Domestic Violence Is a Microcosm of Palestine & Israel
Breaking it Down with Compassion
Note: Early on, on October, 16th, 2023 as the onslaught on Gaza began, during this chapter of Genocide, I wrote a *version* of the piece below, BUT as things have evolved, I offer a deeper view.
Heavy content included: from the personal to the systemic.
He backed her into a corner, growled at her, assaulted her character. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was taller than her, and he used it. One step forward and she went one step back. He’d hit her once upon a time, she was always afraid he’d do it again.
He mocked and made fun of her. She couldn’t take it anymore. She raised her hand pushed and started hitting him. Slapped his face, chased him with spoons, cooking utensils. He’d run, then advance and back again.
He taunted her. She fought back. When their children tried to call for peace, for the fighting to stop, they too were beaten, threatened, chased or harmed.
The whispers of gossip were riddled through extended family and community, he played a role, and ‘if only she…’ They blamed her.
Police didn’t stop it. Religiosity was used to enforce it. Addiction to rightness at the center of it. Neither recovered.
Then I grew up and went on to another war…
The ceasefires weren’t. The armed overwhelmed the unarmed.
It’s a story I knew. I witnessed familiarity. And for the first time, I was watching it from the outside, finally understanding my own experiences.
‘War at home was my basic training. War at home — observing it, experiencing it — gave me the tools to recognize human behavior in its basic consciousness. War at home was level one education.’ ~ Ash, Reckoning in the Rubble, Memoir
For the last year an half (at the time of this writing), we have been watching a genocide in real time, a live streamed cycle of abuse, coercive control and resistance, of violence and propaganda wars.
We watch a modern nation-state, once formed because Western Imperialists did not want “them” (parental dismissiveness). The U.S. in particular turned away ships of refugees and later conditioned them, in the name of a religion and fashioned by an atheist for a political project, with an offering for a land grab (a wealth-inheritance and act of trauma avoidance). Victimization became their revenge on anyone and everyone in their way.
77-years later, the abused and neglected Palestinian people have risen up and taken a bigger swing than we expected.
In return, the Israelis pulverize and burn them, land, home and kids with no reflection on the past, but rather an exploitation of it, co-running smear campaigns with the U.S. to maintain it.
From:
They saturate those who dissent (including Jewish and the few Israeli objectors) with gaslights. They aim to sell it to the ignorant and the gullible and have managed successfully, for many years (enlisting an ‘extended family’ so to speak as ‘flying monkeys’). So it is, they appear to maintain power because their lies are dressed up in modern capitalism and technological development. Allied with their abusers, fawning and advancing, groomed and now independently running the traffic, if you will.
The story is all so repetitive.
It is not unfamiliar in a world waking up to the somatic damage done by war; the wars at home become the wars abroad and back again.
A new generation’s outcry is louder than ever. Perhaps, herein lies the guide to addressing all this Trauma, yes?
Oh, I get it, reading this, you might not want to conflate geopolitical war or genocide to domestic violence. Though I might challenge you,
What is Domestic Violence but a microcosm of War?
Our nervous systems develop in survival mode when subjugated to unhealthy parenting and surroundings at our most formative age (up to about 7 - 10 years old) . The psychology of it makes sense. Of all the wars, Israel-Palestine plays it out in a rhythm.
Dr. Judith Herman, who saw the comparisons as early as the 1970s in the wake of Vietnam veterans and Survivors, who found their voice in feminist movement, wrote,
“The suffering of traumatized people is a matter not only of individual psychology but also, always, of social justice. Because the violence at the source of trauma aims at domination and oppression.”
Consider how many kids in Gaza are either targeted or watching their families be killed in front of them. Consider how many of Christian and Israeli kids are being groomed to repeat the abuse sourced in domination?
What if I told you,
A child who encounters intimate partner violence is at least 74% more likely to become an abuser or commit a violent crime?
or that, Children who experience DV are more likely to develop C-PTSD and effects on the brain are not un-similar to War Veterans?
Think about it for a minute.
If, for the last several decades, we’ve engaged with a region in a constant state of perpetuated trauma, how then was it ever expected to resolve itself?
How ironic that I went from one kind of war to another with my somatic system recognizing the same alertness, anxieties and understandings on how to be vigilant.
In an OpEd, early on, after the Israelis began their onslaught, my colleague and fellow Veteran War Journalist for CNN, Arwa Damon remarked,
“We need to understand the past, the traumas of the past, traumas that have been passed on generation to generation, both on the Israeli and on the Palestinian side. We need to understand those intense emotions that can embed themselves in and change our DNA — paralyzing fear, the desperate need to belong, the longing for home and safety, the desire for a dignified life.”
