All behavior is the result of compromises between drives, wishes, fears, inhibitions, and rational evaluations of risks and rewards. This is true for the individual as well as the nation. It is not at all uncommon to find that an individual's manifest behavior often leads to unintended consequences primarily because saboteurs from the unconscious find ways to effect behavior without conscious awareness.
An example or two:
Mr. A, a 51 year old account executive for a major corporation, was an angry, supercilious, and dismissive man. He had a narcissistic characters, was extremely sensitive to slights and extremely insensitive to his affect on others. Because he was successful, his anger was typically directed at his employees; further, his need for always increasing aggrandizement, led him to demand special treatment and adoration from others. At the same time, and unrecognized by Mr. A, his self-esteem was quite fragile and he considered himself, in his rare moments of deeper reflection, a bit of a fraud, who had achieved his success by virtue of his parental connections and luck. He continually feared being found out and losing all he had, in effect, unfairly acquired. In the middle of a major project for a new, and very demanding, boss, Mr. A accidentally downloaded a virus onto his computer while perusing a porn site. The resulting disaster cost him his job.
Mr. A knew that downloading porn onto his work computer was risky. He consciously thought he would never get caught, yet his unconscious need to take dangerous risks and to punish himself for his undeserved success was also a part of his decision to down load porn at work. He "gratified" his need to harm himself and suffered terribly as a result. The impossible problem for Mr. A was that in order to maintain his self-esteem, he had to believe he was smarter and cleverer than everyone else. Further, his sexual interests and intolerance of his wife's imperfections pressed him to prefer porn to reality. For him to stop downloading porn was an admission that he could be victimized by something as mundane as cause and effect. He would have to give up a powerful gratification and tolerate terrible frustration. For him, this would be psychologically deadly; his self-esteem could not survive such an admission of failure.
Generally, when we pretend to ourselves that we do not contain self-destructive and other destructive tendencies, we increase our risk of allowing such tendencies to escape from our Ego's vigilance and find expression through behavior. An equal danger is to fail to see destructive impulses in others when their existence is revealed; this kind of blindness is ubiquitous and destabilizing.
In The Suicidal Pursuit of Perfection and The Suicidal Pursuit of Perfection Revisited I discussed a young woman who placed herself in danger, in part, out of unconscious desires to harm herself. This young woman's sense of herself, as a liberated feminist, led her to fail to recognize the depravity and hostility in others, and placed her in great danger.
These points are worth keeping in mind when considering the international scene and the upcoming elections.
Consider Amnon Rubinstein's article in the Jerusalem Post today, Suicide, the path to national salvation:
Gaza is becoming a symbol. We rightly emphasize Israel's need to put an end to the daily, ever-widening, shelling of our civilians; indeed, it is obvious that Israel will eventually have to take military action - no country could act otherwise - to silence the guns and missile-launchers.
Another aspect is equally significant and concerns the attitude of Hamas's rulers to the mounting tension: On the one hand, they are negotiating - with Egypt, not with the illegitimate Zionist entity - on a temporary cessation of hostilities. On the other hand, they authorize extending the range of their missile attacks, knowing full well that this will hasten the day in which Israel, under any government, will have to order its army to march into Gaza and strip Hamas of its power.Such is the Hamas policy: not only an endless blood-letting war against the Zionist entity, but also a readiness to lose their hold over Gaza as part of this war. This signifies a readiness not only to sacrifice the lives of men, women and children, but also a readiness to sacrifice the very regime they established not long ago through a violent coup. In other words, it is a process of political suicide writ large: The shahid is not only the individual, but the regime itself.
THIS MAY sound like an extreme conclusion but, as Ari Bar Yossef, retired lieutenant-colonel and administrator of the Knesset's Security Committee, writes in the army journal Ma'arachot, such cases of Islamist national suicide are not uncommon. He cites three such examples of Arab-Muslim regimes irrationally sacrificing their very existence, overriding their instinct of self-preservation, to fight the perceived enemy to the bitter end.
In reality, this is not at all an extreme conclusion. The Palestinians have centered their entire existence around their hatred of the Jews. Hamas simply adds a religious imperative to the hatred that has been nurtured since the establishment of the state of Israel. Yet it is incomplete to see their willingness to sacrifice their regime as simply an extension of their idealization of the shahid. It is also a(n unconscious, repudiated) recognition of a piece of reality that is completely unacceptable to the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular. That is, that Israel's existence is a rebuke to Islam itself and for Hamas to actually run a state of their own (just as for Arafat to have tried to run a state rather than remained an unrepentant terrorist) presents the unacceptable risk of repudiating Allah himself.
If Arafat had accepted a state and not been able to compete with Israel's success, despite the Arab belief that their supremacy over all other peoples is certain, the risk of the crumbling of the narcissistic structure of Arabic superiority would have been intolerable. In the same way, for Hamas to attempt to run a state, a venture almost certain to fail considering the cultural and tribal impediments, the contrast with Israel a successful, fully functioning modern state on its border, would be impossible to tolerate. It would either mean that Hamas has failed Allah or that the G-d of the hated and demeaned Jews is more powerful than the G-d of Islam.
In our current situation, Hamas is akin to Mr. A, forced by their own weaknesses and needs to believe they are powerful beyond reason, to provoke a disastrous response from those who can harm them. In both cases, giving up the fantasy of omnipotence leads to despair.
The young woman who I wrote of would be akin to those in the West who deny the hatred and aggression of our enemies.
Between the two, an enemy who has been forced by his own conscious and unconscious desires to provoke an attack and a Westerner who refuses to see the provocation, the end result is pre-ordained. The enemy will escalate until the reaction occurs.
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