‘Exiting Zionism’ — a former Israeli’s awakening
▻https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/exiting-zionism-a-former-israelis-awakening
Cet article est particulièrement intéressant parce qu’il explique l’équivalent du philosemitisme sectaire qui constitue l’idéologie et la raison d’être de l’état allemand depuis Merkel.
Le sionisme du type israeliste (cf. le documentaire « Israelism ») a besoin du philosemitisme allemand et vice versa.
Les deux sont tout aussi intolérants. En Allemagne on pratique désormais un nouveau #Berufsverbot contre les personnes réfractaires à l’idéologie sioniste et les critiques de l’état d’Israël. En trente et quelques annés depuis la disparition du bloc de l’Est il a bien fallu trouver un remplaçant pour l’anticommunisme déchu. Merci Israël, merci Likoud, avec la nouvelle définition de l’antisemitisme revue et corrigée vous venez de nous faire un beau cadeau.
12.5.2022 by Avigail Abarbanel - Avigail Abarbanel left Israel because she saw no future other than “a life by the sword.”
This article is adapted from a talk last fall by author and psychotherapist Avigail Abarbanel to the Kairos Puget Sound Coalition. A Q-and-A following the talk can be heard at that link. –Ed.
I was born in Tel Aviv in 1964 and grew up in Bat Yam in ‘downtown’ Israel — a side of Israel of which few people are aware. I don’t know if this is still the case these days, but when I started to speak out, Israel was still largely romanticised and had something of an idealised image in the Western world. Influenced by popular culture and by Israel’s sophisticated and relentless propaganda machine, the Hasbarah, many outside Israel believed the same myths that we, inside Israel, were taught at school.
We lived in one of sixteen flats in a square building over a noisy street, where the walls were thin and everyone knew what went on in everyone else’s flats. Those buildings were built in a hurry during the 1960s mostly by Palestinian labourers from Gaza, exploited as slave labour. Labour laws and employment rights were reserved for Jews only.
Walking to and from school down our densely built-up street, I watched these men build endless rows of almost identical buildings. I didn’t know who these men were. All I knew was that they were Arabs, that they were dangerous and that I should ignore them, hurry up when passing a building site and never speak to them.
We lived in better conditions than the people of the ma’abarot—the makeshift shanty towns called ‘transit camps’ that were built for the Mizrahi Jews who had arrived in the 50’s from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco and other Arab countries. My family were among the ‘whites’ of Jewish Israeli society. My father was born in Palestine to a Greek Jewish mother and a Turkish Jewish man. He was a Middle Eastern Jew with a darker skin, but he did not suffer racism because he did not speak Arabic.
My mother was the daughter of German-speaking Romanian Jews from Bucharest. Though born at the end of the war as a refugee in Bucharest, she always saw herself as white, European and superior, as did her parents when they encountered Mizrahi Jews in Israel.
I was, in effect, ‘mixed-race’ by Israeli standards, but still not doing quite as badly as the ‘black’ Jews. Not many people are aware of the Israel that I knew as a child. It was a harsh, nasty, unkind and racist place, even to its own people.
Avigail Abarbanel, as a girl in Israel, courtesy of the author.
But my real problem was in my own family. As a child I was severely abused in a number of ways for years by both my parents, each in their preferred ways. My abusers, my parents, were Jewish –not Palestinian, Muslim or Christian. At school I was repeatedly told that we, Jews, were innately more moral and ethical than all other people. But my ongoing nightmare at home made me recognise instinctively, albeit unconsciously at the time, that Jews were not special, certainly not innately more moral or ethical.
When you grow up in a schizophrenic universe with one reality on the surface and something quite different and quite nasty hidden underneath, you learn that sometimes things are not what they seem. You learn to not just trust automatically, or believe everything you are told about how things are.
Military Service 1982-1984
I served in the Israeli army between 1982 and 1984. During my service and under Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel invaded Lebanon a second time. Many years later ,as dots were starting to join up, I realised that my unit in the central headquarters of the army in Tel Aviv, and my commanding officer whom I adored, played a role in the Sabra & Shatilla massacre in September 1982.
