Between national ideology and Western therapy: On the emergence of a new “culture of trauma” following the 2005 forced evacuation of Jewish Israeli settlers

Abstract

The Israeli government’s decision to evacuate Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank introduced a new category of at-risk individuals to Israeli mental health discourse, namely victims of what has come to be termed the “trauma of the Disengagement.” This category refers to Jewish settlers who are motivated by a religious-Zionist ideology and who define their role as fulfilling the divine command of “redeeming the Land of Israel.” Based on an analysis of the professional activities of the Mahout Center, a mental health service that aimed to mitigate the “trauma of the Disengagement,” this article examines how the Disengagement experience was constructed in the rhetoric and practices of mental health practitioners identified with the religious-Zionist enterprise. It explores the specific notion of trauma and the characteristics of the resilient self, as fashioned according to the distinctive “culture of trauma” that has been developed in the Mahout Center in the context of the Disengagement. This “culture of trauma” is based on a unique alliance between the Western therapeutic model of trauma and the ideological and theological imperatives of religious Zionism.

Keywords

religious Zionism resilience therapeutic culture trauma

Introduction

Illness idioms and therapeutic interventions can both convey and vindicate cultural, ideological, political, and social meanings (Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser, & Sztompka, 2004; Antze & Lambek, 1996; Brunner, 2002, 2004; Furedi, 2004; Illouz, 2008; Kidron, 2003; Lasch, 1984; Nolan, 1998; Rieff, 1966; Young, 1995). This article concerns one instance of this phenomenon: the emergence of a distinctive “culture of trauma” following the compulsory Disengagement (Hitnatkut) of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in August 15, 2005. My account focuses on representations of the Disengagement experience at the treatment facility to which the displaced settlers were referred.

According to the Disengagement Plan, approved by the Israeli Parliament in October 2004, the evacuation process consisted of the evacuation of all Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip (comprising approximately 8,000 civilians from 21 settlements) and four settlements in the West Bank. The evacuation was completed in one day and created a new category of at-risk individuals within Israeli mental health discourse, namely, the victims of a mental trauma that the settlers and many other Israelis attributed to the evacuation.

Various accounts of the Disengagement were disseminated to the Israeli public through the mass media, some of them unsympathetic to the settlers. This paper describes how the events were inscribed in the procedures of the Mahout Center for Preparation and Coping with Emergency. The Mahout Center, established in the West Bank in 1988, provided mental health services for (the soon to be) displaced settlers. The majority of the Center’s practitioners closely identified themselves with the religious-Zionist ethos. Their clinical goals were to prevent distress among traumatized settlers and to prevent their anger from transforming into serious mental health problems.

Over a period of two years, from May 2005, I conducted ethnographic field work at Mahout. I attended the professional gatherings of the Center’s practitioners and the workshops organized by the Center for a variety of professionals, both educators and caregivers, who were working with or who were due to work with potential evacuees. My entrance to the field several months before the Disengagement was not at all simple. This period was characterized by an atmosphere of wariness and reservation on the part of the settler community toward outsiders. As someone who lives within Israel’s official borders and who does not belong to the religious-Zionist sector, I was probably perceived as an outsider and might have been the subject of suspicion. Nevertheless, my interlocutors were interested in the results of my ethnographic research. I believe that they felt they were going through a formative and meaningful historical period which should be somehow documented. I was thus able to take part in a variety of professional forums. The verbatim debates that are presented in this paper underscore the willingness of the practitioners to speak openly about the epistemological and emotional conflicts occasioned by the impending Disengagement. In addition to my field notes and in-depth interviews with the Mahout’s practitioners, this paper draws on the manual of the preventive trauma project drawn up at Mahout.

Mahout’s activities and conceptualizations in relation to the Disengagement and the settlers’ mental state are a captivating and fascinating object of study because of the critical significance of the settlers and settlement evacuation in local and international geopolitical discourse. The settler population emerged in the aftermath of the Six Day War of 1967, during which Israel conquered the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Largely motivated by a religious-Zionist ideology, they regarded themselves as pioneers entrusted with the mission to establish settlements in the newly occupied territories. The settlers defined their role as fulfilling the divine command of “redeeming the Land of Israel” and saw themselves as the vanguard of the state. By and large, the settlements were established with state support, or at least with the formal or informal approval of government agencies. The Disengagement led to the redefinition of both sides of the settlers–state equation. In the minds of the Zionist-religious community, the Israeli state had perpetrated the displacement of the people whose lives, as settlers, had embodied the redemption of the Land and the Nation of Israel.

The narrative of the Disengagement experience, created through Mahout’s professional practices, was rooted in religious, political, and psychiatric registers of meaning. Mahout’s practitioners approached their clients with a messianic and collectivist national ideology that they shared with their clients and a professional “trauma model” shared with fellow mental health practitioners both in Israel and abroad. This is what makes the activities at the Mahout Center, and especially the clinical rhetoric of its staff, unusual.

