| Bill
Slaughter
Paper presented at conference:
Bill (Wm D) Slaughter MD MA
SUMMARY Scapegoating is the universal human tendency to project unacknowledged negative attributes, or "shadow" material, onto others. The fascists did this in Europe to the 1940's; afterwards, US policies in Palestine have produced decades of extremely destructive consequences, mostly unacknowledged by the collective American psyche. As part of coping, the negative quality "terrorism" is projected wholly onto others. The American collective consciousness holds equality for all, regardless of race or religion, as a core value. In Israel/Palestine, one group is privileged by ethnicity over another. Many around the world are keenly aware of this, a core driver of the shift over recent decades from admiration of the US as a liberating supporter of the rights of all to disillusionment--in Israel/Palestine because of support for ethnic privilege. This American shadow in Palestine is not generally acknowledged in the US collective consciousness. After acknowledging briefly various downsides of US Israel/Palestine policies, one specific area of negative consequences is focused on in the paper, by giving results of a literature search for academic articles on the mental health of people of Palestinian ethnicity regardless of geographical location. Examples are given from articles probing the mental health sequelae of political violence, an aspect of Palestinian experience to which American policies have strongly contributed. Various data on psychological trauma are cited, including instances of 99% child/adolescent Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder prevalence. Lack of information about large groups of the population, especially those awaiting return home from refugee camps just outside Palestine, is regretted as an important example of this shadow area of US collective consciousness. Though Palestinian resilience is clearly identified in studies, healing on a much wider scale, for all peoples with ties to the region, will come as the American collective psyche acknowledges the many downsides of its actions there--as is increasingly happening within the US. What if 25% of our children had seen a friend killed by an occupying military power? What would it be like if 13% of the children in your neighborhood had been shot by rubber bullets? What if 84% of American kids had personally watched their community bombarded? What if powerful countries from another culture gave a minority group--which owned six percent of land--more than half of the land in the US, then that group took control of 78% and then 100% of the land, offered to give 10-15 or so percent back-- with the caveat that they could reinvade when they felt it was necessary?
1. Scapegoating, Palestine and the American collective psyche A challenge of human psychology is the question what to do with aspects of ourselves which we would rather not acknowledge. In our overarching Judeo-Christian-Muslim monotheistic tradition, a description is given, in the root text the Torah, of an ancient practice, on the Day of Atonement each year, of symbolically placing peoples' negative attributes, collectively, on a goat and then sending the animal--laden with that symbolic collective burden--out to perish in the wilderness. The community is thereby symbolically cleansed of those negative attributes. In English now, of course, we use the term "scapegoating" to denote the process of projecting a person's or group's negative or "shadow" qualities--unwanted and usually only scarcely acknowledged (if at all)--onto others. This is of course a dynamic in most conflict between ethnicities. This pertains to Palestine in at least two very different but fatefully linked steps in recent decades. The first major step was the upsurge in the 1930's and 40's of millennia-long scapegoating of Jewish people, with the European fascists' diabolical belief in superhuman identity fueled by projection of the reciprocal quality of sub-humanness onto Jewish and many other peoples, leading of course to wide-ranging state terrorism in an effort to clean society of lesser beings. The second fateful step was the subsequent decision by the Christian countries of the early United Nations, led by the colonial powers--the countries which controlled the world for hundreds of years--deciding from afar that large numbers of people who were Jewish should be inserted into largely defenseless Palestine. The terror visited during the process which soon unfolded of cleaning by ethnicity people who were indigenous to Palestine for millennia during that takeover by newcomers was widely unacknowledged, certainly in my country, the United States. The terror visited on the people of Palestine was by no means the same as the terror visited on peoples the European fascists saw as sub-human, but was quite shocking nonetheless to a region which hadn't been directly affected much by the fascist agenda in the foreign lands of Europe. The ghastly quality of "terrorism", unacknowledged in the American and general Western collective consciousnesses as a central reality of the late 1940's