Dan Bar-On (†)
Unlike
certain Israeli historians or sociologists who have developed a
critical Post-Zionist approach, we find only a few signs of a similar
critical trend among Israeli psychologists. This is especially
disquieting in light of the latest transition from warfare to the Peace
Process a transition that created many new social and individual
dilemmas that would benefit from an open debate within social and
clinical psychology. The present paper tries to account for this
deficiency, by looking at its possible historical, political and
cultural roots. The historical aspects relate to the influence of
European and American psychological traditions. Two political aspects
are presented:
- The Israeli psychologists, through their involvement in the military and their acceptance of the Zionist claim for security, tend to belong to the political mainstream (Gergen, 1973; 1989).
- A
hyper-political atmosphere scared Israeli psychologists into neutrality
and objectivism. This provided a convenient rationale for a-politicism,
especially when Israeli political polarization in the eighties and nineties was perceived as threatening the psychologists’ professional authority.
Culturally,
the psychologists, like the European social strata from which most of
them originate tended to adopt the American tradition of individualism,
as a reaction to the strong collectivist trend that dominated the
Israeli society during its early years. This may account for their weak
and delayed social response of humanism, feminism and constructivism.
Exceptions to this general trend are highlighted and the question –
what will be necessary for a change in the Israeli psychology so it
would become more politically sensitive and critical - are explored.
One could assume that this discussion has some relevance for the
development of political psychology in other societies, especially
those going through transition of values or those suffering from long,
man-made violent conflicts.
“The
existence of an experimental method makes us think that we have the
means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and
method pass one another.” (Wittgenstein, 1968. P. 232). In recent years
we have witnessed human, Israeli-military dramas that raise the
question - What in fact is heroism in the contemporary Israeli context?
These dramas have serious psychological implications but the voice of
psychologists has barely been heard. For example, during the Oslo
Accord implementation in 1995 we witnessed on the television screens an
extraordinary event in which an angry crowd in Ramallah (a major city
in the West Bank that was already under Palestinian control) trapped an
Israeli reserve soldier who lost his way. Although they stoned and
wounded the soldier, they did not try to kill him and he avoided using
his weapon and finally managed to escape with the help of the Israeli
Border Police. The country was in an uproar for several days: Should
the soldier be court martialled for not using his gun according to
military instructions (meaning, was he a cowardly soldier)? Or should
he be considered a 'hero' for holding back his weapon and preventing a
massacre and finally managing to escape by the skin of his teeth? A
very similar situation recurred two years later when an Israeli soldier
was filmed by the CNN escaping from a car that was surrounded by an
angry Palestinian crowd. Once again the country was in an uproar, as if
this was the first event of its kind, to be again forgotten a few days
later. A few months later one could see on the Israeli TV a Palestinian
father whose son was killed by the Israeli army, donating his heart to
an Israeli patient who needed heart transplantation. These TV clips
where shown (with several others, representing similar dilemmas) to my
students, after asking them to narrate what they thought heroism was in
the Israeli context (by giving examples). It became clear that the
political transition from conflict and warfare to the peace process
brought up a whole new set of issues - what Israeli heroism was, is now
or should be? It became evident that these young people were quite
mixed up concerning this aspect of their Israeli identity (Bar-On,
1999b). These dramas that we witness almost daily on our TV screens
during this period of social transformations did not gain special
attention of the mainstream professionals who were supposed to deal
with questions of morality and psychological health. The avoidance of
these topics by part of the Israeli academic psychologists will be the
focus of the present paper. Imagine for instance, that the soldier who
escaped from the crowd without shooting developed some 'post-traumatic'
reactions and asked for psychologist's help. What would the latter have
done? Would he or she try and help the soldier overcome feelings of
shame at not having behaved like a 'hero' according to accepted
military standards, becoming more “effective” next time? Or would he or
she reinforce the soldier for having survived with minimal injury,
thereby preventing a mass slaughter (Bar-On, 1992)? Would this reflect
only the political stand of the psychologist? Would the psychologist
consider the social issue – do we have different kinds of ‘Israeli
Heroism’ in the new situation created inside and outside the Occupied
Territories? I am afraid that many psychologists would probably prefer
to evade the issue because his or her mode of intervention might have
“political implications” which he or she must try to “keep away from,”
interpreting the professional capacity as an ostensibly “objective” one.