The association of “trauma” with “nationhood,” although complex and ambivalent, is a conspicuous feature of the Israeli cultural imagination. In national Zionist metanarrative, it is the Jewish suffering in the Holocaust that justifies a self-sufficient Jewish state. Since the 1970s, the memory of the Holocaust has become an integral part of Israeli socialization and has led to the construction of a new “civil religion,” namely, “the Holocaust religion” (Ophir, 2001). Later post-Zionist critiques that question the Zionist narrative of Jewish history have protested the cultivation of the traumatic aspects of the collective Israeli identity. Critics have claimed that the prevailing notions of “national memory” and “historical trauma” are based selectively on experiences that serve to justify current political and social arrangements (Reznik, 2003) in order to gain political, symbolic, and economic capital, through the public acknowledgment and articulation of a painful past (Kidron, 2003). However, the connection between traumatic suffering and Jewish-Israeli nationhood is usually iterated through sites and commemorations that are sanctioned by the state (Lomski-Feder, 2004). There is no distinctive clinical nexus. The traditional object of reference for mental health professionals is the psyche of the individual, not the national collective.

In this article I focus on the ways in which the iconic DSM version of mental trauma was interpreted and transformed in relation to an experience that was of substantial national significance for the religious Zionist collective. I also discuss the cultural scenario of effective coping with traumatic event—a scenario that is fashioned according to dominant assumptions of selfhood in religious-Zionist/therapeutic “culture of trauma.”

The alliance of the therapeutic and the religious-Zionist ethos is fraught with difficulties. While the Zionist ethos is based on an affinity with a particular place (Gurevitch & Eran, 1991); the therapeutic ethos, by comparison, is perceived as universally applicable. The Zionist ethos poses moral imperatives to every Israeli-Jew, positing the adoption of a cohesive, enlisted, unifying national identity (Ram & Yiftachel, 1999); the therapeutic ethos empowers a narrative of personal identity that rests more on intimacy than on connection with stable historic communities (Illouz, 1997) and undermines moral authorities promoting collective redemption (Rieff, 1966). There is an inherent tension, therefore, predicated on conflicting claims to cultural authority: a politico-religious frame of meaning on the one hand, and a clinical, scientific, and increasingly global orientation on the other.¹ Despite these differences, it is possible to identify various points of reciprocal influence between Zionist ideology and therapeutic theory throughout the history of the Zionist project. Alongside the adoption of several psychoanalytic ideas for the purposes of “designing and building a utopian society” (Liban & Goldman, 2000, p. 893) at the very beginning of the Zionist enterprise, one can identify examples of the opposed influence, i.e., the influence of the national ethos and the dominant images of “national subject” on the theory and practice of mental health professionals and their attitude towards different communities of sufferers.²

While critical perspectives on the interaction between therapy and Zionism have been explored by historians, mental health researchers, and sociologists mainly from a retrospective vantage point (Berman, 2003; Bilu & Witztum, 2000; Brunner, 2007; Mizrachi, 2004; Rolnik, 2007; Zalashik, 2005, 2008), this article examines the interaction between them within a current political context. I explore the relationship between professional conceptions of mental vulnerability and ideological-theological imperatives of religious Zionism and describe the ways and conditions, in which they complement, reinforce, and modify each other.

More specifically, I address two sets of questions: First, how were the traumatic effects of the Disengagement predicted and presented and the boundaries of the injured community defined by professional practices developed at the Mahout Center in order to prepare settlers in advance for an anticipated traumatic event? And second, what are the characteristics of the desired resilient self that was stressed and cultivated by these practices? To what extent are the features of this ideal determined not only by psychological assumptions pertaining to healthy and normative behavior in situations of stress and crisis, but also by ideological-theological premises of religious Zionism regarding the basic elements of national identity and the meaning of national redemption? By exploring notions of trauma and the resilient self in a distinctive culture of trauma, situated in the Mahout Center, this work follows studies that unpack the meanings giving to trauma and resilience within particular cultures and geographies, by means of a localized and historical ethnographic approach (see Foxen, 2010).

The Mahout Center: Alliance and contradiction

The Mahout Center was established with the support of the psychological counseling services of the Israeli Ministry of Education and the Samaria Regional Council. The Center employs 11 associates: a clinical psychologist, who is in charge; a psychologist and organizational counselor; a rabbi, who is in charge of Jewish values education; a group moderator and art therapist; a social worker and organizational counselor; two psychologists and an organizational counselor who specialize in emergency response; a psychotherapist, who specializes in trauma and bereavement; a group moderator and educational consultant; and an educational consultant. In addition, five therapists are employed in the clinical unit, and 20–30 freelance group facilitators are employed in the Center’s Community Intervention Department.

