Abstract
Introduction
This is a remarkable book by two very remarkable people. Giandomenico Picco worked for the UN as a negotiator for over 20 years and has been involved in various hostage negotiations, at times risking his own safety and perhaps his life. Gabrielle Rifkind is a group analyst who has become a specialist in conflict negotiation. At the time of writing this book she was Director of the Middle-East Programme of the Oxford Research Group.
The Oxford Research group was founded by Scilla Elworthy in 1982, when she made a significant contribution in the 1980s to the movement within psychoanalysis and psychotherapy to address the developing threat to the continuance of human history from the nuclear arms race. Those of us involved at the time may recall that the subsequent de-escalation owed much to the peace-making efforts of CPSU 1 General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev. This was a time of gung-ho post-Falklands/Malvinas belligerence from the Thatcher regime in the UK and ‘Star Wars’ fantasies from the Reagan regime in the US. Elworthy went and interviewed some of the decision makers whose thumbs seemed not far from the fateful ‘button’ revealing a rather alarming lack of checks and balances. So Rifkind’s work can be seen as following that tradition. Her work too is, as she points out, not without risk, especially when going to meet political leaders from some organizations who might be victims of targeted assassinations, particularly by the Israeli state.
This book’s breadth, value and importance may have contributed something to the extra-ordinary length of time it has taken this reviewer to put together his attempt to grapple with it and to do it justice. The complexities of Middle-East politics and the attempts to promote ‘peace’ are not easily summarized. So, my apologies to my book reviews editor and to readers for having to wait so long.
The book takes us on a tour of many of the world’s ‘trouble spots’ and succeeds in highlighting the psychological dimensions of these conflicts without ever losing sight of the political background. Unlike so many psychological approaches that too easily reduce complex political situations involving long and tangled histories to simplistic individual or group psychodynamics, it recognizes those histories and the complex and conflicting interests of the various parties involved.
Importantly, it challenges two or three myths frequently circulated about many political conflicts, and particularly about those groups that are popularly depicted as unreasonable or crazy, or even psychotic, with whom it is allegedly impossible to talk or negotiate. These myths serve to promote war, because once negotiations become regarded as an impossibility, then military solutions readily become the only alternative. Intelligent generals tend to recognize that political conflicts ultimately require political solutions, and that the most the military can hope to achieve is to create time and space for politicians to negotiate. However, many politicians and media commentators subscribe too readily to the idea that military interventions can solve the problem. I personally recall a late night discussion at an international conference on ‘Trauma’ in 1988, in which my suggestion that talking to and negotiating with the IRA was the only possible way forward in Northern Ireland, was dismissed out of hand by two British journalists—one from the Times, one from the Telegraph. They insisted that I was being totally naive and unrealistic, and that talking to the IRA was completely impossible!
We now know the answer to that argument. But it is sobering to contemplate the way in which we can be assured in the most authoritative way by our media, our politicians and indeed by some so called experts, of certain alleged ‘facts’, which turn out to be no more than speculation powerfully driven by ideological preconceptions and social unconscious interests. More recently, we have been assured that groups such as the Taliban, Al Qaida, Hamas and the Iranian government are all bodies who cannot be talked to. The labelling of such groups as ‘terrorists’ contributes much to this social construction of reality, and sets them up as objects for the projection of all our own unreasonableness, violence, sadism and deafness. As I have argued elsewhere, (Blackwell, 2003, 2012, 2020) such constructions serve not only to demonize the ‘other’ but also to obfuscate the contributions to oppression and indeed to terrorism made by our own western governments.
Another myth is that group analysis has little to contribute to the realm of politics and that its primary function is as a mode of therapy. Yet it is clear from this book that it does not need a lot of adaptation to become highly relevant. Foulkes said somewhere that the conductor’s job was ‘to listen and understand’. That is precisely what Gabrielle Rifkind has been doing. Instead of becoming a prisoner of her own or others’ preconceptions she has gone to meet leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas, not to seek some diplomatic advantage but to listen to what they have to say and to try to understand their experiences and perceptions of the history and contemporary dynamics of the situations they find themselves in. It is a process of humanizing the ‘other’ and making his or her actions intelligible. These groups and the individuals within them have their own histories of suffering and trauma and their own hopes and fears. They are actually far from the nihilistic fanatics that are so often presented in our media and, sadly, in psychoanalytic and group analytic literature attempting to discuss ‘terrorism’.
