New Article: Kemp, The West’s Relationship with Israel and the Palestinians

Kemp, Martin. “Collusion as a Defense against Guilt: Further Notes on the West’s Relationship with Israel and the Palestinians.” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 12.3 (2015): 192-222.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/aps.1466

 

Abstract

Returning to the theme of an earlier paper (Kemp 2011), the author explores the anxiety-ridden nature of debate about Israel-Palestine in the West. Rather than guilt per se, it is suggested that it is collective defences against guilt that are threatened when the issue is raised in public. The West’s dilemma has been to reconcile its commitment to universalist values with its support for Israel. Zionism’s objective of a Jewish state in an already inhabited country has led inevitably to repression and racism. The outcome has been collusion in a cover-up of the true nature of Israeli ideology and policy, akin to the collusion that takes place in a clinical relationship when a psychoanalyst fails to make a necessary interpretation to a patient in order to avoid discomfort or conflict. Among the many unfortunate consequences has been a failure to challenge the instrumentalization of the Holocaust, paradoxically now used to neutralize opposition to the subjugation of the Palestinians.

 

 

 

New Book: Morag, Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema

Morag, Raya. Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. London: Tauris, 2013.

 

Waltzing with Bashir proposes a new paradigm for cinema trauma studies – the trauma of the perpetrator. Recognizing a current shift in interest from the trauma suffered by victims to that suffered by perpetrators, the book seeks to theorize this still under-studied field thus breaking the repression of this concept and phenomenon in psychoanalysis and in cinema literature. Taking as a point of departure the distinction between testimony given by the victim and confession made by the perpetrator, this pioneering work ventures to define and analyze perpetrator trauma in scholarly, representational, literary, and societal contexts. In contrast to the twentieth-century definition of the perpetrator based on modern wars and totalitarian regimes,Morag defines the perpetrator in the context of the twenty-first century’s new wars and democratic regimes. The direct result of a drastic transformation in the very nature of war, made manifest by the lethal clash between soldier and civilian in a battlefield newly defined in bodily terms, the new trauma paradigm stages the trauma of the soldier turned perpetrator, thus offering a novel perspective on issues of responsibility and guilt.

Such theoretical insights demonstrate that the epistemology of the post-witness era requires breaking deep-seated psychological and psychiatric, as well as cultural and political, repression. Driven by the emergence of a new wave of Israeli documentary cinema, Waltzing with Bashir analyzes the Israeli film and literature produced in the aftermath of the second Intifada. As Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir and other new wave films demonstrate, Israeli cinema, attached on one side to the legacy of the Holocaust and on the other to the Israeli Occupation, is a highly relevant case for probing the limits of both victim and perpetrator traumas, and for revisiting and recontextualizing the crucial moment in which the victim/perpetrator cultural symbiosis is dismantled.

Raya Morag is an Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the Department of Communication and Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Table of Contents

Introduction
From Victim to Perpetrator Trauma

Part I: Victim Trauma
1. The Body as the Battlefield
2. Chronic Victim Trauma and Terror
3. Queerness, Ethnicity, and Terror

Part II: Perpetrator Trauma
4. The New Wave of Documentary Cinema: The Male Perpetrator
5. The New Wave of Documentary Cinema: The Female Perpetrator
6. The New Wave of Documentary Literature

Conclusion
The Perpetrator Complex

Cite: Morag, Perpetrator Trauma and Current Israeli Documentary Cinema

Morag, Raya. "Perpetrator Trauma and Current Israeli Documentary Cinema." Camera Obscura 27.2 (2012): 93-133.

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URL: http://cameraobscura.dukejournals.org/content/27/2_80/93.abstract

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Abstract

This essay proposes a new paradigm for cinema trauma studies: the trauma of the perpetrator. Recognizing a current shift in interest from trauma suffered by victims to that suffered by perpetrators, it seeks to break the repression of the abhorrent figure of the perpetrator in cinema and psychoanalysis literature. This new paradigm is driven by the emergence of a new wave of Israeli documentaries such as Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, Tamar Yarom’s To See If I’m Smiling, and Avi Mograbi’s Z32, one that for the first time includes female IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) veterans. Israeli cinema, attached on one side to the legacy of the Holocaust and on the other to the Israeli occupation, proves a highly relevant case for probing the limits of both types of traumas. Taking as a point of departure the distinction between testimony given by the victim and confession made by the perpetrator, the paper addresses the questions of whether the trauma of the perpetrator indeed exists; how we might understand the somatic and epistemological conditions of guilt; how we should define the perpetrator’s trauma in contrast to the victim’s; and whether this cinematic trend indeed paves the way for Israelis to assume responsibility for their deeds. Analyzing the characteristics of perpetrator trauma defined as crises (of evidence, disclosure, gender, audience, narrativization) finally leads to a preliminary reflection on the possible relevance of this model for analyzing related new-war films in twenty-first-century world cinema.