Israel’s Broken Mirror
Eran Rolnik, MD, PhD*
*Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst
Not one of the laws that the Israeli government is advancing
within the framework of the regime coup is intended to benefit
the weak, the sick, the oppressed, the uneducated or the needy in
Israeli society. This is legislation that gives the word “reform” a
bad name. Indeed, it mocks the idea of reform, because its whole
purpose is regressive. The government of Israel is bent on
reverting from the rule of law to the rule of force. It is
determined to transform the public’s right in all spheres of life
into a manifestation of the unequal balance of forces which
pervades Israel society. The government is scheming to
subjugate the country’s citizens to a new order of rights for the
advantage of a few corrupt politicians.
The legislation in its present form displays not even a semblance
of socialism or the protection of minority rights; what it does
display is the use of a parliamentary majority in order to acquire
even greater power. Under the leadership of the greediest and
most diasporic prime minister this country has had since
independence was proclaimed, Israel is annulling the
Declaration of Independence – the warranty without which it
will lose its place in the family of democratic states.
In history there is no such thing as “the last minute.” There is
always another good or bad decision that can be made. There is
always place for hope and for goal-oriented action. The historic
moment of this generation is no longer “the Rabin assassination”
nor the establishment of another extreme-right government. Our
historic moment is the pouring of hundreds of thousands of
Israelis into the streets. It’s surprising and thrilling and it can
decide the campaign – if we do not take it for granted and if we
will not be complacent. Israel possesses a potent civil society, a
fact which distinguishes it from other countries that underwent a
constitutional crisis, such as Iran under the Shah, Erdogan’s
Turkey, and Hungary and Poland.
Amid the brain drain and the flight of investments, those who
are pinning their hopes on the International Monetary Fund or
the markets to halt the process of Israel’s fascization are, in my
opinion, badly deluded. Fascism operates against all
considerations of utilitarianism and self-preservation. In 1933,
5,500 Jewish physicians were registered in Germany; in 1939,
fewer than 300 of them remained in Hitlerite Germany. Two
years before the onset of the “Final Solution of the Jewish
Question,” Germany had dispensed with 95 percent of its Jewish
doctors, as well thousands of psychologists of Jewish origin and
many thousands more academics and chemists, industrialists and
bankers. Entire fields of expertise and knowledge ceased to exist
for many years following the emigration of intellectuals,
scientists and practitioners of the liberal professions.
The essence of fascism is not ideological but experiential. It
aims at silencing dissent and giving priority to action over
thought.
It’s possible that in the near future we will feel a little less at
home in our workplaces – in hospitals, the civil service or the
universities. In an autocracy everyone feels persecuted and no
one feels at home anywhere. Not even when they are at home.
Fascism is a frame of mind that is nourished by the constant
fueling of primary anxieties and by the persecution of spirit and
thought, by eliminating the difference between word and deed.
That persecution persists even when one is sitting in a class at
university or trying to read a book at home. When this frame of
mind becomes a cultural code, it spreads into places where the
voters of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich do not have a majority. In my
daughters’ school a raucous quarrel broke out this week in the
corridor between the class’s homeroom teacher and another
teacher. We mental health professionals see it in the clinic as
well: people are falling apart.
Fascism changes the relations between people, between
physician and nurse in a catheter procedure room, between a
loving couple, between children in a playground. While the
Knesset is passing a law allowing a leader to receive bribery
from tycoons, people are driving like lunatics on the roads,
postal clerks are being contemptuous of the elderly, and children
are attacking the weak and throwing stones at cats.
Fascism always progresses more rapidly than is commonly
thought and it always has a small problem with the law. It is
always the law that prevents fascists from fully achieving their
goal and fulfilling their final solutions for complex social and
economic problems. It is never reality, still less conscience, that
is taken into consideration.