Why have many psychologists in Israel avoided these issues that primarily arose during and after the Intifada (3) , leading
to the Oslo Accord? Why were these dramas not the major issue at
academic conferences of the Israeli psychology? Why did articles on
these issues not flood its professional journals? Can there be a
connection between the absence of this debate and some deeper problems
of identity of social psychologist in general (Parker, 1997) and
Israeli psychologists in particular? Can this crisis also account for
the absence of a socially critical, ‘Post-Zionist’ Israeli psychology?
I will try to answer these questions, specifying its historical,
political and cultural roots.
The last ten years have indicated a
change in the scientific debate in social sciences in Israel
(particularly in sociology and history), a debate that is stimulated by
a ‘new’ or ‘Post-Zionist’ group of intellectuals (4).
For example, Benny Morris, a historian from Ben Gurion University,
showed that Palestinian refugees did not only flee during the 1948 war,
but were actually driven out by some planned and purposeful activity of
the Israeli political and military leadership (Morris, 1996). He
arrived to this conclusion by analyzing documents of the Israeli
government from that time (those that have been released by now). This
research outcome was not easy to swallow for the Israeli public, due to
its wider political implications, as it legitimized some of the
Palestinians claims since 1948. On the other hand – can Morris’s data
be disregarded as ‘non-scientific’, just because of these implications?
This local dispute has been influenced by a similar debate in other
Western countries between modern and so-called post-modern social
scientists. In the Israeli context, however, it focused on the
criticism of certain young researchers towards their predecessors who
were, the former claim, 'recruited' to justify the political or social
Zionist-Israeli Bon-Ton, evading critical observation of their research
subject (Gergen, 1973; Ram, 1995; Bar-On, in press). This process of
'scientific' conflict in these domains of social sciences usually is
accompanied by a generation shift of the dominant researchers on one
hand, and significant changes in contemporary, socio-political climate
that requires a re-examination of previous assumptions, models and
forms of inquiry (Gergen, 1973; Bar-On, 1999a). There is, however,
virtually almost no similar academic dispute among the Israeli
psychologists. My question is - why don't we have a Post-Zionist
Israeli Psychology? This question occurred to me while I was organizing
the 25th Israeli Psychologists conference that took place at Ben Gurion
University in October 1995. As the organizer, I read dozens of
abstracts of lectures, workshops and discussions concerning a wide
variety of subjects. They had to do with perceptual biases, loneliness,
personality evaluation, children and adolescents, decision-making or
cognitive biases. Many of these abstracts were fascinating,
professionally innovative, well adjusted to the psychological state of
art in the most advanced modern countries. But there were few signs of
critical Israeli political or social psychology in the sense I have
described earlier. To the best of my knowledge, there was no
significant change in this respect during the 26th Psychologists'
Congress, held in 1997 at the Tel Aviv University, neither during the
following conference at Haifa University, in June 2000.The Historical dimension: being in the periphery of European and American psychology.
The historical claim would emphasize that Israeli historians and
sociologists were historically used to develop more socially contextual
knowledge. Thereby, conventional “Zionist” historians and sociologists
had created an original Israeli domain of social significance in their
scientific field as early as the fifties and sixties. This early
‘Zionist’ trend has enabled the contemporary critical historians and
sociologists to divert from and argue with them in the last fifteen
years. In contrast, Israeli psychologists (apart from a few exceptions)
viewed themselves as the periphery of the European and American
psychological traditions, emphasizing individualistic and socially
decontexualized norms. According to this claim, psychology in general
focuses on researching the human psyche, especially its cognitive
components and does neither deal with the emotional aspects of the
individual, nor with issues of sociopolitical nature (Gergen, 1973;
1989). This relative conservatism is probably related to the history of
psychology in comparison with that of other social sciences (Gergen,
1973). For example, even if Freud was considered revolutionary in the
field of the theory of the psyche, his social vision was limited to the
bourgeois reality of Vienna at the end of the last century (Herman,
1992). Perhaps it is more difficult to incorporate the complexity of
personal and social change within one psycho-dynamic theory. During the
student revolution of 1969, the psychiatrist Ronald Laing became known
in an attempt to make meaningful social and political claims, as part
of his theory of personal growth. These, however, were characterized by
the naivete anarchism of a destruction of the establishment without
suggesting any practical social transformation. Unfortunately, Laing’s
revolutionary suggestions failed also in the field of psychiatry
(concerning changes in the institutions for psychiatric patients). One
could claim, that despair at the “progress” and impracticality of ideas
like those of Laing generated a neo-conservatism of genetic and
bio-chemical theories that led to relief of individual distress
accompanied by a subtle preservation and reinforcement of the existing
social establishment (Bar-On, 1977). One could also attribute a
positive social meaning to this relative conservatism of psychology
(that I criticize in the present context). It enables usually a 'soft'
generation change of leadership. One does not have to begin all over
again through the dialectic process of thesis and antithesis (Kuhn,
1962). A new generation can construct an additional layer of knowledge
upon that already welcomed by previous generations. However, such a
sequence does not usually generate new social visions or pioneering
leadership of intellectuals, especially not during periods of social
transformation and value crisis. This does, however, raise an
interesting question with regard to the nature of social progress of
ideas. Do the latter develop faster through public debate between
extremes that attack one another for blindness and deafness, which is
what happens in the debate between the critical and the conventional
figures in Israeli history and sociology? Or is it, perhaps, the way of
socially construction of progressing ideas to 'crawl' slowly along the
edge of public attention while giving credit to the actions of their
predecessors, thereby criticizing the ideal of the “fighting
intellectual”? This may be what happened in the Israeli psychology,
when we compare it to the historian or sociologists polarized debates.
