Why Does Guilt Elude Most Israelis?

How could the members of IDF live with the images that would, in normal mentalities, arouse more guilt than the blood that could not be washed from Macbeth's hands?

By Paul Balles
First Published 2008-07-15
Courtesy Of Middle - East - Oline

Macbeth, in Act 2 Scene 2 of Shakespeare's play Macbeth, has just murdered Duncan, his king:

Whence is that knocking?

How is't with me, when every noise appalls me?

What hands are here? Ha! they pluck out mine eyes.

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.

The enormity of Macbeth’s crime has awakened in him a powerful sense of guilt that will hound him throughout the play. Blood, specifically Duncan’s blood, serves as the symbol of that guilt, and Macbeth’s sense that “all great Neptune’s ocean” cannot cleanse him that there is enough blood on his hands to turn the entire sea red will stay with him until his death.

In an article by Paul Rockwell, an Iraq war veteran's deeds haunts him:

Georgia Stillwell is a mother of a 21-year-old Iraqi war veteran. Her son is now homeless, unemployed and despondent. Early one morning he drove his car over an embankment. She says that her son is a mere physical shell of himself.

“My son’s spirit and soul must still be wandering the streets of Iraq.”

It is not simply what happened in Iraq, but how veterans are treated at home when they seek to unburden their souls, that reinforces post-traumatic stress.

On the night he drove the car off the road, he was crying, talking about the war.

“His friends tell me he talks about the war. They describe it as ‘crazy talk.’

He wants the blood of the Iraqis he killed off his hands.”

Similar bloodbaths have been happening in Israel, though something in the Israeli psyche seems to have blocked the guilt where the truth wasn't covered up.

Israeli military historian Aryeh Yitzakhi Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Eretz Yisrael Studies at Bar Ilan University (Tel Aviv) and Senior Lecturer in Military History in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) wrote:

In almost every conquered village in the war of independence, acts were committed, which are defined as war crimes, such as indiscriminate killings, massacres and rapes... For many Israelis it was easier to find consolation in the lie, that the Arabs left the country under orders from their leaders. This is an absolute fabrication. The fundamental cause of their flight was their fear from Israeli retribution and this fear was not at all imaginary.

How could the members of IDF live with the images that would, in normal mentalities, arouse more guilt than the blood that could not be washed from Macbeth's hands?

Here is the testimony of one IDF member about a massacre in al-Dawayima village in Hebron District in 1948:

The first wave of conquerors killed about 80 to 100 Arabs, women and children. The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead. One woman, with a newborn baby in her arms, was employed to clean the courtyard… [They] shot her and the baby… This was not in the heat of battle … but a system of expulsion and destruction.

If American soldiers are able to feel their guilt in the form of post traumatic stress, there may be hope. Americans may eventually become fully aware of the blood on America's hands from its own unjustified murders and from the unbridled support of the murders by Israel.

At present, it seems that guilt is beyond the pale of most Israelis.

Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see pballes.com. This article appeared in Redress Information & Analysis.