Although I have not killed anyone myself, the kind of highly classified work I did for the army meant that I colluded with this crime against humanity, albeit as a small cog in a large machine. During that time my boyfriend, who was an officer in the armoured corps, was rewarded for murdering Palestinians in Southern Lebanon using what was then classified, new tank-mounted, heat-seeking technology provided by the U.S. Other very close friends who served in the Israeli navy indiscriminately bombed civilian buildings in Beirut from the sea, killing, traumatising and displacing many innocent Lebanese people. Other close friends who served in the air force bombed or helped bomb civilian targets in Lebanon. Israeli soldiers invaded civilian homes in the South of Lebanon, looted and defaced private homes and properties.
None of us debated or questioned the morality of this. We did not have a concept of ourselves as people who could do bad things. We believed we were in a war that we had no choice about and we were just serving our country. We believed we were doing our duty, each in our own way, to help our country survive enemies who wanted to destroy us for no other reason than us being Jews. When we managed to get a weekend pass, we did what most young people did, try to distract ourselves and avoid reality as much as possible.
Leaving Israel
I moved to Australia in November 1991 at the age of twenty-seven with my first husband who was a Captain in the Israeli army. I left Israel not because I was politically enlightened. I was a university student at the time, and one of my majors was Political Science. One day I attended a seminar organised by our department hosting the future generation of the Likud and Labour parties. They spoke to us about their respective visions for the future of Israel.
When I came home after that event, I felt depressed. It was then that I felt we had to leave.
It was obvious from listening to both parties that neither saw anything for the future of Israel except a life by the sword. I could not imagine my future in such a place where war, tension and militarism were never going to end. I was not afraid for my life or my safety. I was afraid of suffocating in Israel’s anxious pressure cooker. I did not think about the Palestinians. I only thought about myself.
My path to leaving Zionism was not a simple or straightforward one.
It was during that year at university that I came across the word ‘Palestinians’ for the first time. The professor who used that word spoke about how Palestinians were forced onto the lowest economic rung in Israeli society. I didn’t know who the Palestinians were. I then began to understand that my professor was talking about the same people I was taught to see as the inferior other, the bad Aravim, the Arabs. He was talking about the same people I was supposed to fear and despise and who I was supposed to see as my sworn enemy.
The word ‘Palestinians’ did not exist in our vocabulary or in Israel’s collective consciousness, because to call a people by their name is to recognise their existence. Israel did not recognise the existence of the Palestinian people and I did not meet a Palestinian as an equal until 2001, ten years after moving to Australia!
I know I harbored some uninformed, unnamed doubts that were percolating quietly under the surface. I describe this disjointed collection of early life impressions and experiences in my story in the book I edited, Beyond Tribal Loyalties. My path to leaving Zionism was not a simple or straightforward one.
My training in psychotherapy and the start of my journey
In 1997 I began my graduate degree in individual and relationship psychotherapy at the Jansen Newman Institute in Sydney. It was in our second year, when we trained in family therapy that I became acquainted with Murray Bowen’s work and in particular, his ‘Differentiation of Self’ theory.
What Murray Bowen called ‘differentiation of self’ is a process of growing from our primary group, usually our family of origin, and maturing into the unique individuals we have the potential to become. Bowen defined differentiation as the ‘amount of self you have in you’ and thought of it as being on a scale from the bottom up[1].
At the bottom of the scale are people who are not well-differentiated and do not possess a good sense of self. They tend to be governed by their emotions, are reactive and have trouble standing in the world as separate beings. They tend to try to remain enmeshed in their relationships and tend to be chronically fearful or anxious.
As differentiation improves and people move up the scale, their sense of self becomes more solid, they are less governed by their emotions and they are capable of living their life based on their own values without feeling anxious. They can maintain their sense of self in close relationships.
The lower the differentiation, the more likely people are to oscillate between conformity and rebellion, much like teenagers do. The higher the differentiation, the more stable people’s identity becomes across situations and groups. People feel secure to be authentically themselves and live consciously according to their beliefs and principles in relationship with others.