One might suggest that this tendency of Israeli psychology is also
connected to American psychology, which the academic Israeli psychology
was affiliated with from its beginning. Gergen defines the difference
between social cognition and social construction and criticized the
emphasis of the American academic psychology of the former (“social
psychology without social”), thereby losing its role in terms of social
leadership and change (Gergen, 1989). Parker provides us with a
psychoanalytic interpretation, defining the problem of “identity
crisis” of the social psychologists themselves (1997). Even if there is
no simple solution to combing social cognition with constructionist
perspective, is not the lack of a critical dialogue between the two
more disturbing then the shortcomings of either? In that sense, Gergen
(1989) and Parker (1997), like Milgram (Miller, 1986), Zimbardo (1994)
or Staub (1989) are closer to certain earlier trends in European Social
Psychology (5)
that focused more on acute social issues, stressing the effect of the
collective on the identity construction (Moscovici, 1976; Mugny &
Perez, 1996; Wethrell & Potter, 1992). Henri Tajfel was a central
figure in this concept. He was a Holocaust survivor who, with the help
of laboratory experiments, attempted to prove (1981) that the human
beings identify themselves as part of a group even when in fact they do
not have any representation of the significance of that group. Tajfel
tried to develop a different social psychological trend, assuming that
personal identity primarily consists of social identities that are
'absorbed' in it, contrary to the American psychological tradition that
focused on the internal aspects of individuals, undermining their
social implications.
But the individualistic psychological dominant trend in Israel has also
to be historically contextualized. In the collective Israeli ideology
and practice of the thirties and forties, during its formative years,
the individualistic psychology (introduced by European Freudian and
Jungian clinical psychologists) had a positive balancing effect. It
gave a more important place to the individual and his/her needs that
were not in accord with the normative collective demands. For example,
the first mental health clinics of the Kibbutz Movement in the forties
and fifties were dominated by individual therapies. Those created a
socially stabilizing effect, balancing the strong
ideological-collective emphasis that controlled kibbutz society at the
time, especially as collective child-rearing method had been practiced
(Niv & Bar-On, 1992).
Later, when the Israeli academic psychology was established, some of
the prominent academic psychologists in Israel took their inspiration
and professional socialization from the dominant American and European
psychology. Though there was quite a large group of clinical and social
psychologists that showed professional and personal involvement in the
Israeli society (6),
they did it mostly on an individual basis, unlike the kind of
collective critical professional identity that their colleagues in
history or sociology have developed. There are many Israeli
psychologists who are annually involved in the conferences of Political
Psychology. But again, they did not try or succeed in creating a
collective critical mass or an internal political controversy within
Israeli psychology, like the Post-Zionists have achieved within
sociology or history.
1. Identifying with the security consensus of Zionism.
As long as there was a social consensus around the goals of Zionism,
the relative conformity of Israeli psychologists was not a critical
issue (7).
The deep involvement of Israeli psychology in the military, accepting
the political dominant political claim that Israel was constantly under
strong security threat may account for the conformity of most Israeli
psychologists and other social scientists until the seventies. However,
through the polarization in the Israeli society and the collapse of the
Israeli national consensus during the 1982 War in Lebanon and more so
with the outbreak of the Intifada, in 1987 and the following
Oslo Accord, these questions gained an acute, socially cogent meaning.