The book begins with alternating autobiographical pieces by the two authors. Much of their thinking revolves around the way that narratives are part of identities and identities shape narratives. It recalls Stuart Hall’s observation that identity is formed at that unstable point where personal lives meet the narrative of history. Their approach seems to allow space for the assertion of narratives and identities and the encouragement of a meeting of persons that may begin to soften some of the rigidities and to leaven legacies of bitterness and hatred with recognition and understanding. So they begin in their preface with their own accounts of who they are, where they’ve come from and how they met and decided they could work together.
They quickly make it clear that politics is not a setting for therapy, but that political conflicts and apparent impasses are invariably ‘overdetermined’ through a variety of interwoven interests, narratives and identities that all need to be taken account of. At the end of their introduction, they write tellingly of ‘trying to understand the mind of the enemy, to better understand their narrative: what has shaped their history and how they think’. We can thus see something of how ideologies and political ‘positions’ are formed in the dynamic and dialectical movements of history, and do not emerge more or less fully formed as individual or collective psychopathologies as some psychoanalytic commentaries might have us believe.
Contents
Chapter one is called, ‘A so called diplomat’s story by Gianni Picco’. One suspects that his sense of self-deprecating irony may be a key to his survival in dangerous situations and indeed to his successes in facilitating some kinds of conflict resolution. His story could rival any ‘Boy’s Own’ adventure as, after joining the United Nations aged 24 in the early 1970s he becomes involved in the ‘Cold War’, Cyprus, Lebanon, Iran, Syria and Afghanistan. Vital to his work has been the often unsung contribution of UN General Secretary, Pérez de Cuéllar, to whom he pays a fulsome tribute. ‘He understood that this was not a traditional UN assignment and that it needed flexibility and secrecy that is hard to achieve in a huge bureaucracy unless you have the cover of the boss and the boss is not afraid of his own shadow.’
In the second chapter Gabrielle Rifkind takes us through her personal journey beginning with her encounter, as a probation officer, with the ‘ordinariness’ of a man who had killed a friend in a fight. She saw then what she describes as the fine line between good and evil and, ‘how easily we can all cross the boundary when experiences and circumstances push us in a particular way’. Her shift from psychotherapist to political researcher and negotiator was triggered by her invitation ‘to Israel to help train 40 group analysts’ during the second Intifada where she encountered huge pressure to take sides. Based on her previous experience of there invariably being two sides to any conflict she set about discovering what the ‘other side’ might have to say.
She quickly recognized that the world of governments and the world of politics are not the same. Representing a government would have constrained her in all sorts of ways, whereas working for a research group gave her a freedom as she puts it, ‘to sit with Hamas and Hezbollah who were deemed terrorist groups by the EU (European Union)’. She describes the problem of the demands made by the international community on Hamas when they were elected to power on the ‘Palestine Legislative Council’ in 2006, which, while seeming reasonable to that international community, actually obstructed any meaningful contact between Hamas and European and US government officials. She goes on to explain how the demonization of Hamas blocked not only communications but serious thinking too. One of her, perhaps for some, surprising revelations is that after its election, Hamas expressed an interest in communicating with Israel about the transfer of goods across the Gaza border. Hamas at that point were hoping that such discussions might lead to wider communication. But when she approached a senior Israeli official he angrily dismissed her suggestion.
Later she describes how Hamas leader, Sheikh Yassin, sitting in prison in 1997, offered a ‘hudnah’ or ceasefire. Hamas would continue to pursue its aims for an Islamic state, but co-exist with Israel in return for the recovery of some Arab lands and an agreement to move towards Palestinian statehood. But the Israeli state wanted a final settlement that would end the conflict, or nothing. It is from this impasse that she moves on to her efforts to understand the psychological interests and forces at work.
