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Breakthrough: Transforming Fear Into Compassion - A New Perspective on the Israel-Palestine Conflict
After more than sixty years, the Israel-Palestinian issue is as intractable as ever. Groups and individuals on either side reflexively point to the other as the cause of conflict. Blame and intense emotion permeate virtually any discussion of the subject. In this book, Richard Forer explains that no action occurs in a vacuum, that we all play roles in the suffering of others and that only an honest intention to discover the history for ourselves can alleviate the suffering. Through meticulous research Forer examines and reframes the most common and misunderstood arguments on both sides of the conflict. He shows that the real enemy is the unexamined mind that projects its suffering onto the other. Though not a religious Jew, Forer had been a loyal defender of Israeli policy all his life and zealously supported Israel s 2006 invasion of Lebanon. In response to what he perceived as growing global anti-Semitism, he became a member of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Angry that two of his most trusted friends resisted his views, and surprised that a long-time Jewish friend would suggest that his opinions were not as factually based as he assumed, Forer began an intensive study of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, determined to discover the facts for himself. With an uncompromising commitment to the truth, he went far beyond his original intention, even challenging his very identity. Reaching into the depths of himself, in a remarkable moment he underwent a spontaneous spiritual transformation in which he awoke to his true identity, beyond the limits of the ego and its enforced loyalties. Feeling how his attachment to Israel had blinded him to the human dimension of the conflict and had led him to reject the other in a heartless way, Forer realized that the true root of conflict is one's presumed identity and the beliefs and images that emanate from and reinforce that identity, and that these presumptions are false and unnecessary. He discovered that in Truth we are all Muslim and Jewish, Palestinian and Israeli. Forer had recognized the heart of Judaism, which embraces the Universal and identifies with all of humanity.
- GenresNonfiction
371 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
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October 1, 2013
To some people, Richard Forer's book is highly controversial, but to me it is a welcome challenge to conventional thinking about Israel, Zionism and its history. Following are my views of the book.
“It is difficult to overestimate the emotional attachment of American Jews to the State of Israel,” Anna Balzer writes in her Forward. “Zionism, in the words of Baby Boomers like Jewish psychologist and author Mark Braverman, has been the ‘mother’s milk’ to Jews in the United States and around the world. Unconditional support for Israel is not so much an intellectual choice as a deeply rooted component of Jewish identity. Indeed, in many Jewish circles today it has become more important to believe in Israel than to believe in God. Criticism of Israel feels like a personal attack, a challenge not of a state but of who we are.”
Like Richard Forer, she knew where her allegiance lay. “I saw Israel as a victimized country that simply wanted to live in peace but couldn’t because of its aggressive, Jew-hating, Arab neighbors.” This was also true for Forer until his mid-fifties when he was encouraged by a close childhood friend named Sam to take a closer look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He listened, he says, because his friend was Jewish, because he wasn’t judgmental of his viewpoint, and because he gave him the space to question his beliefs without threatening his identity.
In his transformational journey of self-discovery, Richard Forer discovered the main reason behind Zionism’s and Israel’s poisonous relationship with Palestine’s non-Jewish population: “A reasonable need for safety … had been transformed into an irrational fear that could be satisfied only by incapacitating or destroying the objects of that fear.”[1] Safety, the Zionists believed, would come from creating a homeland where Jews would be forever protected from persecution because, it would be for Jews alone in spite of the fact that it told the world in its Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel that it would “foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants … irrespective of religion, race or sex” and would “be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”
Truth lies in behavior, not words. Throughout its history, Israel has persecuted its non-Jewish citizens, treated its non-Jewish neighbors in the Occupied Territories like vermin, and routinely violated every single principle of the UN’s Charter. The question is why. Where does such malignant behavior
come from? As Forer points out it comes from fear and resentment born of centuries of persecution and pogrom that culminated in the cataclysm of Hitler’s resentments and fear of Jews and other “outsiders” (homosexuals, mental patients, the mentally retarded and Gypsies). As I learned in my years of clinical practice as a mental health professional, fear and resentment left to fester turn into abusive behavior towards others who are perceived as threatening. For the Zionists and their followers after World War II that was everyone who was not Jewish.
