A US and Israeli Psychotherapist Dialogue on Anarchism in Mental Health & the War on Gaza Part II
You can read part one of this two part dialogue here:
Jeff Jones
Jeff Jones:
Could you speak about the ongoing genocide of the implications of your work and also mental health workers in general? Also as U.S. based mental health workers what should be our role?
Itay Kander:
First of all none of this would have been possible without the U.S.’s support. The deal between the U.S. and Israel is that the U.S. government gives Israel a sort of a coupon discount. If they want to buy arms from the U.S. and this is really beneficial to both of those regimes, but to none of the people who live here or there. Every once in a while I see on Twitter or somewhere else- leftists from the U.S. complaining about the state giving free money to Israel. Really, it's not that. The U.S. government is giving money to the arms dealers, to people who manufacture bombs. There's no philanthropy in it.
What I would love for people in the U.S. to do is to somehow work towards the government not providing Israel so many bombs. It's definitely not a very easy thing to accomplish, but if there is a place for you in this entire thing, personally that's where I see your position.
About mental health in Israel at the moment, my God, there's so much to say about that.
First of all, I need to say a few things about what place we are right now as people. There is this part in a book by Chris Hedges, he's an American author, and he wrote about how war puts a spell on people, it hypnotizes them- I dont know any other way to describe what happened here. Obviously most Israelis support the occupation and support some kind or other of Jewish supremacy.
Once the war kicked in, after the 7th of October, and the huge, huge massacre, more than a thousand people died in very brutal ways. Israel started bombing Gaza, and nearly everybody even leftists became supporters of the attack. There was nearly nobody you could find that would say, “no, this is wrong.” “This is not right.” “It is not right to kill thousands of people.” There was a time when there were 200 people dead every day. It's almost hard to understand, it's a huge number. It's inconceivable.
It's hard to understand, it's a horrible thing. Before you experience something like it you don't really understand the captivating force of war. It really makes a whole nation- I used to say this in Hebrew, I don't think it translates well into English, but it's one face, everybody has one face and one voice. I had lots of leftist friends, right? All of them supported it and still do to this day. I sincerely hope that you never go through something like this in your life. I know September 11th was a kind of something like that. But I'm not sure it was that that ultimate, that total.
Jeff Jones:
No, I do remember even leftists getting behind jingoism, nationalism and flags going up everywhere. It's not the same because that only lasted for so long, they didn't go into Iraq until a year afterwards or something like that.
Itay Kander:
Even though it was extremely deadly, brutal and extremely vicious, it still wasn't as horrible as the Gazan genocide is.
Thats just one aspect that makes it extremely hard to live in it. If you're a therapist, if you're not a therapist. You're suddenly in a tiny, meaningless minority. I have always been a political minority, but not in that way. Right now, me here, saying these things is extremely dangerous for me. You can very easily lose your job, you could have no clients, you could go broke very easily. That's the minimum. The more difficult things are getting arrested, getting injured and beat up and so on. Like, man, that’s horrible. Another aspect of what things are right now, for me and for people who in a similar position is that there's a lot of people who need help in Israel because there were so many people who experienced that trauma in the 7th of October massacre. It's a collective trauma. Thousands of people who have seen, people die in front of their eyes, seeing their children die. No words would suffice. There's not enough therapy for that and you can't really help a lot of these people because they can't pay for it. Everybody is a lot poorer now, because the war is taking so much of the money. Onthe top of that, a lot of people are coming from the war soldiers are coming and they're traumatized as well.
It's extremely complex because I oppose all of the things that are done by the military, but I really do believe that they should receive care.
Jeff Jones:
I agree. In fact, I find similarities here in the U.S. as someone who's been very anti-military, very anti-U.S. empire building and whatnot. But I swear, the left supports the vets way more than the right wing does. Right now, I don't know if you're paying attention to the new Trump administration, but they're devastating vet care and veteran hospital care. They just laid off thousands of workers for the vets. It’s really the left who supports them.