takeover of Palestine (until recently, such as by Pappe's "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine") was then projected on people of Palestinian ethnicity when they resisted cultural obliteration and fought for land and rights. Most of you know all this very well, much better than I. However this paper is not so much about Palestine as it is about the collective psyche of my county, the United States of America. Massive decades-long US funding allowing mistreatment of Palestinians--not with that express aim but certainly with that effect--is seen by myriad people world-wide as clearly counter to core American values of fairness and equality for all regardless of ethnicity, race or religion. This longstanding and, in most parts of the world, well-known ethnicity-based action is clearly a core reason for the gradual shift worldwide from respect for the US as liberating supporter of rights for all to seeing America as a supporter of status quo oppression, based in Palestine on ethnicity. Unfortunately, the American collective psyche does not comprehend this shift in perception by others. It is difficult on any level--individual, group, national and so on--to let shadow qualities into consciousness, that is, to accept initially unknown and often unwanted aspects of self or group identity. In this specific case, it is hard for the US to understand its primary role in the ethnicity-based privilege system in place in Palestine now for decades. Geographically remote for so long with the moats of the great oceans on either side of the country, Americans are pushed by some political leaders to fear the rest of the world. We are told others hate American core values such as freedom and equality. This is exactly opposite of the case in Palestine, where a core objection to US policy is precisely the fact that America's vouchsafing of ethnicity-based privilege is at direct odds with our core values of equality and self-determination. Within the US, the overtly expressed reasoning of this is of course support for a Jewish homeland. This support of one ethnicity at such thoroughly destructive expense of another would have been unlikely if the displaced people of Palestine had been better known and ethnically closer to Americans, just as the UN partition of '47 would likely not have succeeded even a few years later when the majority of the world's people were out from under direct colonial subjugation of the colonial powers who founded and controlled the early UN, and had been able to vote in that world body at that time. So the purpose of this paper is to be one example of a wakening on this issue within the US collective psyche, gradually acknowledging the downside of US funding of ethnicity-based privilege in Palestine. The Carter, Mearsheimer/Walt and Pappe books recently published have been watersheds in this movement towards collective awareness, increasing knowledge of the second of the two linked fateful steps noted above, in context of an American culture robustly knowledgeable about the prior, linked step, the European fascist experience including the Holocaust. My aim here is to add to the discourse by highlighting one aspect of our collective shadow having do to with my field, mental health. Tie-building between the US and Palestine exists in several social domains (religious, education, healthcare and other cultural exchanges) and will certainly continue; this is meant as a contribution both regarding clinical-level mental health information and more broadly as commentary on collective shadow and consciousness perspectives. Large-scale US funding and practices (e.g. tax and military laws solely privileging Israel) supporting a system of ethnic privilege (that is, Israeli ethnic preference practices) has a big downside for the US and can be seen as counter to basic American values of equality and inclusion regardless of ethnicity. At a minimum, it is in American interests to respect all involved, as lasting peace--in the area and around the world--depends on acknowledging relationships of all peoples with longstanding meaningful historical ties to the area (Jewish and Palestinian peoples directly, other Christians and Muslims more broadly in perhaps less direct but also obviously longstanding and fundamental ways). America very much wants to see itself as acting for the good, with little or no negative or shadow downside in actions around the world. Any downside to US support for the takeover of Palestine in the 1940's and to the subsequent military/social power structure there is difficult for the US collective psyche to acknowledge--similar to our general denial of negative results from other overt and covert US actions around the world which are opposed to our core values (e.g. overthrowing democratic governments). A prime recent example of this is the struggle for framing American public understanding of the 9/11 attacks--the mainstream public position seems to be that the attacks were on core US ways of life, including values such as freedom and equality, and that no US actions abroad should in any way be examined as possibly relevant or related.