The assumption behind the politically critical approach was that at
certain moments in history, not taking a critical stand implies that
one is making a political statement (8).
Questioning the goals of Zionism in light of occupation of another
national group and territory could suddenly become related to what is
the social significance of an intervention of the organizational
psychologist or the therapist in the army. These issues gained an acute
political and social relevance that could not be ignored anymore by
critical sociologists and historians. They were, however, repressed
quite astonishingly by the majority of Israeli psychologists (Ram,
1995; Bar-On, 1992). This could not so easily be explained away just by
the fact that many Israeli psychologists had (or still have, in
reserves) a professional role in the Israeli army, and stuck to their
commitment to its “non-political” social orientation and position.
The most obvious exception in the absence of an academic psychological
debate concerning the interventions of mental health people in the
changing political and social context, was the appearance of the Imut group
during the late eighties, composed of psychologists, social workers and
people working in education. This group attempted to critically
redefine the professional identity into a politically contextualized
one, creating at the same time a professional dialogue with Palestinian
mental health-care professionals during the difficult periods of the Intifada
and Gulf War. This group reached at its best several hundred
professionals that in a sense, 'predicted' the peace process and the
need to develop a new social professional way of thinking. They did,
however, not succeed in creating an academic debate within Israeli
psychology, like the one taking place among historians and
sociologists, during the annual or biannual conventions. There was a
general tendency among the academic psychology to play down the
implications of the experience of Imut as being irrelevant to the essential theoretical and practical goals of psychological research.
Another argument as to why psychologist are less politically vocal in
comparison to Israeli historians and sociologists, is related to the
tendency of experimental psychologists to present themselves as being
closer in their academic orientation to the biologists or the
physicians, located further away from the social sciences (Gergen,
1973). My argument is that within a hyper-political atmosphere of
polarization and lack of consensus that evolved in Israel in the
eighties, the professional esteem of psychologist was threatened and
scared many of them into a kind of ‘neutrality’ argumentation based on
their so called scientific esteem. To take the earlier example, when
military heroism was under critic as it happened in the case of the
soldier in Ramallah, part of the society felt he was a coward, while
others believed he was a hero. The way psychologists chose to conduct
their intervention could become politically labeled. Many among the
Israeli psychologists preferred to become mute under such
circumstances, trying to maintain a kind of ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’
professional stand, thereby avoiding the conflict rather than
confronting it (9).
According to the argument on “moral neutrality,” even if it is accepted
that social psychologists have certain political affiliations, these
should not affect or “interfere” in their professional work. They do
not operate within their professional field according to some declared
ideological identity, while trying to create for themselves an
“objective” professional image of the natural sciences, more than some
of their colleagues in the fields of sociology and history. I do
not claim that there is a simple answer to this issue. Clearly, if one
takes a political stand, this may create certain boundaries to one’s
professional questioning, interests and arguments. But claiming moral
neutrality during periods of moral crisis (which to my opinion the Intifada clearly
was) or periods of social transition and value transformations, is also
a political statement. Such a statement creates (other) boundaries –
where not to look at, what to silence and keep away from (Gergen, 1973;
1989). Therefore, the critical political psychologists would see this
trend of neutrality as part of the psychologists’ relative
conservatism, mentioned earlier. This was especially disquieting within
the changing Israeli political context during the Intifada and the beginning of the Oslo Peace Accord (Ram, 1995; Bar-On, 1992).
There were clearly exceptions to this rule. For example, a decade ago,
a series of articles were published in the Israeli psychotherapeutic
journal 'Sichot' (Wiztum et Al., 1989) that attempted to account for
the fact why battle shock was not diagnosed in the first Israeli wars.
It became apparent to these researchers that battle shock were evident
in the 1948 war as in any other war, but these totally silenced by the
Israeli society as well as by the psychologists and psychiatrists.
People who suffered from battle shock then were labeled as
'degenerates', 'cowards' or those who simply 'disappeared' from battle
without a trace. When officers in those battles were interviewed, they
claimed (even in the late 90's!), that "There was no battle shock
in the Palmach (the elite Israeli army units of 1948). If there were
such phenomena, they occurred among the Gachal soldiers (those soldiers
who immigrated from Europe after the Holocaust)" (Bar-On, 1999b). Of
course, there is no support to this socially biased stereotypical
statement. It only shows how people cling to their false arguments till
today, arguments that probably had a defensive function already fifty
years earlier.
