My Word: Downplaying and distorting Israeli trauma - opinion

It is beyond chutzpah – it is obscene chutzpah. Ahead of the first anniversary of the October 7 Hamas invasion and mega-atrocity, Naomi Klein wrote a piece in The Guardian condemning how the event is being commemorated. The title sums up the thesis of the very long essay: “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war.”

In short, forget the details of the barbaric attack in which Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorists invaded southern Israel, murdering, raping, mutilating, and beheading. Don’t mention that whole families were shot or burned alive in their homes – 30 children were among the 1,200 murdered that day. No need to focus on the 250 people – Israelis and foreign nationals – who were abducted.

The main fear is not for Israel’s fate. Instead, recalling the dreadful day and all its trauma might encourage Islamophobia.

Israel is charged with using the memory of what was done on October 7 to justify attacking those who perpetrated and supported the savagery; those who are still indiscriminately firing rockets on Israelis – Jews, and non-Jews.

In the ultimate perversion, Israel is now being told how it should mourn its dead. Hint: Using the word “Holocaust” is unacceptable.

Among the ironies in Klein’s piece is a quote by Palestinian scholar Abdaljawad Omar complaining that Israel’s “colonial form of mourning transforms Palestinians into modern-day equivalents of the Amalekites.”

KLEIN OBVIOUSLY spent a lot of time preparing the essay. She could have just gone out and torn down some posters of the 101 people still in Gazan captivity. The thinking is the same: Don’t dwell on the horrors that were done to Israel, as it might make people feel negatively about the perpetrators.

Here is a sample of Klein’s writing: “With a full-scale regional conflagration looking more possible by the hour, focus on the mechanics of how Israel heightens and manipulates Jewish trauma may seem irrelevant, even insensitive. Yet these forces are profoundly interconnected, with the particular stories that Israel tells about Jewish victimhood providing the rationale and cover story for the shattering violence and colonial land annexation now on such stark display. 

“And nothing makes these connections clearer than the ways that Israel chooses to tell the story of its own people’s trauma on October 7 – an event that has been memorialized continuously since nearly the moment that it occurred.”

I briefly wondered if Klein, who is nominally Jewish, spends Seder night commemorating the lost Egyptians rather than telling the story of the Exodus and the start of the Jewish people’s journey to the Land of Israel. I found the answer in another Guardian piece. 

Last April, the newspaper published the transcript of Klein’s speech at the event titled Emergency Seder in the Streets in New York City. Incidentally, I don’t think we have the same definition of an “emergency”: I planned my route to the Seder in Israel according to which parts of the street would provide better protection in the event of a rocket attack.

Klein, not surprisingly, concentrates on the Palestinian narrative and condemns “the false idol of Zionism.”

“It is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, road maps for ethnic cleansing and genocide...”

Millennia-old biblical history is turned into charges of colonialism.

I WAS reminded of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s explanation of why the Israelites are instructed not to abhor the Egyptians but never to forget what Amalek did, attacking the Children of Israel when they were at their weakest, for no reason.

“In today’s terminology, the Egyptians were rational actors, the Amalekites were not,” Sacks wrote in his Covenant & Conversation series. “With rational actors, there can be negotiated peace. People engaged in conflict eventually realize that they are not only destroying their enemies: they are destroying themselves... It is not so, however, with non-rational actors.”

Hamas attacked Israel in keeping with its own charter – to destroy the Jewish state – and it did so when it thought the country was at its weakest, divided over the judicial reform. Hezbollah joined in with massive rocket attacks the next day, on the “weary and weak.” 

And among all the professed pity for the Palestinians and Lebanese in the war their leaders launched on Israel, spare a thought for the more than 60,000 Israelis still displaced from their homes after a year. And for thousands of emotionally and physically wounded Israelis.

Klein’s essay condemned a long list of commemorative efforts. “Consumers of these experiences are encouraged to feel a distilled bond with the victims, who are the essence of good, and a distilled hatred for their aggressors, who are the essence of evil...

“In this state, we do not ask what isn’t included in the frame of the immersive experience. And in the case of the deluge of immersive art being produced to commemorate October 7, what is not included is Palestine, specifically Gaza.”

In an opinion piece Klein published on October 11, 2023, when the shock of the attack was obviously still fresh, she condemned Hamas and criticized its supporters – because “these callous displays are a gift to militant Zionism.”

In the October 7 anniversary essay, this twisted theme is repeated ad nauseam. Or nausea.

“First came the Israeli military’s Bearing Witness, which compiled the most graphic and horrific moments captured on video that day... This was followed by a slew of more professional documentaries, including Screams Before Silence, about sexual violence, fronted by the former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg; #Nova, which uses phone and body-camera video to create a ‘minute-by-minute’ account of the ‘bone-chilling atrocities’; and the BBC’s Surviving October 7: We Will Dance Again, which does much the same. ‘America’s most-watched faith network,’ TBN, aired a four-part special about the attacks that was seven hours in total.”

Although she briefly acknowledges Hamas’s “war crimes,” Klein, who describes herself as an “ecofeminist,” does not address the rape and genital mutilation of women on October 7 and ongoing threats to the female hostages – just the graphic way in which they are being remembered.

The Guardian describes Klein as “the professor of climate justice and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia.” It explains a lot about what’s taking place on North American campuses.

Brendan O’Neill, editor-in-chief of the website Spiked!, has just published the book After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel, and the Crisis of Civilisation.” Promoting its release, O’Neill writes: “It seems to me that the post-October hysteria was the rotten fruit of the West’s turn against civilization. Of our creeping abandonment of reason. Of our trading of the Enlightenment ideals of rational thought and democratic deliberation for the dead end of identity politics and competitive grievance.”

Klein’s credentials as a modern intellectual allow her to get away with Orwellian writing: “Sometimes witnessing is itself a form of denial, marshaled by savvy states to form the justification for other, far greater atrocities. Narrow and hyper-directed at one’s own in-group, it becomes a way to avoid looking at the harsh realities of those atrocities, or of actively justifying them. This witnessing is more like hiding, and at its most extreme, it can provide rationalizations for genocide.”

Every person can decide for him/herself how immersed he or she wants to be in the commemorations. I, for one, have not made a trip to the scorched earth of southern kibbutzim or the site of the Supernova music festival massacre. I have also declined opportunities to see the 45-minute Bearing Witness footage. It’s not because I fear it would make me want to go out and commit mass murder, it’s because I’m still too sensitive following the genocidal attack aimed at me and my loved ones.

While accusing Israel of politicizing the commemoration, this is precisely what Klein is doing – whipping up more anti-Israel sentiment of the type that has already led to a surge in antisemitism and violent attacks on Jews worldwide.

What lies behind Klein's essay

To do away with the traumatizing documentation is to eliminate evidence, to erase it from future memory. This might benefit the Palestinians and terrorist sponsor-state Iran, still seeking military nuclear capability. It will not help the survival of Israel, already being dragged through international courts. And that is what lies behind Klein’s essay.

The savagery seen on October 7 can never be forgiven and forgotten. And no one has the right to tell Israel how to remember, mourn, and commemorate. We don’t want to preserve trauma, we want to protect ourselves from future atrocities.