So the third chapter is, ‘No Politics Without Psychology’. This, refreshingly, is not the often depressing and previously mentioned attempt of psychologists and psychoanalysts, to reduce politics to psychology, but to recognize that within the complexity of political conflicts which need to be understood on their own terms, there are also powerful psychological issues that need to be recognized and addressed. She grapples with important questions of ‘collective memory’, ‘culture’, ‘empathy’, ‘resistance to change’, and whether the world is changing for better or for worse.
Chapter 4 returns to Israel and the impact of the ‘holocaust’ on individual and collective psychology and how that interacts with politics. She refers to her experience of conducting groups on the group analytic training there, describing the difficulties in discussing the political situation. Discussions, she reports, were dominated by group members’ fears and fantasies, not simply for themselves but for family members especially children, and the sense of being constantly under threat. It seemed difficult if not impossible to move from this sense of siege to any sense of empathy with the ‘Palestinians’. She herself was perceived as living in the safety of London and having little appreciation of the reality of life during the Intifada and the threats of suicide bombers. Beneath this lies the collective ‘trauma’ of the holocaust. (I place ‘trauma’ in parentheses because I believe that there is not necessarily a meaningful category of ‘trauma’ or ‘collective trauma’ with predictable consequences, but rather specific traumatic events with their specific consequences and impact on the future of the communities who experience them.) Rifkind spells out some of the specifics of the holocaust legacy and their interaction with the politics of the Middle-East in the first decade of the 21st-century.
Chapter 5, ‘The Taliban Mind’, turns to Afghanistan and the missed opportunities to talk and negotiate with the Taliban. It introduces the importance of religious identities and allegiances, the idea of ‘sacred values’ and the concept of the ‘cosmic war’ that divides the world into the forces of light and those of darkness, and the readiness with which dogma can lead to dehumanization. A perception that is also applicable to the western intervention/invasion, not just to the Taliban. She ends with an emphasis on how understanding may eventually encourage a sufficient level of trust to facilitate a productive dialogue, but that personal relationships need to be built to develop that understanding.
Chapter 6, ‘My God is Right, your God is Wrong’, takes us further into a place or space, unfamiliar to many psychotherapists, that is the realm of religion with its varieties, complexities and its tensions with secularism. Theological illiteracy is commonplace amongst secularist psychotherapists, many of whom seem to take a perverse pride in dismissing or pathologizing any sort of ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ inclination, tendency or belief. This often involves resort to simplistic psychoanalytic formulations without making much attempt at understanding such beliefs and values on their own terms. Too often this is accompanied by conventional and simplistic labelling of certain political-religious groups and organizations as ‘terrorist’ on the basis of very little actual knowledge, much less the sort of understanding of such organizations or their historical context that might serve to illuminate rather than denigrate their existence and viewpoint. Rifkind and Picco display a welcome open-mindedness and an attempt to grapple with the place of political Islam and its different manifestations. There are succinct descriptions of various organizations and movements such as ‘political Islam’, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaida, and the differences between them. These descriptions also indicate the sense in which some secular belief systems, including beliefs in the rationalism of western civilization, may be clung to with a fanaticism not very different from that usually attributed to ‘religious believers’.
One telling point made here is that it is often the younger members of various political/religious groups who are most passionate, rigidly determined and suspicious of processes of negotiation. So the tactic of seeking to assassinate the leadership (usually the older guys) tends to reduce the possibilities of negotiation and compromise.
Chapter 7 ‘Iran: Getting into the Mind of the Enemy’, sets out, as its title indicates, to describe some of the relevant history of another frequently demonized group, and to reveal something of the world as it is perceived by Iranian leaders. Most importantly it reports the frequently overlooked 1953 coup d’état engineered by the CIA and British MI6, which overthrew a democratically elected Iranian government to replace it with one more favourable to western economic interests. This, unsurprisingly, ‘continues to live on in Iran’s collective memory’.
The elements of nationalism and anti-western/anti-capitalism embodied in the revolution of 1979 are well described, as is the exacerbation of anti-western feeling engendered by western support for Saddam Hussain’s Iraq in the eight years of war that followed shortly afterwards. This was a war that included Iraq’s use of chemical weapons and cost the lives of an estimated 300,000 Iranians. Thus has the West earned a high level of mistrust which now infests and frustrates efforts at negotiation 20–30 years later.
