[News] Israel's Monopoly on Psychological Suffering

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/fernandez01072009.html

January 7, 2009


Israel's Monopoly on Psychological Suffering


The Trauma Vortex

By BELÉN FERNÁNDEZ

Based on the tallies currently being produced by 
Israeli towns located in the haphazard line of 
Qassam rocket fire, it appears that the bulk of 
Israel's civilian casualties in its war on Gaza 
will once again be shock related.

This was the case in the July 2006 war on 
Lebanon, during which the Israeli Health Ministry 
reported that 4,262 wounded Israeli civilians 
were treated in hospitals; this total was broken 
down into 33 seriously wounded patients, 68 
moderately wounded, and 1,388 lightly wounded, 
with the remaining 2,773 treated for "shock and 
anxiety." The UN Commission of Inquiry on 
Lebanon, meanwhile, cited the Lebanese 
authorities' claim of 4,409 wounded Lebanese 
civilians­the only attempt at classification of 
casualties being a chart listing 56 different 
"collective massacres" conducted by Israeli 
forces during the war, with identifying labels 
such as: "Air raids struck heavily on the funeral 
procession of the victims of the previous day['s] air raids."

BBC News reported different figures in its August 
2006 civilian casualty scorecard for the war, 
according to which there were 32 seriously 
wounded Israelis, 44 moderately wounded Israelis, 
614 lightly wounded Israelis, 1,985 Israelis 
treated for shock, and 3,697 wounded Lebanese. 
Israeli casualties were thus still overwhelmingly 
shock related, while the Lebanese were still:
    * a lump sum.
    * not affected by acute stress disorders.

The same trend will most likely hold for Gaza­and 
not only because it is difficult for hospitals to 
accommodate people with heightened norepinephrine 
levels when they cannot accommodate people with missing limbs.

I awoke this past Sunday morning to find that 1 
Israeli in Sderot had been lightly wounded, 4 
Israelis had been treated for shock, and 23 
Palestinians had been killed in Gaza since 
midnight. After performing a Google search of the 
terms "Palestinians treated for shock"­which 
mainly produced articles about Israelis being 
treated for shock due to Palestinian behavior­I 
phoned a Palestinian friend in Lebanon in an 
attempt to determine why enemies of Israel did 
not enjoy the luxury of psychological conditions. 
The investigation was conducted in modified 
English, the idiomatic form on which Hassan and I 
relied for all of our communications:

ME: Do Arabs ever go to hospital for problem with head?
HASSAN: Arab he don't have head.

This hypothesis would undoubtedly have been 
endorsed by ex-Israeli premier Golda Meir, who 
might have used it to back up her argument that 
Palestinians were not real people. Other possible 
excuses for the traditional embargo on 
Palestinian shock included the following:
    * The Palestinians were used to having bombs fall on their heads.
    * It was the Palestinians' own fault that 
bombs were falling on their heads.
    * Shock had become the exclusive property of 
Israel's international sympathy campaign, as had 
the words "hail," "shower," and "barrage."

The Health section of Sunday's online edition of 
the Jerusalem Post offered some insight into the 
unique phenomenon of Israeli shock. The main 
article was entitled "Escaping the trauma 
vortex," which­although it sounded more like 
instructions for breaking down the Rafah border 
crossing­turned out to be the goal of Somatic 
Experiencing (SE), a self-healing philosophy that 
had recently been advertised in Sderot.

The article begins on a Friday morning at the 
"bomb-proofed Sderot Resiliency Center," where 
visiting SE guru Gina Ross of Los Angeles is 
presiding in front of a rapt audience of health 
care professionals and social workers. According 
to the author of the article, the meeting has 
been auspiciously timed given the fragility 
currently felt by Israelis in the vicinity of the 
Gaza Strip, most of whom are nonetheless 
described as "sleeping in on the first day of the 
weekend." A corresponding estimate of how many 
Gazans sleep in on Friday mornings is not provided.