2. Some general aspects of America's shadow in Palestine There are of course many unacknowledged downsides or shadow aspects to US policy in Palestine, such as a very narrowly defined support for democracy, the hugely unequal "two state" approach, ethnic privilege, healthcare and nutrition crises, and wholesale projection of "terrorism" onto others. A. Discrepancies regarding democracy There is a disconnect between the core American valuing of representative democracy on the one hand and the exclusion of large sections of Palestinian society from US-sponsored negotiations and elections on the other. Being acted on by state authority without representation is a core dislike of Americans. "No Taxation without Representation!" was a rallying protest cry of US activists against paying taxes to the far off King, when America was a British colony in the 1700's. During recent Iraqi elections, American newspapers carried stories on arrangements made for a few Iraqis in the US to vote, at such a distance from their native land. Zionists point to Arab voting within Israel as one reason all should support that state. And until people voted the wrong way, the US praised Palestinian elections. The major "shadow" unacknowledged by the US in this area is the non-participation of the approximately two-thirds of Palestinian who aren't geographically situated to participate in government elections nor included in talks which may be very close now to give up on the fundamental issue holding their fates by a thread for decades, the UN-vouchsafed right of return home. If all the Palestinian population regardless of location participated in voting and negotiations, it is unlikely that the right of return would be negotiated away or that individuals supporting this position would garner much support. US support for these electoral and negotiating processes looks like manipulation of putting a democratic face on giving up fundamental rights. If the US collective consciousness continues not to understand these inconsistencies, US policy won't be questioned from within the US. B. State/statelet dynamics Given our American valuing of equality as a core value, a "two state solution" sounds wonderful to the US collective. After all, "two states" must mean a fifty-fifty sort of outcome, fair between Israel and Palestine. In the shadow stay of course issues such as difference in arms and land. The strength of the Israeli military, most powerful in the Middle East and with the constantly unacknowledged potential for very quick decimation of the region's population centers through the nuclear arsenal is clearly head and shoulders above Palestinian and other groups and countries regionally. In the US psyche Israeli fears of being 'pushed into the sea' are much more well known than Palestinian actualities of being expelled. The 78%-22% split in land control in Palestine from 1948 to 1967, with something perhaps more in the 85-90% to 10-15% range likely soon, is simply not known well in the US, as maps, including of many discontiguous Palestinian territory plans, are simply not well publicized in the US. Two states, fifty-fifty and fair is the overt common American understanding; a more realistic view of the situation--as one party being an actual sovereign state with defensible borders and nuclear weapons which would continue to easily dominate an oft-reinvaded statelet--stays in the shadow. C. Ethnic privilege Privileging one ethnic group above another happens in many ways around the world, but is against core values of the collective American psyche. In Israel/Palestine, support for ethnic privilege has been a non-acknowledged aspect of US policy for decades, supported massively by American funding unparalleled elsewhere in the world. (Mearsheimer and Walt report 1/6 of all direct US foreign aid goes to Israel; this differentially supports the five or so million people of the dominant ethnic group there--out of a world of now roughly 6,725 million souls.) The US collective consciousness for instance does not know much about the differential right of entry, citizenship and return based on ethnicity, nor about everyday practices which are unfavorable to people who are not Jewish. Moving this material from the unknown shadow reaches of our American collective psyche to general public awareness might well not sit well with general American values of equality. D. Health and nutrition crises Sometimes healthcare inequalities in Palestine/Israel are recognized in the US media, but mostly not. Little play is give to issues such as those long noted by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, e.g. "...systematic and ongoing severe violations... of the right to health in the Occupied Territories..." and "...complete fragmentation and increase in violations of medical human rights". Deaths of dozens of women giving birth at checkpoints, with approximately 1/3 of the babies born there not surviving has received little attention. The New York Review of Books did in 2007 publish a review of healthcare crises in the area (Horton). Also last year, the UN Committee on Nutrition characterized the food and general humanitarian situation in Palestine as "grave", and then in May of this year, an UNRWA/World Food Program Food and Agriculture survey found an increase in the percentage of population without secure food to 38% for people in Palestine outside the Israeli borders, with over half of the population in that dire situation specifically in Gaza. Food prices were up overall by 15%, flour about 70%, in context of falling incomes for many and a 40% income drop for the poorest. 89% of the population reported decreasing quality of food used, with 75% decreasing quantity as compared to the beginning of 2008. E. Simplistic projection of "terrorism" onto others Clearly this is a major topic in and of itself, with other papers in this conference covering this topic more than mine here. Just one example is that the only mention of the refugees outside Palestine to be quickly offered to the general American consciousness recently was the fighting between militants and the Lebanese Army a few months ago in the Nahr Al-Bared/Cold River camp. This was with no mention of how or why the camp came into being, how many camps and refugees there are (the return of whom would do away with all the camps) and any other aspects of the issues forming the context for the conflict there. So of course terror involving Palestine stays as shadow material for we Americans, and the ghastly attribute of 'terrorism' was in this instance yet again projected wholly outward during the Nahr Al-Bared coverage. The possibility of course is that if understanding grows in the US psyche regarding Palestine, including of those refugees who are immediately outside waiting--that is, if this knowledge moves from being unknown to generally being known in the US collective consciousness--natural American sympathy for the 'underdog' and concern for equality could kick in.