What is missing from this chapter are two matters: First, the violence of the western supported Shah’s post 1953 regime, with its terrorizing secret police force, the SAVAK, subsequently perhaps echoed post-revolution by the revolutionary guards. Additionally there is the reported involvement of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, the CIA and the FBI in establishing the SAVAK in 1957 (Abrahamian, 1982). This claim is repeated by Mohsen Milani (1988) who further claims that by 1977 Savak had already paralysed most of the organized opposition to the Shah. Tahmoores Sarraf (1990) notes that this destruction of opposition groups in the 60s and 70s created an absence of any organized political alternative to Khomeini and the Ayatollahs after the Shah was overthrown.
Second, the way in which leftist and feminist participants in the revolutionary overthrow of the Shah were subsequently wiped out by the Islamists. This is a significant and potentially misleading omission in the presentation of the revolution only as an Islamic movement and its population and ideology as devoid of any liberal secularist desires or enlightenment values.
Chapter 8 tells the story of 13 successful negotiations with Iran. They seem to be mainly the work of Picco and his ability to establish personal relationships across political and ideological divides. He tellingly notes that the concept of so-called ‘impartiality’ ‘has finally proven to be illusory’. An important point for psychoanalytic and group analytic commentators on political issues.
The third section of the book, ‘Fighting Wars or Fighting for Peace’, reflects on what might be described as the human addiction to warfare over 5,000 years and the prospects for peace. It reviews the changing nature of warfare with more devastating weapons of destruction which, with the advent of cyberwars and drones, can give the appearance of a sort of ‘clean’ warfare. Having acknowledged the influence and problems posed by the ‘military industrial complex’ and the arms industry, the authors turn to the possibilities for genuinely non-violent action drawing particularly on the writings of peace researcher Gene Sharp (2012), the Serbian youth movement Otpor (credited with a key role in toppling Milosevic) and on the movements known as the ‘Arab Spring’.
Considering ways to promote and maintain peace, the authors assess the way that conflicts usually offer opportunities to intervene at some point to facilitate negotiation, through the kind of relationship building and development of trust and understanding they have described. Though they do acknowledge that it is not always easy to spot such opportunities or to take them when they arise.
They go on to question the idea of the ‘nation state’ and its role in providing identities that may be divisive and conducive to conflict and war and they wonder whether there are more progressive and peaceable identities that might be encouraged and fostered.
This echoes Lifton’s (1974) work with Vietnam veterans, in which the veterans’ anti-war movement and the (counter) cultural climate of the time seemed ready and able to question ideas of the heroic ‘warrior’; suggesting that the refusal of war might become seen as the more ‘heroic’ option. Half a century on, there seems to have been relatively little progress on this front, and Rifkind and Picco do not offer much specifically in terms of how this might be promoted. Moreover, they are arguably less critical of the western narratives than Lifton’s vets. But it is not without value to have concepts of nationality, patriotism, etc., called into question rather than treated as inevitable givens; especially given the centrality of nationality in many group analytic discussions.
Finally there is their proposal for a sort of international task force of conflict negotiators who might be jetted in to the sites of incipient or emerging conflicts before the fighting starts or at least before too many shots have been fired and too much blood already shed. Curiously, they give the label of ‘Commando’ to this envisaged peace-making group.
Discussion
This is, in many ways, an excellent book. One it is impossible to praise too highly and one to be recommended to all readers of this journal. It is rooted in the direct experiences of two remarkably courageous and dedicated workers and it provides some valuable history of a key area in contemporary politics and economics, the Middle-East. It further shows us the possibility of negotiating conflicts rather than simply slugging them out on a battlefield of one sort or another. Moreover, it demonstrates the value and importance of our stock in trade, or at least what should be our stock in trade—talking, listening and trying to understand and empathize. It ought to bury the doctrine of ‘not talking to terrorists’. But of course that doctrine is not merely misguided but driven by forces other than the desire for peace and justice, as is the selective use of the term ‘terrorist’. It also challenges some of the assumptions circulating within the world of group analysis, of an almost entirely virtuous civilized and democratic ‘Israel’, surrounded by anti-Semitic, authoritarian and fanatical Arab dictatorships who refuse all efforts and overtures to make peace and will settle for nothing less than the total annihilation of the state of Israel and its whole Jewish population. A depiction that contributes little to movements towards peace in the Middle-East, and little to dialogue and understanding between group analysts.