When the Zionist forces began their push to establish Israel, their goal was to remove Palestine’s Arab population and replace it with Jewish immigrants from Europe and elsewhere. Every act of resistance was met by a withering fury of violence that has continued unabated in large and small ways for over sixty-two years. It is this deep-seated, pathological fear and resentment that drives Israel’s abusive behavior and the steady stream of denials and lies about it.
“Resentment”, a wise client told me years ago, “is like swallowing poison and waiting for the other person to die.” The cruel irony is that resentment of past persecutions has led Israel’s leaders to create a State that mirrors in its behavior the horrors of the pogroms and the holocaust and subject its Palestinian Arab victims to the persecution and murder for over sixty-two years. This is classic abusive system behavior in which a beaten child becomes a child-beater in its turn. One of the values of Breakthrough is that it shows how unexamined emotions and beliefs prevent us from seeing and living in reality, and how examining them honestly leads to the kind of awakening the author experienced in 2006 when he began to examine and question his beliefs.
“If we look … carefully,” the author asks, “who is the enemy and who is the righteous? The enemy is the righteous mind that sees everything in terms of us against them, [and] calls forth death upon the other.”[2] It is this more than anything else that lies behind Israel’s mindless violence and the massive propaganda campaign that seeks out and attempts to destroy anyone who dares question Israel’s behavior and motives. Forer is not afraid of revealing how he was deceived by a belief system that consisted of antagonists and protagonists that saw “one part of the world as represent[ing] sanity and the other insanity” and enabled him to support “indiscriminate and massive destruction; in a word, insanity.”[3]
Forer does a masterful job of deconstructing denial with example after example of naked and incontrovertible facts, showing time after time behavior on the part of Israelis that is unspeakable in its sadism and beastliness. Where people like Alan Dershowitz and Abraham Foxman don't want to see, Forer deconstructs their arguments so they must look away not to see. Denial is a powerful mechanism of defense; when fear becomes malignant and blocks one’s natural ability to look, to see and to feel.
“Hope is something we will never give up,” says Ali, a young Palestinian college student the author interviewed. “My people want the world community to give us more support. They don’t have to be pro-Palestinian; they just need to be pro-human rights. We don’t want to replace or be replaced, and we don’t want to treat the Israelis the way they treat us. We just want peace and equality.”[4]
In the chapter about the “purity” of Israel’s IDF (Chapter 8, “Purity of Arms”) the author includes this revealing comment by Israeli general Yigal Allon: “If we accuse a family – we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included.”[5] In this statement and others, truth is revealed and one either looks and sees, or denies and looks away; there is no middle ground. There is story after story of horror that is born of resentment, fear and denial, revealing a horrifying, malignant self-righteousness that leads fundamentalist parents to teach their three year old children to throw stones at Palestinian babies, and an Army officer to snatch a man’s three and a half year old son from his arms and throw him onto a cactus. Any society that permits and encourages such behavior ultimately destroys itself in a nightmare of emotional and behavior problems that causes the society to collapse.
Reading Breakthrough is not comfortable, nor should it be, especially for someone like me who is the citizen of a country (the U.S.) that, as Israel’s primary source of financial and materiel aid, has been complicit in its crimes every step of the way. Two things are eminently clear about America’s relationship with Israel: in denying Israel’s behavior. We support it and in our denial are led around by Israel like a bull with a ring in its nose.
In my opinion, Breakthrough is a major contribution to the creation of genuine peace between Israel and the Arab population in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza because it explores the emotional issues that block peace and prevents people from seeing. “Where a man cannot look,” Forer writes, “he cannot feel; and where a man cannot feel, he has not really looked. Without both he will never understand.”[6] Without understanding there will never be peace.
