We Need an Eichmann Trial, not a Couple's Therapy Session

The Violence of Liberal Therapy in Colonial Contexts

Since October 7, one of the things I vowed to change is my consumption of mind-numbing TV. One day, in lack of subscription streaming service, I turned to YouTube instead. I clicked on a video under the title ‘Couples Therapy’, a Showtime production of real life therapy sessions with one Dr. Orna Guralnik. It was good TV, and effectively distracted me for a while. I passingly wondered where Orna was from (she has an androgynous accent and aesthetic) but I did not dig further. After all, I was only YouTube surfing.

A week ago, I was scrolling The Guardian App, which I visit to assess what kind of lousy coverage Palestine gets each day. I scanned for the first story I could find on Palestine and came across this headline in The Opinion section: 

It was a transcribed exchange between the therapist Orna, and a former participant, Christine. Christine is Palestinian and Orna is Israeli, and this was staged as a couple’s therapy between the ‘two sides’. I devoured it in one sitting, swallowing through red flags.

So often ’dialogue’ between Israel-Palestine is a means to normalization, but the honesty with which Christine and Orna navigated the conversation resulted in a stalemate instead. I much prefer this to the submission of a false peace. 

Still, I was angry. This format is too mild and slow for too total and urgent a crime. We need an Eichmann trial, not a couples therapy session. But as dehumanized subaltern communities, we are afforded this conversation, a morsel in the Op-ed section of The Guardian.

I tried to get more information about Christine but found very little. She understandably has not shared her last name. I was in total awe of her grace in clarity, and that double punch of honesty and uncompromising push-back against power.

For a therapist, I expected more of Orna. She acknowledges the failure of Israel, and expresses shock at the death toll, but is too wrapped up in her own pain and willfully blind to her justifications of settler colonialism. As the conversation progressed and Christine pushed her to grapple with questions of political identity and position, her Zionsim showed, and she become defensive. 

She said things like:

“Palestinian terrorist groups have made the grave mistake of pressing the most traumatised buttons of the Jewish-Israeli psyche with terrorism”

The conversation is an artifact of the both-sides fallacy and the limits of Western empathy for colonized people’s suffering. The stalemate comes in the persistence of one colonizer’s historic victimhood or past trauma justifying the daily suffering of one colonized civilian population. The colonizer’s fear of a projected potential threat takes precedence over the pain and fear of the realized, actualized, extermination of the colonized. 

Take for example this exchange:

Orna: We can debate different versions of why the Arab world is at war with Israel. But the wars are the reason Israel needs an army – it wouldn’t have survived for a second without one. The issue for the Arab world is not this tiny piece of land. It is the presence of a very small group of people that represent the west and its differing economic, political and social systems.

Christine: But what you’re describing is a colony. A western civilisation violently imposing itself on the east. And isn’t there a desire from the most rightwing Zionists to build a Greater Israel?

Orna: I don’t consider the tiny group of extreme Zionists to be representative of Israelis! The amount of land we are talking about – whether Golan or Sinai, is absurdly small, and from Israel’s perspective was not about a Greater Israel but all about creating a thin buffer zone of security around villages.

Christine: But the extreme Zionists are currently the leaders of your country! They are representing Israel whether you want them to or not.

When one cannot recognize one’s role in another’s pain, their fear becomes a form of deflection or justification. See here how Orna’s pain and fear eclipses the conversation, erasing the scale and magnitude of Israel’s present crimes, such that Christine is the one left apologizing to Orna.

Orna: Why are you asking me if the threat is real? What would it take for you to hear? It’s not an imagined threat. It’s ongoing killing and war against a tiny nation. The connotation of the Holocaust is brought up when terrorism is unleashed on Israel, and as a reason, excuse, to respond with what Israel has deemed “self-defence” – which is, of course, very complicated….

Christine: …I feel guilt that I made you feel like I was questioning the validity of your fear. I want you to know that I hear you. The reason why I mentioned the concept of perceived fear is because of Israel’s power in the context of the Middle East and power over Palestinians. Israel is a nuclear power. You have one of the strongest militaries, not only in the region but the world. You have the support of global superpowers. Part of me is making comparisons between your fear and mine, where Palestinians are a stateless people with no military and no centralised government. We are successfully divided and conquered in some ways, and we’re subjected to violence daily by our occupiers…

Then again:

Christine: …I think another thing that is playing a role here is the power dynamic between us. In some ways, as a Palestinian, I’m asked to empathise with my oppressor – not you specifically, but someone who’s part of a society that has subjected me to a great deal of trauma, control and subjugation. I’m empathising with your fear and your suffering, while understanding that that fear is justifying the occupation. I think that’s where my anger is.