The "upbeat" Ms. Ross describes the purpose of SE 
as replacing the "trauma vortex" with a "healing 
vortex." The trauma vortex is the result of "an 
uncompleted biological response to threat, which 
leaves the system in an excessively high level of 
arousal, with thwarted movements of defense 
frozen in time"; the healing vortex occurs when 
victims learn how to "thaw the freeze and release 
the sensory motor expressions of trauma-based 
emotions." Ross enthusiastically contends that 
the replacement process is sometimes possible in 
only a few sessions, even with years of buildup.

The SE method was developed by Dr. Peter Levine, 
who is described in the article as being the 
author of the book Taming the Tiger; it turns out 
that the book is in fact called Waking the Tiger, 
which is perhaps more appropriate in the Israeli 
context given apparent preferences for unleashing 
beasts rather than deterring them. In addition to 
a host of other titles, Ross is the Middle East 
senior trainer for Levine's Foundation for Human 
Enrichment, as well as a self-proclaimed expert 
in overcoming "the insecurity and difficulties of 
exile"­her family having fled their home in Syria 
and later their home in Lebanon. Familiarity with 
exile might prove useful in the event that Gaza 
is one day deemed to be deserving of human 
enrichment, or somatic experience in general.

Ms. Ross has determined that Israelis, 
Palestinians, and Israeli-Arabs all suffer from 
collective trauma vortices­especially the second 
group, whose vortex "has been spiraling out of 
control for a while." Thus, although the Gazans 
are permitted in this case to suffer 
psychologically, they are doomed to fail even at 
their own suffering, as it is not possible to 
implement a collective healing vortex while an 
army financed by the global superpower is overhead and underfoot.

The SE method does, however, provide innovative 
opportunities for such international notables as:
    * Barack Obama, who is in danger of 
developing a trauma vortex due to repeated 
reliance on the "flight" option in fight or 
flight situations­namely AIPAC addresses and opinions on the war on Gaza.
    * MK Shai Hermesh, resident of a kibbutz 
close to the Gazan border, who­Tzipi Livni 
explained to a meeting of foreign diplomats in 
Sderot on 28 December­"has had to almost live in 
a shelter for weeks now." Livni declared the 
situation "unbearable," although this description 
most likely did not apply to the situation of 
Palestinian MPs held indefinitely in Israeli administrative detention.

Gina Ross' assertion that "peace can only come 
from balanced collective nervous systems" might 
also prove revelatory for other members of the 
international community, such as those under the 
impression that peace can only come from 
preventing Israel's disassembly of Palestine into 
noncontiguous enclaves. Instead of fretting over 
what percentage of remaining Palestinian 
territories should be permitted on the Israeli 
side of soaring cement walls, Middle East envoy 
Tony Blair might thus focus on more concrete 
issues like building emotional resilience into 
the roadmap for peace. Blair has already 
demonstrated a strong commitment to resilience, 
by choking back tears while discussing letters 
received from parents whose sons have died in 
Iraq but who nonetheless retain their conviction in the rightness of war.

(In keeping with the global distribution of 
power, Iraqis­like Gazans­have been judged 
unworthy of psychological victimhood, which is 
reserved for coalition troops, their families, 
and people who duct tape their windows to guard 
against WMD attack. Incidentally, the fourth item 
in the list of results returned by a Google 
search of the terms "Iraqis treated for shock" 
was a Haaretz article from 2007, entitled "Qassam 
fired from Gaza hits Sderot; man treated for shock.")

Near the end of the Jerusalem Post article on 
escaping the trauma vortex, an Israeli SE 
practitioner at the Sderot meeting declares her 
intention to host an emotional first-aid workshop 
for citizens of Jerusalem experiencing secondary­i.e. vicarious­trauma.

Moving on to the second headline in the Health 
section of JPost.com, I was informed that: 
"Emotional hot lines see sharp rise in callers 
from the South," most of whom were experiencing 
repercussions of the imbalance of the Gazan 
collective nervous system. According to the 
spokeswoman for the hotline run by Natal­Israel's 
Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War­a 
number of parents were concerned that their 
children were not eating or drinking; such 
behavior would have been less of a concern in 
Gaza, given the lack of food and drink.

