Eighty-six years ago Europe’s Jews suffered the most catastrophic event in their history, ending in a systematic, industrial-scale slaughter. Six million was the body count, its physical manifestation. But the Shoah, or Holocaust, as it is also known, delivered a psychic wound that cannot be so easily measured. Nor has it ever truly healed.

Studies of its history can enlighten us, as has Zionism’s history. But to fully grasp the extent of the Shoah’s effects perhaps we should turn to psychology. A good place to start, I think, is acknowledging that we humans are a species of primates, with whom we share certain defining characteristics. For all our complexities and material achievements, homo sapiens is a social animal, with an ontological need for belonging. Like our closest primate relatives we are tribal animals. To overlook or deny this is at our peril – in Jungian terms, a denial of the ‘shadow’.

Seen from this perspective, Hamas’s horrific surprise attack on Israel last year tore open that festering psychic wound. Thus for many Jews the cry of ‘Never Again’ references the shame and trauma of the Shoah, rather than its lesson for the whole of humanity. For Israelis, who have assumed the mantle of its repudiation (and in so doing embarked on the cruel oppression of yet another people), the psychic affront has been seemingly unbearable. So too the guilt borne by western nations who did little to prevent the Shoah, or in Germany’s case, actually conducted it. That few thus affected would accept that their reactions are largely unconscious........

© Pearls and Irritations