Perpetuating Trauma

There was some good news yesterday. A ceasefire has been called in the Israel/Gaza conflict.

It capped off a disturbing week where various issues seemed to be about ongoing inter-generational traumas. Just an ordinary every day meeting up with people, in my morning walks on the beach, chatting with strangers on the train, in reading and listening to the news.

Firstly the news from the Middle East.

A six week ceasefire has been agreed to in the Israeli/Gaza war. The Israeli cabinet met to debate the proposed ceasefire and there were strident voices against it, threats to walk out of the meeting, threats to undermine the efforts for a ceasefire because the work was not yet finished (could it be that there were still some Palestinians alive in Gaza?). Aid convoys will be able to enter Gaza, up to 600 trucks per day. Sounds good? Prior to the comencement of the war about double that amount of supplies was entering Gaza, so no, it is not enough, but better than what was allowed to enter. In the meantime, the attacks up until the final ceasefire announcement was made, continued unabated. Another 80 casualities. But let’s celebrate the good news that a ceasefire has been agreed to, commencing Sunday.

Secondly, a discussion on a train I had with a young student, studying for his PhD at UWA, we talked about where he was from, India, but his parents live in Dubai. He is an engineering student. I asked him about racism; he says it does not seem to be evident in his life, but he has been here a short while. The conversation turned into about life in Australia, the opportunities here and so forth. I mentioned a special education programme where ‘troubled kids’ are taken in on a kind of last ditch effort to save the kids, to guide them into a future life where the current one is severely challenged. Behavioural issues at school which have led to the real possibility of expulsion, the trouble kids get into, including police involvement and the threats of imprisonment. I cited an example where the programme had so changed a kids life that he was now gainfully employed after having completed a TAFE course and in an apprentiship. The programme did save him from a life of crime, and potential imprisonment. A man interrupted my conversation, aggressively stating that since I was not Aboriginal I could not know what I was talking about. There had been no mention of who the person we talked about was, whether he was Aboriginal or any other racial definition, he was just a person we were talking about.

The man would not listen to me, but went back to his partner and shortly after got into an argument with others who left the train at the next station, prefering to be 15 minutes later than to put up with the aggression.

The third conversation was most disturbing. At a social gathering I was introduced to a woman from Sudan. She explained to me the reasons for her leaving her homeland, of a journey through refugee camps and the application to come here as a refugee. She descibed a situation, a particular incident which was deeply disturbing. A group of boys, young teenagers were tied together and marched into a pre-dug trench and the trench was filled in while the boys were still alive. As she told the story, emotion was raw, tears were flowing freely. She choked on her words as she hugged her ten year old son.

The civil war in Sudan has been on again, off again for many years, thirty, approaching forty years of ethnic and religious violence, and now a power struggle between two military forces which should be working together, but seeking to dominate. The people are just a hinderance to the fight, caught in the cross fire. Human life has no value.

How long does the trauma of such situations need to be carried?

It seems that Intergenerational Trauma drives so much of the hatreds and conflicts we see today, whether it is in the Middle East, The Sudan or here. But the most important question we can ask is what can we do about it.

In the aftermath of the European war and the Nazi Holocaust, much was done to redress the entrenched antisemitism which had marked European history for many generations. The Jews were the useful scapegoats for just about any issue which arose. ‘The Fiddler on the Roof’, the musical stage play is about a Jewish family in the Ukraine at the time of the 1905 revolt against the Czar in Russia which saw Jews being expelled from their villages, moved on, pushed aside. Blamed for the instability.

The Spanish Inquisition was to ensure that Jews who settled in Spain converted to Catholicism, and did not engage in Jewish religious practices, like the Sabbath, like the Friday night Sabbat meal which included the singing ‘Shalom Aleichem’, welcoming angels, prayer over candles and other rituals.

The trauma of continual repression and isolation set Jews apart throughout Europe and particularly so when Hitler used that animosity to stir up hatred, blaming the Jews for just about anything and everything that was wrong with the world. So the final solution was to exterminate them. The traumas of generation after generation of abuse, of marginalisation, of blame, of ‘othering’ has left its mark.

So a deal was struck to settle Jews in their promised Biblical homeland. In the shocking realisation of what hatred can amount to, the call to exterminate a whole population based on religion or ethnicity, on race or colour led to the writing of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, The ICC and other moves to protect humanity from such ‘othering’ andd the hatreds that produces.

So to see the Israeli reaction to 7 October 2023 is not really all that surprising. They see the violence of that day as a continuation of the persecutions they as a people have endured for over two thousand years. But seeing that reaction, that demolition of Gaza just in the light of that one event is wrong. The colonisation of Palestine has traumatised another population, the Palestinians, who since 1948 have seem their homelands over run, have seen them marginalised and brutalised in similar manner to that which the Jews have suffered. Dealing with one traumatised people has opened a can of worms through a lack of genuine negotiation when it was agreed that Jews/Israelis and Palestinians were to cohabit in that land.

The situation in Sudan is beyond my understanding. Such a long, bloody dispute of a people divided over ethnicity and religion, where people are killed for being who they are and what they believe. A seemingly intractable war which had its origins in the colonisation, not just in recent centuries, but going back to the times of the Egyptian, Roman, Turkish empires which each laid claim to the lands and the peoples throughout recorded history. The writer, Zienab Badawi has researched African history and published ‘An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence.’

African history written by an African academic. And unlike a European history which is that of European colonisation, it looks at the ebbs and flows of empires and the devastations that has caused. The traumas faced by the Sudanese are deeply embedded in their heritage, in their identities and in the on going conflicts.

For me, well beyond my understanding, and oh so hard for those who have witnessed, have lived through the inhumanities of religious, ethnic and political power struggles where people are an impediment to the acquisition of the wealth that land can generate.

That leaves the Aboriginal Inter-generational Traumas, like the one demonstrated on the recent train ride.

We have tried, or at least some of us have tried to address that trauma.

The Indigenous Voice to Parliament was just one attempt at reconciling the differences, the marginalisation felt by our First Nations people, but that was defeated. The arguments against were based principally on fear.

In Queensland, prior to their last election, there was a Truth Telling programme, a means of addressing the pains and harms that colonisation had brought to Queensland. An opportunity to discuss those events and the consequences, to gain some form of reconciliation, but that was quashed by the incoming LNP government.

Some initiatives, like acknowledgement of country, the Aboriginal and the Islanders flags recognise the prior ownership and custody of the land taken through colonisation, small steps on the way to a continuing reconciliation, but now we have those questioned as campaign announcements in the lead up to the Federal and in WA the state elections with the leaders of opposition in both jurisdictions saying they will not recognise the flags and will not cite the acknowledgement of country.

Intergenerational Traumas are hard to deal with, and those in other countries are too far away for us, but we have the opportunity to do something here. Refusing to acknowledge country, refusing to stand before the First Nations flags are emotive dog whistles which again stand in the way of dealing with the problems colonisation and racial superiority have created.

 

Also by Bert Hetebry: Antisemitism, Racism, Religion, Xenophobia

 

 

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