In 1948, the relevant professional knowledge did
already exist in Israel that could have enabled the diagnosis and the
necessary treatment of battle shock. At the time, three articles were
published in a medical journal by a German psychiatrist, Doctor Kalmus,
who had successfully treated thousands of soldiers suffering from
battle stress during the First World War. He achieved this by means of
the Salmon method that is still recognized today as an effective method
(Herman, 1992). But no one listened to him then. He was viewed as an
“old irrelevant German physician.” The fear was probably, that an
acknowledgment of battle shock by psychologists might have harmed the
war effort and the ideal image of the Israeli Sabra, (10) the Israeli hero-fighter of that time (Wiztum et al., 1989).
There
are still remnants of fear of and hostility toward psychologists among
officers in the Israeli army today similar to those that can be found
in other armies. The argument in the army was usually that the
psychologists create (awareness of) problems and, had they not
identified them, commanders could continue to take action 'effectively'
within the framework of the a social status quo. If so, one could ask
why has battle shock been diagnosed in the subsequent 1973 and 1982
Wars? It appears that in the former, the whole Israeli society was
somewhat shocked and this facilitated the 'acceptance' of that
diagnosis. During that war it became apparent for the first time in the
Israeli wars that 'survival' and not only ‘fighting’ could be heroic (11).
After the 1973 war an internal military professional unit was
developed, following the 1973 Israeli experience and the American army
experience during the Vietnam War and (Solomon, 1995). When the 1982
war broke out, this unit was ready to identify the battle shock and
treat them professionally. This may account for the fact that during
this war there were more battle-shock cases diagnosed and treated than
during the 1973 war, even though the later was, objectively speaking, a
much more difficult war to fight with a much higher potential for
battle shock occurrences.
Quite surprisingly an echo of the silenced phenomena of battle shock during the 1948 War reappeared during the Intifada in 1987-1993. First, the Intifada
was not defined as a war by the military or the government for
political reasons. The official position was that this was not a war
but suppressing violent activities of protest led by Palestinian
civilians. The semi-official position was that the recognition of
battle shock would have exposed the government to additional public
pressure to find a political compromise with the Palestinians. Clearly,
the questions at stake for the professional psychologists were
difficult ones: Were soldiers in fact emotionally affected by
suppressing civilian violence of women and children? In what way
was their emotional wounding during the Intifada (moral
trauma of military victimizers) different from regular battle shock
(emotional trauma of war-victims) (Young, 1995)? How could these wounds
be treated without a social acknowledgement of soldiers’ wrong doings?
It was extremely difficult to diagnose and treat such emotional wounds
in a context of social polarization, as their acknowledgement had
political implications. For our present debate it is interesting to
note that it had become undiscussable in the Israeli public or
professional psychological debate if the Intifada has caused
ongoing emotional wounds to the Israeli soldiers. Whoever made such a
claim was immediately labeled as making a political statement (9),
identified with an 'unprofessional' claim according to the conventional
‘objective’ psychological tradition. Therefore, many psychologists
(apart from the Imut organization) preferred to avoid the
debate altogether, at a time when Israeli sociologists and historians
had heated debates on similar issues. To what extent did the Intifada
leave emotional scars on youngsters who acted to suppress it during
their army service? We may never a precise answer to this question.
What may be more disturbing is the fact that most of those who became
emotionally impaired had to 'manage' by themselves, without the help of
psychologists, similar to those among their parents’ generation who had
suffered from battle shock in the 1948 War. Following Herman (1992), at
some point in the future, after the peace process with the Palestinians
will be completed, the Israeli society may accuse the psychologists - it's
all very well to be wise after the event. Where have you been then,
when it all happened? Why didn't you anticipate these after-effects and
raise the public debate and attention? But by then the social
context will be different, and the memory of the present context, in
which it was socially unacceptable to make such statements, will be
forgotten. Sometimes taking a political stand puts one’s professional
position at risk. This can be painful, as many Israelis still feel
great discomfort concerning the Palestinians having a political and
moral 'voice' of their own. This voice is essentially different from
the Israeli collective dominant position that tried for years to
exclude the Palestinians and the necessary recognition of their
national rights. In this sense, the price of confronting the Israeli
consensus that Post-Zionist sociologists and historians were willing to
pay, could unfortunately not be attributed to the majority of Israeli
psychologists. The latter may have felt also discomfort but they were
less willing to take a similar risky professional stand.