Listening to one-another will not resolve this conflict. ‘Talking it out’, will not ‘resolve’ the ‘conflict’. However gently and carefully they tread, it remains a conversation between colonizer and colonized. The question of Israel-Palestine is a political question of morality, and the practice of apolitical psychology cannot become to be seen as an antidote to colonialism.

Earlier this year, Esther Perel, a famous therapist with strong ties to Israel, (she attended The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) spoke out after October 7. She barely speaks of politics, but like many public figures, she broke her silence for Israel. 

The deeply articulate sex therapist put out an explainer of the ‘conflict’ to her 2M+ Instagram followers (many more across platforms). Steering clear of the UN acknowledged labels of Israel’s occupation as apartheid, or that of the Zionist regime’s blatant genocidal intent, she chose to instead label the conflict as ‘intractable’. 

Intractable means ‘unmanageable’ or ‘stubborn’. It is one way to sound smart but say nothing new (we all know that the Israel-Palestine crisis has lasted almost a century), or to allow you to look away from calling it what it is: a settler colonial occupation and apartheid regime that has reached genocidal levels with Western impunity.

And how to resolve an intractable conflict? We simply need to talk and listen, she says: “The world needs a mediator, a diplomat, similar to what we do as in couples therapy where we see partners deadlocked and polarized and we create a holding environment to bridge between these two intractable entities”.

If you know the long history of negotiations and peace treaties between Israel and Palestine, you know not only how this is ineffective, but that it is a trap forcing the colonized into submission.

She may have seemed neutral or compassionate to a bystander, but she was pacifying activist learning: “On social media when we begin to mirror the polarization and flattening of complexity, we may think that we are helping but we are making it worse.” After all, social media is where the genocide was being documented and where young people were starting to challenge Western propaganda and change their minds about Palestine-Israel.

Meanwhile, Brene Brown, a shame and vulnerability academic researcher and writer, and yet another liberal trope of the self-help category, is a beacon of the blatant bias of the west.

In October, she posted a post-it note stating that she stands with the Jewish community on her social media accounts. She did not give a second thought to Palestinians. Already, a Palestinian child Wadee Al Fayoumee was killed by his neighbor in cold blood in his own home, and by December, a Palestinian-American University student Hisham Awartani was run down in the US. Nothing.

Months later, as the genocide revved on, she posted another post-it note driving viewers to her website blog, promising courage and controversy, but instead giving credence to the Israeli narrative despite the magnitude of its crimes and uncovered lies to back them. After facing public backlash, she announced that she would publish a podcast to learn from both sides. Like Esther’s recommended resource and reading page, Brene’s podcast also shied from political Palestinian voices unless they were in conversation with Israelis.

Brene was an especially vocal white ally of the Black Lives Matter movement. Her sheepish stance on Palestine shows how fragile white allyship can be when it does not enhance prestige. Unlike Jewish youth who have been disowned by their families and communities for their moral stance on Palestine, self-help personalities of the liberal age prefer to keep their fame and success. 

As a mom, I was following many Western-based parenting experts and child development therapists. A barrage of statements about how to protect your kids from pain and tragedy came out in the weeks after October 7, making it painfully clear to the Global-South-listener-base that their life, pain, and children, matter so much less that those of white, Jewish parents. It is as if the gentleness of therapy, the privilege of self-care, of protection even, is not afforded to poor, brown communities.

Many of those who were outraged and scared after October 7 would go on to be pursed-lipped in all the months succeeding October as Israel maims, tortures, and obliterates Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and now in Lebanon too. We are left to ask where the compassion of these deeply-feeling ‘conscious’ practitioners has gone, and question everything we had believed from and about them before. 

Jewish pain and suffering is widely acknowledged, it has a particularly prominent space in history books, culture, and psychology. Ester and Orna cite their holocaust survivor ancestry as motive for their intellectual inquiry in research and practice. These understandings are very seldom applied to non-white people who suffer from trauma. Indeed, the trauma of Palestinians has no past and no future; for 75+ years they have been resolved to a life of struggle that leaves no space to process historical injustices. 

Gabor Mate, also a psychologist and trauma researcher with holocaust survivor ancestry, demonstrates an integrity based in self-reflection that has resulted in anti-zionism and a moral out-spokenness on Palestine. Otherwise, modern day celebrity therapy and self-help has proven to hold the same double standard we have uncovered of most liberal international systems. Palestinian voices do not need to be in conversation to be taken seriously. They are not the party that needs to be therapized.