Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

by Sarah Schulman

Nuclear weapons or other WMD in Gaza won’t be used, but not b/c the Israeli gov’t doesn’t want to commit genocide. The world’s reaction to such a thing would be the end of Israel.

I know how some very idealistic young Jewish men and women handled in the early sixties, when the situation was only fifteen or sixteen years old. They went over, expecting to find they had a home, and, when they got there, they were appalled at what they found--and they came back to America, and sat in my kitchen and broke down crying because they were so outraged at what they’d seen.

Why do I recall the kids who had gone there, planning to stay forever, coming home after three months so disillusioned?

For Israel, Hamas is an entity that must be dehumanized by being entirely shunned, an object that is not real, but that only exists to be projected onto and acted upon.

The US government has murdered far more people than Hamas, yet we don’t advocate bombing every home and town that holds a registered Democrat.

hi, I’m a conservative, I want to overthrow the US government because my lightbulbs are dimmer now but Palestinians have no right to resist

A humanitarian ceasefire is “not on the agenda right now,” says a senior Israeli official. Well, nothing remotely human is. #Gaza

One-quarter of Gazans were made homeless; most of the country was in literal ruins. Israel destroyed their power plant, thereby knocking out electricity, contaminating water, and halting sewage processing. The destruction included a university, many mosques, most hospitals, 146 schools, and several UN-run shelters filled with civilians, even though the UN gave Israel the coordinates seventeen times in one case and thirty-three in another.

Only one Congressman, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, spoke out in support of the people of Gaza.

This was based on the belief that their earlier trauma justified their contemporary Supremacy ideology: the mirroring of Trauma and Supremacy.

It is a cry of hopelessness, the impossibility for rescue, futile fury in the face of dehumanizing cruelty. It’s a poem that deeply resonates with the Palestinian experience. But only if Palestinians are embraced, instead of blamed, does that become clear.

Being treated as a non-person may be the most crushing kind of oppression that there is. —JOHN BOSWELL (1986 lecture at the University of Wisconsin)

OUR TRANSFORMATION into a conscious, accountable, and healing culture requires an openness about differentiating real danger from projected danger.

“Do what feels right” is unfortunately considered the individual’s best guide to ethical action. But this can be a capitulation to the controls of impulsivity, rooted in trauma and egged on by bad friends and negative family relationships.

Her basic argument was that since I had apologized, that meant that I was confessing that I had been wrong. And since only one person can be wrong, that meant that they were right. So instead of my gesture serving to open the door, it was used as a confirmation of their unilateral Supremacy.

Melissa Dahl cited recent studies revealing that “digging in and refusing to admit an error feels pretty great.”

The study showed that people who refused to admit wrongdoing felt greater self-esteem and more in control than those who did apologize, even if they were liars.

Dorit Naaman didn’t do this—she was ending the wrong. She was changing how she saw herself. She would no longer be an Israeli Jew, she would be a Palestinian Jew. She recognized the other, heard them, and as a consequence, was transformed.

This is my favorite kind of apology. It is not a Christian-style confession; there is nothing abject here. There is no martyrdom. There is only the recognition of a reality. That’s it. It’s factually correct.

Some of these refugees, whose families and friends were murdered by fascists, actually wished to treat their tormenters, to have them as patients. They didn’t want them to go to jail or be killed. Instead, the refugee practitioners wanted to talk to their persecutors about their feelings. I find this to be remarkable. That, like Edith Weigert, some of these refugees saw fascism as a neurosis, a compulsion to act out on anxieties about Jews and Communists. And her beautiful vision, The Courage to Love, expressed that, by talking to them in a therapeutic relationship, she could help them separate the anxiety from the action.

We discussed what the alternative would be, and how it may be more responsible for these wealthy institutions to develop ways of dealing with or treating male offenders, rather than passing them on to the masses. And this, in turn, raised the question of whether or not we want people to be treated or to be punished.

She was finding, as a result of talking to a wide range of students, that there were a small number of men who were pathological assaulters, and that it was the violation of consent, itself, that was the motivator. But at the same time, she discovered a large percentage of young men who were confused by women. They didn’t understand women’s messaging. They were confused by women’s conflicts about sexuality. They couldn’t figure out how people got from one place to another in the trajectory of a sexual relationship.

I then repeated for the audience some of the research from this book about how the early feminist anti-violence movement emphasized “patriarchy, racism, and poverty” as the causes of violence against women. I expressed how this focus on cause, or understanding, has been replaced by a focus on punishment which enhances the power of the police, but leaves the causes of violence unaddressed.

some basics emerged: shunning is wrong. It is unethical. Group shunning is the centerpiece of most social injustice. To bond, or to establish belonging by agreeing to be cruel to the same person, is dehumanizing and socially divisive.

If someone asks you to hurt another person, to refuse to speak to them, to cold-shoulder them, to refuse to sit down and hear what they have to say about the consequences of your actions on their lives, then you are being invited into a Supremacy system.

Learn from the art of fiction writing: all people are real.

Progressive people do not shun, and in fact they intervene when group shunning is being organized.

Finally, ultimately, when groups bond over shunning or hurting or blaming another person, it is the state’s power that is enhanced. Because the state doesn’t want to understand causes, because the state doesn’t want things to get better, it doesn’t want people to understand each other. State apparatuses are there to maintain the power of those in control and punish those who contest that power;

nothing disrupts dehumanization more quickly than inviting someone over, looking into their eyes, heari...

Vivian Gornick’s book The Romance of American Communism first articulated for me that people who believe themselves to be progressive can violate their own stated values through an identification with a negative group relationship that supercedes and thereby violates any actual commitment to justice.