopping anytime soon as there will be many BS excuses to recommence the offical killing with the phased ceasefire.
Very depressing.
Thank you for your heartfelt comment. I too walk around and imagine destruction everywhere. I had a tiny taste of it in 1991 when a scud missile from northern Iraq hit about five meters from the front of the apartment block I used to live in near the centre of Tel Aviv. This was my first and only experience of war arriving in the centre of the city I lived in.
There is no comparison, but I saw the level of destruction one low-tech, primitive missile can do. It is beyond my comprehension what the Palestinians have been experiencing, not just since 10/2023 but for decades. Back in 1991 I was so shocked by the experience, the sound of the missile hitting the ground, the sound of the patriot missiles that failed to intercept it, the shockwave through the walls and then the rubble everywhere. By some strange miracle the flat I lived in with my ex husband was the only one in our block that did not suffer even a scratch. The rest of the building suffered considerable damage. I couldn’t leave the flat for two weeks. It was years later, in Australia, that I finally got over the visceral trauma reaction I developed which was triggered by the sound of fireworks, which sound very much like missiles. Every child in Gaza has been through a million times worse than this.
I served in the military and was no stranger to the sounds of live ammunition, artillery, the sound of shells fired from tanks, or sonic booms from fighter-jets. But seeing your street flattened, buildings, shops, destroyed by a missile is a real shock.
The buildings you helped build, the streets they line, feel so permanent to us, and as you describe, in minutes they can be brought down into a pile of rubble. A home that meant so much more than just a shelter to those who lived in it, suddenly disappearing, is beyond comprehension. Israel knows precisely the psychological harm it is doing to the Palestinians. This genocide was never intended just to destroy infrastructure and kill people, It is intended to hurt them emotionally. Israel is vile.
You said you were not sure about my comment on imagination because you think people don’t imagine and basically avoid. I agree with you. I guess my writing is sometimes a combination of wishful thinking and an appeal perhaps. I do know that those who avoid are not likely to read my articles or anything on the topic except the manicured, predigested crap the mainstream media feed people. People read and research when they already have the openness and willingness to find out. I am not depressed, just deeply disappointed in our species. We have such potential, and this is what we are doing…
Thank you so much for taking the time to read my essays and comment. It means a lot to me. It reminds me also that there are so many good, empathetic human beings among us too.
Crikey, a scud missile very, very close. That and having served do give you much greater insight than the majority of us in the “western” world.
The closet I have been is firing rifles and I imagine the lightening strikes that shake the house must be something like air strikes and artillery landing. One is nature letting fly randomly, the other deliberate cruel sadistic military murder by man.
Agreed, we can do SO much better… and yet we don’t.
Much of it I see as our entrenched unaccountable manipulated by the elite power structures. Ha, a rant for another day.
“Israel is vile” certainly is a profound statement, when placed just the context of reading all your other essays.
I think your first hand experience of literally everything in and your experience out of Israel places you in a unique position to help guide us all.
I urge you use your first hand experience examples, just like scud missile story, to really show just how deep and far at a human level you really do seem to see and understand the vile Israel cult.
Wow, quite a statement to make, but you know far more than I to be able to make it. Chow and peace.
Human beings by nature will never cease to differ.
It is OK to differ and it is not difference itself that is the problem. What I have a problem with is the destructiveness, the killings and the psychopathic exploitation, discrimination and torture. Differing can be a source of enrichment and deeper relationships, but it is not the choice humanity is making. Humanity is choosing to use difference as an excuse for cruelty.
And, to add a small twist to this whole article that mentioned Rabbi Shapiro and his comments, I first heard Rabbi Shapiro say exactly that while being interviewed on The Katie Halper Show, sometime earlier last year.