[News] Israel's Monopoly on Psychological Suffering
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Wed Jan 7 12:20:14 EST 2009
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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