Yet the book is not without its problems. Most importantly, it is written, perhaps inevitably, from a western viewpoint and it subtly implies a world view in which representatives of an advanced western civilization can be instrumental in making peace amongst warring factions in other parts of the world. While there is no systematic suggestion that western nations and power blocs are immune to taking up rigid, blinkered and entrenched positions (more or less acknowledged in relation to Vietnam and Northern Ireland) nor is there any sustained denial of western manipulations and malice (acknowledged in relation to 1953 British and US Sponsored Coup in Iran), it nevertheless does not really approach any serious critique of the part played by colonialism and western imperialism in creating so many of the problems and conflicts that appear to bedevil this region. (Remember Said’s observation that the ‘Middle-East’ is only the Middle-East if you’re drawing the map in Whitehall.) For the most part, the worst that is attributed to western governments and diplomats is misreading and misunderstanding various situations along with a certain bureaucratic and ideological rigidity. The sense remains that the West is still the guardian and representative of enlightenment values and a potential beacon for the rest of the world. Not the architect and executive of a global hegemony.
This is conspicuous in the references to former US Secretary of Defence, Robert MacNamara. First, the title of the book ‘The Fog of Peace’ is a variation on McNamara’s phrase, ‘The Fog of War’. It referred to the ‘Vietnam War’ which has elsewhere been described more critically as the ‘US invasion of Vietnam’. McNamara is reported to have explained the erroneous view held at the time by the US State Department as to what the war was really about: We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our experience. We saw in them a thirst for—a determination to fight for—freedom and democracy. The West saw the war in Vietnam through the lens of the Cold War and the Vietnamese saw it through the lens of a civil war. (p. 59)
Pre-occupied with the idea of misunderstanding the enemy, the book overlooks the perspective that the US invaded Vietnam to support a right wing dictator as part of a strategy of global domination and control.
Rifkind quotes the death toll of Vietnamese as three million. I have found assessments of 2–4 million. The lack of clarity itself would appear to indicate some high level indifference that might be regarded as an unconsciously colonial/imperialist attitude to native lives: What I would characterize as ‘negation’. Moreover, I find it disconcerting that the ‘Vietnam War’ is so readily passed off as a ‘mistake’. If the devastation of a tiny country and the killing of millions of its people by a global super-power is to be passed off as a ‘mistake’, then it is impossible to suppress the thought, ‘That’s one hell of a mistake!’ It is, moreover, hard to imagine Joe Stalin being so readily forgiven for his ‘mistakes’.
The overlooking of the part played by the Iranian left in the Iranian Revolution and its subsequent defeat and exile by the religious elements lead by Khomeni, not to mention its violent suppression under the Shah, may also be significant in this regard. There is a sense in which portraying Iran as ‘the enemy’ feeds the perception of a split between the reasonable rational enlightened values of the West against the more rigid fundamentalism of the ‘other’. Recognizing not only anti-western feeling in Iran, but also the desires and struggles for democracy and human rights, especially for women, inside the Islamic Republic (routinely underreported in western media) opens up conflicts and tensions between left and right, and the possibility that a socialist republic of Iran might have been less welcome to the West than a regime it can more readily portray as a sort of pantomime villain. Feminist protests against a patriarchal system, particularly anti hijab protests begun in 2017, have been significantly under reported in the western media.
The description of the Iran-Contras affair in the chapter on negotiations with Iran, is also revealing. The Contras, are described as ‘rebels’ whom the US government supported ‘in order to prevent the spread of communism in South America’. The widely acknowledged reality is that the Contras were encouraged by the US to engage in what can only be described as ‘terrorism’ against the civilian population, targeting schools and hospitals, while avoiding engagement with the Nicaraguan army.