3. The mental health aspect of America's shadow in Palestine Now let me focus a bit on our field, that of mental health. My purpose here is to add another voice in the US acknowledging downsides of our policies in Palestine, by focusing on the extensive literature having to do with mental health sequelae of political violence, among the most destructive consequences of American funding. Keeping this knowledge outside our collective consciousness hurts America as well as the Palestinian people directly affected, by cutting off from ourselves the experience of some of our co-inhabitants of the earth--from a region rich in meaning to most Americans, the place of origin of the teachings on compassion which are a core component to mainstream US spiritual and religious belief. Additionally we are harmed when we don't understand that others in the world are upset that we have funded ethnic privilege in Palestine for decades. Many people have been toiling for decades now in perhaps the most challenging mental health environment on earth to articulate in many ways the psychic experience of people of Palestinian ethnicity, especially in the West Bank and Gaza, as a parallel activity to providing direct services there. If human suffering of any sort deserves concern and compassion, this includes Palestine; special appreciation should go to all those individuals who have been involved in articulating these experiences into literature for the understanding of the rest of us. I'm simply trying to sketch one overview here from one American perspective, as a step towards doing so more broadly for others who should know and care more about this shadow of our spending. Literature search To get an overview of sequelae of terror/violence resulting from US policy in the region, a literature search was performed of English-language psychology and medical databases for articles on the mental health of people of Palestinian ethnicity regardless of their geographical location for the years 1987-current. 349 articles were discovered. Because of the goal of understanding the shadow of US policy in the region on people of Palestinian ethnicity, 62 articles were set aside because they covered population mental health issues of whole countries (Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria) and did not clearly distinguish information on Palestinians from those general populations (see table 1). Similarly, 68 articles were on other aspects of the mental health experience of Palestinians outside the target topic area of violence sequelae (e.g. service provision, special populations, specific relatively narrow clinical considerations, etc). 84 articles were set aside which were otherwise outside the target topic area (e.g. on general Arab mental health issues, broad identity/acculturation issues etc). Table 1: Literature search results
Of the 135 articles which were identified which focused on specific demographic populations, 72 were on children and adolescents, twenty on women, twelve on men, six on older adults, eighteen on entire families, and seven more holistically on communities or general Palestinian national experience. Table 2: Articles on political violence sequelae per demographic group (children/adolescent and women articles sorted to date):
Articles on specific demographic populations, were sorted to identify those which pertained to political violence sequelae. Of the 72 articles on children and adolescents, 44 (61%) were on mental health sequelae of political violence; of the twenty articles on women, thirteen (65%) had this same focus. 83% (10) of those articles on men, none of the older adult articles, 6 (33%) of the families-focused articles and all (7) of the articles on general community/national perspectives had this focus. Note that some articles were difficult to easily sort by these categories; most but not all articles reported study results (some reported more narrative/qualitative information) and I may re-sort in the future in order to separate out more clearly study material as opposed to other sorts of literature, etc.
