There is an incredible “edge” or resistance around criticizing Israel, as many people will immediately accuse me of being anti-Semitic. Being of Jewish heritage myself, it breaks my heart to see the abuse that Israel is unconsciously acting out against its neighbors. It is as if the Jewish people have not learned the deeper lesson of the very Holocaust that almost destroyed us, which is that to project the shadow outside of ourselves is to become the very evil that we are trying to destroy in the outside world (Please see my article Shadow Projection: The Fuel of War, available on my website www.awakeninthedream.com). And yet, for anyone to criticize what the nation of Israel is doing is to not only NOT be anti-Semitic, but is to be a true representative of what the Jewish people ultimately are supposed to stand for, which is peace. This situation is analogous to when a family member in a position of power abuses their power, the other family members are enabling and complicit in the abuse if they remain silent (such as, in this case, other Jews who blindly support whatever Israel does, as well as the United States, who is giving tacit approval of Israel’s violent actions by its silence). The family member who speaks up and sheds light on the abuse, though at first quite unpopular and unwelcome, is the one who is the truly loving “patriot” of the family system.               

Of course, Israel’s enemies are doing to Israel exactly the same thing that I am pointing out that Israel is doing to them. Both Israel and its enemies are mutually projecting their own shadow onto and blaming each other, which creates a dark, but very intimate connection between them. Each party couldn’t project the shadow onto the other without its adversary’s secret collaboration in playing out and embodying the very shadow being projected. The violence that is happening between these two polarized agencies couldn’t happen without their unwitting, mutual co-operation. Israel and its enemies don’t exist in isolation from each other, but in co-relation with each other. A deeper process is revealing itself through their interplay.

Israel and its adversaries are both mirroring back what the other is doing. They are enacting their trauma onto each other, and are simultaneously playing both roles of terrorized-victim/terrorist-victimizer. Though the American mainstream media is propagandizing the conflict as being between Israel and the “terrorists” (similar to how they frame the Global War on Terror as being between the United States and the “terrorists”), the question arises “Who is the real terrorist? (The answer goes something like this: the terrorist is just a role in the field that is being played at different moments by all participants in the conflict).

Like a kitten looking in a mirror, Israel and its enemies are reacting to their mirrored reflection, thinking it is separate from themselves. They don’t recognize that they themselves are generating and calling forth the very behavior that they are reacting to. Reacting to their own reflection, they are compulsively acting out a collective form of the repetition compulsion, which is to be feeding into and off of each other’s madness. 

Israel’s argument that Hezbollah or Hamas “started” the violence, though seemingly accurate on a superficial level of reality, is profoundly untrue. Israel and its enemies “reciprocally co-arise” together, which is to say that we can’t pinpoint in linear time where the violence actually started.

The “inner name” of ME disease is “Mad Emperor” disease, as it is what happens when an individual such as Bush, or a nation such as Israel, is in a position of power and abuses its power over others simply because it can. Those who have fallen prey to ME disease identify with an illusory “separate self” (be it on the personal, or national scale) which is fear-ridden, while simultaneously generating fear in others by traumatizing anyone within its dominion. Instead of being in relationship to others and the environment, people (or nations) taken over by ME disease want to dictate, subjugate, dominate, and have power over others. They are tantrum-throwing bullies, who live by the rule of “might makes right.” I immediately associate to the archetypal and mythic figure of the negative father (Cronos/Saturn), who abuses his power over others simply because he can, a morally indefensible act.