Jewish Ancestral Trauma & Zionism
A few years ago, I was standing outside of the club Sidetrack in Boystown getting some air. I struck up a conversation with an attractive boy-and somehow, we discovered that we were both Jewish. Somewhere amidst the flirtatious laughs and light skin contact, I made the mistake of sharing that I believed the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people is oppressive. I knew right away that I shouldn’t have said it. He tightened up. His smile wiped clear off his face. And before I knew it, a wad of spit was coming at my face. As I wiped it away in shock, he scoffed at me, “you are not a real jew.” And he walked away. Shamed and embarrassed, I texted my friends I was going home and hopped on the bus. All I could think about on my way home was, “how could someone hate me that much?”
I’ve come to realize that my extensive trauma training has been, in part, motivated by a deep pull in me to understand this question. Let me share some of what I’ve learned with you. Trauma, as understood in the somatic world, is not a cognitive memory of what happened. It’s not even really about what happened. Trauma is residual energy from what happened. This energy is often referred to as fight or flight, though recently, new terms have come into that understanding: fight, flight, freeze, fawn and appease (and more, I’m sure!). Trauma happens not because of what happened to me, but because I was not adequately able to discharge the physiological reaction of fight/flight/etc. This is why an event can be traumatic for me but potentially not for someone else.
Historical/ancestral trauma is a relatively new term. Originating from the work of Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart in her research on the long-term psychological impact of genocide, particularly on the Lakota tribe. Research was also conducted on descendants of holocaust survivors, and, later, descendents of slaves. Though many people have understood on a psycho-spiritual level the existence of an impact of large-scale trauma, science is finally starting to catch up, such as this study on the transmission of trauma found in multi-generations of rodents: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4142995/.
All the same, historical trauma is difficult to understand; it’s easy to live a life with underlying themes of it without realizing there’s anything wrong. It’s a fear without understanding why we are afraid. It’s a stress without fully understanding what is stressing us out. It’s a distrust without recognizing we are not trusting. It’s a deep, guttural desire for a safety that we may not even be lacking. It’s an essence of victimhood, without the ability to articulate a victimizer (or consistently projecting the role of victimizer on others). It’s a deep fear of and a deep desire for intimate connections.
Physiologically, it’s a residual energy of that fight or flight. The important thing to remember about these energies is that they don't necessarily refer to an actual want/need to fight or flee. Particularly for the modern human, they can manifest in many different ways: it can be a constant need to be doing (e.g., workaholism), or a relational struggle of push and pull, or depressive states, etc. So for those of us who are descendents of peoples who experienced large-scale trauma, we can have this residual energy living with us, pulling the strings, driving behaviors otherwise, perhaps, unexplainable (e.g., spitting in a stranger’s face).
So here we are. Nearly 30,000 dead. And the Zionists are still saying the same old tropes. “Israel didn’t start this war,” “Palestinian citizens are hiding Hamas,” “If Israel stopped, Palestinians would wipe out all the Jews.” Zionists are seeing mangled children, bulldozed families, lives stolen-and their hearts are hardened. Instead of choosing the side of life, there is something within the collective psyche desperately seeking safety-a drive so powerful that it is making the unconscionable a reality “worth” justification. The genocide of Palestinians is not one acted out of logic or strategy*, but rather an internalization of fear powerfully implanted from generations of trauma.
This is not an attempt to dismiss or excuse what Israel is perpetrating against Palestine. Israel needs to reckon with what it has done. And because Zionism has committed to intermingling Israel with Judaism, we as a people have to recon with it. Where it has become complicated for me is the dismissal of Jewish trauma as a means of defending Palestine. I’ve heard sentiments like “the holocaust was so long ago” as a means of attempting to decenter Jewish trauma. But this has long been an issue of leftist spaces (see https://www.aprilrosenblum.com/thepast). Dismissing Jewish pain will only serve to embolden the underlying trauma already sending the message that Jews are not safe, when anti-semitism is already on the rise (taking out the false equation of anti-Israelism and anti-semitism). We can recognize the atrocities of Israel without saying Jews have nothing to fear.
I fear for the Jewish people-my people. Not because of perceived destruction from an indigenous people fighting to keep their land. I fear us because of us. In the end, this will change us. The genocide will not heal our trauma. It will stiffen it. It will cement it in our bodies. We will be stuck wondering why the world has turned against us, not seeing that, first, we turned against each other. Like the man who spit in my face because, suddenly, I was the threat, Zionists continue to berate, question anti-Zionists’ Jewish “legitimacy,” expel us from their communities, and dismiss us as self-hateful and naive.
But that is changing. The film Israelism addresses the indoctrination of American Jews. Articles like this one discuss the ways in which leftist Jews have been abandoned by their Jewish homes and finding new homes in organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace and IfNotNow. Tzedek Chicago is providing an anti-zionist Jewish spiritual home. Recently, I went to a Shabbat dinner (my first in 15+ years) where I broke bread with other Jews committed to Palestinian liberation. I’m making Jewish friends. I’m finding a community to share in a specific grief left-leaning, anti-Zionist Jews are facing at this moment: a mix of accusations of self-hatred with knowing a genocide is happening using an identity that has meaning to us.. We are processing shared traumas, and in doing so, reconnecting with ancient traditions beautifully linked to our pride of a diasporic heritage.
