Violence in the Not-So-Holy ‘Holy Land’

... And Our Culpable Complicity

Violence takes many forms.  There is a very important historic place in our world, known to many as “the Holy Land,” which I visited with much fondness many years ago, when I was invited to speak at Hebrew and Tel Aviv Universities on prison reform.  It seemed to share the extremes of the U.S.: great ideals for democracy, at the same time as great problems of racism.

In Jerusalem, there was much intermingling among the different faiths, and the great promise and potential of the place still seemed palpable.  Now, however, it is a land that has fallen into terrible troubles with ongoing, rapidly-escalating violence.  In some ways, it is the birthplace of violence that has spread to many other regions of the world.  In fact, the current prime minister spawned the very phrase, “war on terrorism,” in the 1970’s, for the United States to embrace it enthusiastically, once it enlisted itself as well. 

Publicly, I am primarily known as a forensic psychiatrist with my medical doctorate from Yale, where I settled to teach at both the medical and law schools for many years, after leaving Harvard.  In 2017, my feelings of obligation to society and to public health led me to having much greater public exposure through the unexpected New York Times bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, which led to thousands of mental health professionals joining and establishing the World Mental Health Coalition.

However, I also seriously studied theology and religion while at Yale, where I pursued a master of divinity degree alongside my doctorate.  Spiritual and cosmic considerations loom large in these days of the faster-ticking Doomsday Clock, but also in terms of growing abuses of religion.  Human psychology dictates that the greatest atrocities and “evil” will be committed in the name of religion.

These concerns bring me to what is happening in the Holy Land, where violence in the name of religion is more rampant than anywhere else.  In today’s “Holy Land” is the longest and most consequential military occupation and subjugation in modern history.  And the violence that has resulted from this military occupation has had a profound impact on the world.

The length and magnitude of the various forms of violence the Israeli occupation continues to take to maintain dominance in the region stems, tragically, from a sense of victimhood and vulnerability.  Just as paranoia—not actual threat—is the greatest risk factor for violence in an individual, exaggerated, self-perceived victimhood transforms a culture into becoming the greatest aggressor.  This also happened to the United States after September 11, 2001, as we began consistently to be, in the eyes of the world, “the greatest threat to world peace.”

Our own country has facilitated the military occupation and the escalating violence by providing Israel with unprecedented amounts of money and weaponry, far more than has been provided to any other country.  In addition, the U.S. has provided Israel with disproportionate political cover, including more United Nations Security Council vetoes on behalf of Israel than all other U.S. vetoes combined. 

The “Two-State Solution” that much of the world had hoped would end the brutal military occupation and allow Palestinians finally to have their own state, is a promise that goes back more than a hundred years to the end of the Ottoman Empire and the 1918 Paris Peace Conference (nicknamed, one might note, “the Peace to End All Peace”).

In the time of Jesus, what was to become known as “the Holy Land,” called Palestine from the fifth century BCE until it became Israel in 1948, was also occupied—then by the Romans.  Throughout this time, those who inhabited the Holy Land were mostly Muslims and Christians.

A renewed promise of territorial sharing was in fact a critical part of the agreement made with Egypt at Camp David in 1978, between Israelis and Palestinians at a historic White House Lawn ceremony in 1993, and most recently at the White House with the so-called Abraham Accords in 2019.  History books and news accounts abound with advocacy of and preparations for the “Two-State Solution.”  But the reality turns out to be very different, with an increasingly racist Apartheid State deflecting criticisms and condemnation through threats and aggressive “lobbying”, rather than through correcting the underlying problem.

The result now is that the most right-wing, nationalist, and religiously conservative ruling party ever is nullifying the nation’s judiciary and therefore democracy in order to “save” a prime minister from corruption prosecutions.  It is not very different from a similarly right-wing, nationalist, and theocratically-oriented Republican Party dismantling American democracy by taking over the Supreme Court in collusion with the likes of Donald Trump.  That the appointment of political judges, oppressive legislation that undermines the Law, and the condoning of corruption ultimately devour democracy from within, is a predictable fate—and denial through adoption of an impaired leader’s delusional thinking offers comfort but for a time.

Two vibrant democracies are disappearing in our lifetimes, driven largely by two impaired “leaders”, for whom democracy itself is psychologically intolerable.  They exemplify how current-day Christian Evangelicals and Jewish Zionists have more similarities than Christian Evangelicals and other Christians.  Indeed, they also bear greater resemblance with Muslim Fundamentalists and “terrorists” as well, since they have in common what they consider to be defensive and self-protective than ideological motivations.  I have written about the contemporary “unholy alliance” between extremist Jews and extremist Christians, who have now amassed considerable political and military power and are motivated for nihilism.  Religion does not have to be this way; indeed, this is the antithesis of the essence of religion. Investing in our collective mental health helps bring us out of the spiral of using “religion” and “ideology” merely as ways of carrying out our impulse for self-destruction.