Why Him and Not Me? Speaking of Home, An Update

Eyal and I could have easily met across a trench with rifles in our hands and darkness in our hearts. We met, instead, to build a bridge between us in the hope that it can be strong enough to carry us and the people we love across floods, through fire and brimstone.

 

In late October 2023, Eyal and I began a correspondence. We generated two publications and a film about our histories.  In the process, something began to cohere between us. Our dialogue revealed a common humanity. He was willing to understand and change, and so was I. On a personal level, we found a way to forge a bond. On a collective level, he is Israeli. He comes from that group and belongs to it. I am a displaced Palestinian who comes from and belongs to a group that is being decimated by what is best described as a massive war crime being committed by Israel in response to a brutal and gruesome attack by Hamas fighters that killed 1,200 Israelis. Israel has been relentlessly bombing Gaza for almost two years now. The body count on the Palestinian side is around 100,000. People are being starved, with scores of children dying in their parents’ arms from malnutrition, injury, and shock. The highest percentage of child amputees in the world is in Gaza; the highest numbers of orphaned children are in Gaza; more than 20,000 children are dead.  A population of 2.2 million people is being tortured and erased in front of our eyes. The world yawns in indifference and Israel is gripped by what is best described as genocide fever. More than 82% of Israelis support the genocide and displacement of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, and 56% of Israelis support the expulsion of non-Jewish citizens from Israel (Palestinian Israeli citizens). These are the facts. We can dress them up any which way we want, but numbers don’t lie. 

Eyal and I have been meeting for the past 18 months on Zoom every other week, and we see each other every few months where we engage in extended recorded conversations. We have watched each other change over this period of condensed time. More importantly, we have learned from each other. Eyal is an original thinker, a fearless seeker of truth, and a deeply humane soul. Besides, he is easy to be with. How can I not like him? On a collective level, our story is more complicated. The part of Israel he comes from is the part of Palestine we were expelled from. At some point in time, we could have easily encountered each other across a trench with loaded guns and an intent to kill the other.  

Our initial correspondence and film have been ambivalently received. Many institutions shunned us, and people from within our collectives expressed deep reservations, suspicion, and at times disdain for us and our work. On the other side, there were scores of individuals who have written to us to express their gratitude for our work and enthusiasm for its continued development. ROOM received a grant to produce a book that would allow us to elaborate on our work, at the same time that others pulled their money and support from ROOM.  

The International Psychoanalytic Association and the American Psychoanalytic Association refused to let us present our work at their annual conferences. And elements within the Palestinian collective were unhappy with me. How can you talk to an Israeli when they are killing us? I understand the sentiment but I do not agree with it. I am talking with a person who is willing to learn, willing to teach, willing to stand firm while being willing to compromise; a person with emotional honesty, a moral compass, and critical thinking.  If I refuse to talk to him because he is Israeli, I am being racist. What matters are a person’s dispositions, their heart and mind, not their ethnicity. If a person is disposed towards honesty and humanity across contexts, then I can speak with them. It is my experience and contention that our dispositions can and do override any unconscious fantasies of destruction and paranoia.

One point of convergence between Eyal and me is a shared understanding of what we would call social psychoanalysis and an unwavering commitment to apply it to ourselves and in our work with patients and colleagues. I would say we have common analytic dispositions—ways of seeing, understanding, and engaging the world in us and around us. These dispositions facilitated an experience between us that deepened our contact and understanding of each other.  

In April of 2025, I was invited to participate in a conference held at Columbia University titled “Distortions of Reality in the Social Sphere.”  

In preparation for the conference, two organizers and the panel, consisting of a research psychologist, a journalist and academic, and another psychoanalyst, met with the purpose of getting to know each other and work on linking our presentations. I did not say much for the first 45 minutes of the meeting because I became engrossed in observing an unconscious social process. Finally, I said:

“I notice that we have been speaking for 45 minutes about very troubling events and social processes without ever mentioning their source—Palestine. The word ‘Palestine’ has not been spoken even though all the events being described are directly related to what is unfolding in Gaza. I am wondering if the group is observing a rule to not speak the word. It would be impossible for me to speak about Distortions of Reality in the Social Sphere without speaking about how the narrative around Palestine is constrained and distorted.” 

The organizers pointed to how difficult it is to speak about Palestine because people become upset and end up engaging in a blame game. They asserted that I am free to speak whatever I think is appropriate, carefully. Then an exchange ensued between a panel member and myself that left me feeling unsafe. I was asked if I can protect myself should I elect to speak about the genocide in Gaza.  

