Psychological activism in the Israeli-palestinian arena

pp. 171-194

in: Uri Hadar, Psychoanalysis and social involvement, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Activism as it is practiced in the Parents Circle Families Forum offers an especially instructive example of what I have been trying to explain here concerning the formative role of a sense of loss in the emergence of postist activism, the centrality of ethical impatience and the way in which the modes of activity make up a model, on the micro level, of the macro-level objective. Most conspicuous is the very concrete realization of negativity as the consolidating core or background for the activist agenda. Negativity, in fact, creates a two-fold psychoethical dynamic around bereavement. Once regarding the experience of loss, and another — no less important — regarding the decision to act against the forces that have caused the loss. The violence that is inherent in the occupation and enacted by practices that perpetuate the occupation. The second negativity does not, of course, derive from the former. It does not depend on it yet, in the absence of this first form of negativity, there is no postness — though activism would still be a possibility, like, for instance, of another organization of bereaved parents, one which struggles against the release of Palestinians from Israeli prisons (like, in prisoner exchange deals).¹ These two groups are both instances of ethical impatience in response to bereavement, but they differ in terms of the recognition of the subjectivity of the Other.