Itay Kander:
I've worked with rapists and murderers and it wasn't that hard. I mean for me it wasn't that hard working with people who have committed heinous acts. Most of the time these are people who have come along away from that place in their lives and its in the past. Now it's a completely different thing. It's happening in the present moment and so people are bringing it into therapy. This well known therapist, he's one of the pioneers of EMDR from Israel- he said in a podcast, when somebody comes and asks for therapy, he's just a patient. He’s none of those other things outside the clinic. If that works for that therapist, that's good for him. But that's not me, it's not that easy. There's a huge tension and there's a huge contradiction in it. You can do the work, but it can be extremely hard. I's not just with people who were in Gaza or who go back to Gaza as soldiers, but it's also the entire society as a whole.
Everybody's now supportive of the Gazan genocide. So I need to somehow work with that. I really have nothing much more to say other than that it's hard. I think people try to solve the contradiction by saying no to some kinds of patients. There are all kinds of ways to solve this tension, but for a lot of people, that's a privilege. You can do that if you have a lot of patients, it's a sort of a privilege as a therapist, if you can do that.
Jeff Jones:
I try to practice that I as a therapist am a part of our larger community as well. For example, let's say someone from the right-wing comes in for therapy. I’m not turning them away as they are part of the larger human community. But I’m also a part of the community. So I also practice from a perspective that I'm not going to hide who I am. I cannot stand it when the therapist is this “blank canvas.” Earlier I was telling you that, we were in the thick of the George Floyd riots here. I would hate for a client to come in and doesn't know what the therapist thinks about police brutality. When maybe they were brutalized by them and that's the reason they are coming in for therapy. Maybe that therapist is married to a police officer or just very sympathetic. Well, that could just feel very icky for the client.
I can work with people though who have horrible views on the world. I could work with somebody who is a fascist or a white supremacist that is if I know that they're trying to get out of it. They're probably coming to me because they know who I am.
Itay Kander:
I've started Realizing that there are some things that have become too hard for me. I’ve stretched my limits in a lot of ways over the years but it's now becoming harder and harder. On the other hand, it's getting harder and harder to turn down people who want to come into therapy. It's really unsolvable tension between different ideals or values, tension is there for me.
I might solve it in some other way, some other time, but for now that's really it.
Jeff Jones:
I see it not as the individual. They’re just operating in relational and cultural norms, expectations, and politics. Just not putting blame on that individual person per se. The blame should be put onto larger systems that created those possibilities for war in the first place.
Itay Kander:
That's definitely part of my perspective of therapy- the systems are to blame. But when the entire nation is completely for it, it's hard to distinguish between the system or the authority and the layperson. It's not easy anymore to make that distinction.
For me it has become almost unsolvable.
Jeff Jones:
How do you personally deal with the tension?
Itay Kander:
I just live in it. I just live in it. I build a house in it.
Jeff Jones:
Yeah, okay.
Itay Kander:
Unless I immigrate or go through some other radical change in my life, I will simply have to live in it.
Things are just getting worse. They're getting worse and worse. Right now there's a sort of a ceasefire. The whole hostage situation is going on, swapping hostages, but it's continuously trying to get back to another kind of violent occupation of Gaza. It didn't help when Trump said that they're going to turn it into a riviera and I really think it might go into that place. I'm very pessimistic.
When it started, I couldn't believe it, because it was 2014, I think it was operation Cast Lead later. There was a bunch of other times when Israel bombed the hell out of Gaza. Back then, I I couldn't believe it was just so, so, so brutal. I think it was in Tel Aviv, they read a Khadish- this is a prayer for the remembrance of people who have died- A Khadish for all the kids that died in operation Cast Lead. I remember thinking to myself, my God, it's 80 kids. That was an unimaginable number.
But now it's 10,000.
10,000 kids. A whole region that's been demolished.
I guess if they'll ever stop counting their dead, I think it's going to be 100,000 people.
How do you even start to process that? I live in a society thats rapidly going into a full blown fascist state. Not just for palestinians- thats always been there with the West Bank and evicting entire communities- now it’s going into the jewish community as well. My role as a therapist in a fascist state is honestly- I really don’t know what the answer is to that.