Mahout is not the only professional organization in the Israeli therapeutic field to deal with mental vulnerability in the shadow of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It is, though, one of the leading members of the “Israel trauma coalition”,³ which today is comprised of approximately 65 agencies. However, Mahout is quite unique among other Israeli professional agencies. Since its inception, Mahout’s practice has linked therapeutic discourse with the religious-Zionist settlement enterprise:

[The] objective difficulties inherent in every settlement enterprise, events of the Intifada⁴ and the inner divisions of the nation (Jewish-Israeli) put settlers in Samaria in an ongoing stressful situation. Mahout fosters the coping ability of this population by cultivating mental resilience and supplying a therapeutic response … to traumatic situations. (Professional Profile of Mahout, 1988; “Mahout,” 2013)

The linkage between ideological and therapeutic assumptions and rationales in the processes of narrativizing experiences of suffering and coping has always been the trademark of the Center’s activities. The perception of Mahout’s metal health interventions as strengthening both the settlers’ personal resilience and the religious-Zionist settlement enterprise can explain the uncontested legitimacy these projects have enjoyed among their clients during the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000–2004).

However, within the context of the Disengagement, mental preparation programs produced by Mahout’s practitioners for families, parents, and the leadership of settler communities clashed with the settlers’ religious and spiritual beliefs and their hopes that the Disengagement would not actually be implemented. The Disengagement was considered by the religious-Zionist community as contradicting the very purpose of Zionism by uprooting Jewish people from their “historical motherland.” Thus, the preparedness for the anticipated evacuation created conflict between therapeutic rational and ideological-theological imperative for the Mahout’s practitioners.

My field notes, collected in the professional meetings held by communal interveners for settlements designated for evacuation, illustrate the tangled nature of this situation. These meetings took place once a week or two in the meeting room of the Mahout Center. The participants sat at a round table, discussing in depth the complexity of their task in light of this newly created contradiction. At one of the meetings, the group facilitator spoke of how she was forced to deal with interpreting the settlers’ insistence that “there will be no evacuation”: “Someone said ‘there will be no evacuation,’ and I immediately think ‘denial, denial,’ and then I said to myself, ‘why denial?. maybe it’s faith, maybe I gave up too quickly?’” Additional statements from the interveners’ forum demonstrate the complexity of their professional task in the face of conflicting expectations:

It is impossible to get people to understand how to prepare mentally for the Disengagement.

We have several different roles … there are many conflicting values here.

People question therapists’ legitimacy to “talk about it” by claiming that “we are involved in a struggle”.

In an interview, the head of Mahout outlined the practitioners’ complex position as being the product of a tension between professional and political demands: “How is it possible, if it is at all possible, to carry out psychological tasks in a political, cynical environment. This is a political environment, there is a conflict here.”

However, it was my sense that through the clash of values, therapeutic and religious Zionist demands were actually reintegrated in order to create a space for both preparation for and resistance to the Disengagement. The debates on the preparedness for the anticipated evacuation and the practices of the Mahout practitioners revealed how ideological and therapeutic narratives together actually shaped the meaning-making of the evacuation experience and effective coping with it.

Disengagement bricolage and “ideological trauma”

The psycho-educational program Connecting with our Pupils (2005) provides a unique example of a specific bricolage of national-religious and psychological narratives and meanings, created in the context of the Disengagement within Mahout Center. This program was developed for the state-religious educational network (HEMED) of the Israeli Ministry of Education a year before the evacuation in order to prepare a possibly traumatized population for the coming traumatic event. Through my discussion of different elements of this program I intend to illustrate how the religious-Zionist/therapeutic “culture of trauma” paved the way for perception of traumatic effects of the Disengagement and conceptualization of the mechanisms of traumatization caused by it; how it led to professional strategies oriented to the prevention of these traumatic effects, and how it defined the characteristics of the resilient person, which were shaped and cultivated by these strategies of actions. The following analysis is primarily based on the 25-page program manual augmented by data I collected in numerous forums organized by Mahout for educational and therapeutic teams preparing to implement the program.

According to Rabbi Yona Goodman, one of the program’s main authors, the program was based upon the premise that even a year prior to the evacuation it was possible to speak of an ideological crisis and therefore of a need for professional intervention. This was contrary to the prevailing opinion within the religious-Zionist community, which believed that the crisis would only occur if and when the Disengagement was actually implemented.

In the year before the Disengagement, we felt that there was a crisis … a crisis that stemmed from the anxiety of youngsters regarding the future; from present confrontations … an ideological crisis in relation to the state and the army, as a result of the mere fact that they decided to carry out such a plan. Regardless of this, educators and community leaders claimed that there would only be a crisis if the Disengagement was carried out, but that for now “there is nothing; and there is no need to give professional-therapeutic assistance to the young” … the metaphor we adopted was that of a couple in the process of an acrimonious divorce. There is yelling and violence in the house, and extreme anxiety for the children regarding the future. Is there anyone who would say that the children will only have difficulties if the divorce actually takes place, but that now they have a calm and safe existence? (Personal communication)

The program’s rationale and content were dictated not merely by the planners’ assumption that a “crisis” had already started, but also by their conception of the crisis as “an ideological crisis” that stemmed from the Israeli government’s decision to evacuate Jewish settlers. The Disengagement was depicted as an emotional, ideological, and theological story, i.e., as the event that undermines the ideological and theological foundations of religious Zionism and causes mental vulnerability.

The program Connecting with our Pupils (2005) elaborated three “domains of influence of the current situation”:

The domain of faith – How is God doing this to us? Is it a punishment? Is it true that someone who really believes in God will be automatically redeemed?