“There are many books that detail Israel's oppressive treatment of the Palestinians,” the author wrote to me in a recent email. “I think my book's strength in that regard is the logic I bring to it, how I show that the arguments that Israel's defenders make are projections [that] should be applied to Israel far more than to the Palestinians. The primary contribution of my book, in my opinion, is the deconstructing of the mind that creates a world of internal oppression and then projects it out into the world onto appropriate scapegoats (Palestinians) who are the objects of their blame. Equally primary is my suggestion that the root problem is a spiritual one, of identity, more so than land or religion as the root cause. If people can begin to intuit their connection to all beings and to life my book will have been effective.”
I agree. Once we are able to intuit our connection to all beings and to life itself, there will be no need to engage in persecution and war. And isn’t that the real end we seek in this so far endless conflict?
“It is difficult to overestimate the emotional attachment of American Jews to the State of Israel,” Anna Balzer writes in her Forward. “Zionism, in the words of Baby Boomers like Jewish psychologist and author Mark Braverman, has been the ‘mother’s milk’ to Jews in the United States and around the world. Unconditional support for Israel is not so much an intellectual choice as a deeply rooted component of Jewish identity. Indeed, in many Jewish circles today it has become more important to believe in Israel than to believe in God. Criticism of Israel feels like a personal attack, a challenge not of a state but of who we are.”
Like Richard Forer, she knew where her allegiance lay. “I saw Israel as a victimized country that simply wanted to live in peace but couldn’t because of its aggressive, Jew-hating, Arab neighbors.” This was also true for Forer until his mid-fifties when he was encouraged by a close childhood friend named Sam to take a closer look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He listened, he says, because his friend was Jewish, because he wasn’t judgmental of his viewpoint, and because he gave him the space to question his beliefs without threatening his identity.
In his transformational journey of self-discovery, Richard Forer discovered the main reason behind Zionism’s and Israel’s poisonous relationship with Palestine’s non-Jewish population: “A reasonable need for safety … had been transformed into an irrational fear that could be satisfied only by incapacitating or destroying the objects of that fear.”[1] Safety, the Zionists believed, would come from creating a homeland where Jews would be forever protected from persecution because, it would be for Jews alone in spite of the fact that it told the world in its Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel that it would “foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants … irrespective of religion, race or sex” and would “be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”
Truth lies in behavior, not words. Throughout its history, Israel has persecuted its non-Jewish citizens, treated its non-Jewish neighbors in the Occupied Territories like vermin, and routinely violated every single principle of the UN’s Charter. The question is why. Where does such malignant behavior
come from? As Forer points out it comes from fear and resentment born of centuries of persecution and pogrom that culminated in the cataclysm of Hitler’s resentments and fear of Jews and other “outsiders” (homosexuals, mental patients, the mentally retarded and Gypsies). As I learned in my years of clinical practice as a mental health professional, fear and resentment left to fester turn into abusive behavior towards others who are perceived as threatening. For the Zionists and their followers after World War II that was everyone who was not Jewish.
When the Zionist forces began their push to establish Israel, their goal was to remove Palestine’s Arab population and replace it with Jewish immigrants from Europe and elsewhere. Every act of resistance was met by a withering fury of violence that has continued unabated in large and small ways for over sixty-two years. It is this deep-seated, pathological fear and resentment that drives Israel’s abusive behavior and the steady stream of denials and lies about it.
“Resentment”, a wise client told me years ago, “is like swallowing poison and waiting for the other person to die.” The cruel irony is that resentment of past persecutions has led Israel’s leaders to create a State that mirrors in its behavior the horrors of the pogroms and the holocaust and subject its Palestinian Arab victims to the persecution and murder for over sixty-two years. This is classic abusive system behavior in which a beaten child becomes a child-beater in its turn. One of the values of Breakthrough is that it shows how unexamined emotions and beliefs prevent us from seeing and living in reality, and how examining them honestly leads to the kind of awakening the author experienced in 2006 when he began to examine and question his beliefs.
