If you got out of a Nazi death camp, liberated by battle hardened American GIs who puked when they saw the piles of bodies and inhaled the stench of the Nazi death machine, (as Dwight Eisenhower reportedly did) it is hard to imagine you were not severely traumatized.
The trauma that made ordinary Germans faithfully support a maniac who convinced them that millions of humans needed to be exterminated? As hard to imagine as the trauma that caused the maniac to come up with his plan of mass murder — and have the will to make it happen.
A year or two after the war, if you were lucky enough in the displaced persons’ camp, you landed in British Palestine, which had been a British possession since 1920, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. You were not welcomed by most of the people who lived there, as floods of impoverished immigrants seldom are welcomed by native populations anywhere.
Some of the longtime inhabitants of Palestine, Palestinians, could see the writing on the wall as the world organized the United Nations and the international argument was made for a state for the Jewish people. It was a unique moment in history, after millions of Jews had been killed, in part, because they’d been rendered stateless. A Jewish state seemed the least the world could do for this decimated, historically despised minority after the horrific genocide of the Holocaust. Well might the Jewish rallying cry be “Never Again!”
Then, because trauma often produces PTSD and harsh reactions in the traumatized, and not everyone who feels pursued by enemies is paranoid, after what was either a War for Independence or a Catastrophe in which many thousands were driven from their homes forever as the new Jewish homeland was created, the fate of those now displaced persons in refugee camps was kicked down the road, left up to other Arab nations to solve. These other nations had little incentive to help this mass of poor, displaced people who were handy political pawns for international haggling.
Generations of Palestinians were raised in the hopelessness of these crowded, impoverished refugee camps because nobody could solve the humanitarian crisis they presented. Generational hopelessness in the face of brutal injustice is a crushing thing.
Now we have all the conditions for deep, mutual distrust and hatred. If you hate me, and tell me you will slit my throat at the first opportunity, I will certainly hate you. If I hate you, what reason for you to not vow to slit my throat? And so on.
This is not to oversimplify the horrific situation in Israel/Palestine. Just to point out the two way arrow of trauma between two populations who have suffered mightily, been despised by people with the power to make them suffer, and had their need to live negated.
Trauma, it seems, is the wheel that makes the fucking world go around.
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