The domain of values – The attitude towards the state, the Israeli army, secular Jews, the leadership, and democracy. Are soldiers “evil”? Is it still possible to call this state “the beginning of our redemption”?

The domain of emotions – Sadness, despair, anxiety, fear, frustration, helplessness, somatic syndromes.

This perception of the effects of the Disengagement plan may, perhaps, explain how the boundaries of the traumatized community were defined by the program, or, in Michel Foucault’s (1972) terms, what the organizing principle was for the formation of the objects of professional intervention in the described case. Since prevention trauma practices are implemented before the actual appearance of traumatic symptoms, one may claim that the objects of these interventions are formed according to the assumed mechanisms of traumatization (pathogenic factors), rather than its effects (visible traumatic symptoms).

The program was aimed not only at actual candidates for evacuation, but also at all those who identified with them and the Zionist settlement enterprise in general. As the program manual stated:

90% of the Gush Katif population and 50% of northern Samaria are religious-Zionists. Naturally, our pupils identify emotionally with the population of the settlements under threat. For that reason, it is correct to include them among all those who are injured by the [Disengagement] plan.

The inclusion of all those brought up to identify with the Zionist settlement enterprise within the community of those “injured by the Disengagement plan” leads to the assumption that the assumed mechanism of traumatization in the context of the Disengagement implies an identification with the threatened ideological project. Ideological identification as a mechanism of collective traumatization corresponds to the current broad and flexible definition of indirect exposure to trauma, as formulated in DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994; McNally, 2003). In light of this definition, ideological identification seems to be similar to other indirect mechanisms of traumatization (such as through the media or intergenerational transmission) that are already acknowledged by the professional community (Brunner, 2004). The professional term for the phenomenon of indirect vulnerability, which has appeared in psychiatric research primarily in connection with terrorism in the United States, is “distant trauma” (Costello, Erkanli, Keeler, & Angold, 2004). The notion of “distant trauma” blurs the distinction between those who were directly exposed to the traumatic event and those who experienced it indirectly via identification with the direct victims. According to Allan Young, it was the development of the “distant trauma” paradigm in American mental health professional discourse, who exists Gaza and the west Bank that created the conditions for what he sees as a spurious “epidemic of mass trauma” after 9/11 (Young, 2008).

It seems that the narration of the Disengagement experience by Mahout’s practitioners is suited to the paradigm of the “distant trauma”: ideological identification with the settlement enterprise does not assume direct contact, in time or place, with the “traumatic event”—the evacuation. However, the ideological identification differs from other mechanisms of indirect traumatization: it implies an implicit connection between ideological rupture and emotional vulnerability. The definition of practically all of those who identified with the Zionist settlement project as the victims of the Disengagement allows it to be conceived as a new kind of trauma, one that can be categorized as “ideological trauma.”

The narrative of “ideological trauma” implies a particular culturally shaped perception of the self attributed to the religious Zionist person. As one of the psychologists working in Samaria stated:

When one is asked to do something that is antithetical to the ideologies, that shape who you are, it poses a danger to mental wellbeing. In the milieu of the left, these things occur less frequently … I see it as something that tears at one’s psychological identity. There is a difference in how one perceives the meaning of life, what is dangerous and what is not, what is acceptable and what is not … The basis of a Zionist-religious person’s personality is founded upon beliefs. (Psychologist, personal communication, December 1, 2005)

The psychologist points to the specific mechanisms of mental vulnerability that characterize the Zionist-religious person and emphasizes unique comprehension of the meaning of Disengagement as antithetical to the ideology and belief systems that shape a Zionist-religious person’s “meaning of life.” This conceptualization clearly resonates with the concept of “cultural trauma” which refers to an “invasive and overwhelming event that is believed to undermine or overwhelm one or several essential ingredients of a culture”, i.e., cultural values, outlooks and norms (Smelser, 2004, p. 38). The narrative of “ideological trauma,” therefore, is grounded on the assumed affinity between a crisis, actual or potential, in the religious-Zionist settlement enterprise and emotional vulnerability of the religious-Zionist person, and on the perception of an ideological identification with this enterprise as a possibly pathogenic factor.

The “remedy for Disengagement” and the resilient self

Conceptualizing the Disengagement as an “ideological trauma” implies a particular model of professional intervention in order to prevent its traumatic effects. What were the coping strategies proposed by the project Connecting with Our Pupils (2005) in anticipation of resettlement and what were the characteristics of the “resilient subject” cultivated by these coping strategies?

