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From: "iakov levi" <[email protected]>
List Editor: Lloyd deMause <[email protected]>
Editor's Subject: Why Are Palestinians Rioting? (Iakov Levi)
Author's Subject: Why Are Palestinians Rioting? (Iakov Levi)
Date Written: Thu, 25 May 2000 08:41:44 +0200
Date Posted: Thu, 25 May 2000 07:39:57 -0500

> Joan Lachkar wrote, concerning Arabs and Jews:
> >From a psychohistorical
> >perspective, this clearly an issue of sibling rivalry and oedipal
rivals
> >dating back to Biblical times, which has nothing to do with living in
a
> >modern contemporary world.
>
> David Harley comments:
> Arab-Jewish hostility has, of course, nothing to do with Biblical times,
or
> even with the times of the Prophet.  Indeed, there's not a lot of
hostility
> between Muslims and Jews to be seen in the Middle Ages, in Spain before
the
> Reconquest for example, or in early modern Istanbul, or even in relatively
> recent periods of Middle Eastern history.  Without seeking to blame the
> Jews who have sought refuge from persecution in the state of Israel, I
> would say that it is the huge influx of European and Oriental Jews that
has
> brought about the hostility.  Different cultural values and mutually
> exclusive claims to the land have exacerbated matters way beyond what
> little conflict the handful of early kibbutzim experienced.

Iakov comments:

Joan intended of course the other way around: ancient rivalries permeate
reality with emotional contents, which have nothing to do with actual
reality but with archaic fantasies.
In the context of this conflict, it is particularly interesting  the
previous wondering of David Harley about when Palestinians penetrated the
land. In the 7th century or in the 19th century, or did they, at all?
The issue is complex and I shall try to lay down a scheme.
First of all the biblical rivalry:
Isaac is the prototype of the semi-nomadic shepherd. Ishmael is the
prototype of the Bedouin.
Jacob is a repetition of Isaac, and Esau is the repetition of Ishmael.
Both have no interest in the Land. The semi-nomadic shepherd wanders in the
narrow strip between the desert and the fertile valleys, he breeds the white
sheep, and rides the donkey: the sheep and the donkey cannot penetrate the
desert, which is the reign of the Bedouin.
The stories of the Patriarchs (the Hebrews) reflect the way of life of the
donkey-rider, who migrated seasonally between the Esdrelon valley (South -East of
Haifa) and Beer-Sheva, on the fringe of the desert.
The third element is the cultivator (the Canaanite)
He inhabits the fertile valleys and protects himself with massive
fortifications from the Hebrew (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) and from the Bedouin
(Ishmael and Esau).
Since in Palestine the rain descends only between November an March, and
stops 35 miles from the sea, there is only one agricultural season. The
Canaanite seeds in November and harvests in May. In an average year, the rain,
between the coast and the Judean Hills reaches 600-800 mm. This is enough
for a good harvest.  During this period the Patriarchs had to migrate south,
to the Negev in which in an average year, the 200 mm. of precipitations
provide enough grass for the white sheep. With the beginning of the dry
season, the Patriarchs had nothing to do in the Negev desert and migrated to the
North again, to the fringes of the Canaanite fields which had been just
harvested. In an average year, this delicate equilibrium was somehow sustainable.
However, if the winter was particularly dry, and there were no precipitations in
the Negev, the Hebrews could not migrate southwards, the sheep invaded the
Canaanite fields, and the clash was unavoidable.
The story of Dina, daughter of Jacob, who had been allegedly raped by Schem
son of Hamor, and the slaughter that Jacob's sons made of the 
inhabitants of the the city (Gen. 34) is the story of a dry season, 
when shepherds and cultivators clashed on the fringe between the desert and the seeded land. The Bedouin was even more of a menace to the cultivator, because rain or no rain, if he only could gather enough strength to make a ride on the fields he befell on the Canaanite for a brief but very painful strike, the aim of which was not the grass of the field but booty, loot and plunder. So, the Biblical "siblings" are the semi-nomadic shepherd and the Bedouin. They were not siblings at all, because the Abramitic clan and the Patriarchs had migrated from Mesopotamia, while the Bedouins were sparse and sporadic clans that raided the seeded land directly from Arabia and the Sinai. The Hebrews and the Canaanites were the same people and spoke the same language. The difference between them was that the Canaanite had migrated from Mesopotamia 200-300 years before the Hebrews, and so had had enough time to settle down and change his ways of life, while the Hebrews, who came later, could not settle down,
and remained semi- nomadic. So, "sibling", for the Bible, has nothing to do with ethnic affinity or differentiation: it is a SOCIAL concept. Isaac and Ishmael are "siblings" because had different but still similar ways of life, vis a vis the common enemy: the hated Canaanite city-dweller - cultivator. This is the reason why the Bible differentiates so strongly between Hebrews and Canaanites, but creates an "ethnical" affinity between Isaac and Ishmael. This is also one of the threads which leads to Anti-Semitism, and David Harley comment that there has never been Jews - hatred in Arab countries. Jews and Arabs have the same psychical affinity, vis a vis the Canaanite-city dweller- Hellenistic- Roman-Christian-European. This psychical affinity has nothing to do with race (Canaanite and Hebrews were at the beginning the same people), but with social structure, which eventually translates into psychical affinity or differences. It took to mankind several tens of thousands of years to reach the peak of stupidity as took form in 19th century European theories of race. So, at first, the hostility between Jews and Arabs must be analyzed in the context of Freudian "Narcissism of little differences". But the story is not that simple.
Once upon a time, the semi-nomadic shepherd, the Hebrew, "made it" big. The one who destroyed the common enemy, the Canaanite, and inherited the Land, was not the elder Ishmael or his repetition, Esau, but the "younger" scions of Abraham: Isaac, Jacob and his sons - the children of Israel. The Bedouin remained Bedouin, but the semi-nomadic shepherd outpassed him. All what the Bible tells us of the rivalry between Ishmael and Isaac - Esau and Jacob, including the very interesting episode of the "theft" of the primogeniture by Jacob from his Bedouin brother, is the story of what happened between the Bedouins and the shepherds, betweeen Arabs and Hebrews. The Biblical saga made a personification, a fantastic story, out of the real story of how things really happened. So, we must listen to the elders and their strange apparently fantastic stories, to be REAL historians. The more the manifest message seems absurd, the more the latent one is worth listening. As said a wise ancient sage:
When I began to write my history I was inclined to count these legends as foolishness, but on getting as far as Arcadia I grew to a more thoughtful
view of them, which is this. In the days of old those Greeks who were
considered wise spoke their sayings not straight out but in riddles, and
so the legends about Cronus I conjectured to be one sort of Greek wisdom.
In matters of divinity, therefore, I shall adopt the received tradition
(Pausanias, Description of Greece, 8.8.3 )
And as said a modern wise man: "A true myth is never invented; it is handed down. It is not true, but it is honest" (Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, The Meridian Library, New York 1957, p.318) And as said an even wiser one: "We too believe that the pious solution contains the truth- but the historical truth and not the material truth. And we assume the right to correct a certain distortion to which this truth has been subjected on its return. " (Freud, "Moses and Monotheism", in Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXIII, p.129)
So, what began as a "Narcissism of Little Differences", after the children of Israel inherited the land, became a real Oedipal confrontation between the siblings, because the elder had been left out in the cold (abandoned), as Joan has acutely pointed, and the little one narcissistically "showed him" who is the really successful in the contest.
And so has been until yesterday, when a Hizballah bully pointed to an Israeli soldier, beyond the gate, in its double meaning, his stretched arm as phallic symbol of despise, and "showed him back". Because, winning the Oedipal contest, had had also the byproduct of leaving the preferred child with a heavy, disturbing, sediment of guilt, which, when reactivated, is paralyzing and making him impotent. Iakov Levi [email protected]
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