Jeff Jones:
This is exactly why I feel the need to speak up. The U.S. is in a fascist state. To be clear it was always “fascist lite.” Trump just called himself a king. Even though he might joke about it, it’s not a joke when you're the president. In my opinion this is the definition of what Mussolini said fascism was, which is the state and capitalism mixed together. We've got frickin’ Musk doing the seig heil and now some other people are starting to do it this last week. It's almost becoming normalized. I'm sorry, I'm so emotional. I don't know what we have to do. But we have to do something.
Itay Kander:
I guess we need to continue, just continue with whatever we're doing.
We might lose. I might die. I might be killed. It really might happen. It just gets realer and realer every day here, and it gets realer and realer every day there too. Every day you need to make a harder and harder decision. I don't know what price you would pay for speaking out, but the price for me to express how I feel is getting bigger and bigger every day. Everytime I write something that's political people just curse me, people I've known for years. You slowly become an outcast. In the professional sphere, my practice has always been liberatory, liberation based and I'm always for the liberation of people. That means being with them, being in a dialogical space, being with families, being with people who have gone through trauma. I will just continue doing that and creating institutes that can hold these things. That for me feels extremely important. In wider political dimension of things it's pretty much the same thing you need to organize, need to connect, you need to find a community.
I have to tell you, right now the only thing that's keeping me semi-sane here in Israel is knowing that there are other people who think like me. There are not a lot. It’s maybe 5,000-10,000 people tops in the entire country that think like me, but it's still something I hold onto as if my life depends on it, because my life really does depend on it. The sooner you find this community, the better it is, because right now I need this for mere psychological survival, later on I might make this for actual physical survival. Before that, I needed it for action, for working together. I always see politics in the States through social networks and it always seems like a lot of people are finding out about a lot of fairly meaningless stuff instead of just going out, organizing and doing shit. Once you organize and you start working together theres a million thing you can do. And you need to do it. It’s not about anybody else, anarchism is all about direct action. Right now for me, I don't feel like there's much I can do. I can't stop the Gazan genocide. I can speak out against it. And that's a very, very tiny, tiny, tiny thing I can do. But that's what I'm doing.
Jeff Jones:
Survival is liberation right now.
Itay Kander:
Right now, yeah.
There's a wonderful writer called Dan Landau. I don't think anybody in the United States knows about him. He's kind of the Israeli Ron Kanski. He's also a professor of linguistics. That's why I make this comparison. He writes these incredibly long essays about what's really happening here in Israel. Over the years, I've gotten so much inspiration from this person. The way that I write about mental health has a lot to do with what he wrote over the years, because for a lot of people, the best thing you can do is write about things. For other people it’s build institutes, don't be afraid of organizing and building shit. For me, there's nothing new here. I'm not providing anything that's groundbreaking or that I think that narratives and activists haven’t been saying for over a milenia. Well ever since this whole thing started.
Jeff Jones:
Right, again survival is liberation- to keep on creating those mutual aid and solidarity networks. To not isolate. Even though it is scary we must keep doing the work because other people are going to take inspiration from you as well.
Itay Kander:
It's extremely scary to speak out and do these things right now but it's just going to get scarier and scarier. The price is only going to get higher so you might as well do it now while it's still low. If you do it now, while it's still low, there's a smaller chance that it's going to progress on that horrible path it's going.
Jeff Jones:
As fathers, as fathers, it matters. It matters.
Itay Kander:
Yeah. Oh god. If I talk about my daughter I’ll cry as well. I cry as well because I'm scared for her. I'm scared. You know there's suicide bombings here They haven't had that for a while now, but it’ll start again. God.
Jeff Jones:
I worry too. You know, Trump had a dinner with Nick Fuentes and after the Supreme Court overturned Roe versus Wade, which is the abortion rights here. Nick ended up saying online, “Your body, my choice. Forever.”
Itay Kander:
Yeah.
Jeff Jones:
The worst part of it is you know you're going to see someone who has filmed a sexual assault and someone is going to quote that in the video or in online discourse about the video. I'm like oh God, this is the world my daughter is going into. I'm really trying to fight back. It matters what we're doing. That's just one of millions of examples.
Itay Kander:
It's endless, because the assault is really endless.
Jeff Jones:
I really, really appreciate this. Very much so, and thank you. I just, I can't thank you enough.
It's given me inspiration. I really hope the best for you.
Itay Kander:
Thank you Jeff.