In order to follow the path ideological trauma takes when translated into clinical practice, it is important to understand the complex meaning of connecting in the program and in its attendant professional practices. Connecting, the Hebrew word for which (mithabrim) is the opposite of the term “disengaging,” served as a key concept for the entire program and was presented by the Mahout’s director as a “remedy for Disengagement.” According to one of the program’s founders:

The people of Gush Katif saw the Disengagement as a fundamental expression of disengagement from the roots of Zionism, settlement and Judaism. The copious use of the term “connecting” expresses a desire to connect to values that would prevent disengagement from Zionist values in general and from Gush Katif in particular. “Connecting” raises strong association with national struggle, while “with our pupils” implies a desire to understand what the students are experiencing, to listen to their difficulties and to try and help them to build from the difficulty. (Y. Goodman, personal communication, June 15, 2007)

It seems that the meanings attributed to the “remedy for Disengagement” by the program’s founder were engaging with religious-Zionist values, a national struggle, and understanding the pupils’ experiencing and difficulties. These multiple meanings primarily implied reflective introspection of the internal reality of religious-Zionist adolescents. As stated in the introduction to the program manual, the program was an invitation “to a journey intended to deepen acquaintance with what has been bubbling under the surface among some religious-Zionist adolescents.” However a careful reading of the program’s manual suggests that the target of reflective analysis was far beyond adolescents’ internal reality. The connecting journey was aimed at deepening acquaintance with the internal reality of the entire religious-Zionist collective, which was perceived as traumatized by the Disengagement.

I propose distinguishing between three main manifestations of “connecting” as an act instrumental in cultivating three different types of “resilient self”: emotional, ideological, and messianic. Through this conceptualization I aim to illustrate that the resilience-building process, produced by Mahout’s practitioners, consists of clarifying and rehabilitating the ideological worldview of the traumatized community, examining the emotional state and improving the emotional performances of this community, and exploring the theological foundations of the relationship between this community and those who are seen as responsible for its suffering.

Connecting as constructing the “ideological self”

The program Connecting with our Pupils (2005) clearly stresses the importance of the reflective analysis of the ideological foundations of the religious-Zionist collective. This kind of “connecting journey” can be extrapolated from the program manual’s invitation to enter into the ideological and spiritual world of religious-Zionist Jews in order to understand its “collective ideological credo.” This approach was portrayed as an alternative to the attitude of so-called “ignoring and silencing,” in which “there is no on-going discourse about the meanings of current events that are influencing the foundations of our values and spiritual world.” Instead, the program proposes that the state–religious educational network “upgrade its faith” by clarifying with its pupils the “spiritual meaning of the current situation.”

Specific techniques of “value clarification” were suggested as means of constructive coping with the ideological challenges created by the Disengagement for Zionist-religious collective. Arguing that “due to intensive dealing with resistance, spiritual clarification has been abandoned,”5 Mahout’s practitioners presented value clarification as a venture that was, perhaps, no less important than resistance to the Disengagement.

In other words, Mahout’s practitioners saw reflective analysis of the ideological foundations of the religious-Zionist collective as having an effect on coping. The act of reflection provided an opportunity for the self-analyzing subject to create some distance from his or her own narrative, and thereby allowed the reconstruction of this narrative in a way that would make it possible to identify with it once again. Taking into account this therapeutic meaning of reflection, the coping effect involved in the traumatized collective’s analysis of its own ideology rests on the possibility of reconstructing its “injured” ideological image, discredited by the Disengagement.

However, in this case, the reflexive act is not entirely open-ended, as per its usual function in “classic” therapeutic settings. Reflective introspection is portrayed as steering the traumatized community in a very specific direction: that is, towards “processing beliefs” in order “not to lose them.” This redemptive function is rooted in its potential for restoring the religious-Zionist value structure, that is, “to contain and control contrasting values in such a way that these values complement each other.” Reflection can reframe “the crisis situation as an opportunity that leads to strengthening, growth and hope for a life abundant with faith and Zionist meaning.” This nurturing of the ideological self of the resilient subject gives new meaning to therapeutic reflexivity, which is directed beyond the boundaries of the private self and not only assumes a re-examination of the collective values of the traumatized community, but also their rehabilitation.

Connecting as constructing the emotional self

In addition to connecting with the ideological foundations of the Zionist-religious collective, in order “not to lose them,” the construction of resilient subject implies connection with the emotions and cultivation of the emotional performances of the traumatized collective. This kind of connecting is clearly presented in the therapeutic rhetoric of the Connecting with our Pupils (2005) program. As stated in the program manual, it aims

to turn the teachers and the school into a place that is aware of difficulties and contains them, to support teachers in creating an atmosphere that allows the pupil to express his difficulties, to process and channel his feelings, to ask direct and indirect questions … thus educating the pupils that one can talk, raise questions, think and feel … to manage class discussion without cultivating hysteria.

The program can thus be seen to have a noticeable socializing effect on both students and teachers in the state–religious educational network. It sought to develop their therapeutic abilities and performances (such as the ability to acknowledge and to express emotions) and to cultivate qualities such as listening, containing, management and the channeling of emotions.

However, therapeutic skills, performances, and values are not always perceived as self-evident for the teaching community. As one of the participants of a seminar organized by Mahout for HEMED educators claimed:

This is the difference between a mental health professional and an educator. The mental health professional makes room for everything, everything is ok. An educator needs to educate.

The Mahout psychologist responded:

First just listen to them, give a measure of legitimacy to what they have experienced, and then indicate what the children’s confusions are…. It’s true that a teacher is not a mental health professional, but these are skills that one needs to know.

The participant retorted:

But at the end of the day a teacher needs to take a stand.