The readiness of hundreds of thousands of Israelis to do battle
for justice and truth is exhilarating. Yet it is precisely because
the governmental coup is being fomented so crudely and
provocatively, that there are some who still see it as an authentic
expression of something. I think that in the psyche of us all a
great drama is being played out of contradictory identifications
which ought to be named and verbalized. In order for us to be
able to persist with resistance and triumph in the struggle, we
need both to believe in the justice of our cause and also to be
aware of forces that destabilize us from within. We must not
identify with processes of exclusion, projection and
divisiveness, we must not allow the hollow identity politics
which we have become accustomed to hiding behind to eat us
away from the inside. We Israelis must wean ourselves from the
narcissism of the small differences. For example: stop
reprimanding demonstrators who hold flags of Palestine.
The longer the assault on the truth and the incitement continue,
the more we are likely to meet large numbers of cowards,
informers, thugs and dissemblers. We will meet them in our
close milieu and within ourselves.
It seems to me that in recent weeks the Israelis have been trying
not only to revolt against the government judicial overhaul, but
also to peel off their own face their identification with the lies
and duplicities of their elected officials from the right and the
left. This is an extremely difficult task, because it undercuts
what we are familiar with.
We, the mental health professionals, need to and can help people
understand that without democracy there is no life of the mind
that is worthy of the name. Mental reality is now outside in the
street, not in works of culture and art or in therapy rooms. Those
who wish to fathom their psyche, to know what it truly feels and
thinks, will not find the answers to those questions by
disconnecting from the political reality. There is no better way
to secure the individual’s and the group sense of agency other
then participation in the demonstrations.
As I understand and am experiencing the events, the movement
of resistance to the regime revolution is not trying to forge the
political consciousness of its supporters via identification. As
such, the protest movement is in no hurry to place its trust in
well-known political leaders or in charismatic figures. It does
not draw its strength exclusively from the moral validity of its
demands, but from the mental process that each person who
joins it undergoes, from the democratic experience that the
struggle against fascism offers. When I try to clarify with myself
the meaning of the passion with which I proceed to Kaplan
Street in Tel Aviv every Saturday evening, the conclusion I
arrive at is that I have learned how to derive satisfaction and
draw hope from taking part in a protest that is worthy and just
without precisely reflecting back my ego-ideal as a person of the
left. The opposition to the regime coup is a kind of broken
mirror of Israeli democracy that on each occasion brings me
together with another part within myself as an individual and as
a citizen. The experience of being in a mass rally is potent and
very new mainly for the young. To be in a historic moment
means to experience an emotional jolt that shakes us to the roots
of our identity. It starts as identification with something familiar
– the flag, the hymn or the army service – but no one returns
home from these marches to what they are familiar with the
same as when they set out. Not a single compound in the Israeli
consciousness, not even the Hebrew language itself, will remain
unaffected by the cataclysmic events of the past weeks. We are
in the midst of a collective trauma – which hold a potential for
individual mental and social growth. The difference between a
life crisis that arouses anxiety that shatters the mind and a
facilitating trauma that awakens the self lies in the degree of
awareness, the loneliness and the feeling of lack of control that
accompany it. This political trauma that we are experiencing
now, similar perhaps to the War of Independence which erupted
following the state’s proclamation, can dissolve redundant
political identifications, strengthen, develop and make us
stronger and better as individuals and as a nation.
For the past 12 weeks Israelis are writing together the first of its
kind manual for resistance to fascism and theocracy in its Israeli
version. Sigmund Freud’s letter to Thomas Mann in 1935 could
inspire us in this venture: “In the name of countless numbers of
your contemporaries I wish to express the confidence that you
will never do or say anything—an author's words, after all, are
deeds—that is cowardly or base, and that even at a time which
blurs judgment you will choose the right way and show it to
others.”
Indeed, then as now, the assault on democracy undermines the
capacity for judgment of many politicians and citizens. But we
will not wait until the Federation of Labor or the Medical
Association or the Teachers Unions get their act together and
join our struggle. We shall walk the straight and narrow and
show it to our children, to our students and to our patients; to
everyone who has not yet grasped the gravity of the hour and
will be ready to listen.
Link to my Speech at the Academics Rally on March 17 in Tel-Aviv