Fratricide in the Holy Land

Fratricide in the Holy Land
Author: Avner Falk
Publisher: Terrace Books
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2005-02-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299202534

This is the first English-language book ever to apply psychoanalytic knowledge to the understanding of the most intractable international struggle in our world today—the Arab-Israeli conflict. Two ethnic groups fight over a single territory that both consider to be theirs by historical right—essentially a rational matter. But close historical examination shows that the two parties to this tragic conflict have missed innumerable opportunities for a rational partition of the territory between them and for a permanent state of peace and prosperity rather than perennial bloodshed and misery. Falk suggests that a way to understand and explain such irrational matters is to examine the unconscious aspects of the conflict. He examines large-group psychology, nationalism, group narcissism, psychogeography, the Arab and Israeli minds, and suicidal terrorism, and he offers psychobiographical studies of Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat, two key players in this tragic conflict today.

Bloodlust

Bloodlust
Author: Russell Jacoby
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2011-04-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 143911756X

THROUGHOUT HISTORY AND ACROSS CULTURES, the most common form of violence is that between family members and neighbors or kindred communities—in civil wars writ large and small. From assault to genocide, from assassination to massacre, violence usually emerges from inside the fold. You have more to fear from a spouse, an ex-spouse, or a coworker than you do from someone you don’t know. In this brilliant polemic, Russell Jacoby argues that violence erupts most often, and most savagely, between those of us most closely related. An Indian nationalist assassinated Mohandas Gandhi, “the father” of India. An Egyptian Muslim assassinated Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. An Israeli Jew assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister and similarly a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Genocide most often involves kindred groups. The German Christians of the 1930s were so closely intertwined with German Jews that a yellow star was required to tell the groups apart. Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia, like the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, are often indistinguishable even to one another. This idea contradicts both common sense and the collective wisdom of teachers and preachers, who declaim that we fear—and sometimes should fear—the “other,” the dangerous stranger. Citizens and scholars alike believe that enemies lurk in the street and beyond, where we confront a “clash of civilizations” with foreigners who challenge our way of life. Jacoby offers a more unsettling truth: it is not so much the unknown that threatens us, but the known. We attack our brothers—our kin, our acquaintances, our neighbors—with far greater regularity and venom than we attack outsiders. Weaving together the biblical story of Cain and Abel, Freud’s “narcissism of minor differences,” insights on anti-Semitism and misogyny, as well as fresh analysesof “civil” bloodbaths from the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in the sixteenth century to genocide and terrorism in our own time, Jacoby turns history inside out to offer a provocative new understanding of violentconfrontation over the centuries. “In thinking about the bad, we reach for the good,” he says in his Introduction. This passionate, counterintuitive account affords us an unprecedented insight into the roots of violence.

The Israeli Mind

The Israeli Mind
Author: Alon Gratch
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2015-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1250067804

An Israeli-American psychologist examines his native nation's state of mind and its disproportional impact on the Middle East and the global community.

Psychoanalysis, collective traumas and memory places

Psychoanalysis, collective traumas and memory places
Author: Robert D Hinshelwood
Publisher: Frenis Zero
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2015-12-05
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 889747909X

Psychoanalysis has always had to reckon with the epistemology of the witnessing of the analysand, but perhaps it has only recently been reckoning with the discourse of the ethics of testimony. “Here I am” is the answer addressed to those who call on us to testify. And who are the people who have answered with a “Here I am” in this book dedicated to the places of the memory of ‘Mediterranean civilisations and their discontents’? The reference to the work of the same name by Freud (1929) is clear here, but what many of the authors and of the essays in it seem to have in common is the attention to the traumatic nature of certain places of the memory: theatres of wars, such as the wars in the Balkans at the centre of the contribution by N. Janigro, lines in the diary of a father, who miraculously survived genocide, that a daughter-essayst (J. Altounian) wrenches from oblivion, or even non-places of a memory in which the witnesses-survivors are the many refugees who have fled their homelands. As Bohleber writes, psychoanalysis began as a theory of trauma. In this book, the places of the memory are often the rooms of analysis, places of re-evocation of collective traumas which have not always taken place historically along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. In some cases, the victims of collective traumas, undergone in the home Mediterranean countries, take their dramas of migrants and refugees to analysts in the North of Europe (as in the case of Varvin and Papadopoulos). In other pieces, neither the geographical origin of the analysand nor that of the analyst have apparently any connection with the Mediterranean. We are referring to the essay by M. Ritter and that of Halberstadt-Freud: however, in them, the consulting rooms are places of the memory in which the analyst reflects on the subject of trans-generational transmission of collective guilt connected with Nazism and with the Shoah, which also affected the history of Mediterranean countries. In other contributions in this book, the places of the memory are those of the Middle East caught up in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From different points of view, three authors, Y. Gampel, J. Deutsch and H.-J. Wirth, speak to us of places of the memory where the collective traumas have not been assigned once and for all to the work of historians (as in the case of the Shoah and of the other genocides of the 20th century) as, unfortunately, they are still on-going.

Zionism and the Quest for Justice in the Holy Land

Zionism and the Quest for Justice in the Holy Land
Author: Donald E. Wagner
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2014-07-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 162564406X

A critical examination of political Zionism, a topic often considered taboo in the West, is long overdue. Moreover, the discussion of Christian Zionism is usually confined to Evangelical and fundamentalist settings. The present volume will break the silence currently reigning in many religious, political, and academic circles and, in so doing, will provoke and inspire a new, challenging conversation on theological and ethical issues arising from various aspects of Zionism--a conversation that is vital to the quest for a just peace in Israel and Palestine. The eight authors offer a rich diversity of religious faith, academic research, and practical experience, as they represent all three Abrahamic faiths and five different Christian traditions. Among the many themes that run through Zionism and the Quest for Justice in the Holy Land is the contrast between exclusivist narratives, both biblical and political, and the more inclusive narratives of the prophetic Scriptures, which provide the theological foundation and the moral imperative for human liberation. Readers will be drawn into a compelling, readable, and stimulating series of essays that tackle many of the complex issues that still confound clergy, politicians, diplomats, and academic experts.

The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790–1876

The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790–1876
Author: Brian Yothers
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2016-03-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317017056

This book is the first to engage with the full range of American travel writing about nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine, and the first to acknowledge the influence of the late-eighteenth-century Barbary captivity narrative on nineteenth-century travel writing about the Middle East. Brian Yothers argues that American travel writing about the Holy Land forms a coherent, if greatly varied, tradition, which can only be fully understood when works by major writers such as Twain and Melville are studied alongside missionary accounts, captivity narratives, chronicles of religious pilgrimages, and travel writing in the genteel tradition. Yothers also examines works by lesser-known authors such as Bayard Taylor, John Lloyd Stephens, and Clorinda Minor, demonstrating that American travel writing is marked by a profound intertextuality with the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and with British and continental travel narratives about the Holy Land. His concluding chapter on Melville's Clarel shows how Melville's poem provides an incisive critique of the nascent imperial discourse discernible in the American texts with which it is in dialogue.