{"id":37214,"date":"2024-10-23T12:35:02","date_gmt":"2024-10-23T19:35:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=37214"},"modified":"2024-10-23T12:35:03","modified_gmt":"2024-10-23T19:35:03","slug":"naomi-klein-israel-has-weaponized-october-7-trauma-to-justify-its-genocide-in-gaza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2024\/10\/23\/naomi-klein-israel-has-weaponized-october-7-trauma-to-justify-its-genocide-in-gaza\/","title":{"rendered":"Naomi Klein: Israel Has Weaponized October 7 Trauma to Justify Its Genocide in Gaza"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>OCTOBER 22, 2024 (DemocracyNow.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.democracynow.org\/shows\/2024\/10\/22?autostart=true\">Watch Full Show<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Naomi Klein: Israel Has Weaponized October 7 Trauma to Justify Its Genocide in Gaza\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/s_RdKi6h3YM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer\/sharer.php?u=https:\/\/www.democracynow.org\/2024\/10\/22\/naomi_klein_october_7_weaponized_trauma\"><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/share?url=https:\/\/www.democracynow.org\/2024\/10\/22\/naomi_klein_october_7_weaponized_trauma&amp;text=Naomi+Klein%3A+Israel+Has+Weaponized+October+7+Trauma&amp;via=democracynow&amp;lang=en\"><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/submit?url=https:\/\/www.democracynow.org\/2024\/10\/22\/naomi_klein_october_7_weaponized_trauma\"><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/wa.me\/?text=https:\/\/www.democracynow.org\/2024\/10\/22\/naomi_klein_october_7_weaponized_trauma\"><\/a><a href=\"mailto:?body=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.democracynow.org%2F2024%2F10%2F22%2Fnaomi_klein_october_7_weaponized_trauma&amp;subject=Naomi%20Klein%3A%20Israel%20Has%20Weaponized%20October%207%20Trauma%20to%20Justify%20Its%20Genocide%20in%20Gaza\"><\/a>This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.democracynow.org\/donate\">DONATE<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\">TOPICS<\/h5>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.democracynow.org\/topics\/israel\">Israel<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.democracynow.org\/topics\/israel_and_palestine\">Israel &amp; Palestine<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.democracynow.org\/topics\/palestine\">Palestine<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.democracynow.org\/topics\/gaza\">Gaza<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\">GUESTS<\/h5>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.democracynow.org\/appearances\/naomi_klein\">Naomi Klein<\/a>award-winning author and journalist, columnist for&nbsp;<em>The Guardian<\/em>&nbsp;and professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, where she is also the founding co-director of the&nbsp;UBC&nbsp;Centre for Climate Justice.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\">LINKS<\/h5>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/ng-interactive\/2024\/oct\/05\/israel-gaza-october-7-memorials\">&#8220;How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war&#8221;<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/us.macmillan.com\/books\/9780374610326\/doppelganger\">&#8220;Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World&#8221;<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>More than a year since Israel launched its war on Gaza in response to the October 7 attack, we speak with the award-winning author, journalist and activist Naomi Klein, who says a \u201ctrauma industry\u201d has emerged to keep Israeli society permanently in crisis in order to justify the country\u2019s expansionist wars and human rights abuses. \u201cThough the Israeli government likes to frame everything that is happening now as a response to October 7, this is a preexisting agenda,\u201d says Klein, whose latest&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/ng-interactive\/2024\/oct\/05\/israel-gaza-october-7-memorials\">essay<\/a>&nbsp;for&nbsp;<em>The Guardian<\/em>&nbsp;explores how Israel \u201chas made trauma a weapon of war.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Transcript<\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p>This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>AMY&nbsp;GOODMAN:<\/strong>&nbsp;This is&nbsp;<em>Democracy Now!<\/em>, democracynow.org, \u201cWar, Peace and the Presidency.\u201d I\u2019m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>NERMEEN&nbsp;SHAIKH:<\/strong>&nbsp;As we continue our coverage of Israel\u2019s war on Gaza, we turn now to look at \u201cHow Israel has made trauma a weapon of war.\u201d That\u2019s a headline to a recent&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/ng-interactive\/2024\/oct\/05\/israel-gaza-october-7-memorials\">essay<\/a>&nbsp;in&nbsp;<em>The Guardian<\/em>&nbsp;by our next guest, the award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein, who examines how memorials to the October 7th attacks have stirred support for Israel\u2019s limitless violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>She writes, quote, \u201cIt\u2019s a simple fable of good and evil, in which Israel is unblemished in its innocence, deserving unquestioning support, while its enemies are all monsters, deserving of violence unbounded by laws or borders, whether in Gaza, Jenin, Beirut, Damascus or Tehran.