I’ve chosen to see the Palestinians as the goodies and the Zionist movement, currently governing Israel, as the baddies. How much of my irritation arises from this set of beliefs being challenged, as for example by the Guardian containing two articles today about the holocaust, again helping to whitewash or justify Israeli government behaviour.
I react defensively to the accusations against the UNRWA employees. Of course they will have followed the fighters if the barrier was down. Who wouldn’t given 16 years of imprisonment in an enclave? Was it a crime? Not in any legal system with which I am familiar. How did Israel come by this information? Was it extracted under torture?
These questions are all valid, but I am more interested in my emotional reaction and what it says about human behaviour.
I remember studying Leon Festinger’s theory of Cognitive Dissonance.
According to this theory, discomfort is triggered when the person’s belief clashes with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort. The easiest way consists of attempting to deny the validity of the new information. Enlarge.
Does this theory explain my emotional reaction? Are you also puzzled by good intelligent friends who see things very differently to yourself? Do you wonder what holds people clinging to fixed ideas?
I too am confused by the current situation in the West, where reasonable, intelligent people are ignoring the evidence of Israel bombing, starving, and depriving the Gaza people of water, food, fuel, housing, and all the basic commodities for life. These Western people are still supporting Israel, despite all the evidence of genocide. I feel horror at a major aid agency being deprived of its income and its ability to feed the registered Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East, because of Israeli allegations. Do others not see the truth? These allegations may have some truth, but surely in our Western society people are innocent until proven guilty.
I imagine the discomfort of challenging the established belief prevents some people from thinking too deeply. It’s far more comfortable to live in a world where newspapers and TV tell the truth, than in the real world. It’s far more comfortable to live with a police force that acts correctly and is not corrupt, than to live with the reality. It feels much safer to live in a country controlled by a good government, rather than see how both the major political parties support the genocide in Gaza, and question the principles of these parties.
I have been lucky, together with all of us who think for ourselves. I was brought up within a Roman Catholic education system, and was taught to pray rather than question and investigate my doubts. At 20 I had the benefit of travelling and living in Turkey for 18 months. I discoveried that there are ways other than the Western way of viewing the world. I then did an excellent Diploma in Social Studies, where I learnt to attempt to distrust what was presented unless I’ve seen it.
When I worked as a counselor in a college of further education, I saw how easily the young people healed their psychological damage. Subsequently when I worked with mature people I found the damage was more written in stone, and the healing process much slower. I imagine that with us older people attempting to change a part of how we see the world sends the whole network of our belief system into disarray. How many of us can cope with that?
I grew up with gentle télévision and radio, clearly distinguishing between the good compassionate police and the baddies. I then became a social worker, and saw how the police ignored the safeguards for children who had committed minor crimes. I witnessed a friend whose son was killed by the police having to reform her belief system into one that saw the law and order system as flawed.
I believe Festinger’s theory can help us make sense of some of our own reactions as well as the reactions of others. It can support me in my questioning of my own reactions and give me more equanimity. It can enable me in holding others in an awareness loving kindness, knowing that there but for the grace of God go I. I could have been born one of the helpless in Gaza, or one of the Israelis slavishly following the government, just as I slavishly followed my teachers’ and priests’ guidance at school.
As a loyal, trusting citizen, it is harder to wonder if the Western governments are in error in their support of Israel and the acceptance of the terrible aggression being done to the people of Gaza, and to a lesser degree to the people in the West Bank.
My resilient heart is finally breaking, and I don’t know how to make the world and its people wake up.
May all beings live in peace.