The question of the relative apolitical trend of the Israeli
psychologists can not be accounted for only by the historical and
political arguments. We find that also in other countries the
individualistic psychology dominated and socially critical approaches
did not develop during social transitions (Gergen, 1973; 1989). But the
exceptions to this trend are valuable and should be addressed in some
detail. For example, clinical and social psychologists were among the
leadership of the Velvet Revolution in Czech Republic, in 1990.
Psychologists
are among the leading figures of the TRC process in South Africa
(Gbodo-Madikizela, 1998). Also, certain domains of American psychology
can be viewed to have developed a critical social message, perhaps even
gaining some political influence in fields of feminism, constructivism,
humanism and leftist political activism. The research and intervention
regarding sexual abuse within the family can serve as an example.
Herman (1992) claims this to be an outcome of the feminist social
movement in the USA. Likewise, she found the acknowledgement of the
post-traumatic syndrome (PTSD) to be the result of Human Rights
movement’s resistance to the Vietnam War (12).
Her claim reminds us of Foucault's similar claim (1965) that the method
of diagnosing insanity was a social construction. The 'scientific' (but
mainly socially constructed) debate defined the professional categories
of understanding and, through them, the legitimacy of the subjective
experience.
It is clear that sexual abuse in the family did not begin when
psychologists started to diagnose and treat it, just as the long-term
effects of the Holocaust did not begin when psychotherapist finally
identified them. According to Herman’s claim psychologists are a solid
part of the social status quo and lack the intellectual stamina or
social courage to lead the way, thereby risking to finding themselves
outside the status quo. This situation, with all its attendant comfort,
prevents them from openly identifying and proclaiming phenomena that
society is still reluctant to debate, but which urgently need “a
voice.” These two psychological issues (sexual abuse in the family and
the post traumatic stress syndrome) share a common attribute, which
shed some additional light on the difficulty associated with the social
pioneering role of the psychologists. While they have generated a
considerable body of knowledge and created a degree of public
awareness, they have very little to tell us – what to do in order to
prevent the continuation of the phenomena itself. That is, we are more
exposed today to knowledge concerning accumulated harm by man-made
trauma, but we do not have yet enough social or educational tools that
could prevent or even reduce their negative effects. Thus, we are
frustrated with regard to that new awareness that cannot be implemented
politically or socially to bring about reduction or prevention. This
social frustration can have a regressive effect, similar to the way in
which Laing's revolutionary psycho-social analysis caused despair of
community solutions concerning psychiatric problems (Ignatieff, 1998).
Still, these new developments can be viewed as signs of a more critical
and socially sensitive psychological thinking in the USA. Can we find
similar signs in the Israeli academic psychological culture? We find
similar developments in the local professional culture, but in minor
and delayed forms. How can we account for the still dominant
a-political tendency of Israeli psychologists, beyond the historical
and political dimensions discussed earlier? I believe that a cultural
dimension should be added here. The current Israeli culture of
individualism is not only a reflection of the globalization of Western
culture of individualism but also a reaction to the strong collectivism
that dominated the Israeli society during its first decades. This
argument demands some clarification concerning the changes in the
construction of the Israeli identity in the past few decades.
The Zionist, Israeli-Jewish identity was constructed monolithically in
opposition to several Jewish and Gentile “others” (Bar-On, 1999b).
Specifically, the Diaspora Jew (represented mainly by the European
Diaspora before WWII), the Ethnic Jew (represented mainly by the
Sephardic Jews who emigrated from the Afro-Asian countries) and the
Gentile (those who persecuted the Jews in the Diaspora, the Nazis and
the Arabs). This identity construction was accompanied with a strong
collectivist approach, in which the hegemony of the Eastern European
Jewry dominated the political scenery and heroism was defined as
sacrificing one’s own needs and preferences for the collectively
defined goals.
During the last two decades, since the beginning of the Peace Process
with Egypt and later with the Palestinians and Jordan, this monolithic
construction is rapidly disintegrating. A multitude of different
ethnic, religious and gender ‘voices’ emerged, all claiming to have
been repressed by the previous political hegemony. The latter reacted
by a strong individualist tendency, trying to ally itself with
globalization and capitalism from without, thereby also trying to play
down the multitude of competing socially constructed voices,
threatening to take over, socially and politically. But clearly, the
transition is not unilateral. The monolithic topic around which one can
still unite most of the Israeli public is its self-perception as being
victims of others that need self-defense and protection: Victims of the
Nazis, of earlier persecutions all over the world and clearly victims
of the Arabs. Begin and Netanyahu (13) knew very well how to manipulate the public fears related to this topic, as a way to maintain their own hegemony.