A year-long ‘differentiation of self’ project was a compulsory part of our degree. Amongst other things, we had to examine the values, principles and beliefs that the family has passed on to us down the generations, consciously or not, intentionally or not, and think about how these impacted on our development, identity, character and choices. We had to evaluate how much of what we were given by our family’s history was helpful to our development and how much wasn’t. Bowen believed that we have a choice about what we wished to keep and what we wanted to discard, and he wanted us to exercise this choice.
My evolution
In 1999 after my graduation, I moved to Canberra where I began working in private practice. During my first two years in practice in Canberra, two processes began to unfold at the same time. One was in my external reality and the other, internally.
In 2001 I renounced my Israeli citizenship after Ariel Sharon’s infamous march to the El Aqsa Mosque that sparked the 2nd Intifada. The only way I can described what I felt was that I was fed up with Israel’s behavior. I was angry at what looked to me like a flagrant display of unnecessary brute power by a narcissistic thug and his helpers. Renouncing my citizenship was my symbolic way of expressing my desire to not be a part of that country. I felt that although I lived far away, as long as I carried an Israeli passport and an ID card, I was still complicit in what Israel was doing. I was angry and determined, but at the same time felt shaky and fearful. I was troubled by worries about what the people at the Israeli Consulate in Sydney might have thought of me when I contacted them to inquire about renouncing my citizenship. I was fearful of being judged. My act was morally correct, but it was motivated by a feeling of rebellion, indignation and anger mixed in with a lot of self-doubt.
A few months earlier, I heard Professor Avi Shlaim speak on radio about his new book, The Iron Wall. I was deeply disturbed by what he said but ordered the book anyway. That book told me that everything I was taught and believed to be true about Israel’s history and the conflict with the Palestinian people, was in fact a lie.
Externally, Israel kept doing bad things that despite Australia’s general sympathy for Israel were still reported in the media. I began to take part in rallies that supported the Palestinian plight and began to publish opinion pieces in the Canberra Times. I was increasingly invited to be a speaker in rallies and other protest and educational events, many by trade union groups or socialist groups that were sympathetic to the Palestinian people. I was invited and welcomed as a speaker by Muslim groups and organisations all over Australia and was also invited by progressive Jewish groups, especially in Sydney who wanted to hear what I had to say. My background seemed to offer me credibility and a foot in the door.
As a result of what I was writing, I was also increasingly approached by Australian Palestinians and by people from all the Arab countries that I was raised to see as my sworn mortal enemy. This was the first time in my life that I met Palestinians and people from Arab countries as equals and really heard what they had to say. I remember thinking more than once, ‘I wonder what so and so in Israel would think if they saw me now’.
One of the people I met was Ali Kazak. Ali was at the time the Head of the Palestinian Delegation to Australia, the equivalent of an Ambassador except Palestine isn’t an independent state so they only had a ‘Delegation’.
Ali saw something in me that I was blind to at the time. In my own mind I was a nice person who cared about my fellow humans, was prepared to speak out against injustice and abuse and could empathize with human suffering. But I still did not understand the reasons for the so-called ‘conflict’ between Israel and the Palestinians, for Israel’s strong feelings against them and for the suffering of the Palestinian people. I didn’t know why they were angry with us, and I didn’t know that I was a Zionist.
Ali recognized this because he saw the same thing many times before in well-meaning Jewish people. He could see that I did not know about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and that I did not question Israel’s right to exist as an exclusively Jewish state at the expense of an entire people. He saw that I still had an unconscious sense of entitlement. In one of our meetings Ali challenged me and mentioned the word ‘colonialism’. Ali was right of course. Zionism, from what I learned at school was an idealistic, mostly socialist movement that we identified with noble values like social justice, equality, secularism and progress. Zionism was presented at school as the political manifestation of the yearning of ‘our people’ to return to ‘our’ ancestral land after 2000 years of exile and of persecution. We were taught that the land was empty and that the ‘small’ number of Arabs who did live on it were just hired peasants from other Arab countries who occupied the land but didn’t come from there. They did not really belong there but just lived there temporarily.