The difficulty involved in adopting therapeutic performances is not merely a result of the educators’ perception of their role as obliging them to “take a stand” and making it impossible for them to “make room for everything,” as opposed to the therapeutic practitioner, who is characterized by moral ambivalence. The therapeutic strategy of speaking about one’s internal experiences, including feelings of fear, is perceived as threatening the settlers’ faith and ability to resist the Disengagement. As one of the participants put it:

Am I not weakening the struggle when deal with these things – feelings, and all the pretty psychological things?

Although the legitimacy of expressing certain kinds of emotions is quite limited in the religious-Zionist community, Mahout’s practitioners were, in fact, introducing therapeutic ideals into this community. They articulated the emotional self of the settlers’ community as an important resource for coping with the Disengagement, as a source of strength rather than weakness. Educating a settler population, that is by and large unfamiliar with therapeutic culture (in terms of the regular consumption of therapeutic services), to apply therapeutic assumptions and performances challenged the culturally shaped image of religious-Zionist person that stressed elements of strength rather than weakness.

“Emotional determinism” as cultural scenario

The articulation of the emotional self may be interpreted as reflection of the cultural scenario of effective coping with a traumatic event that is fashioned according to the assumptions of Western therapeutic culture. As several authors have claimed, “emotions serve as mediators and as data for processes of judgment, evaluation, and decision-making” (Bar-Tal, 2001, p. 602). The prominence that emotions are given can productively be understood in terms of Furedi’s concept of “emotional determinism” (Furedi, 2004). “Emotional determinism” implies the assumption of a direct causal relationship between emotions and individual and collective behavior, or between “emotional dysfunctions” and “social breakdown” (Furedi, 2004, p. 27). Within this interpretive framework it becomes increasingly important to properly process and manage emotions. However, as therapeutic culture favors the proper processing of certain emotions over that of others, the emotions selected to serve as the objects of proper processing with regard to a particular traumatic event bear witness to what Bar-Tal (2001) defines as the “collective emotional orientation” characteristic of the traumatized community.

The central emotion that was selected by Mahout’s practitioners for therapeutic processing in the context of the Disengagement was anger:

It is necessary to support an open discourse about emotions and thoughts, including strong feelings of anger and fury, and to stress that we are talking about emotions but that it is forbidden to let them turn into violent acts. (Excerpt from an interview with the manager of the Mahout Center, Appendix, Connecting with our Pupils, 2005)

Mahout practitioners attempted to combine the authentic expression of the settlers’ opposition to the Disengagement with restraining possible violent behavior on the part of the settlers. Encouraging the expression of anger while channeling it within controlled boundaries allowed for the authentic expression of emotions while at the same time exercising self-control.

This process of channeling anger in order to neutralize and prevent violence can be explained by the logic of “emotional determinism.” However, the specific relationship between the “victim” and the “traumatizing agent” can be better understood in terms of a third type of connecting that I extrapolate from the program’s manual, namely, connecting as constructing a messianic self. The “messianic self” illustrates that the theological collective meanings and narratives that fall far outside the boundaries of Western therapeutic narratives can allow us to better understand the described anger-management strategies (for related investigations see, Atlani & Rousseau, 2000; Foxen, 2000; Zarowsky, 2000).

Connecting as constructing the messianic self

As part of the invitation to “value clarification,” the Mahmout program designated relevant “others” who, though located beyond the boundaries of the traumatized collective, could play a significant role in the process of reexamining its theological and ideological foundations. It suggested clarifying the attitudes of the religious-Zionist community towards the state, the army, soldiers, the political left (who were generally supportive of the Disengagement), the Israeli government, and democracy. This kind of connection to the larger Israeli collective appeared as a many-faceted, complex act that simultaneously included and excluded those who were considered responsible for the trauma. While exclusion enforces a dichotomy, distancing the “victim” and the “perpetrator,” inclusion implies containing the “perpetrator” within the boundaries of the “victim’s” self. This double meaning of the complex traumatizing–traumatized relationship needs further elucidation.

The program offered to “start a dialogue” on attitudes towards the state, the government, the left. The practitioners provided the traumatized population with legitimacy for expressing anger, and, at the same time, they restrained this anger by imposing certain limitations on it. Distinctions were made between a “war” (as “between enemies”) and a “struggle” (as “between brothers”):

Using the term “war” in connection to the nation’s internal struggle and maintaining the more proper term “struggle” … assumes associatively the actual existence of the enemy within the Israeli nation, instead of an opponent that is from your people. (Excerpt from an interview with the manager of the Mahout Center, Appendix, Connecting with our Pupils, 2005)

This rhetoric presented the Disengagement as an “internal story” with two main meanings: a story taking place “in the family” (“between brothers”), as well as an “emotional story” that must be contained in order to prevent violence. This representation reflects theological and ideological perceptions of the state and the Jewish collective in religious-Zionist thought.