As the Israeli psychologists are mostly affiliated with the dominant
European hegemony (and with the Israeli political left wing), one could
understand their individualistc professional tendency also as a
reaction to the collectivism of the past. Still, one could see it as a
certain helplessness to cope intellectually and emotionally with the
powerful process of disintegration of the social construction of the
collective identity. They themselves are a part of this process and may
not be able yet to analyze and reflect upon it. Here one should note,
that the social criticism of the Post-Zionist historians and
sociologists did not find always ways into the hearts and minds of the
new social groups or voices that confront the traditional social
East-European hegemony. Paradoxically, they were in a way the more
critical part of that same hegemony, but mostly did not succeed to lead
or become part of a social transition or reallocation of power.
I would like to provide a few examples of a possible new trend among
Israeli social and clinical psychologists that could be identified as a
new critical approach to conventional psychology and toward the Israeli
society, even if they are not collectively yet identified as such. I
refer to those academic professionals who try, mainly with the help of
qualitative methods (14),
to become more socially relevant. The study of Witzdum and his
colleagues (1989), cited earlier, represents such a trend. Lieblich’s
earlier work on the Israeli Kibbutz (1980), soldiers (1975) and
prisoners of war (1984) represent a similar trend. Yanai’s paper on
Israeli religious women’s attitudes toward the Arabs (1996) provides a
fresh look at a critical aspect of Israeli society. Bar-Tal’s work on
the Israeli ‘siege mentality’ (1992) and his research as to how Israeli
schoolbooks did not change, in their negative representations of Arabs,
as a result of the peace process (1997) are good examples of such a new
trend. My own studies on decendants of Holocaust survivors and
descendants of Nazi perpetrators (Bar-On, 1989; 1995) and those of my
students’ on different aspects of the transforming Israeli identity
(Bar-On, 1999b) could be categorized within this trend. The common
denominator to these studies – that they were ready to sacrifice
conventionally attributed “objective” or “neutral” qualities, by using
qualitative methodology, to create relevant and socially valuable new
data that addresses issues in relation to social change and transition
with individual implications. Still, until now, this trend is usually
viewed at best as an individual risk taking process, but lacks any
clear recognition among the Israeli psychologists or the Israeli
society.
Until the creation of such a recognized critical Post-Zionist Israeli
psychology, we will probably have to listen to a myriad of voices from
Israeli social and clinical psychologists. This is, perhaps, the
most striking characteristic of Israeli psychology, as it contributes
indirectly to the disintegration of the collective monolithic identity.
Any social topic will immediately evoke a variety of different voices
that leave the layman in a state of confusion: If professionals can't
make up their minds, what do you expect from the ordinary person? For
instance, psychologists played quite a significant role in the media
during the Gulf War. Nonetheless, the public stated that it was
difficult to know how to behave with so many professional voices
telling them what to do or how to interpret their stressful reactions.
For anyone who has experienced an ideological regime of a single
collective hegemonic voice (of “pure” ideology – Bar-On, 1999a), the
disharmony of a variety of voices may sound pleasant. However, this
disharmony also has a price: As professionals, psychologists have
little leadership in relation to social processes taking place before
our very eyes. Perhaps, the more conventional Israeli psychologists
should try the following exercise. What will they answer when their
grandchildren will ask them in 20 years: Grandfather/mother, where
have you been and what did you do when Israeli soldiers broke
Palestinian children's arms and legs with sticks, and some of those
children (on both sides) are still suffering from these acts today?
It is my conclusion that psychology is essentially a science that acts
within the framework of the social status quo, following social
processes rather then leading them. If one wishes to develop a more
critical social perspective and role, one has to dare and go beyond the
social status quo, as the critical historians and sociologists have
attempted to do. This debate, when it takes place, has to investigate
the question of the existence (or lack thereof) of an Israeli socially
and historically contextualized psychology before the Israeli society
got involved in the present transition from warfare to the current
peace process. The Israeli Jewish professionals will also have to deal
with the somewhat frightening similarity between the 'degenerate'
shell-shocked soldiers in the 1948 War and the reactions of the
military system to the behavior of the soldier in Ramallah in 1994; to
the unrecognized stressful reactions of Israeli soldiers during the Intifada.