Regardless of who occupied the land before us, we were taught we had a right to have a state of our own, a Jewish safe haven, free from persecution. We were taught it was OK to do whatever it took to ensure our survival, that the end justified the means. There was never any discussion of the morality of this. Survival was everything. It never occurred to me to question what Zionism did or to see it for what it is, a settler-colonial project intended to replace the indigenous people of Palestine with Jews. We were given an almost water-tight simplistic narrative that was difficult to question. If pushed to the corner, the argument was that as Jews we were always under existential threat and it was ‘us or them’.
I remember feeling confused and disoriented, almost physically dizzy when Ali challenged me. I had no idea what he was talking about and I didn’t know what to say. But the seed was planted.
At the same time as my activism was developing and growing, in my psychotherapy practice I had a wave of cult-leavers who came to see me for therapy. Some had already left their groups and some were trying to leave and were being harassed in a number of ways both as a form of punishment for leaving, and as pressure to go back. As I heard the stories and listened to these clients’ struggles, I began to realize that I understood them and even identified with them more than I had expected. I found it strange and wondered about why it was that I really understood the turbulent and intensely difficult experience of leaving a cult.
I began to realize the similarities between my cult survivor clients’ psychological struggles as they were leaving their groups or contemplating leaving, and my own feelings as I was learning more and more about Zionism and Israel’s true history.
In those days I felt a lot of fear and shame. I felt like a bad person. Each time I sat down to write an article, usually in response to something Israel did, each time I was supposed to speak at a rally or attend another function with people I was raised to think of as my enemy, I felt like I was doing something terribly wrong.
My feelings were reinforced by an avalanche of hate mail I started to receive, phone calls in the middle of the night and death threats. This was something I was neither expecting nor prepared for. Others now confirmed to me that I was a bad person, a traitor to my people and that I was so bad, that I deserved to die for it. The word ‘traitor’ in particular was mentioned more times that I can count, along with ‘Nazi’, or being labelled a person ‘filled with hatred’ and the now wellknown phrase ‘self-hating Jew’. I was subjected to unsolicited amateur psychoanalysis that declared me insane or someone who was unconsciously and unfairly projecting my unresolved childhood anger against my mother on innocent Israel. I was told that by speaking out I was ‘giving ammunition to the antisemites’ thus aiding and abetting the enemies of my people, which therefore made me a member of the enemy group.
There was no doubt that these attacks were intended to silence me.
One thing I knew was that my fears and the guilt and shame I felt did not begin with these threats. They were in me before the threats began. The threats just ‘pressed those buttons’, triggered and reinforced those feelings. There was an innate recognition in me that I was crossing a line I was not supposed to cross and that I was breaking one of the most important rules I was brought up with. You can feel sympathy for others, yes, but you don’t ‘air the dirty laundry’ on our people, especially not to gentiles, even if you don’t like what Israel is doing.
Eventually the penny dropped. I realized that differentiating from my family of origin, the process I went through in the second year of my degree, was not enough. If I wanted to continue to do what I was doing without being tortured by constant fears and self-doubt, I now needed to differentiate from my entire country, the society and culture that raised me and that in important ways also shaped me.
The tension between separateness and togetherness
Bowen argued that all human beings experience a tension between ‘togetherness and separateness’ throughout their lives. On one side we are pulled by our natural need to be a part of our group and feel accepted by those who matter to us and to whom we are attached. On the other, we are pulled by our equally natural human need to develop our unique identity and reach our potential.
But why should there be a tension between belonging to a group and becoming an individual? The answer is that most human groups require sameness and conformity as the price of belonging.
My differentiation process from Israel made me look at some of the beliefs Israeli society had instilled in me. Some of these beliefs are:
Everyone has always hated us the Jews and this is unique to us. No other people is, or ever has been, as hated as we are and our suffering can never be compared to anyone else’s.
We are always under a threat of annihilation and another holocaust is imminent.
The hatred against us, ‘antisemitism’ is special and not like ‘ordinary’ racism.