Natal's advice to those battling the trauma vortex included:
    * moderately abstaining from news reports.
    * finding "light entertainment to ease them 
through the stress." (The word "entertainment" 
was underlined; when I clicked on it I was 
transported to a website in Spanish where I was 
invited to download popular tunes to my cellular phone.)
    * encouraging small children to spend time in 
their bomb shelters even when there were not air 
raid sirens, such that the shelters would become 
associated with things other than fear of death.

A visit to the Natal website itself revealed that 
many of the hotline callers were from northern 
Israel and were "experiencing flashbacks from the 
Second Lebanon War." Condoleezza Rice, meanwhile, 
was also experiencing flashbacks to this 
particular war, and repeated that a ceasefire 
should never allow a return to the status quo ante, i.e. Gaza.

The Natal website describes the residents of 
southern Israel as "living in an abnormal 
reality" and provides them with coping tools, 
including a list of exercises entitled "Muscle 
Relaxation For Children." In one of the exercises 
listed, parents are advised to have their 
children pretend that: "A little elephant is 
coming closer; in a moment it's going to step on 
your stomach! Tighten your stomach; make your 
muscles as tight as you can. The elephant is 
gone; now your stomach can relax again."

Alternate therapeutic activities are explored on 
SderotMedia.com, which features a video of a 
small boy in a black yarmulke intently decorating 
a Qassam rocket he has fashioned out of a plastic 
bottle, paper, and masking tape. A more complex 
juxtaposition of innocence and war can of course 
be found in the photos of Israeli children 
decorating missiles en route to Lebanon in 2006, 
but the director of the SderotMedia video does 
cover additional symbolic ground in the final 
scene, in which the decorated Qassam is placed in 
the middle of the floor with a baby in a purple 
sweater seated a short distance away. The baby 
eyes the Qassam for a few seconds, then crawls 
over to it and knocks the rocket over.

Further navigation of the website produced an 
article to accompany the video, entitled 
"Environmental Friendly Kassams." In the article, 
the mother of the Qassam decorator explains that 
"the encounter with threat through creation" 
provides a sense of security to the children of 
Sderot (or at least to the 70-94% of them that 
SderotMedia diagnoses with Post Traumatic Stress 
Disorder). The author of the piece supplies more 
relevant background information, such as that the 
"Color Red" alert is as familiar a concept to 
these children as the word "Dad," and that the 
kids "don't really care if the IDF is the one who 
began with the response"­an example that the rest of the world might follow.

After viewing another video of Sderot­this one 
starring a woman in a nightgown trembling in her 
house­I returned one last time to the Health 
section of the Jerusalem Post's website to find 
an article entitled "Psychologically Speaking: 
Feeling sad." This piece explored other potential 
reasons aside from rocket hail that Israelis 
might feel down, such as seasonal affective 
disorder (SAD), brought on by winter, and reverse 
seasonal affective disorder, brought on by summer.

Most Palestinians in Gaza at the moment 
presumably do not have enough spare time to be 
affected by seasonal changes, nor are the 
melatonin supplements recommended to combat SAD 
likely to be available on humanitarian aid 
trucks. Regular explosions, however, might offer 
Gazans access to some of the other suggested 
treatments, such as bright light therapy. The 
Israeli government, meanwhile, might consider 
ceasing the exploitation of its citizens' genuine 
psychological torment in order to justify 
existential battles against its neighbors.

Belén Fernández is currently completing a book 
entitled Coffee with Hezbollah, which chronicles 
the 2-month hitchhiking journey through Lebanon 
that she and Amelia Opali?ska conducted in the 
aftermath of the July 2006 war. She can be 
reached at <mailto:belengarciabernal at gmail.com>belengarciabernal at gmail.com.




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