Probably this discussion has some relevance for the development of
political psychology in other social contexts, especially those going
through social transition of values from collectivism to individualism
(like the societies in Eastern Europe) or those suffering from long,
man-made violent conflicts (like South Africa or Northern Ireland).
Still, I would suggest that a socially contextual perspective should be
developed. One has to study the specific processes in each social
context and its relevant transformations, rather then deliberately
looking for parallel trends in all these contexts.
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1:
I wish to thank Dr. Ifat Maoz, Department of Communication, Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, Israel, and Prof. Marc Howard Ross of Bryn
Mawr College, USA, for their insightful and helpful comments on an
earlier version of this manuscript.
2: For correspondence write to Prof. Dan Bar-On, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, POBox 653, Beer Sheva 84105, Israel.
Tel. 972-7-6472035. Fax: 972-7-6472932. Email: danbaron@bgumail.bgu.ac.il
3: The Palestinian uprising in the Occupied Territories during 1987-1993, that led to the Oslo Accord.
4:
I do not want to sound as if I glorify the Post-Zionist approach. I see
many problems in its failure to develop a new scientific paradigm
(Kuhn, 1962; Bar-On, in preparation). I do, however, applaud to the
social issues it brought to public attention and debate.
5:
I will bring most of my examples from social and clinical psychology.
First, I am more familiar with them. Second, one would expect these
fields to me more socially sensitive and critical, while relating to
individual and social health and ethics.
6:
For examples, the late Professor Kalman Binyamini, and the winner of
the Israel Prize, the late Professor Yehuda Amir, (Amir, 1976). One
could include in this list quite a few active social psychologists like
Arie Nadler, Ariela Freidman and Daniel Bar-Tal at Tel Aviv University
(1992) (the latter was President-Elect of Political Psychology), Amiya
Libliech, David Bar-gal and Shalom Schwartz at the Hebrew
University, Yona Rosenfeld, also a winner of the Israel prize,
Emanuel Berman, Yoel Elizur and Raphael Moses as clinical
psychologists, just to name a few of a longer list.
7:
There is an earlier example of this phenomenon: Psychologists were
relatively late in addressing the after-effect of the Holocaust on
descendants of Holocaust survivors. In that sense many of them followed
the public silencing of these issues, rather then being the pioneers to
break through it (Bar-On, 1995). Again there are exceptions to this
rule: Hillel Klein, Shamai Davidson and Israel Charny.
8:
A good example for this is the question of the so-called neutrality of
Switzerland and Sweden during WWII. Only lately we can learn how this
“neutrality” actually reinforced Nazi aggression and its annihilation
process.
9:
Another example outside the Israel context is the deletion of the
chapter on moral judgement from American textbooks of social psychology
during the last fifteen years. Asking colleagues in America why this
change has happened, the answer was “this chapter belongs to
developmental psychology but has little relevance to social
psychology.” I believe that this is part of the effort to “neutralize”
academic social psychology, trying to make it seem more scientific and
less value-burdened (Gergen, 1989). Whenever I teach the introductory
course in social psychology at my department, I teach this chapter and
bring examples of relevant research in social psychology, trying to
discuss the question - why did social psychologists preferred an image
of “objectivity” and “moral neutrality.”
10: Sabra
is a nickname for the Israeli born. It is the Arabic name for a wild
fruit that has thorns on the outside but is juicy and soft inside. This
reflected the public image of the new Israeli-Jew (Bar-On, 1999b).
11:
This acknowledgment had some retroactive implications of accepting the
heroism of survival among Holocaust survivors. The earlier social
judgment of the fifties that they “went like sheep to slaughter” had to
be revised in light of the 1973 war (Bar-On, 1995; Segev, 1992).
12:
It is important to note here that the concept of PTSD enabled Vietnam
Veteran victimizers to claim mental distress as if they had only been
victimized during the war (Young, 1995).
13:
Two political leaders of the Israeli nationalist right wing party, the
Likud, who served as Prime Ministers during the late seventies and
eighties (Begin) and late nineties (Netanyahu).
14:
It is interesting to note that the quantitative methods of the
experimental psychologists contributed to their self presentation of
scientific objectivism and neutrality (Gergen, 1989).
