Arnon Grunberg

Experience

Stories

On trauma as a weapon – Naomi Klein in The Guardian:

‘In Germany, they speak of a Staatsraison, or reason of state – and in recent decades, its leaders have said that reason is protecting Israel. Israel has a Staatsraison too, related but different. Officially, it is Jewish safety. But integral to the state’s conception of safety is Jewish trauma. Building shrines to it. Erecting walls around it. Waging wars in its name.’

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‘What is the line between commemorating trauma and cynically exploiting it? Between memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity? And what does it mean to do so while Israel actively produces more grief on an unfathomable scale, detonating entire apartment blocks in Beirut, inventing new methods of remote-controlled maiming, and sending more than a million Lebanese people fleeing for their lives, even as its pummeling of Gaza continues unabated? With a full-scale regional conflagration looking more possible by the hour, focus on the mechanics of how Israel heightens and manipulates Jewish trauma may seem irrelevant, even insensitive. Yet these forces are profoundly interconnected, with the particular stories that Israel tells about Jewish victimhood providing the rationale and cover story for the shattering violence and colonial land annexation now on such stark display.’

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‘With very few exceptions, the primary goal of these diverse works seems to be the transference of trauma to the audience: re-creating terrifying events with such vividness and intimacy that a viewer or visitor experiences a kind of identity merger, as if they themselves have been violated.’

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‘Nowhere is the trauma transference goal more explicit than in Israel’s booming “dark tourism” sector. For months, synagogues and Jewish federations from around the world have been sponsoring trips that take their supporters on “solidarity missions” to southern Israel. Their tour buses line the edges of the site of the Nova festival, which is now filled with memorials to the hundreds of people who were killed and kidnapped there. And, much to the consternation of some locals, they also step over the rubble to crowd into the still ravaged kibbutzim.’

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‘It is hard to believe, given the volume already available, but far more 7 October memorializing is still to come. Despite a worsening economic crisis, last month, the Israeli cabinet approved a proposal from Netanyahu to spend $86m on future memorialization projects related to 7 October and the multi-front military campaigns that have raged since. The money will be spent on the preservation of “heritage infrastructure” (AKA damaged buildings); the creation of a new commemorative site, the establishment of an annual national holiday, and much else.’

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‘Though the speed (and, yes, the kitsch) with which Israel has transformed the suffering of 7 October into media and tourism products is impressive, it is not without precedent. Photos of Ground Zero and the September 11 attacks were also immediately aestheticized and turned into gallery shows, and the disaster movies weren’t far behind. The debate about how to memorialize Ground Zero began almost instantly, as did tourist pilgrimages to the site.
More importantly, just like in Israel today, these moves to turn 9/11 into an experience that would provoke specific emotions – grief, pride, patriotism – happened in parallel with the ferocious US military response to those attacks. And the more jingoistic post-9/11 films and TV series, in which Arabs and Muslims were almost invariably portrayed as bloodthirsty terrorists, formed a cultural front in the so-called war on terror, playing a critical role in justifying the US’s worst abuses, from the battlefields of Falluja to the dungeons of Guantánamo Bay.’

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‘Incidents like these prompted Marianne Hirsch, a professor emerita at Columbia University and a highly respected scholar of traumatic memory and commemoration, to write an influential essay challenging her colleagues in Holocaust studies to question the wisdom of methods of memorialization based on passing traumatic memories on from one generation to the next (a process she has described as the creation of “postmemory”).
In an interview, she told me that memorializing traumatic histories can be done in ways that encourage collective healing and a sense of solidarity across divides. But there are also times when, for political actors within these groups, healing isn’t the goal – keeping trauma alive, despite the passing of time and changing conditions, is infinitely more useful. “In its beginnings, Holocaust studies has mostly been about how to keep the wounds open and transmit the trauma as directly as possible,” she said. It has also been about presenting antisemitism as an immovable and omnipresent force of nature, a hatred in a class of its own – a worldview that the rabbi and scholar Shaul Magid terms “Judeopessimism”.
This, Hirsch says, has a great deal to do with how tightly Holocaust memory has been tethered to Zionism, with the creation of the highly militarized state of Israel cast as “redemption” from the destruction of the Holocaust. In this narrative, dominant in Jewish schools, summer camps, synagogues and Birthright trips to Israel, “healing only comes from the ‘homeland’”. That means that when the homeland comes under intense attack, as it did on 7 October, all of the trauma – implanted through those films and museums and memoirs and horror stories – comes rushing back and the threat feels existential. If it’s true that the Holocaust can return at any time, and Israel is the only safeguard against that happening, “it creates a kind of alibi for whatever Israel wants to do” – an alibi whose horrific implications we have seen in relentless action over the last 12 months.’

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‘Before that hope can become more than a slogan, there will need to be some kind of common history about how we arrived at this wrenching place, which is the work of the remarkable Israeli-Palestinian group Zochrot. For two decades, they have been quietly educating Jewish Israelis about why the histories that they grew up with are dangerously incomplete, because the triumphant and redemptive story of Israel’s founding is inextricable from Palestinian dispossession and forced exile – the Nakba. And so they lead tours to destroyed and depopulated Palestinian villages, distribute alternative maps, hold courses and workshops, and call for “a joint future for all the inhabitants of this land and all the refugees.” In Hebrew, zochrot means “remembering”, and unlike the re-traumatization currently passing for commemoration, remembering in its truest sense is about putting the shattered and severed pieces of the self together (re-member-ing) in the hopes of becoming whole. Re-membering the land. Re-membering the people exiled from the land. Re-membering earlier colonial genocides that shaped and inspired the Nazi Holocaust, which in turn shaped the state of Israel. Re-membering that Israel is right now in the grips of a nuclear-armed colonial revenge frenzy in the lineage of earlier colonial punitive expeditions, ones that also used art and collective sorrow as potent weapons of annihilation.’

Read the article here.

The culture of remembrance, a side effect of the Holocaust (it existed before, but not on this scale) has been copied by many other minorities and groups that felt that they have been wronged.

The Staatsraison of Israel is the Jewish trauma – this is a sharp and important observation. Without it, the state loses its raison d’être. (Apparently Israel is still a state that needs a a raison d’être) Which means that a sense of Jewish victimhood is essential for the survival of Israel.

On a practical i.e. political level Hamas and the right-wingers in Israel (i.e. a large majority, the left is diminished and what’s called left is not so leftish) might need each other very much, they can exist because of each other. But also on a slightly more philosophical level, the mutual dependency cannot be overlooked: without enemies, without anti-Semitism, Israel doesn’t have a Staatraison anymore.

Trauma has become a weapon, not only for Israel, but for anybody who is looking for status and power.

Once again, the future of identity politics is what Zionism is today.

The future of trauma is what the politicization of trauma is in Israel and elsewhere.

In other words, get rid of your trauma before it’s too late.

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