Faten Morsy* offers an archetypal reading of the latest Israeli aggression against Lebanon Jungian psychologist Marie Louise von Franz explains how our refusal to honour or recognise an impulse does not drive the impulse away. It returns in a dehumanised way, transformed into something wild and destructive: "It is a fact that if an impulse comes up and is not lived out, then it goes back down and tends to develop anti-human qualities. What should have been a human impulse becomes a tiger-like impulse." Behind the latest supremacist war on Lebanon and the decades-long ethnic cleansing of Palestinians lies the dangerous remnants of a peoples' collective unconscious. The killing, revenge, punishment and destruction recently inflicted on the Lebanese people, and for decades on the Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, display and reinforce the occupation force's body as a military machine, a fiend seeking pretexts to conduct Armageddon battles in the Middle East. Israel has systematically practised a strategy of brinkmanship, pushing a dangerous situation to the brink of disaster in order to force the opposed power to back down and make concessions. The daily killing of targeted Palestinian members of Hamas and members of resistance groups and the demolishing of Palestinian houses are witness to that policy. It also manifests itself in Israeli political manoeuvring and the repeated threats to use ever more extreme methods rather than make concessions. This could never have been possible without the support of Israeli politicians and intellectuals, even some leftists among them, who with other political ideologists act as functionaries of a sadistic surplus of power. As Tariq Ali maintains in Bush in Babylon (2003), the new world order marked by the power of multinational corporations and neo-liberal institutions has always rested on imperial force. The imperial rhetoric of the American Empire systematically reflects a firm belief in the ability of wars to buttress the "new order". The discourse used by those who masterminded the carnage, George W Bush and his follower Tony Blair, speaks for itself. Recently Bush announced that "the free world is at war with Islamic fascists", concluding that "terrorism" (Hamas and Hizbullah) is attacking a democratic country (meaning Israel). In turn Tony Blair, in the wake of the war, argued it was "a battle against global extremism", led by Hizbullah, which he added, is backed by Syria and Iran, leading to the conclusion that "Iran must be isolated". There is nothing new in this demonising discourse. A few weeks ago, though, something more disturbing was brought home to us, a testimony to the level of hatred and revenge embedded in the collective unconscious, or consciousness, of Israelis. I am referring here to the widely disseminated photo of pig-tailed Israeli girls writing messages on bombs wishing Lebanese and Palestinian children, both Muslims and Christians, death with love. What lies in the collective unconscious that can so transform itself into the slave of such a barbaric master? For more than half a century Hitler has been treated as evil incarnate, as the demonic archetype Doppelganger, the devil figure par excellence. This last war, however, teaches us that the diabolic archetype lurks inside the souls of yesterday's victims. It has become an urge sustained by the deceit, manipulation and pathological denial reflected in distortions that view Israel as an oasis of democracy in the region and represent Israelis as civilised lovers of life facing subhuman fanatics who embrace death and welcome shahada (martyrdom) in the form of suicide bombers. The systematic genocide of the people of Palestine, and recently of Lebanon, is proof that once there is a trigger the beast confined within will devour everything that comes in its direction. And if we are to at least make sense of the insanity that has marked the latest crimes committed by the Israeli army, backed by the majority of the Israeli people; if, in short, we are to understand the psychology of this latest war, we must seek assistance from Sigmund Freud and his disciple C G Jung. Freud shows us that feelings like love, hate and revenge when repressed tend to reappear in a distorted fashion. In Freud's analysis the return of repressed feelings or impulses occurs in various neuroses through processes such as displacement, condensation and conversion. In simple terms feelings of hatred or revenge, understandable responses to any state of injustice, have to be lived out. If they are not, they become repressed but never totally obliterated. They reappear but are displaced or converted, directed against targets other than those that caused the transgression. Israel's "obsessional neurosis", to use Freud's term, could offer an explanation to the successive massacres committed by a state suffering a "collective neurosis". Since 1948 Israel has committed a series of massacres against civilians. In Palestine alone an estimated 70 massacres were staged to terrorise the Palestinians, force them to leave the land or exterminate them: Deir Yassin, Al-Tantoura, Alsefsaf, Sabrin, Kafr Qassim and Jenin are only the best known. In Egypt, Abu Zaabal and Bahr Al-Baqar, in which 46 school children were killed when their school was hit in 1970, are other unforgettable crimes. In Lebanon the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, Qana I (1996) and Qana II (2006) are among the long list of suffering inflicted on generations of Arab children whose sole crime was to belong to a region that is called the Middle East. Since 1948 the Palestinians have been paying the physical, territorial and psychological price for crimes committed against the European forefathers of present-day Israelis. It has been the fate of the Arab resistance, whether in Palestine or Lebanon, to bear the consequences of a people's converted and displaced impulses of pain, anger and suffering. It is noteworthy that the Israeli collective unconscious, and with it the Western collective unconscious as represented in Anglo-American state policies, have resorted to a very primitive archetype, the practice of scapegoating. In Biblical times, on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, all the sins of the Jewish people are heaped upon the back of a goat which is sent off into the wilderness. The Bible clearly explains this Jewish practice: "...And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions and all their sins putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness: And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness." (Leviticus 16:21-22) But what are the qualities of the scapegoat? The choice of the goat in itself is significant in the sense that it is capricious, playful and likely to turn wild. Modern scape-goated groups of people are usually either alien others or powerless groups whose death or expulsion from the group expiates some sin inflicted on the group. Political opponents and national enemies are the classic examples of the practice in modern times. In the latest chapter of Israeli aggression, Israel and the US have been using Hizbullah, Syria, Iran and Hamas, alongside Bin Laden and his group, as convenient culprits, blaming them for all the ills of the region, if not of the whole world. The destruction of Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Lebanon is represented as the evil work of "terrorist" groups that ought to be uprooted. Growing Islamophobia and flagrant racism, the discourse of "us" versus "them" -- the Islamic fascists as Bush describes them -- bears witness to this present-day practice. The scape-goated are, of course, to be kept out of power, hence the frantic efforts from Western leaders, imperial politicians and unfortunately some Arab decision-makers, to disarm Hizbullah, and with it, any form of resistance that could threaten imperial projects in the region. To use another as a scapegoat is to project one's shadow onto the scapegoat. The scapegoat functions as convenient alibi for the scapegoater's shortcomings and frustrations. The atrocities daily committed in the Middle East speak for themselves. Repression and scapegoating are faces of the same coin. While Western neo-imperial forces are seeking to crush the resistance in the Arab world and elsewhere their own sense of guilt, combined with an unconscious envy of the power of the resistance, causes them to demand even harsher retaliative action. The vituperative discourse and hostility directed against the Islamic resistance have pushed Western forces to wage destructive wars in the vain hope of finding their own peace of mind. The only guarantee that we will not see coming generations of vengeful Arab girls writing messages of death and hatred to Israeli, American or other Western children is to keep the resistance alive as long as there is occupation and injustice, rather than repress it and wait for it to return and destroy everything. * The writer is a professor of English and comparative literature at Ain Shams University.
