ABSTRACT
Most experts agree that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the most intractable in the modern world. Its violence and persistence have defied rational analysis. Zionism was a yearning to turn back the wheel of time, the clock of history, to restore to the Jews their great losses. The Zionists wished to restore those historical losses, to be reborn in the ancient motherland or fatherland. The fact that Zionism has been eminently successful at altering Jewish reality by creating first the Jewish community of Palestine and then the State of Israel does not mean that Zionism did not involve defensive psychological processes. This chapter explores the complex attitude of Israeli scholars toward psychoanalysis. A typical example one may take Harkabi’s book on the Arab attitudes to Israel. Harkabi warned his readers against the “limitations of psychological explanation”: Arab hostility to Israel was not a response to any psychological need to relieve tension or aggressive impulses.