The painful fact we are all learning is that no one can protect us Palestinians at this moment in history. I decided to withdraw from the conference. 

I liked the organizers, who are supportive and thoughtful people, and felt bad about withdrawing. The organizers were very upset but understanding, and asked if Eyal would be willing to take my place.  

Eyal’s basic stance is that we must speak to anyone who is willing to listen. How else are we going to reach people? I appreciate what he is saying, but it is a privileged position that I do not share. The toll of speaking is higher on me than it is on him. I have to be more thoughtful and protective because I am more vulnerable by virtue of my identity and social position. His first response to my asking him if he would be willing to take my place was: “It does not look good for a Jew to replace a Palestinian during a genocide.  German analysts replaced persecuted Jewish analysts in the buildup to WWII.” In the course of our discussion, Eyal decided that he would go “to represent me/us instead of replacing me/us.”

We met and recorded a conversation in which I articulated my reasons for withdrawing. The conference contained three panel presentations over the span of a full day. Ours was the last panel, and I was scheduled to be the last speaker of the day.   

Eyal took the mic and began to speak. He told them that he was there because I did not feel safe enough to join them, given the context of the situation we are in. He was there, he said, to bring my words. He described our meeting earlier that day and proceeded to read the transcript of our conversation.  We spoke of the genocide in Gaza, the world’s indifference, the weaponization of antisemitism to suppress thought, speech, and dissent, and the real threat we all face in saying what needs to be said: What is happening in Gaza is morally reprehensible and dangerous to the rules-based world order. 

When Eyal was done, a person in the audience expressed shock and gratitude; shock at how he brought me in and gratitude for bringing me in. Another person spoke. Then the moderator took the mic and said, “We received a comment from the audience that must be read.” They were visibly nervous as they read the message: “Karim Dajani is antisemitic. His drawing a false equivalence between the events in Gaza and the Holocaust is a clear example of antisemitism. The group must repudiate him.”  

The audience was stunned.  A long silence ensued. The research psychologist on the panel emitted a guttural sound and said: “I see why Karim did not want to be here. I miss him.” Eyal was given the mic. He seemed shaken, his voice quivering. Eyal said that Karim was not drawing any sort of equivalence with the Holocaust in his comments. He stopped. A few people in the audience expressed a wish for the person who wrote the statement about me to identify themselves and join us in an honest conversation.  They did not.  

Eyal then asked for the mic. He stood up straight and spoke with a commanding clarity:

“I came here today to represent my friend Karim. I was inhabiting his position and frame of reference. When the speaker lobbed their comment on us, I froze. I thought to myself, what have I done?! What kind of horror did I just engage in?!  I experienced the accusations from his position—a Palestinian. I felt helpless, horrified, and scared. BUT, I am a Jew and an Israeli who is free to speak about what his country is doing. From that position, I feel quite fortified when people accuse me of not being a good enough Jew. It does not bother me much. I experience it as obviously false. Also, the accusation was directed at Karim, not me, even though I am the one who is here and who is speaking. Why him and not me? Nevertheless, I experienced it as Karim would. From that position, I felt so intensely helpless, misunderstood, and threatened. It helped me understand something about his daily experiences among us. Karim is not engaging in antisemitism when he objects to the genocide in Gaza, and he is not drawing any false equivalences. The Holocaust, unfortunately, is not the only genocide to occur in history and regrettably not the last.”

It used to be said that people got better by gaining more insight into their minds. That might be true on some level, but it leaves out more than it describes. People heal and resume their development by being understood, by having another mind generate insight into their experience. This points to our fundamental dependence or interdependence. People heal by being understood much more than by understanding themselves in some sort of vacuum. 

Understanding another person is an activity. Links are verbs. They are activities or actions. Bion describes the link K as an act of knowing. Concepts are driven by memory; they are not verbs. To know is to learn something new, which requires loosening our existing conceptual frame. Knowing destroys. Concept preserves. 

Eyal extended me a link, a real link between humans who care for each other and for the world. He understood something about my experience, a burden I carried on my own for decades. I am perceived through a pernicious social lens; my being is distorted and my words are twisted. This is a normal daily occurrence for me. On that day, he joined me, understood something about that experience. He broke the isolation. I am grateful.  

Can this link be made into a bridge strong enough to ferry sanity and humanity to all sides of this biblical flood and these hellish fires?