ed note–as always, a mountain range of ‘existentially important’ info that every Gentile with a vested interest in his/her own future survival needs to understand about this.
Firsto ladies and Gentile-men, for anyone, Gentile or non-Gentile, to spend as much as a micro-millisecond’s worth of time kvetching about how much the Jews need a ‘respite’ for being ‘mentally and emotionally exhausted’ over the events of the last 15 months, a time in which a religiously-driven, ceaseless, Apocalyptic, murder-en-masse Ju-had of innocent men, women and children in Gaza has taken place is like some bad joke told by the horrible Hebress ‘comedienne’ Sarah Silverman.
Several hundred thousand people have been murdered, several MILLION people have had their lives completely destroyed, thousands of children have had their arms and legs amputated–WITHOUT ANY ANESTHESIA, MIND YOU, never to be able to feed themselves again or take care of their own personal needs, and how does the Jewish brain compute all of this?
‘Oy vey, we Jews really need a vacation…’
And remember, ladies and Gentile-men, that in the aftermath of their planned for/hoped-for genocide of the West, brought about either by nuclear war, a new pandemic or a combination of the both with a dash of civil war/political disintegration added in, their attitude towards it all will be the same–
‘Oy vey, we Jews really need a vacation…’
The reader will note that only ONCE does the word ‘Gaza’ appear in the story, in the title, and not once, NOT ONCE, does the word ‘Palestinian’ appear, as well as any mention of the horror that the Jews and their ‘state’ have put the men, women and children of Gaza through and continue to put them through at the very moment of this writing.
Perhaps it was POTUS Henry Truman, certainly no ‘humanitarian’ himself as evidenced by his ordering the mass murder of a million or so Japanese via the detonation of 2 atomic bombs over Nagasaki and Hiroshima who, in his personal diary dated July 21, 1947, said it best about ‘them’, the ‘Children of Israel’ as they love to refer to themselves–
‘The Jews, I find are a very, very selfish people. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated (as displaced persons) as long as the Jews get special treatment… Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political, neither Adolf Hitler nor Joseph Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog…’
Merav Roth for Haaretz
For one year and four months, an entire country has been holding its breath. In times of emergency, the mind operates a sort of mental adrenaline. It activates every defense mechanism at its disposal: It is sometimes manic, sometimes detached; sometimes filled with rage that gives it a sense of control; and sometimes, in between, it crumbles and rises, like a battery that requires recharging on occasion. Ever since October 7, we have all been in a great storm, trying to row to the shore.
Some among us have experienced the terrible massacre or have had relatives murdered or taken hostage; and there are others who relate to them in varying degrees of sympathy and awareness, but there is nobody out of the water. Nobody. It is impossible to remain outside the storm, because the hostages could have been each and everyone’s children or sibling or parents.
They are just citizens whose simple life have been stolen: the right to get up lazily in the morning or to leap out of bed to get the children ready for school and to go out to work. The right to stand up tall, without thinking of it as some special gift because it is impossible to do so in the tunnel. The right to tell day from night by natural sunlight, and who could have believed that the right to see it could be taken away from anybody. Those were and still are long months of mental torture, and everyone was rowing in turmoil by their own means.
But now, for the first time in a period so long as to seem like eternity, we can see the shoreline again. The three young women, Romi Gonen, Emily Damari and Doron Steinbrecher, whose smiling pictures have been popping up in our dreams for a year and four months, have returned home. And it is this moment, when we can see the shoreline again, that is a very dangerous moment, mentally.
This is the moment when all the feelings and emotions that we suppressed in order to row through the storm come rushing out all at once: the terrible fatigue that seeks to cover the world in a huge blanket and to finally get some rest from this ongoing nightmare; the rage at what an entire people has been going through together with families who have been torn out of their lives into this unending nightmare; the astonishment at the loss of human form by the country we knew and loved; the despair and grief over so much and so many that we have lost and that will never come back; the terrible fear for the fate of the returnees, for the fate of the country, for the fate of the spirit of democratic, liberal, life-seeking Israel, so proud of its solidarity, unparalleled in the entire world.
All those emotions and many others we have kept, to a certain extent, on a mental hold. We suppressed some in order to preserve our sanity, to function, to fight for the return of each and every one back home. This resulted in severe erosion. Our clinics are overcrowded with patients who are collapsing due to secondary symptoms of this extended personal restraint: sleeping disorders, invisible or visible depression, dissociative detachment, mental and physical erosion.
But now the danger lies not in the erosion but rather in the sense of relief. Here we are, glimpsing the shoreline while still at sea, in the midst of a storm that will take a long time yet to blow out, until the last hostage is returned to shore. And if we do not pay attention and allow all those emotions to do some rushing out spontaneously as they yearn to do – we will drown on the spot.
We will drown in mutual recriminations, in quarrels at home and in workplaces. We will drown in the most primitive of mental tendencies: to again divide the world into good guys and bad guys, to hate, to be violent to each other, to forget how this injury, more than ever, is shared, painful, sensitive and requiring treatment. Even the joy that comes rushing out of us is dangerous, because we could lavish attention on the returnees that is unsuited to their need for quiet, private time.
It is also dangerous because joy immediately conjures grief over everything and everybody that was not saved. It is survivors’ guilt that threatens joy as if it were treacherous – which is not true at all. And it conjures fear over this joy being so fragile, with every phase of the return of the rest of the hostages dependent on so many factors. But there is nothing for us to do but to contain all this complexity, to believe and to fight in every way possible for the process of return to open the gates for the return of each and every one back home.
The human spirit is big and strong. It is there all along, stable, standing tall, powerful – remembering for us what the mind forgets anew each and every moment. It is our compass. It signals to us that the road always is, now more so than ever, first and foremost a determined, uncompromising movement to undo every wrong and every human abandonment, wherever they may be. But at the same time, on the interpersonal level, it reminds us to act in moderation, in mutual consideration and very gently.
The danger is inherent to this moment’s great complexity – between returnees and those who await them, between those coming back alive and those coming back for burial. It is also there between hostages’ families who will get to hug their loved ones who are returning at long last, and between those hostages’ families who believe that this is the wrong way, that all should have been returned together or none at all, or those who believe they must not be returned before exhausting military capabilities against Hamas.
The mind’s weakness is the tendency to turn every ‘other’ into an enemy, so as to unload on them all the excess mental baggage that is filling up the mind and flooding it with toxins that seek release. It is easy and accessible, but it never provides the hoped-for release; it only loads us with more toxins. If this is what will happen, this will be a regrettable collapse at a very precious moment.
We all hope that the arrival of Romi, Emily and Doron marks the beginning of our rescue from the worst storm in our history and our return to shore. But on this oh-so-precious moment, when we are finally raising our heads from the water and seeing the shoreline in front of us, it is important to realize that we are beginning to flounder and are in grave danger.
Let us take in some air, because we still have a few months’ rowing ahead of us, given that we are hopefully beginning to recognize the longed-for change since losing our way. Our lighthouse is the human spirit – let us row toward it and be inspired by it, all the time, without losing our way, without drowning just a few meters before reaching the shore.
Prof. Roth is a clinical psychologist, supervising psychoanalyst at the Israeli Psychoanalytical Society and a cultural researcher.
The sadistic glee exhibited by Israel over the past year has done more to promote “anti-semitism” than centuries of propaganda. The mask has slipped and what has been revealed is inexcusably hideous.
Let’s build a KKK meeting hall in Bedford-Stuyvesant..