Summary tabular information on articles covering political violence exposure, effects and resilience However note most of the material on political violence sequelae was indeed specific study results. Tables 3 and 4 below list specific articles on political violence exposure and effects, and the related issue of resilience, table 3 for children and adolescents and table 4 on adults as well as family/community and nation-centered articles. For a cursory overview of this extensive literature, please look in column one for the number of individuals included in each of the article where that was noted, and column three for basics on study results, frequently for example PTSD prevalence rates and suchlike. Note that as of this writing some of the adult, family and community/nation articles are not yet summarized/included in table 4. Table 3 presents tabularized summary information on the articles on measurements of results of political violence/terror and related issues among Palestinian children and adolescents: Table 3: Articles focused on political violence exposure, effects and resilience in children and adolescents of Palestinian ethnicity
Psychological study tools abbreviations used in tables 3 and 4: BSI Brief Symptom Inventory CBC Child Behavior Checklist CDI-A Children's Depression Index, Arabized CPTSDRI-A Child Post-Traumatic Stress Reaction Index, Arabized CRIES Children's Revised Impact of Events Scale CSSEI-A Cooper Smith Self-Esteem Inventory, Arabized Version DSM4 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 4th Edition DV Scale: Domestic violence scale GTC Gaza Trauma Checklist GCMHTEC Gaza Community Mental Health Programme Traumatic Event Questionnaire GHQ General Health Questionnaire GSAC Gaza Socioeconomic Adversities Questionnaire GTEC Gaza Traumatic Event Checklist HTQ Harvard Trauma Questionnaire (HTQ_I), IES Impact of Event Scale LESHQ Life Events and Social History Questionnaire MMSE Mini Mental State Exam NSLCSC-A Nowicki-Strickland Locus of Control Scale for Children-Arabized version OSRS Observed Symptoms Rating Scale PHQ Patient Health Questionnaire PSS-HS(Y) Parental Support Scale, Hopefulness Scale (Youth). PTDEQ Peritraumatic Dissociative Experiences Questionnaire PTSDCP Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist for Parents PVE Scale: Politcal Violence Events Scale RCMAS Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale RPQ Rutter Parent Questionnaire SCL90-R Symptoms Checklist SNC Social Network Schedule TMASP Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale WHO CIDI World Health Organizaton Composite International Diagnostic Interview WHOHBSAC World Health Organization Health Behaviour in School-aged Children Survey WHOQOL-B World Health Organization Quality of Life questionnaire-Bref
Table 4 presents tabularized summary information on the articles on measurements of results of political violence/terror and related issues among Palestinian adults.
Table 4: Articles focused on political violence exposure, effects and resilience in adults, families and communities/nation of Palestinian ethnicity
General themes in literature Some general themes throughout the literature on sequelae of political violence include:
Excerpts from/comments on some journal articles identified regarding sequelae of political violence Al-Krenawi's 2007 study of about 1800 teens across the West Bank, "Psychological symptomotology among Paletinian adolescents living with political violence," showed personal exposure to political violence at levels such as:
Discussion focused on political violence contributions to psychological symptoms (as of course do other forms of violence, eg intrafamilial, crime victimization and so on--however the latter are currently endemic to all peoples globally and not closely attributable to relatively short-term US policies in the area with differential effects by ethnicity). Hostility and anger are part of post-traumatic experience, with a likelihood that the longer occupation continues, the more hostility and anger will mount. However levels of other general psychological symptoms were not found to increase in this way, with resilience in fact seen as coming from defocusing from personal psychic suffering, as well as from the presence of social aspects of experience including acknowledgement of others hurt and killed resisting oppression. Baker and Shalhoub-Kevorkian's 1999 article, "Effects of political and military traumas on children: The Palestinian case", synthesizes much information and discusses the widespread evidence on how anxiety, aggression, withdrawal are common experiences among people of Palestinian ethnicity due military trauma exposure, peaking during times of increased violence and receding somewhat thereafter. Having more traumatic experience gives higher levels of symptoms in response, e.g. three-quarters of children exposed to high levels of trauma were aggressive while about a third of those exposed to low levels had similar aggressive characteristics. Table 5: Psychological sequelae to high and low levels of trauma exposure
The question of how active participation in community resistance to oppression may help self-esteem--while also giving high anxiety and depression--is another thread noted to run through much of the literature, including the positive aspects of social regard for heroes/martyrs and high internal locus of control, not helplessness and hopelessness as some might have expected. However self-esteem seemed not to be protected in the case of youth undergoing the most extreme trauma, e.g. torture. Baker and Shalhoub-Kevorkian's article also notes as themes:
In a cross-section of locations in Gaza (urban, camp and village), Thabet et al's 2001 survey of 286 children 9-18 years of age and their mothers ("Effect of trauma on the mental health of Palestinian children and mothers in the Gaza Strip") showed 76% of mothers with some level of diagnosable psychiatric distress and 34% of children with PTSD. Children had, on average, personally witnessed four types of traumatic events. Imagine in one's American hometown the following: Table 6: Percentage of children experiencing various types of events
In 2005 Lavi and Solomon published a comparison of Palestinian 6th-9th grade adolescents in and outside the "green line" 1948-67 area of Israeli control during 2001 ("Palestinian youth of the Intifada: PTSD and future orientation"). Though those living in Israel had much less trauma exposure, both groups had about the same perception of potential danger to themselves. 66% of those outside Israel and 46% of those inside had moderate to high levels of PTSD symptoms, high compared to findings in other war zones.
