Palestinian Civil War: Schizoid Splitting, Fragmentation, and Self-Harm of States and Polities. Fri 2nd Feb.

The appalling news of the conflict in Gaza resonates with what I'm reading at the moment in The Archaeology of Warfare, about which more in due course under Updates and Critiques, and even more with what I have learnt from the practice of psychotherapy. Children who experience oppression in some form, maybe sexual or physical abuse or intolerable control and restriction, will psychologically develop a pathological schizoid condition with fragmentation and are likely to exhibit self-harming behaviour. In me it manifested as failing exams by not working, and would not have been recognised under the heading self-harming behaviour, which in others shows in self-inflicted cuts, burns etc. There are many levels of psychological explanation but the simplest one to use here is that the oppressor is so unassailable that the victims can only turn upon themselves in order to gain some control, at whatever cost, over the persecutor. I will insert here a paragraph from my notes on the book The Archaeology of Warfare which will demonstrate the point I'm making: --

"The availability of guns and other weapons to slave raiders and dealers was responsible for the wars that devastated chiefdoms in Southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique; slave raids and warfare were so horrific that some groups killed themselves and their children to avoid enslavement. Others mutilated themselves in order to repel the slave raiders. Marjorie Perham (1979: 214) relates a grim story of the Makonde:

"these were the first people I met the mutilated themselves as a decoration; the women make a hole in their upper lip and plug it with a piece of wood and stretch it with the increasingly large plugs until they call to mind the duck-billed platypus. Their appearance is so horrible that it is depressing to go through their country; they cannot smile, they can hardly talk, when drinking water they have to pour it down their throats and their faces have no expression. It is said that it was done at first to make them repulsive so they would not be taken by slavers."

Sat 10th February. That book is much in demand, and the need to get as much as possible out of it in the three weeks I am allowed by the British library has delayed completing this, so that I must shorten it. The point I was making is that the Palestinians had been living under oppressive occupation for so long that it is only amazing that serious civil war did not break out earlier. The present deal which has stopped the fighting will not last if most of the world continues to support Israel in what will be being experienced in their hominin psyches as an attempt to starve the Palestinians into submission.

Behaviours of groups often mirror that of the individual psyches of their members. The appalling stresses under which mothers have been attempting to rear their infants in Gaza and the West Bank have resulted in weak and fragmented egos, ripe for grooming as suicide bombers for example, and naturally acting out their internal schizoid conflicts and splits in violent political conflict within the oppressed polity. The rationality of the sapiens psyche has no real chance in such a situation. As the book demonstrates, when things get bad enough people will accept oppression in return for security and so the electoral success of Hamas was inevitable in spite of the fact that the majority would not want the Islamist restrictions they wish to impose.

I'll leave it here, much more will be found in the notes when I put them on site.