The traumas of the past help us to know who we are now. They are embedded in generations who came before us who passed along violence, oppression and resistance too. They passed on the emotions and dispositions. They passed along patterns of abuse and some passed along their wisdom.
We have incredible power to harm one another, and in the wound we live, we must learn to transform it.
If we unpack What happened and How we’ve carried it in our Bodies for so long, might we develop an incredible power to heal ourSelves and each other?
Some Holocaust survivors did just that, they take to the front-lines of protests now. So, it’s worth noting, one of them, who became a trauma and addiction specialist said,
‘The essence of human trauma is a disconnect from the Self. Therefore, the essence of healing is not just uncovering one’s past, but connecting with oneSelf in the present.’
~ Dr. Gabor Maté, Holocaust Survivor
He went to Gaza once, he saw and he cried. He was a Zionist once too, and then he learned it didn’t align with the realities. He found out; the idea sold to him was Jewish protection and sovereignty but it came at the cost of slaughtering an entirely other group of people.
He uncovered and he got present with himself and stepped into confronting the “abusers” rather than fawning to them.
As someone who continues to do the hard work against what I grew up with and the marriage I escaped, it’s not an easy task to recognize the realities or how I hold my emotions —anger, rage or fear (which were condemned as a kid). When expressed in tender honesty, it relieves the harshness of the past. And still, I must be mindful not to repeat the patterns of the past.
Once upon a time, I sympathized with one parent, the dominant abuser or oppressor, who kept me close, as their ally. As a kid, I looked a little more like them and their family favored me a great deal, as if I was the redemption for a marriage they hated, so they didn’t have to face their sins. It took me a long time to see or understand the full story, especially how my sibling and I were pitted against each other. I was also made to believe fighting back was disobedient or sinful (with religious language, sound familiar? Whose version does God belong?) all while that same parent inflicted propaganda wars (gossip & smear campaigns) against the other, with disdain, us kids were caught in the middle of a never ending rhythm.
I’ve gotten older, my looks have morphed into that other parent, whose own addictions and reactive violence played a role in the trauma. It’s compelled me to contend with all of the violence and their history.
It leads me to Compassion for mySelf, in order that I might reConnect and reconcile inside of me what I am capable of —for better and worse— and change the story.
So, rock back and forth with me here…
In the case of Gaza’s children, they are growing up with nothing but the “fight mode” as a permanent state in their sympathetic nervous system. They don’t have a chance to breathe in hell.
That’s not normal, it’s not supposed to be. We, the extended family, in the world ignore this and even blame them, in favor of a perpetrator’s suffering. We become the perpetrators, because we demand ‘forgiveness’ as a way to placate continued abuse, supplying the weapons and insist vengeance is “self-defense” after seven decades of instigated harm.
We
Are
Complicit.
But Palestine’s kids are not alright. We’re ignoring them, repeating history, demanding their obedience with no reparation. We insist they condemn their own resistance while never acknowledging the massacre we helped commit to take away their dignity, slander their name and assert egotistical power.
In 2014, I went to Gaza. I spoke to a new generation of young ones at the time. One of my conversations with the boys (above) went something like this:
Do you like Hamas?
No
Who do YOU like?
Islamic jihad
Why do you like them?
Because they fight the Israelis. They killed the Israelis
What do you say to the Israelis?
Go Home, you dogs!
Would you allow them to come to Gaza?
They came. With the tanks.
These boys would be 18–21 years old by-now. And I wonder, did they join the militants? Did they even make it? Are they still alive? Where are they?
Whether it be Hamas or the Islamic Jihad, for them, it’s about resistance to abuse.
Israeli Journalist, Gideon Levy, for the Ha’aretz once told Democracy Now,
“You can kill the current top people of Hamas — you cannot kill the ideology of Hamas — there will always be a replaced group operation.”
And the Israelis assassinated Hamas leaders, from Ismail Haniyeh to Yahya Sinwar. Still, the resistance fighters persisted. Even the Houthi rebels in Yemen attempted to stop U.S. ships and targeted Israel in defense of their Palestinians brothers (how many times did I pick up a much younger sibling to try and hide her and get caught in them middle of parental storms?).
Israel’s tactics and propaganda didn’t work. Now, they are openly targeting everyone.
The average age in Gaza is 18 years old, a generation of Palestinians who do not know any other story than being born and raised under missiles and bombs.
How could those boys, whom I met, not hurt or learn to hate those across the border when, from day one they had a target on their back? The only thing they know are the destruction of their cities, their mothers’ fears and their fathers’ tears over broken homes all around them.
