New Nazis

(10) Blind Rage

Daniel Williams of the Washington Post succeeded in meeting and interviewing some members of the Al Aqsa Martyr Brigades. They are the young Palestinian militants, who sprang up during the most recent uprising against Israel. They are action-oriented gunmen and number in the thousands. They have gone deep underground since Sharon ordered his tanks to enter Palestinian cities and have his soldiers hunt down as many prospective suicide bombers as they could find, murder, arrest or lock up. The Aqsa Brigades still upstage both Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) and the Islamic Jihad. The same goes for Arafat's political and armed group, Fatah, which assisted in directing the harder-edged AAMB fighters. The Israelis hate them since they consider them to be the warriors responsible for most suicide attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians. Sharon hunts the AAMB leadership with helicopter gun ships and rockets and has them shot dead. They are even targeted in the cars they traveling in.

Rage does not obey orders, not from Arafat, not from Bush, not even from Sigmund Freud. Sharon's wild and precipitate actions have led to new forms of collective rage among Palestinians and visa versa. Bush firmly concluded - and we have seen how he goes about informing himself since his days at Yale - that Sharon was right and Arafat wrong. This obdurate and outrageously stupid resolution has further enraged Arabs. Repressed and maladaptive anger has run amok on both sides. Israelis and Palestinians are locked in fear for each other. These are essentially emergency emotions that are biologically determined. Both peoples respond to affronts to their pride, status, manhood and dignity with biological defenses appropriate for assaults. They are continuously experienced as bloody threats to sheer survival. Apart from bodily harm the adversaries in the Middle East share deep psychologic-al assaults on their well being, which propel violence and rage even further.

Willard Gaylin, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons has warned, that human anger, per se, is not invariably a pathologic phenomenon, nor is it automatically translated into aggressive behavior. We actually don't know much about

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the biology of anger. The central nervous system remains an enigma, even today. ‘We have not yet adequately chartered the anatomy - the structure - of the brain, let alone its physiology or function. Pathways of the brain have remained a mystery... Nothing - let me repeat nothing can be definitely said at this point about the chemistry of emotion, despite all the claims and counterclaims.’ (The Rage Within, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1984).

In the mean time, the current man in the White House plays world affairs by ear, and was far from trained in world affairs. His moronic conclusion of the current perils in the Near East was, that Sharon was right and Arafat wrong. This rush to judgment led to another crazy demand, namely, that the PLO chairman call off the boys of the Al Aqsa Martyr Brigades at once, or even better, vacate his chairmanship of the PLO altogether. Bush seemed to think, that Arafat had a convenient magic switch in his Ramallah headquarters, with which he could, at will, turn off Arab rage.

The president lacks the intelligence to test his opinions with the chairman of the PLO, whom he has refused to see since he entered the White House. When in 1961 JFK prepared for his first summit with Nikita Khrushchev in 1961 in Vienna, he invited psychiatrist Dr. Bryant Wedge of the School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University to draft a report on the personality of the Soviet leader and how best to handle him. I went to interview professor Wedge. He explained how he had assembled a team of 20 psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and historians. They analyzed speeches, films and television appearances of the general secretary of the CPSU. They handed JFK a 50-page manual on how speak and negotiate with Mr. K. It was Soviet intercontinental missile power that inspired Kennedy at the time to take the Kremlin very seriously. Unfortunately, in other instances, like dealing with Fidel Castro, JFK returned, as did most US presidents, to the classic White House reflex: ‘Kill him.’ If Bush would have been a true statesman, as miss Rice feels he is, and if he cared as profoundly for human rights as he says he does, he would be taking Arafat seriously as JFK had Khrushchev studied by the best men he could find. JFK would - like Bill Clinton did - at least have taken time out to listen.

Kennedy at least showed a degree of sophistication by consulting experts and scientists on how to deal intelligently with uncharted territory. If Bush had been properly educated for the job he now holds, he would have discovered many years ago, that we learn most from those with whom we fundamentally disagree. I joined the Club of Rome in 1971 and worked, in close cooperation with its chairman dr. Aurelio Peccei, for a dozen years in the former USSR. Like everybody else in the West, I arrived in 1971 in Moscow burdened by biased views and plenty of prejudice. I stayed till the fall of Gorbachev. One lesson I relearned in the USSR, to paraphrase Shakespeare, was

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that there was more happening in Russia than dreamt of in my philosophy. If I thought for a minute, that Bush was genuinely interested in this late hour what is really happening in the occupied territories of Palestine, I would send him myself Gaylin's book on Rage.

‘Rage does not obey orders’, wrote Uri Averny, head of the Israeli peace movement ‘Gush Shalom’ in The New York Times (March 28, 2002). He spoke of Israeli tanks running wild ‘shooting indiscriminately in all directions, in an orgy of vandalism, causing panic to a whole population, and this induces helpless rage. When soldiers crush through a wall into a livingroom of a family, causing shock to children and adults, ransacking their belongings, destroying the fruits of a life of hard work, and then break the wall to the next apartment to wreak havoc there as well, it induces further helpless rage.’

Averny described how Israeli officers ordered soldiers to shoot at ambulances, to kill even doctors engaged in saving lives of the wounded. At least this Israeli writer was aware that suicide commando's are actually eliminating feelings of helplessness and despair among Palestinians, that are under constant attack by overwhelmingly superior US backed Israeli state terrorism. At the same time, Israelis are dumbfounded by these suicide attacks in their cities, ‘because they don't know (and perhaps don't want to know) what is really happening in Palestinian towns and villages. The obedient Israeli media suppress the information, or water it down’, wrote Uri Averny.

It's Nazi Germany all over again. After the Third Reich collapsed in 1945 a far majority of Germans had no clue as to what their leaders had done to people in the Nazi occupied territories, or for that matter, to Jews. Both in Israel and the United-States, the public is haphazardly and one-sidedly informed about realities on the ground. Just as their boss in the White House doesn't want to know the whole truth about what criminal mischief his Israeli allies are really committing.

Uri Avnery, a rare Israeli voice, penetrated for this one single occasion the otherwise deafening barrage of misinformation in US and western media. He ended his alarming message on this note: ‘American politicians, like Israeli officers, do not understand what they are doing. When an overbearing US vice-president (Cheney) dictates humiliating terms for a meeting with Arafat, he pours oil on the flames. A person (Cheney) who lacks empathy for the suffering of the occupied people, who does not understand their condition, would be well advised to shut up. Because every such humiliation kills dozens of Israelis. After all, the suicide bombers are standing in line.’