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Harold Behr

The tangled connections between reason and emotion in Israel’s war of survival

There is a strong connection between our reasoning faculties and our emotional responses to the world around us. However, the parts of our brain governing reasoning, cognition and reflection evolved later than those parts containing the emotional substrate which simply allows us to survive as animals. So we humans are still at the mercy of archaic emotions which we have inherited from lower life forms.

In theory, the two faculties, reason and emotion, should articulate in tandem, but ours being an imperfect world, there is, more often than not, a disjunction between the two which we do our best to disguise by constructing elaborate justifications for our emotions. Hence the conflict and paralysis which frequently overtakes our actions. Arthur Koestler has called this ‘the ghost in the machine’.

The deadly conflict currently enveloping the Middle East illustrates this conundrum. I find myself as much moved by images of bewildered and agonized Palestinian children wandering through the ruins of bombed-out buildings in Gaza as I am by graphic footage of distraught Israelis grieving over the deaths of their loved ones. However, I will go to great lengths to steel myself against too deep an involvement with the former because my deeper resonance lies with the latter. And this is because I can more readily identify with my fellow Jews, whom I see as caught up in existential struggle to survive, rather than with their Arab counterparts, whom I see as trapped in a war brought on by their co-religionists whose primary aim is to murder my people.

Statistics and counter-arguments count for little in this battle for the mind. Every argument can either be wiped off the slate by tit for tat references to historical precedents or reinforced by a mountain of justification. The result is a paralysis of all action except that which causes us, literally, to ‘soldier on’ in a cycle of escalating violence.

Can this cycle be broken? In matters of life and death there can be no choice but to fight on in order to protect oneself. It is hard to gainsay the Israeli philosophy of hitting back strongly enough to deter the enemy. But what if the emotions driving that determination are based on faulty rationalizations? What if potential friends are seen as hostile? And what if Israel’s so-called punitive and retaliatory measures are perceived by those on the receiving end as further justification for their own resistance and retaliation? The only result, surely, must be a deepening of hatred on the part of the survivors of such onslaughts and an increasing alienation of Israel from the wider world. Israel’s dogged insistence on ‘going it alone’ and pursuing the war without envisaging the peace could well prove counterproductive.

Friends tell me that my liberal qualms reflect a failure to understand the implacable mindset of Israel’s Islamist enemies, whose only goal is the conquest and subjugation of non-Islamic peoples and Jews in particular, and that these fanatics see any attempt to compromise as a sign of weakness and an opportunity to strike back. This may be so for many extremists but I have yet to lose faith in our evolution as a species, through which it is possible to discern a strand of reasoning irrespective of religious belief which works against the impulse to inflict harm on groups seen as different from one’s own.

If we yield to the fatalistic view that violence untrammeled by empathy is the only answer to inter-group hostility, then emotion will have prevailed over reason and we might as well give up the ghost.

About the Author
I was born in South Africa in 1940 and emigrated to the U.K. in 1970 after qualifying in medicine. I held a post as Consultant Psychiatrist in London until my retirement in 2013. I am the author of two books: one on group analytic psychotherapy, one on the psychology of the French Revolution. I have written many articles on group psychology published in peer-reviewed journals. From 1979 to 1985 I was editor of the journal ‘Group Analysis’; I have contributed short pieces to psychology newsletters over the years.
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