A
study done in 2001 by three dedicated contributors to the Palestine
trauma/mental health literature,
Samir Qouto, Reija-Leena
Punamaki and Eyad El Sarraj ("Mental flexibility as resiliency factor
among children exposed to political violence"),
was of 121 children in the
Gaza
strip whose homes had been bombarded a few months earlier. Active attacks
were continuing while data was collected. 88% of these 6-16 year olds had
PTSD of moderate or severe levels--54% severe and 34% moderate. Over half
had seen strangers being killed or injured; over a third had seen these
types of atrocities against family members or neighbors. 88% of the
children were refugees from the original Palestinian displacement in the
late 1940's. The 1999 article by Miller, El-Masri et al ("Emotional and behavioural problems and trauma exposure of school-age Palestinian children in Gaza: some preliminary findings") looking at 669 school aged children 6-16 years of age and their families in Gaza showed high PTSD, conduct, emotional and attention deficit disorder prevalence--51% diagnosable with one or more condition. Children averaged experiencing over three traumatic events each, with about two thirds having their home damaged through searches, over half seeing shooting, fighting or explosions, and 70% experiencing tear gassing. Children who had been through more political trauma had higher rates of the various sorts of emotional and behavioral distress measured than those who had experienced less such trauma, with this association strongest in the girls. One scale, used for the teens only, showed 87% of the children had some level of PTSD, of that 8% severe and 32% moderate. Qouta and Odeh's 2005 paper ("The impact of conflict on children: the Palestinian experience ") surveying some of the healthcare trauma statistics on both Gaza and West Bank children note the high levels of malnutrition (2.5% acute and 9% chronic) and anemia (38%), increased from 2000 levels. Their count regarding the infamous issue of delays of emergently expectant mothers at checkpoints gives 39 deliveries, 22 pregnant mother deaths and 27 newborn deaths at checkpoints to that point in time. They reference Khamis's research which measured a low in one study of 34% of school aged children surveyed having PTSD, with other studies showing 82% of 944 10-19 yr olds from Gaza with moderate-to-acute PTSD symptomotology, rising to 90% (99% including a few with only low symptom levels) in areas close to settlements. 25% of children wanted to be martyrs. Over two thirds of that sample of 944 children had witnessed killings or injuries.
4. Closing Like all peoples, the people of the United States like to think well of themselves. We Americans want to believe we act for good, for equality, for freedom. Indeed one factor driving US support for Israel is acknowledgement of longstanding anti-Jewish sentiment in the US and elsewhere, including lack of action by the US to save people who were Jewish during the Holocaust. In fits and starts a transition occurred late in the 20th century to helping that people, an "other" known to general American society through the presence of a significant Jewish population for hundreds of years. People of Palestinian ethnicity are clearly much less known for most Americans, a major factor in the mental health and other situations outlined here which are not well known to the US collective psyche. Sometimes the US collective consciousness is able to acknowledge its role in ethnicity-based unfairness and mistreatment, which then allows movement toward repair, reparation and atonement. The most widespread ethnicity-based atrocities in the US itself were those having to do with the genocide of Native people--a major part of America's founding and development--and slavery of African-Americans, a key factor in establishing US economic power and social fabric. Starting perhaps in the 1960's and '70s, generally speaking, the collective American psyche has become open to acknowledging the mass terror visited on Native people without which the US could not exist, leading to a wave of reworking of the legal agreements between Native nations and the US government in the last decades of the 20th century. This has been an important factor in the economic and cultural resurgence of Indian people in the US. More and more Americans are acknowledging their Native ancestry; just recently America's place of public symbols of honor, the National Mall area in Washington DC, added a large monument museum acknowledging and celebrating Native peoples. Regarding slavery in the US, governments of at least six of the twenty states where slavery was legal have publicly apologized for that form of race-based terror; more will surely follow. This movement was furthered in July of this year when the overall US House of Representatives apologized on the national level. However without an economic aspect to this move, many feel it is merely empty words; some leaders are thus working towards economic reparations. A major gap in American symbolic healing is the lack of a fitting acknowledgement of and atonement for slavery in the central place of American national symbolism, that mall area in Washington. One more example of how the US has atoned for ethnicity-based actions are the acknowlegment and economic reparations which have taken place for the government holding captive US citizens of Japanese descent in the 1940's. No two ethnicity-based atrocities are ever the same. Slavery in the US was different from the Holocaust was different from the 1990's