On the one hand, the sovereign Jewish state embodied the spiritual religious-Zionist vision of connecting the people and the Land, thus consecrating it as “the beginning of our Redemption”:

Religious Zionism sees the resurrection of the Jewish people in their Land and the establishment of the State of Israel as the beginning of Redemption … the establishment of the State of Israel is the realization of generations of yearning and Jewish prayers for the Return to Zion and Jewish statehood.⁶

On the other hand, the Disengagement, a decision made by the very same state, “contaminated” the image of the state among the traumatized community. Mahout’s practitioners thus attempted to develop an attitude towards the Israeli state that is depicted as a golden path between two similarly undesirable possibilities. It aimed at avoiding “disappointment with statehood”⁷ on the one hand, and an “adoration of democracy,” on the other. The first position was rejected as implying disagreement with a government decision that discredited the state among the settlers. The second position was condemned since it presented acting in accordance with a democratic decision as submissively obeying a state order.

Taking into account these theological-ideological meanings of the Disengagement for religious-Zionist Jews it seems reasonable to interpret the act of connecting to the state and to the Israeli collective that supported the decision to disengage in terms of the construction of the messianic self. This messianic self must contain the “perpetrator” as a “contaminated” but nevertheless inherent part of itself:

This state of internal division regarding our role now demands one thing: that we know how to respect and accept the others among us who chose to act differently. We need to endeavor to remember that they are not acting out of a lack of sound judgment, or out of weakness and despair. They are acting out of their understanding and a perception of reality … the Israeli nation is a whole system, large and diverse, and in it there are pious persons, average people, and wicked people. Together they comprise the nation, and strange as it sounds, we cannot do without any one of them. (Goodman, 2005, p. 58)

The containment of “the others among us, who chose to act differently” is rooted in the religious-Zionist moral imperatives of the redemption of the Land as well as the redemption of the People of Israel:

Our dream is to connect the whole people to the whole Land…. We all see and suffer when people submit to despair and give up the Land, due to their feelings that it is impossible to continue its settlement. But another danger lurks for those who break down in the other direction. Anyone who is disappointed with the people of Israel is giving up the second half of the dream. (Goodman, 2005, p. 12)

In keeping with the Janus-faced nature of the religious-Zionist dream, the Israeli left wing is still perceived by religious-Zionist Jews as an inherent part of their collective self, in spite of its opposition to the ideological program to redeem the Land of Israel. The messianic command of redeeming the People exhorts to contain those who “think differently.”

I believe that this attitude towards the large Israeli collective may provide a useful explanation for the strategy of anger-management strategies described in the context of the Disengagement.

When we are angry, there is usually a lot of pain hiding behind the anger. It is more real and correct to connect with the pain rather than the anger, and then it is also easier to listen and discuss. It all comes from love, from the faith that the other doesn’t want to harm me, just the opposite. In my opinion he might be wrong, and I will try to explain why, but he is in my favor because he cares about me. And I, obviously, also care about him, and this is the basis for our togetherness – one family, one settlement, one nation. (Goodman, 2005, p. 59)

The transformation of the “dividing anger” into “uniting pain” and the inclusion of those who are on the other side of the traumatic story within the boundaries of the self of the “victim” links together the “victim” and the “perpetrator” as two halves of the same national community, thus creating solidarity within it.

As can be seen, Mahout’s professional interventions brought about unique amalgamations of the resilient self—the ideological, emotional, and messianic—which reflect the cultural scenario of effective coping with a traumatic event—a scenario that is fashioned according to the dominant assumptions of selfhood in the religious-Zionist/therapeutic culture of trauma. The construction of the ideological self recreated the “injured” ideological image of the traumatized collective through reflective performance. The construction of an emotional self reversed the strength–weakness dynamic characteristic of the national identity of the traumatized collective as delineated by the religious-Zionist ethos. The construction of the messianic self provided the victim with the ability to connect to the perpetrator in accordance with the religious-Zionist moral repertoire.

The multidimensional perception of resilience to “ideological trauma” produced within the Mahout Center can be better understood by recognizing the importance of community-specific collective narratives and cultural or spiritual meanings and taking into account the complexity of local histories and social relations (see Foxen, 2010). This perception is actually in line with previously formulated conceptualizations of resilience as culturally shaped, multidimensional process that may be defined and expressed in a multitude of ways, but that is usually evident in a person's ability to maintain a sense of self and identity, continuity and purpose, cultural cohesion, social justice, and spiritual meaning (Ungar et al., 2007).

Conclusion

The founding Zionist narrative of the State of Israel is based on “a sweeping interpretation of Jewish history from antiquity to the present” (Zerubavel, 2002, p. 116) and the idea of a renewed encounter between the exilic Jew and the ancient Jewish homeland. This narrative introduced a radical shift in Jewish history, which began with the return of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, towards the notion of national redemption (Zerubavel, 2002). The redefinition of the national collective returning to its “historical homeland” and linking its destiny with the land was an important component of the predominantly secular rhetoric employed by Israel’s founding fathers (Herzog, 2007). This foundation of national identity on the basis of territory was reconfigured by religious-Zionist ideology. Linking modern secular nationalism and Jewish religion, this ideology conceived of the project of settling both inside and outside Israel’s official borders in terms of fulfilling the divine command to redeem the Land of Israel. Within this conceptual framework the Disengagement is perceived as “uprooting” the Jewish people from its “historical homeland.”

