“Half of the Israeli public is no longer in favor of the war,” one friend told me Saturday night as we witnessed thousands of Israelis take to the streets to protest the Israeli government under the slogan, “Elections Now.” “Yes, but the other half is all-in, and REALLY in favor,” responded his wife. “And they are the more powerful group.”
She, of course, is right. For months, reports of torture and rape have emerged from Israel’s military base turned torture camp, Sde Teiman, where Israel has imprisoned thousands of Palestinians without charge. I wrote about it in a previous diary earlier this month. Palestinians who have emerged from this torture camp refer to it as the “slaughterhouse” with horrendous tales of torture, rape, abuse, and sleep deprivation being meted out by Israeli prison guards. Nearly 30 Palestinians have died while in Sde Teiman and other prisons, according to the information provided to date.
And while the precise chain of events is unclear, what we do know is that the Israeli military advocate general decided to dispatch the military police to question nine Israeli soldiers on suspicion of gang-raping and sodomizing a Palestinian man from Gaza at Sde Teiman. The man was rushed to the hospital where he exhibited signs of rape, including a ruptured bowel and broken ribs. It would be a mistake to simply think that Israel’s actions in prisons like Sde Teiman came only after October. Since becoming Israel’s national security minister in 2022, ultranationalist Itamar Ben Gvir has made prisons his target, with him authorizing abuse against Palestinians. He has also called for the death penalty to solve problems of overcrowding.
That’s still supporting an abusive system. That’s possibly the brain of the abuser. We can not discard with one hand while clutching, with the other. To leave the abuser means making hard sacrifices, including any “benefits” that keep us bound to the abuser, because this benefits allow the abuser control.
We’re not getting out without suffering. It’s a matter of making the decision and having the grit to deal with the unpleasant, but intermediate, consequences. Anything else is lying to ourselves.
I keep telling people to leave the abusers and vote Green instead.
It’s not a message that’s generally received with any enthusiasm.
We can’t tell anyone what to do, or should do. We can offer potential options for them and their egos to sort. We have our own stuff to sort with our own egos, and a major stumbling block seems to be getting out of our own ways, and out of our own comfort zones.
Personally, I don’t even think it’s that. I think it’s programming, like how people are brought up with religion. The devotion to political party is very similar.
If we think of the Freudian paradigm of ID (instinctive drive/child self/ inner child, ego/middle self/in the driver’s seat, and superego/God/parent self, "Mommy and Daddy tapes), this is true; and from my perspective, with the colloquial/Buddhist use of ego, it still ties in, in that it takes a a good deal of setting ego aside, to admit that cherished beliefs, perhaps from good parents, schools, therapists, religious institutions may have been mistaken, even when well-intentioned. Would you agree?