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>AMY&nbsp;GOODMAN:<\/strong>&nbsp;Naomi Klein is professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, the founding co-director of the&nbsp;UBC&nbsp;Centre for Climate Justice. Her latest book,&nbsp;<em>Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World<\/em>, is now available in paperback. She\u2019s the author of many other books, including&nbsp;<em>The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Naomi, it\u2019s great to have you back in our New York studio, but horrifying during these times. If you can respond first to what\u2019s happening on the ground in Gaza, in Lebanon, and then if you can relate it to this&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/ng-interactive\/2024\/oct\/05\/israel-gaza-october-7-memorials\">piece<\/a>&nbsp;that you just wrote for&nbsp;<em>The Guardian<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>NAOMI&nbsp;KLEIN:<\/strong>&nbsp;Sure. Well, I think the first thing that we \u2014&nbsp;what we need to understand, and I think we have seen this in the clips and in your previous interview, is that though the Israeli government likes to frame everything that is happening now as a response to October 7th, this is a preexisting agenda. I mean, this is the settler movement, Ben-Gvir. I mean, all of these figures have always wanted Gaza depopulated. They\u2019ve always wanted to settle Gaza. They\u2019ve always believed it is part of so-called Greater Israel. So does Netanyahu. It\u2019s part of their coalition agreement dating back to 2022 \u2014&nbsp;right? \u2014 that they want the whole thing, and also the West Bank, by the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, you know, I\u2019ve written before about how states of shock are often exploited very cynically to ram through a preexisting agenda. And I think that\u2019s absolutely what we\u2019re seeing. But in order for that to work, the state of shock needs to be continued, heightened. There can never be a recovery. So the Israeli society needs to be reshocked and kept in this kind of trauma loop. And that\u2019s what this piece about the kind of trauma industry is about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I want to be very clear: People have a right to grieve their loved ones. This is not about families gathering in grief. This is not about the right to remember and honor. It\u2019s about state-orchestrated and -manipulated trauma. It\u2019s a memorialization from above \u2014&nbsp;right? \u2014&nbsp;not from below, for a very specific end. And people in the Netanyahu government have been very clear that really what they\u2019re doing with the way they are telling the story of October 7th is creating what they call a new national identity. And it\u2019s a national identity that uses the trauma of that day to create a story that fuses October 7th with the Holocaust, and then uses that as the excuse for the genocide that we\u2019re seeing right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, you know, when we think about the horrors, that you\u2019ve already outlined today on the show and, frankly, every show \u2014 right? \u2014 the deliberate starvation, the torment of an entire population, the torture of an entire population, the deliberate humiliation \u2014 how do you \u2014 and I think we all ask ourselves this question: How are people able to rationalize it? Right? And they\u2019re able to rationalize it because within their information bubbles, they are being fed this constant story of \u201cthis is what they did to you,\u201d a whole industry of reexperiencing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I mean, what I write about in this piece is all of these immersive, so-called memorialization kind of technologies, so it\u2019s not only people in Israel, but in the diaspora, who are encouraged to put on VR goggles and reexperience October 7th as if it happened to them, immersive tunnels where you can go into the Gaza tunnels. It\u2019s really an attempt to transfer trauma far and wide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And in a state of trauma, you don\u2019t really think. It\u2019s pure emotion. It\u2019s pure reaction. You can\u2019t be analytical. You\u2019re not going to be empathetic towards others. It\u2019s about monsterizing the other and fusing your identity with the people in those houses, at the Nova music festival, in the tunnels. It\u2019s very deliberate. It\u2019s extremely manipulative. And it\u2019s how you turn off any compassion or empathy or sense of ethics or morals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>AMY&nbsp;GOODMAN:<\/strong>&nbsp;And just to be clear, you point out that a number of hostage family members, in response to the state memorializations, as you put it, on October 7th, said, \u201cDo not use our family members\u2019 names. We don\u2019t want to be a part of this,\u201d as they fight for \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>NAOMI&nbsp;KLEIN:<\/strong>&nbsp;Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>AMY&nbsp;GOODMAN:<\/strong>&nbsp;\u2014 their family members to be released and a ceasefire, an end to Palestinian anguish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>NAOMI&nbsp;KLEIN:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh yeah. I mean, this is \u2014&nbsp;the way in which the government is weaponizing, instrumentalizing the deaths on October 7th and the hostages, the people who are most opposed to it are the families themselves, right? So, I begin the piece with the fact that, originally, the government\u2019s plans for October 7th was to have this huge public event in the south. There were going to be thousands of people, I think 7,000 people. And they wanted to have, you know, members of the families there to testify. And kibbutz after kibbutz that was really, you know, on the frontline, like kibbutzim like Be\u2019eri, said, \u201cWe\u2019re not participating in this.