In this article, I have explored how these ideological perceptions informed the professional practices of the mental health practitioners as they attempted to prevent the “trauma of Disengagement.” At the same time, I have demonstrated how the Disengagement, as an event with ideological significance, was incorporated into a pervasive transcultural professional framework of trauma theory.

The Disengagement disengaged the therapeutic values of preparing for a traumatic event from the religious-Zionist values of resisting it. However, it created an opportunity for the emergence of a new kind of “psycho-ideological alliance,” expressed in the reconceptualization of pathogenic factors, in new strategies of preparation for the traumatic event, and in unique characteristics of the resilient self cultivated by these strategies. Taken together, the conceptualization of an ideological identification with the religious-Zionist enterprise as a possibly pathogenic factor, and mapping the Disengagement’s effects as mental-psychological, ideological and theological, allow the “trauma of the Disengagement” to be characterized as an ideological trauma.

The strategies of action employed in order to prevent the “ideological trauma” were purely therapeutic strategies, such as reflective introspection, listening, containing, management and the channeling of emotions. These strategies were intended not only to prevent the mental trauma of potential evacuees, but also to rehabilitate and redefine the shattered ideological credo of the traumatized collective; they did not only define normal and healthy behavior from a psychological point of view of the “victim” towards the “perpetrator,” but also the appropriate attitude toward the perpetrator according to the religious-Zionist moral repertoire.

However, it is not my intention to claim that therapeutic practices were simplistically subjugated to serve the purposes of an ideological enterprise. Rather, I propose that the described model of intervention is a direct product of the specific use of the “cultural toolkit” at the disposal of mental health practitioners identified with the religious-Zionist ideology. As such, this model may testify to the great capacity of theological and national-ideological values and strategies to mediate experiences of suffering and wellness, especially when they are combined with Western therapeutic values and strategies.

The creative usage of therapeutic and theological assumptions and strategies of actions in order to cope with a significant crisis waged by the religious-Zionist settlement project allows us to suggest that the Disengagement is one of those historical crossroads that Swidler (1986) termed “unsettled life.” Such periods invite new ways of organizing action; they establish new entities with operational capabilities, they fashion the modes and tools through which they act, and they establish new forms of authority and cooperation. The Disengagement created an opportunity to establish the authority of new social agents—mental health practitioners identified with religious-Zionist enterprise—and to put into practice new modes and tools for interventions.

These interventions presented the narrative of the Disengagement as primarily a national-collective story. They emphasized the social sources of suffering and provided meaning to the suffering through the adoption of communal narratives where individual trauma is experienced as “social suffering” (Kleinman, Das, & Lock, 1997). Thus the Disengagement was given the status of a social and moral disorder, which led to a mental disorder (Brunner, 2004). Taking into account the ideological and theological meanings that informed Mahout professional activities, the moral shift from individual suffering to social disorder in this case is a primary function of the appearance of the state as the “perpetrator” and the state’s role in religious-Zionist ideology. The allocation of moral responsibility to the state undermines one of the central components of the religious-Zionist ideology that equates the Jewish sovereign state with “national redemption.” Bearing in mind the theological perception of the state that orients the trauma prevention practices of the Mahout Center, these practices can hardly be included within other “modern mechanisms of disaster management” (Ophir, 2003). Indeed, they usually enable the moral cleansing of the state by means of “containment of disaster,” in the sense of blurring its consequences. Rather than “containing” the consequences of the event, the practices discussed in this paper construct it as a national disaster, most likely uncontainable.

However, perceiving the state in terms of national redemption requires its inclusion within the boundaries of the “victim’s” self, on the basis of a symbolic connectedness anchored in his collective identity. Herein lies the uniqueness of the mental health practices intended to prevent “national trauma” caused by the entity associated with “national redemption”: it aims, at one and the same time, to contain the “agent of traumatization” and to dis-contain the “disaster” that it brought about. Extrapolating from the Mahout case to Israeli society in general, we can point to the shared strategies employed by the Mahout counselors and the state in working to create resilient, if conflicted, citizens and note the Janus-faced construction of an Israeli collective national self, both victim and perpetrator.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Galia Plotkin-Amrami is an anthropologist specializing in historical-ethnographic research of psychological and psychiatric knowledge and practices. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and coordinator of the research group “Therapy in Translation: Knowledge, Culture and Politics” at the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University (jointly with Prof. Jose Brunner). Plotkin-Amrami received her PhD from The Porter School of Cultural Studies and The Cohn Institute for the History and the Philosophy of Sciences and Ideas at Tel-Aviv University. Her dissertation examined narratives of suffering surrounding the Al Aqsa Intifada and the 2005 Disengagement from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as they were constructed through the knowledge and practices of Israeli mental health practitioners from different epistemic cultures. Her research interests focus on the interactions between the therapeutic discourse, national ethos, religion, and ethics. She is also interested in the cultural, political, and moral factors that influence the emergence of new mental illnesses and disorders at particular historical junctures.

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