genocide in Rwanda was different from genocide of Native people in most parts of the Americas since 1500. In searching for biological clues about violence, there is likely widespread human potential for visiting terror on others--though the question remains open as to what may increase the likelihood of this sort of action in some (see e.g. Filley et al 2001, "Toward an understanding of violence: neurobehavioral aspects of unwarranted physical aggression"). Along with American memorials to events which occurred in the US and on events largely outside, such as the National Museum of the American Indian and the United States Holocaust memorial museum, in that area of national symbolism and reflection in Washington DC, there may not, for a long time, be a monument to the experience of splintered nationality and displacement you all of Palestinian ethnicity have experienced, including acknowledgement of US funding and policy as major contributors. However, this sort of acknowledgement happens within the psyche of some--a growing number--of people in the US. Many Americans already understand that our spending which supports actions against you all are grossly out of line with our core values of equality and respect for all. The US is not monolithically ill-informed about and against Palestine. The US general population is often more understanding of downsides of US role there than US policy reflects, with many examples in public polling results. About 40% of the general population in one recent poll acknowledged US support for the ethnic privilege system which is Israel as a main cause of anti-American world sentiment; 2/3 of international relations scholars in a 2006 poll felt the Israel lobby was too influential on US policy (Mearsheimer and Walt 2007 p. 10). This year there have been public acknowledgments of the Nakba in many American cities; activists have arranged some votes on divesting from public ownership of Israel bonds; church and activist groups regularly host pro-Palestine speakers, as well as visiting and serving in your land. I was heartened at the turnout of thousands at Rachel Corrie's funeral in a small city in my home state of Washington in 2003. Movement from these relatively small steps to full acknowledgment of our American role in your nationality's experience can come. Perhaps doing the mental/emotional exercise of transposing Palestinian mental health information onto our own American experience--our families, our communities--could be helpful. What would it be like if 13% of the children on our block had been shot by rubber bullets, by a power which had taken over a few decades ago and which had much more powerful weapons in reserve if the rubber bullets weren't enough? What if the UN voted to give a group which was a minority owning about 6% of land over half of the land in the US, and that group then took first 78% and then 100%, offering to give 15 or so percent back, with the caveat that they could reinvade when they deemed necessary? What if 25% of our children had seen a friend killed by an occupying military power? What if 84% of American kids had personally watched their community bombarded? Part of how shadow works in psychology is in this way: material within ourselves which we aren't aware of is often visible to others. Others may indeed act towards us through responding to parts of ourselves which we aren't at all--or just dimly--aware of. This can be confusing to us, as those actions of others seem to be unprovoked because of our self-unawareness. If many in the world are aware of the destructive, shadow side of US policy towards Palestinian people and act accordingly to us, it may be the case that we Americans do actually in the future undergo more politically-motivated violence, with the 9/11 attacks just a start. Trauma to Palestinians is emblematic for many of US ethnic prejudice, and as a result a process of not simply performing a thought exercise of how we Americans might in turn be subjected to retaliatory trauma but actually undergoing more such retaliatory attacks could be set in motion more and more. This can be nipped in the bud early on if we mentally set ourselves in the place of others, without the need to act out violently in actuality. This is the benefit of working to 'reclaim' shadow material, that is, to acknowledge material we would rather remain only dimly aware of. We can change actions which are against our core values, understand why others are upset about our dimly-acknowledged stances, and calm others' understandable anger. Such a collective shift in the US would likely be helpful for Palestinian lives overall, including mental health. In other instances similar shifts of public awareness have been key in growing American collective psychic health, such as our acknowledgment of atrocities like the Native genocide which our country is based on, and our collective widespread actions against people who are black, Jewish, of Japanese descent and many others in past and current actions which are too numerous to fully enumerate here. Acknowledging unwanted parts of ourselves makes us more whole and helps us understand why others, who clearly see these traits, act in upset ways towards us. Perhaps we may some day even go so far as to acknowledge our projections, acknowledge trauma we have inflicted, directly in some cases and a bit more indirectly in Palestine--that is, stopping demonizing others as the sole terrorists--as if states don't have much more massive ability to cause terror than isolated individuals and loosely networked