Lifton, writing in the 1970s about his work as a psychiatrist and rap group facilitator with Vietnam veterans against the War, described the ‘counterfeit’ nature of the war and the propaganda surrounding and promoting it. This he links to something deeply counterfeit in the whole country and much of its culture. His work challenged the ideas of nationalism, patriotism and identity, particularly that of the heroic warrior, that Rifkind and Picco also call into question here. But their questioning is somewhat abstract and general, whereas, it seems to me that western peace activists must hold their own governments more rigorously to account. Israeli peace activist Itamar Shapira, a founder of the ex IDF2 soldiers’ protest movement, ‘Breaking the Silence’, has also questioned the whole discourse of the ‘West’ in which it is axiomatic that western governments and western ‘civilizations’ are essentially benign and democratic and enlightened.
In a later work, Lifton (1990) noted that it is virtually impossible to kill large numbers of people without believing one’s cause is inherently virtuous. But while this may be important in understanding political decisions it also frequently involves a degree of self-delusion which is what Lifton and his Vietnam vets were struggling with.
Although the authors acknowledge western contributions to various problems, they not only present them as mistakes, but they never connect them up in a way that suggests a consistently malign policy. In a recent interview the son of former CIA chief in the Middle-East, Miles Copeland, was clear that his father had seen his job as ‘keeping the oil flowing’ rather than promoting peace and justice. Documenters of US foreign policy such as former CIA employee William Blum (2003) along with Noam Chomsky (2003) have depicted, not a few mistakes, nor even a series of mistakes and misunderstanding, but a consistent project of political and economic domination on a global scale.
Some of this is acknowledged in a remarkably frank and open statement in the concluding pages of the book: Western governments have been a force for both remarkable progress and remarkable destruction. Extraordinary imagination has been shown in the creation of a number of ideas that have changed the world such as capitalism, communism, fascism, psychoanalysis, the atomic bomb, computers, aeroplanes, human rights and gas chambers. The West has made an extraordinary contribution to mankind, but it has also been the cause of much destruction and war. It has been convinced of its own superiority and the belief that conquering the world would spread the benefits of medicines and new techniques as well as liberty. But at the same time it looted, massacred and brought people into subjection, arousing as much resentment as fascination everywhere. (p. 244)
They go on to question whether western governments can change and learn about emotional and political intelligence. But they are writing as if western governments are primarily well intentioned doing their best for the future of humanity. There is little recognition of other motives and forces driving and motivating governments. No mention of Marx and Lenin’s observation that the state is the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. No mention of internal class conflicts and tensions within western states between competing and conflicting ideologies. The West becomes simply the ‘West’ somehow representing all of us. Colonialism and the new global order built on it and its legacy remain largely overlooked. The Israel-Palestine conflict remains depicted as two peoples each with their troubled histories in conflict with each other. Almost 20 years ago I proposed that an attempt to understand the Israel Palestine conflict without taking account of the history of colonialism in the Arab world and anti-Semitism in Europe was unlikely to take us very far. Now the role of the Israeli state in a new global order of population management and control, described at length by Jeff Halper (2015) as a ‘War Against the People’, and its vested interests in maintaining the repression rather than a negotiated solution, becomes of major importance.
Additionally, I am reminded of how I was struck, reading an account of the development of the conflict in Afghanistan (Coll, 2005), of the detachment with which decision makers viewed military engagements. A sort of ‘psychic numbing’ to borrow another term from Lifton (1967). I am left wondering what part such numbing might play in the diplomacy addressed and reported in this book, how it might figure in what Robi Friedman (2015) has called, the ‘Soldier Matrix’ and in the connection between soldiers and politicians, and in the work some of us engage in with survivors of war.
As I write these comments I am wondering if I may be asking too much of two exceptional activists and authors who have already contributed so much. The answer to that question is surely ‘Yes’, I am asking way too much. Moreover, the authors have surely to maintain a position of credibility with western governments and interests if they are to have any influence on policy and decision making, and to preserve the political spaces in which to continue their work. At the same time, it remains important to question their ideological position, or at least to bring it into focus. To accept too readily their position as neutral, humanistic peacemakers and merely praise their efforts necessarily endorses a particular viewpoint which otherwise remains implicit and therefore, to some extent, hidden. It remains a fact, as Picco affirms, that genuine neutrality is a myth. Indeed there is something refreshingly honest about their identification of themselves as being from the West, and that is certainly progress in the field of psychoanalytic engagements with politics.
