THE TRANSFORMATION OF SUFFERING

My name is Marcia and I was born 60 years ago in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. I came to Israel as an idealistic, Zionist 20-year old, hoping to give my heart and life to building a new land for the Jewish people, a land founded on justice, and loving-kindness. I felt that after the suffering of 2000 years in the Diaspora, after the Nazi Holocaust, the Jewish people would be yearning for a life based on the most important Torah teaching - Love your neighbor as thyself.

As I matured and our country went through many changes, including the occupation of the Palestinian territories, I gradually had to admit to myself that my beloved and beautiful Israel was being overcome by waves of fear and mistrust, aggression and injustice. This, I saw, touched all aspects of our society, but it took form particularly and most violently in our behavior toward the people we had conquered, the Palestinian people.

In my efforts to understand this painful situation and to think of what could be done to begin a healing process, I joined a peace movement called Imut ("Facing the Truth"), which consisted of Israeli and Palestinian psychologists and social workers. By this time I was in my forties, working as a clinical social worker-therapist for the Kibbutz Movement. I had grown sons and had recently separated form my husband.

With my colleagues in "Imut," I began to understand that the Israelis had become a victim of their own long victimization. They are like a child who has been abused by his parents and grows up feeling that in this world there are only two roles for him to play - he can either be the victim or the aggressor. This child will feel that he has to protect himself from being the victim and so he himself becomes the aggressor, hurting his own children and wife as he himself had been hurt. I saw the Israelis, afraid of again becoming the victim, turning themselves into aggressors, and in their fear and mistrust, and the hate that resulted, they oppressed the Palestinian people as they themselves had been oppressed.

For me, as a human being and a Jew, this was unbearably painful. This feeling became totally focused when I met Palestinian psychologists and social workers and heard their personal stories of daily danger, of beatings, imprisonment and torture. I felt a searing moral shame and knew that I could not continue to live with myself on this earth without doing whatever I could to heal this tragedy.