Fratricide in the Holy Land: a Psychoanalytic View of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

• Author: Keith, Jessica A.
• Position: FURTHER READING - Book review

FRATRICIDE IN THE HOLY LAND: A PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEW OF THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT Avner Falk (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 271 pages.

In Fratricide in the Holy Land, Avner Falk, an Israeli psycho-historian, contributes a unique and balanced perspective on one of the world's most intractable conflicts. Falk presents evidence that neither religious beliefs nor competing territorial claims, nor any other "rational" cause, fully explains the complexity of the Arab-Israeli struggle. Rather, Falk asserts, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs are living in two completely different psychological worlds.

Throughout the book, Falk demonstrates how psychoanalytic concepts might elucidate the irrational behavior of both sides of the conflict. Both Palestinians and the Israelis, he argues, are influenced by a number of unconscious psychological processes including painful self images based on histories of loss and humiliation; intense group narcissism that defends against this negative image; denial of inner and outer realities, a "splitting" of the world into good and evil and the related projection of hated parts of the self onto the enemy; and an inflexible attachment to land as representative of an idealized mother. A particular problem, in Falk's view, is the inability of both sides to mourn their historical losses and give them up in order to move forward in the present...