As a result they grew up and sent rockets across the border, back at their abusers. They ransacked the villages, took drastic action to call attention to their pain. They demanded an exchange.
It was ignored. Neglect, Stonewalling and Rejection or Denial are part of the abuse too. Have you seen the media interviews? Western coverage?
And violence begets violence…Justice left unserved and children lost.
Then the surviving kids grow up and transition to familiar wars. (sigh)
Palestinian violence was painted as a vaccum and therefore the trauma of the attack was used to justify on repeat, collective punishment, and therefore, genocide.
I can condemn violence and understand its pathway, I can hate violence and condone Resistance. It’s all in how the structure of violence plays out.
Palestinians took a bigger swing, can we understand why? I dislike the term “reactive abuse” in DV language, because it’s not equal, it’s an “act of resistance” because their nervous system just can’t fucking take it anymore. Nor should they.
Assata Shakur said,
Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them
Listen to their stories, their parents and grandparents too. They tried to appeal to the moral sense of their abuser, they had treaties and agreements and talks. Sure, it’s ideal. And yet…and yet…
Walk away? Well, in this case, it doesn’t work like that when it’s land, and history.
Don’t see it through a colonizer’s way of dealing with abuse. See it through indigenous eyes.
What if we, the extended human family, recognize this, could we finally understand what must be done to bring peace? There must drastic action which will inflict extreme measures: boycotts, divestments, refusing to be silent, rescinding money and yeh, taking on the oppressors.
I want to believe in impossible things, it’s the only way to have hope.
We have multiple fronts to fight, from the political to the religious to the psychological, to bring a sense of calm and eventually regulated bodies that breathe justice and healing. We are not free until all are free. Read that again. Feel it. Because it hits different when the ache is felt.
And I’ll tell ya, so many of our Jewish brothers and sisters who are standing with Palestinians ARE feeling it. They KNOW. It’s in their bones. “Never again for anyone” is a desperate plea because they really know (I sometimes liken this to being an elder sibling feeling of the younger one’s abuse, knowing the stakes).
And do they not deserve reConnection with their “brothers and sisters” with themselves too? They’ve lived generations in fear long enough.
The “supportive” white colonizing “parents’ elevated them with a lie (Zionism) while making them unsafe in the world, starting wars in their name, slaughtering innocence in their name.
No More. They too are screaming “not in my name.”
Yes, even as some who claim to align with them, use the Zionist messaging to call them self - hating. But are they? Isn’t “never again for anyone” an outcry of Love?
I feel the collective ache.
As I sit, burrowed in the corner at a cafe in a big city, under a skylight, and partly cloudy skies, I feel the weight of my own past and the abuse we are watching unfold as a blended understanding of the lasting impact. My body knows it.
While my reporter days in Palestine have shifted (let’s be honest, the current Israeli government would ban me for the content I post), what I know for sure, is the story is tattooed on my Nervous System, on my soul, and I cannot just ‘let it go.’
It’s a story which belongs to our Collective Humanity. Can you connect the dots and see the patterns?
We owe it to Palestinians, to our Jewish friends to engage, and offer spaces for healing, negotiation and create possibility for reparative justice.
Perhaps, I also have this hope, that you dear community, in all of this,
1) will start taking Domestic Violence in your prospective space more seriously — see it as a War at Home and
2) As you grapple with how you can be a voice in this War, this Genocide, consider the Trauma, the history, and start Advocating for Accountability, as fiercely as possible.
They ARE connected. I’ve only scratched a small surface here and I am ever engaging.
WE, the People, must demand shift. Get involved, yes? Start having smarter conversations rather than bitter ones. Be impassioned and don’t lose your Humanity along the way.
Ash Gallagher is a Veteran War Correspondent, Author, Coach and Relational Analyst. If you are interested in connecting, podcasting, or working with Ash as a coach/consult, Email Here for More Information and to set something up.
Further Writings: I Do Not Condemn Hamas / Human Shields is a Propaganda Line/ More writings on Gaza
Writer’s support, “buy a coffee style” here
Further Resources
If you or someone you know is facing a personally abusive situation, Call the National Hotline Here.
Dr. Judith Herman’s book, Truth & Repair, How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice
Palestinian Support: Anera, Hind Rajab Foundation, Middle East Children’s Alliance, Film & Stories, Watermelon+ Pictures
Israeli/Jewish Organizations to Consider: If Not Now, Jewish Voices for Peace,
This part “I can condemn violence and understand its pathway, I can hate violence and condone Resistance. It’s all in how the structure of violence plays out.”