\u201d Then family members said, \u201cNot only are we not participating, you can\u2019t use our child\u2019s name. You can\u2019t use their image,\u201d which is to not say that they\u2019re not grieving. They had their own private, dignified ceremonies, vigils, you know, for people who are still alive. They just didn\u2019t want any part of the pageantry and the weaponization of the government. They didn\u2019t \u2014&nbsp;and that was withheld.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You know, of course, the way my piece has been responded to through the sort&nbsp;<em>hasbara<\/em>&nbsp;channels is, you know, \u201cNaomi Klein says we don\u2019t have a right to grieve,\u201d ignoring the fact that it\u2019s the families themselves who have the most to grieve who are actually objecting the loudest within Israeli society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>NERMEEN&nbsp;SHAIKH:<\/strong>&nbsp;And if you could say, Naomi \u2014&nbsp;you know, you just mentioned, which your&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/ng-interactive\/2024\/oct\/05\/israel-gaza-october-7-memorials\">piece<\/a>&nbsp;talks about at length, the conflation of October 7th with the Holocaust. First of all, what that makes possible?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>NAOMI&nbsp;KLEIN:<\/strong>&nbsp;Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>NERMEEN&nbsp;SHAIKH:<\/strong>&nbsp;Some of the examples of the ways in which that\u2019s happened through these different memorialization practices that you outline? And then, whether an argument can be made for whether this is not precisely a kind of a trivialization of the Holocaust, a kind of banalization of it, which is precisely what survivors and scholars of the Holocaust warned against?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>NAOMI&nbsp;KLEIN:<\/strong>&nbsp;Right. Yeah, I think it\u2019s extraordinary, because one of the things that is happening from the same people who are trivializing the Holocaust in this way, they\u2019re also \u2014&nbsp;if you say what\u2019s happening in Gaza is genocide, you know, they\u2019ll throw their arms up in horror and say, you know, \u201cThat is impossible,\u201d despite the immense scale and the deliberate plans and all of the markers, the announcements of intent \u2014&nbsp;now, I\u2019m not going to go into that. But they think nothing of saying that October 7th was \u2014 as if 80 years had not passed, as if it was not another continent, as if it was not another group of people, as if the power dynamics were not flipped on their head, that this day just grafts onto the Holocaust, as if it was 1945.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so, this goes from everything from the Shoah Foundation adding another chapter \u2014 so, the Shoah Foundation, which is, you know, an incredibly important archive of testimonies of Holocaust survivors, now has added testimonies from survivors of October 7th. March of the Living tours of Auschwitz, now you hear from survivors of October 7th. So it\u2019s a total conflation of these events. You know, in the piece, I tell a kind of extreme story of \u2014 they call it an art project. I wouldn\u2019t call it an art project, but it\u2019s some \u2014&nbsp;it was a bizarre kind of stunt of taking \u2014 creating a juxtaposition of the iconic memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in Berlin and hanging a pair of mocked-up bloodied pants that were to symbolize sexual violence on October 7th and suspending them over that memorial with drones and then saying \u201cNever again?\u201d \u2014&nbsp;question mark \u2014&nbsp;as if this is all the same event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now, Nermeen, you asked about: Well, what are the implications of this? The implications are that if you do conflate these events, of course, it justifies any response, right? And more than that, if you cast Palestinians as Nazis, if you create this continuum, this absolutely false continuum, then it actually,&nbsp;<em>post facto<\/em>, does a lot more work than that, because then, if Palestinians are Nazis, then the original crime in the creation of the state of Israel, which is the Nakba, which is the mass, forced ethnic cleansing, displacement of hundreds of thousands, more than 700,000, Palestinians, who had nothing to do with the Holocaust, is, like, after the fact, justified, right? So, if they\u2019re Nazis, then the original crime that Israel can\u2019t look at in its founding is sort of, after the fact, justified. This is the psychology of it. Of course, it makes no sense. But this is why it\u2019s very dangerous, and it\u2019s why we\u2019re seeing this acceleration of kind of finish-the-job Nakba from Israeli politicians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>NERMEEN&nbsp;SHAIKH:<\/strong>&nbsp;I want to ask, Naomi \u2014&nbsp;one of the people that you cite in your&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/ng-interactive\/2024\/oct\/05\/israel-gaza-october-7-memorials\">piece<\/a>, I mean, on the question of grief and grieving, is historian Gabriel Winant, whose&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.dissentmagazine.org\/online_articles\/a-response-to-joshua-leifer\/\">piece<\/a>&nbsp;in&nbsp;<em>Dissent<\/em>, which you take from, is headlined \u201cOn Mourning and Statehood.