I’ve been wanting to comment on the situation in Gaza for a long time but have refrained because I was never sure whether I knew all the facts. But video footage verified by respected journalists, cannot be disbelieved no matter what Netanyahu says.
But this post isn’t about the horror that has been largely ignored by the western world, it’s about how my subconscious perception of Jews has changed. And if mine has changed, then the chances are that the world view is changing too. And please note, this is NOT an antisemitic post. It is merely a discourse on my changing conscious perception.
I work with dreams and have written many books on how to explore and interpret one’s own dreams. In ‘Working the Night Shift’ I included one of my own dreams from the 1990s; a dream that featured a Jewish woman. The association to the concept of a Jewish person I made at the time was someone who is brave and respectful but someone who has suffered greatly. Another dream about a Jewish man cropped up in 2010 and was included in my book ‘Dreaming Yourself Aware’. Here the associations were subjugation, disempowerment and victimisation – all aspects believed by me to be embodied within the concept of a Jewish person. This belief was reflected in my consciousness – I have always had enduring empathy for Jews because of what they, and their ancestors, suffered during WW2. I now feel really sad to report that all that has changed. What they suffered at the hands of Hamas was terrible and inhumane but, an eye for an eye ends up with both the aggressor and the victim blinded.
In one of my
other books about my visit to Dachau (2021), I wrote in the epilogue;
‘We
may feel helpless and ineffectual when we are fed the daily news of slaughter,
but there is something we can do.
We
can teach our children to be empathetic and compassionate. We can nurture them
so that when they grow to adulthood, they don’t need religion or political
ideology to make sense of their life, nor to feel secure in the world.
We
can show them what happens when intolerance and injustice prevail or when
religious or national fanaticism tramples humanity under foot. We can teach
them that violence breeds hatred and intolerance and only leads to more
violence.’
All I can do now is hope that the younger generations all over the world, grow up heeding those words. Yet, I don't see how a child that manages to survive this current horror, will ever be able to forgive.
I just cannot understand how a people, whose
ancestors suffered genocide in Hitler’s concentration camps, can commit the same
crime in an even more inhumane way by reducing a country to rubble and slowly and systematically starving
children to death. It’s horrific and I hope the world never forgets. And I should add, that my heart goes out to all those Jews who disagree with what Netanyahu has done because they too will suffer the consequences of a changing world view.
‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only
light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.’ Martin
Luther King