WHY GAZA IS INSANE

By a Psychiatrist

WHY GAZA IS INSANE

EINSTEIN’S DEFINITION OF INSANITY is an excellent starting point – it doesn’t cover everything, but then nothing does. The human mind is the most complex and elusive entity in the entire cosmos – so we need to grasp what few straws there are, so as to keep abreast of its worst failings. What Einstein said was that it is insane to keep doing the same thing over and over again, while hoping for a different outcome. In other words, if what you're set on doing, isn’t working, re-think. If what you do, doesn’t give you the right answer – try doing things differently. It sounds obvious enough – but sadly, the emotions get in the way. We tend to insist that what we’re doing is the best possible in all possible worlds – and those who suggest otherwise risk falling foul of the “Warrior Woes” – (1) you don’t understand my problem; (2) you ignore my history; i.e. (3) you're deluded.

Now you may have noticed that when emotions are cool, then more creative alternatives have a better chance of being tried. There’s no other way to escape Einstein’s unarguable label of ‘insanity’. So emotions have a powerful part to play here – if you can once take the heat out, then calmer, more successful, less insane ‘solutions’ can become not only available, but OBVIOUS.

Armed with this excellent common-sense advice, let’s dip a tentative toe into the current cauldron that is the Gaza-Israeli conflict. Could emotions run higher? Or for longer? I rather doubt that. So let’s start by calling for a calm dispassionate survey – we may not get one, but until we do, things are only going to get worse.

The first thing to decide is – who’s side am I on? Am I pro-Israel or pro-Palestine? Is this article rooting for one, or the other? The context is so dire, so loaded, you are almost bound to assume that I must have a preference, for one or the other. And of course, if it turns out I’m secretly backing the side you don’t, then you’re likely to drop me like a stone, and dismiss all my claims to logic as being piffle.

Well, if you don’t know me personally, then my answer is likely to seem light-weight. But I’m not writing this because I’m a judge doling out blame – I’m a doctor looking for solutions, for salves, even for cures. Unlike most doctors, I was happy to work for 5 years with homicidal maniacs – interviewing them unaccompanied for some 2000 hours – few doctors have done that. Not many would agree to do it, or find time in their medical curriculum to do so. But as things turned out, I was offered a golden opportunity – which I grasped with both hands. I already knew that childhoods mattered – I wanted to find out if they inflicted violence, too.

I’ve written extensively, about what I found – a full list is available on my Substack page – so let’s turn to one man, who I’ll call ‘Jim’, to see what he thought. Jim was one of the prisoners and he refused to talk to me at all, for some 9 months – I kept inviting him, and he kept declining – until one day, he changed his mind, and we talked every week for 6 months. Eventually he said – “if I hadn’t been talking to you, I’d have killed 3 times on this wing”.

Now I believed him. There had already been a murder on that same prison wing, some years before I went there; and Jim himself had killed earlier in prison, so he knew well enough how to do it. Yet here he is telling me, and I have it on video, that he no longer wants to freely murder people who got on his nerves. Which is exactly what he had done before, and (or so he says) would certainly have done again. I don’t ask you to believe this straight off – the UK Government didn’t. But bear in mind – there are ways of going about human arguments that do not need to end in murder.

So turning back to Einstein’s definition of insanity – suppose you had as your objective the living of a peaceful life on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. Sounds simple enough. So you set out various methods to achieve this. You happen to retain one, which you keep trying over and over again. It manifestly doesn’t work. People are no more peaceable there after 70+ years than they were to begin with. Here is Einstein hitting the target. Could it be that if you really want to achieve your objective, then you need to change the method by which you had hoped to succeed? Do you concede that Einstein was correct – deploying the same method and expecting a different, i.e. a better, result, is nothing short of insanity?

It's those emotions again – we’ve always gone to war, so why should we change now? Well, one reason is – according to Einstein – if it doesn’t work, then this in itself calls for a change, however emotionally uncomfortable that might be. Obstinacy here, presuming you still want to live in peace, is pure insanity.

So let’s examine the objective. Is it reasonable to expect a bunch of human beings to live amicably side by side in a given piece of land? Well, yes it is. Everywhere else, we trade, we do business with each other, we take in each other’s laundry – and for the most part we get along fine. Commerce prospers. But it only prospers with consent. Coerced commerce is a contradiction in terms.