\u201d It was a response to Joshua Leifer, a journalist, in the same journal, in&nbsp;<em>Dissent<\/em>. But I\u2019d like to read a short excerpt. This is not what you quote, but it\u2019s from his original piece. He writes, \u201cThe genuine humane sentiment that it is possible to grieve equally for those on both sides is, tragically, not true. One side has an enormous grief machine, the best in the world, up and running, feeding on bodies and tears and turning them into bombs. The other is starved for grief.\u201d Now, Gabriel wrote that piece less than one week after October 7th. Now it\u2019s over a year, over 42,000 Gazans killed. If you could elaborate on this? Because this is something that people have struggled with, you know, because, as you said earlier, people have a right to grieve what happened on October 7th, and yet there is this massive discrepancy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>NAOMI&nbsp;KLEIN:<\/strong>&nbsp;Massive asymmetry in who\u2019s grievable, right? I mean, this is Butler\u2019s term, Judith Butler\u2019s term, that within a vastly unequal, white supremacist society, you have lives that are treated as more grievable than others. And so many justice struggles are about asserting that every life is grievable. And so, I mean, the Black Lives Matter movement is about asymmetrical grief in so many ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I mean, personally, I don\u2019t think \u2014 I think there\u2019s sometimes this idea that you can tell people not to grieve, because \u2014&nbsp;you know, to sort of balance the scales. I don\u2019t think grief is a very obedient emotion, from my experience. It\u2019s highly disobedient and unruly. And I think it is dangerous, actually, to tell people that they can\u2019t have the emotions that they\u2019re having. I think it\u2019s more constructive to try to redirect those emotions into a project that is liberatory, that is in solidarity, you know, create containers for grief that are not the weaponized containers or instrumentalized containers that are using that grief and turning it into a justification for genocide. So, you know, I have respect, but disagreement, with that position. But we need to wrestle with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You know, in the piece, I also quote a scholar, a Lebanese Australian scholar, Ghassan Hage, who talks about how he felt this pressure to grieve those deaths in a certain way after October 7th, in a way that he described as \u201csupremacist mourning,\u201d which had encoded in it the idea that these lives were more important, more precious than Palestinian lives, Lebanese lives. And that\u2019s what we must reject on all counts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The other thing that\u2019s been pointed out many times is that you can\u2019t really mourn when the bodies are still piling up, when there are bodies still under the rubble, when cities are being turned to dust. Mourning is something, actually, that you do once it\u2019s over. And it\u2019s not over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>AMY&nbsp;GOODMAN:<\/strong>&nbsp;You also quote Marianne Hirsch, a professor emerita at Columbia University, and you end your piece by applauding the group, Israeli Palestinian group, Zochrot, which means \u201cremembering.\u201d Talk about both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>NAOMI&nbsp;KLEIN:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah. I mean, Marianne Hirsch is a wonderful scholar of different forms of memorialization and the way in which these sort of top-down \u2014 this top-down pageantry memorial creates a false experience, a sort of \u2014&nbsp;she doesn\u2019t use this term, but a prosthetic trauma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The remembering, you know, if you break down the parts of the word \u201cremembering,\u201d it\u2019s really putting the pieces of the self back together again. And the work of Zochrot, which is \u2014&nbsp;you know, they\u2019ve been doing work for many years, which is really about putting the pieces \u2014 like, Israel is based on erasure \u2014&nbsp;right? \u2014&nbsp;erasing the presence of \u2014&nbsp;it\u2019s every settler-colonial state \u2014 the United States, Canada, Australia. They\u2019re all about erasing the original Indigenous presence there, renaming towns, denying that there are burial grounds. So, it\u2019s actually the opposite of memorialization that happens. And so, what would real remembering mean in violent settler-colonial states? And it would be actually putting the pieces of the self back together again, which is this deeper form of remembering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>OCTOBER 22, 2024 (DemocracyNow.org) Watch Full Show This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today. DONATE TOPICS GUESTS LINKS More than a year since Israel launched its war on Gaza in response to the October 7 attack, we speak with the award-winning author, journalist and activist Naomi Klein,&#8230; <a class=\"continue-reading-link\" href=\"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2024\/10\/23\/naomi-klein-israel-has-weaponized-october-7-trauma-to-justify-its-genocide-in-gaza\/\"> Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr; <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37214"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37214"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37215,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37214\/revisions\/37215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}