groups. This will allow our collective psyche a more realistic and thus healthy view of itself and a more realistic view of the world. An alternative to projection of negativity onto others is acceptance of all humans as having a mixture of good and bad, flaws and brilliant wonder. Just as the Palestinian folks I've been lucky enough to be acquainted with don't seem to have a shred of doubt about their resilience (mixed with the usual human range of qualities, including the less desirable), we Americans can acknowledge all aspects of our actions. We can apply our core values of equality for all, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion and so on, to acknowledge and even atone for the harm we've sponsored regarding the Palestinian people. In America itself, whites have, very generally speaking, dominated people who are of African and Asian and Native American descent. And the way this dominance of people of European background occurred more generally throughout the world over recent centuries is well known, though the US entered later and in different ways into the business of global colonization than the European powers and generally speaking this sort of history is collectively less acknowledged in the US than in other former colonial powers. I personally am of a group that has had such power, and personally had to come to terms with issues of privilege flowing from how my ethnic group dominated others. It is not easy to come to terms with this legacy; part of what has made this process possible and unavoidable in general over recent decades has been the abundance and clarity of information about white male Christian/Western world dominance. I grew up when this was being articulated in a sustained and widely-available way by myriad people and groups: feminists, liberation movements around the world, civil rights activists and so on within the US, etc. Regarding Palestine however, the situation has been different. Unfortunately from the perspective of inside the US, the Palestinian experience has been very much in the shadows, and with the challenging language barrier for we whose brains learned only European left-to-right languages, without 'ains and dhals and s.ads, it's hard when even most sincerely trying to directly learn from Arabic written or spoken sources. No wonder for people in America who were raised--not like me in an environment unknowing and mostly neutral regarding Palestine-- specifically raised Zionist, with exposure only to that group's well-known narrative about the correctness of its ethnic privilege in the area and thus of the takeover in the 1940's, not much really *is* known of Palestinian experience. Part of what I take from Pappe's citations of Zionist military and political primary sources in "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" is that Ben Gurion apparently shielded general Jewish and broad general world public opinion from the full brunt of information on the violence done by the Zionist armed/terror groups during the takeover; certainly, one consequence of the millennia-long experience of oppression is that Jewish folks as a group, including loved family members of mine, have not had the experience--at least for some thousands of years since the Jewish kingdoms--of being in a position of power as an ethnic group over other peoples, with the potential for large-scale oppression of others along ethnic lines, and thus not having the experience as some of the rest of us have of coming to terms personally and collectively with being of groups which have had this position of power and acted in such ways. It is counter to deeply-held collective views of many that this is even conceptually possible. It serves no one of any group, in the long-run, to keep information on any ethnicity-based oppression in the shadow of not-knowing. Clearly people of Palestinian ethnicity have been working in many ways on acknowledging and working against the injuries to their collective psyche, such as all the information amassed in the mental health field which I've been lucky enough to be able to look over; Jewish groups in the area of mandate Palestine/Israel, the US and elsewhere acknowledge the Palestinian Nakba/Catastrophe and atone. It will be healthy for the American collective consciousness, as well as this region, to bring knowledge of the negative results of US funding in Palestine--such as the mental health trauma which so many dedicated people in the field have clearly measured in these articles--further out of the shadow of unknowing into the light of consciousness in my country and elsewhere. The US needs to be challenged directly on--needs itself to more broadly acknowledge--how the massive US funding for ethnicity-based privilege in Palestine can be seen as counter to fundamental American values of equality and inclusion. In other, prior instances, the US has acknowledged and made amends for harming groups based on ethnicity, and we certainly as a society have the option of doing so again in this important instance.
Postscript (23 Sept 08/15 Nov 2008): This paper is at a draft level and continues to be in progress; I welcome any comments including corrections or other views, as clearly no one statement on the topic, is definitive: William_slaughter@hms.harvard.edu . Some articles were difficult to sort per the categories mentioned; I may re-sort, such as more narrowly by articles reporting study results (most articles) as opposed to narrative/qualitative-focused material, etc.
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