The Palestinian genocide rages on and shines a light on everything we don’t want to see. There have been lots of analyses on how it’s exposing the colonialism and hypocrisy of the academic world, the international relations world, western democracies, the human rights world, and international law. South Africa’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel) claim to the International Court of Justice took a brave stand for integrity, but still lacks the support of many other nations that seem stuck.
The UN passed a ceasefire on March 25, 2024, the USA abstention rang so, so loud. Unsuprisingly, little has changed on the ground since then. So the movement towards denouncing the genocidal abuses of Gaza are oh, too quiet, even by those who voted in favor of the cease-fire.
I agree that colonialism and racism are center-stage, here. Dual-standards are norm in our world. The torture, hunger, and air strikes against civilians including children, is clear. The scale of Hamas’s killing of 1,410 Israelis is no way near Israel’s killing of 33,091 Palestinians as of April 5, 2024 according to UNOCHA. According to an article in the Miami Herald, both governments admitted in March, that that there was a casualty ratio of 26 to 1 — meaning the harm Israel has caused Palestine is 26 times higher that that caused by Hamas.
We’ve all been watching accusations of antisemitism run rampant in the past months. To me, the way the West has framed this argument in black and white — it’s either antisemitism OR genocide — hides the following blindspot: all perpetrators are first, victims.
Psychology has known forever that it’s victims who become perpetrators. Victims become perpetrators when we/they:
- Perceive we/they were attacked and decide to react to avoid ever being a victim again;
- Perceive we/they were attacked, are triggered, and react with an out-of-proportion fight response given the the new situation;
- We/they are attacked and react with an out-of-proportion fight response proportionate to the old hurt (not the new situation).
While this is common knowledge in the world of psychology, our institutions have failed to keep up. Our institutions are still based on a fictional idea of victim and perpetrator being separate entities, unrelated, and easy to separate.
The image below comes from my book: Digging Up the Seeds of white Supremacy. It illustrates how USA institutions were based on one premise: the basic needs of white folks could ONLY be met at the expense of those of folks of color. This either/or thinking permeates not USA institutions, but also international ones.
Our institutions have been set up essentially to sort the deserving from the undeserving (See my book for more on this), the complexity of a victim who becomes perpetrator is inconceivable. When you add racial prejudice in there, the rigidity of our institutions tend to overexcuse the innocence of whites an overassume the guilt of folks of color. So folks of color are accused of being perpetrators even when they innocent; whites are excused when they’re guilty.
If this is delicate for all perpetrators, it’s extremely sensitive when we’re talking about a people with the ancestral trauma of the Jews. We often mention the tragedy for humanity that the holocaust was, but we often fail to remember that the Jews were persecuted by Christians in Europe for hundreds of years, before the holocaust. As an example the word “ghetto” originated from Pope Paul IV in 1555 who forbade Jews to live outside the perimeter. This made it extremely easy for 1,023 Italian Jews to be dispossessed of their goods, rounded up and sent to Auschwitz almost 200 years later, in 1943.
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When I wrote the book: Digging Up the Seeds of white Supremacy, I really wanted to leave religion alone. Taking on 10 systems in the USA across 500 years felt like enough. I didn’t want to take on religion, too. But it was impossible. In digging up the seeds of white supremacy, I found that white supremacy was rooted in Christian supremacy. It was clear to me, from the moment that Cristopher Columbus decided to enslave 10–25 Natives and take them to Europe to be baptized, that he believed he could enslave them, because he, as a Christian, was superior to them. So the seed of white Supremacy — of one human feeling superior to another, is in fact religious supremacy.
I am no longer Catholic, nor Christian. I left Christianity for three reasons. One, I could not reconcile the faith I studied and the role Christianity played in facilitating, fostering, encouraging, and sanctioning enslavement. Two, at some point, having been a teenager who taught Sunday school, confessed everyday, and did three rosaries per day, Christianity offered me at age 19 no where else to evolve except nunnery (and while many tried — I wasn’t interested). I felt Christianity was stifling my spirituality instead of nurturing it. Three, from where I stand, Christian superiority has tainted, not gifted the world. I’m for a faith the enriches the world by how we behave: I owe this to my mother who taught me this was real faith. I have not seen the Church — as an institution — do this. Of course there are Christians who have, but that wasn’t enough for to stay Christian.
I have a sense of disgust towards Christian superiority and the way it led to white supremacy. Since I have a passion for going to the roots of ideologies, I dug deeper. Turns out, Christian superiority is rooted in this New Testament passage:
But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation Peter 2:9
In saying this, Peter was recalling this passage from the Old Testament:
For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. Out of all the peoples on the face of the earth, the LORD has chosen you to be his treasured possession. Deuteronomy 14:2.
Now, as a person who is no longer a Christian and not a Jew, it’s really not my role, to tell folks who see themselves as “the chosen ones,” what to do about that. I’ll leave that up to a Christian and Jewish theologians.
When it comes to white supremacy though, I do know a lot about that, since I’ve studied it for the past 30 years.
And I wonder: how is believing one is the chosen one, similar or different to feeling superior to another?
To what extent is being “chosen” saying:
My pain is more important than yours.
My pain is bigger than yours.
My hurt is bigger than yours.
My life is more important/valid/valuable than yours.
My family’s well-being is more important/valid/valuable than yours.
And because of all that….
I can do whatever the hell I want to prevent my pain, my destruction, my life, and the lives of my loved ones.
That’s trauma. People who are not traumatized don’t believe in this either/or bullcrap. As Thomas Hübl says in Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds in the absence of trauma, we empathize with the needs and the pain of others, we don’t remove ourselves from it.
A trauma victim becomes a perpetrator when a prior victim chooses the perpetrator position in the trauma-triangle (victim-rescuer-perpetrator): the role is “new,” but the trauma, the violence is still repeated.
This is called trauma re-enactment. While the perpetrator may get an short-term high from the experience of not being a victim, in trauma reenactment there are no winners. The repetition of the violence leaves everyone hurt again.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Sandra Bloom (written in 2002, independent of the Israeli-Palestine conflict), expert not only of trauma but also of trauma-transformation. Her take is that trauma re-enactment is not individual, its social and as such requires a social response.
“Every time the victim traumatically reenacts his own experience by playing the role of perpetrator, he digs himself into an ever deepening hole. Since he has committed the evil deeds of his own volition, despite the fact that he feels compelled to respond to the inner propelling force of traumatic reenactment, he cannot pull himself out of the pit. As more and more boundaries are broken, as wider lines are crossed, the perpetrator moves from acts of simple cruelty to what has been earlier described as “radical evil”. Perpetration is always a social act and requires a social response.” From the Article Trauma and the Nature of Evil.
What is our social response? Who have we become as witnesses of this violence?
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: Marek Studzinski on Unsplash