All non-Jews are potentially antisemitic, even if they appear nice and friendly. NonJews cannot be trusted because one day they will turn against us again. Those who do not, will turn their backs on us and will do nothing to help us.
We are different from all other people. We are more ethical, just, moral, intelligent and by nature more democratic than any other group on Earth. That is the main reason we are hated.
The holocaust was unique. It cannot, and must never be compared with any other genocide. Learning a universal lesson from the holocaust is to deny its uniqueness and it is what antisemites do.
Israel is the only place in the world where Jews can be safe. But because everyone hates us, they do not want us to have our state so we always have to fight for its existence.
The Jews who died in the holocaust were weak. They went ‘like sheep to the slaughter’. Israel’s role is to create a powerful ‘new Jew’ who will never again be a victim.
We are a peace-loving people. All our wars were imposed on us (wars of no choice- mil’hammot ein-breira).
Our Israeli Defence Force is the most moral in the world. It’s only for defence. It never attacks without provocation. It never hurt innocent people.
Anyone who does not like Israel or who criticises it is an antisemite
It was not difficult to see why I felt such an affinity with cult-leavers. The characteristics of the Jewish Israeli belief system I grew up with are identical to the belief systems of many cults. For example:
Cults tend to believe they are special and different from the rest of the world.
Cults tend to be fearful and consider the group to always be under existential threat.
Cult members are often told the world out there is dangerous to them and the only safety for them is in and with the group.
Group members are often told they are misunderstood or hated by those outside the group.
In many cults the survival of the cult is seen as the most important value and that it must come before anything else.
Loyalty to the group is the highest value each individual can have in their life. Loyalty is absolute, even if members think the group is doing something wrong.
Typically, in cults it is not permissible to discuss with the outside world what is going on in the cult. This is considered disloyal and a threat to the group.
What I am referring to is in fact cult-psychology. Cult psychology is typical of enmeshed family-systems and it can exist in almost any context of group interaction. It does not have to be religious. It is a type of pack mentality that must have evolved in hostile conditions when humans were under constant mortal threat
There are those who are born into this kind of psychology and are indoctrinated into it as I was. And there are people who join later. Cult-psychology tends to draw to itself people who are already fearful and who are looking for clarity about reality, existence and about their purpose. They have little tolerance for ambiguity and are searching for safety by huddling together with others. If a cult was given an option to create its own state, Israel is the example of it.
It was no wonder I felt what I felt. When it came to a to a choice between universal values, which would include supporting the plight of Palestinians, and the value of loyalty to my people, I was expected to put the latter first. By not making loyalty to my people my most cherished value, I was not only a traitor but a person of extremely bad character.
Bowen was clear that physically leaving is not the same as differentiation. What I did by moving to Australia and by renouncing my citizenship, he called ‘cutting off’. Through the conscious process of differentiating from Israel, I became aware that differentiating meant leaving the group psychologically, emotionally and spiritually. I had to let go of the identity that Israel expected me to have and become my own person. But in order to liberate my individual identity from my Israeli identity, I had to go through an intense emotional struggle. It is the same struggle anyone who leaves an enmeshed cult-like group or family goes through. These groups are guilty of not allowing people to develop to their potential and in cases like Israel of forcing people to collude with, whitewash or cover up unspeakable crimes.
Conclusion
In order to recover from my trauma and earn the right to be a therapist and sit in front of clients, it was necessary for me to differentiate from my family of origin.
To work towards becoming a decent human being and not waste my life as a bystander, watching and saying nothing as a crime against humanity unfolds in front of my eyes, it was necessary for me to differentiate from my entire culture. I have made a conscious choice to replace loyalty to the group I was born into with loyalty to my own values, to universal values and to something greater than all of us.
I do not believe any one human being or group are more valuable than another. All humans desire much more than just survival. We need to work to create a world where all human beings are enabled to fulfil their potential but to do this work well and sustainably we have to have a solid sense of ourself.
[1] Kerr M., Bowen M. (1988). Family Evaluation: An Approach Based on Bowen Theory. NY: Norton.