Two further points need also to be acknowledged:
First, peace and justice are not necessarily the same thing. Putting a stop to the overt violence—the shooting war—does not necessarily end the violence inherent in oppressive systems. The Norwegian Accords acclaimed by the mainstream media and western opinion were also widely criticized as little more than a series of concessions more or less forced on the PLO by the more powerful Israeli state. The similarly acclaimed Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland left marginal republican groups still dissatisfied and in some cases still at war. And if we look back to the problematic treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War, we can see how peace at any price can end current violence but pave the way for even worse to come. This is not to diminish the importance of bringing an end to violence in any situation, but simply to warn against the idealization of peace treaties that can obfuscate the limitations and deficiencies of the peace.
Second, that peace-making may not be solely the province of negotiators and intermediaries like Rifkind and Picco. As we can learn from the internal opposition within the US to its invasion and occupation of Vietnam. Civilian populations who can see through their own government’s propaganda and are sufficiently determined to oppose it, can also play a part. Much has been made in the UK over the last decade or two of the failure of a massive peace march to influence the Blair government over its participation in the invasion of Iraq, and many would-be activists became instantly disillusioned. But one march is a small gesture compared with the years of protests, campus sit-ins and occupations, urban guerrilla activities, writing publicizing and campaigning that preceded the US withdrawal from Vietnam. It is easy to see clearly the faults of the ‘other’ far away, and to be influenced if not permeated by the propaganda to which we are all routinely subjected.
In recent years there have been three particularly important contributions to our understanding of the Middle-East. First, Robert F Kennedy Jr’s (2016) paper on the history of US foreign policy in the region, detailing the machinations of the CIA and the various attempts to advance US influence and control. Second there has been Adam Curtis’s concept of hyper-normalization, whereby populations become inured to the characteristic violence, exploitation and injustice of the modern age. Third there has been a new history of Palestine by Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi (2020), The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.
In the first of these, Kennedy details CIA interventions in the Arab world, beginning with a coup in Syria in the late 1940s through to the promotion of Saddam into power in Iraq long before the West began supporting him in his 1980s war against Iran. Central to these repeated attacks on democracy in the Arab world has been the promotion of religion based politics—that’s ‘political Islam’—as an effective antidote to Arab Nationalism with its socialist inclinations. Arming and supporting Jihadist groups has been happily carried out in the service of controlling the flow of oil. Most tellingly, Kennedy refers to, ‘CIA coup plots in Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Egypt, all common knowledge on the Arab street, but virtually unknown to the American people who believed, at face value their government’s denials’. Regarding the more recent concerns about Syria, he further observes that ‘While the compliant American press promotes the narrative that our military support for the Syrian insurgency is purely humanitarian, many Arabs see the present crisis as just another proxy war over pipelines and geopolitics’.
Curtis details the particular machinations of Henry Kissinger (notorious for instigating the bombing of Cambodia, and a major architect in the ending of democracy—replaced by torture and state terrorism—in Chile) in the Middle-East. He also focusses on the capacity of the western media to create a state of hyper-normalization where current patterns of power and privilege, based on exploitation and enforced through violence, come to be experienced as a kind of normality that goes relatively unquestioned and unchallenged.
Khalidi publishes the correspondence between his great-great-uncle who was Mayor of Jerusalem in 1899, and Theodor Hertzl, the man usually credited with the founding of ‘Israel’. While the mayor expresses recognition and indeed sympathy for the plight of Jews in Europe, he entreats Hertzl not to seek a solution through the colonization of Palestine. Hertzl brushed his concerns aside, thereby introducing a contradiction into the whole Zionist project that remains unresolved and tends to require a divorce of neo-Zionists from their own Zionist history. This is a problem seldom touched on in the western media.
As group analysts, having a concept of the social unconscious and an awareness of our own potential for unconscious colonialism and racism, we are surely obliged to reflect on our own susceptibility to the propaganda to which we are subjected and the way it might shape our own discourses. If such propaganda is to be deconstructed and analysed we might have contributions to make that do not require us to travel to the Middle-East and to sit down with Hamas and the Taliban. We might make use of this book as a source of a different and more critical perspective that enables our own discourse to be more firmly rooted in historical fact and more open to alternative perspectives.