However, when it comes to ‘security’, we forget all that, and reach for the ammo. We’re addicted to ‘force’. We use coercion as a lazy substitute for trust, which is its antidote. It’s those emotions again – anything to do with life and death, or threats thereto, makes tension skyrocket. When I first arrived in Parkhurst Prison, there was a battle every fortnight – knives were sharpened, boiling water had sugar added – destruction and inflicting pain was rife. You hit me, so I’ll hit you. Sounds logical – what could you expect? It’s what’s always happening – it’s the jungle in us coming out.

Happily I had brought a blue-print with me – I had a not-so-secret-plan. My objective was for the men there to grow up emotionally. I reasoned that they really wanted to live amicably together, but had never learnt how. Their nursery years had been nightmares, and I needed to persuade them to wake up, that those days were long over. I didn’t do this by coercing them – that’s orthodox prison policy. I insisted on persuasion. With their consent, I wanted them to feel adult, to see that hitting people was the same old way of not getting what they really wanted. And that they too had the one objective that is the same for every human ever born – peace-of-mind.

Like I said, childhoods matter. Just as they do in Gaza and Israel today. And, as Einstein would confirm, if you want people to behave in an adult civilised manner, then treat them that way, throughout. It’s not too late to turn the clock back, to try a radically different approach, like I did in Parkhurst – but you have to have confidence in it, you have to agree that violence is infantile in origin, and that we humans much prefer adult-security – one which does not rely on who is strongest. It’s not brawn over brain, weapons over trust. Trust is vital for both social and mental health. But emotions run so high, it’s likely to be as hard to instil it here, as it was in that prison wing. But that shouldn’t stop us trying. If the incidence of alarm bells rung in that prison wing, can fall from an average of 20 a year to zero in the last three, then there’s every reason to try the same approach elsewhere – I call it “using social delight to defeat social harm.”

Just to show quite how far we still have to go, here’s an excerpt from The Observer, 15^th October 2023, p 10 by Chris McGreal.

“Two decades ago the mother of nine-year-old Abdul Rahman Jadallah described to me how she twice lost her child. Once to a worship of death and then to death itself. Living in southern Gaza, the Palestinian boy had come to accept destruction and killing as normal, and to admire the men attacking Israel and what he saw as the heroic circumstances of their deaths. .  . .

“One day an Israeli soldier shot a shy eight-year-old who lived on Rahman's street, Haneen Suliaman, as she walked back from the shops with her mother. "Rahman went to the morgue and kissed Haneen," Attalah, Rahman’s mother, said. "He came home and told us he had promised the dead girl he would die too. I made him apologise to his father." Rahman was in school a few weeks later when an Israeli bullet apparently fired randomly from a watchtower hit a Palestinian girl in the head. Lessons were cancelled and Rahman defied his mother to join yet another funeral. As he hung a Palestinian flag on the fence enclosing Gaza, an Israeli bullet caught Rahman under his left eye and killed him instantly. Palestinian boys in Gaza who were Rahman's age in 2003 are now adults. . . . .

“. . . . Abu Shawarib [a social worker] told me that many children came to welcome the prospect of being “martyred”. “The martyr is in paradise. He has glory here and in the afterlife where it is so much better than life in Rafah," she said. "The children see many people killed, so they come to expect to be killed."

SUMMARY

IN SUM, no one said life would be easy. We all suffer from disease, both physical and mental. When you next feel ill, check out the “Warrior Woes” with your doctor – (1) do you understand my problem?; (2) have you ignored my history?; i.e. (3) are you unreal? Ask my medical opinion on the present topic, and I give you – (1) Gaza is horrific; and (2) we’ll keep repeating history, until (3) Einstein’s diagnosis of insanity hits home. How come Einstein knew something we don’t ?

~~~o0o~~~

Professor Bob Johnson, DSc(hon), MRCPsych, MRCGP, PhD(med computing), MA (Psychol), MBCS, DPM, MRCS, School of Psychology, University of Bolton, BL3 5AB, UK.      GMC num. 0400150           21 October 2023           

   Saturday, 21 October 2023