“If we look … carefully,” the author asks, “who is the enemy and who is the righteous? The enemy is the righteous mind that sees everything in terms of us against them, [and] calls forth death upon the other.”[2] It is this more than anything else that lies behind Israel’s mindless violence and the massive propaganda campaign that seeks out and attempts to destroy anyone who dares question Israel’s behavior and motives. Forer is not afraid of revealing how he was deceived by a belief system that consisted of antagonists and protagonists that saw “one part of the world as represent[ing] sanity and the other insanity” and enabled him to support “indiscriminate and massive destruction; in a word, insanity.”[3]
Forer does a masterful job of deconstructing denial with example after example of naked and incontrovertible facts, showing time after time behavior on the part of Israelis that is unspeakable in its sadism and beastliness. Where people like Alan Dershowitz and Abraham Foxman don't want to see, Forer deconstructs their arguments so they must look away not to see. Denial is a powerful mechanism of defense; when fear becomes malignant and blocks one’s natural ability to look, to see and to feel.
“Hope is something we will never give up,” says Ali, a young Palestinian college student the author interviewed. “My people want the world community to give us more support. They don’t have to be pro-Palestinian; they just need to be pro-human rights. We don’t want to replace or be replaced, and we don’t want to treat the Israelis the way they treat us. We just want peace and equality.”[4]
In the chapter about the “purity” of Israel’s IDF (Chapter 8, “Purity of Arms”) the author includes this revealing comment by Israeli general Yigal Allon: “If we accuse a family – we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included.”[5] In this statement and others, truth is revealed and one either looks and sees, or denies and looks away; there is no middle ground. There is story after story of horror that is born of resentment, fear and denial, revealing a horrifying, malignant self-righteousness that leads fundamentalist parents to teach their three year old children to throw stones at Palestinian babies, and an Army officer to snatch a man’s three and a half year old son from his arms and throw him onto a cactus. Any society that permits and encourages such behavior ultimately destroys itself in a nightmare of emotional and behavior problems that causes the society to collapse.
Reading Breakthrough is not comfortable, nor should it be, especially for someone like me who is the citizen of a country (the U.S.) that, as Israel’s primary source of financial and materiel aid, has been complicit in its crimes every step of the way. Two things are eminently clear about America’s relationship with Israel: in denying Israel’s behavior. We support it and in our denial are led around by Israel like a bull with a ring in its nose.
In my opinion, Breakthrough is a major contribution to the creation of genuine peace between Israel and the Arab population in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza because it explores the emotional issues that block peace and prevents people from seeing. “Where a man cannot look,” Forer writes, “he cannot feel; and where a man cannot feel, he has not really looked. Without both he will never understand.”[6] Without understanding there will never be peace.
“There are many books that detail Israel's oppressive treatment of the Palestinians,” the author wrote to me in a recent email. “I think my book's strength in that regard is the logic I bring to it, how I show that the arguments that Israel's defenders make are projections [that] should be applied to Israel far more than to the Palestinians. The primary contribution of my book, in my opinion, is the deconstructing of the mind that creates a world of internal oppression and then projects it out into the world onto appropriate scapegoats (Palestinians) who are the objects of their blame. Equally primary is my suggestion that the root problem is a spiritual one, of identity, more so than land or religion as the root cause. If people can begin to intuit their connection to all beings and to life my book will have been effective.”
I agree. Once we are able to intuit our connection to all beings and to life itself, there will be no need to engage in persecution and war. And isn’t that the real end we seek in this so far endless conflict?
August 13, 2016
Maybe a bit of background. I spent the last two years in Israel as a student. I grew to really love the people I interacted with and Tel Aviv very soon became home to me. During my time there I have visited the Palestinian territories on numerous occasions, including two tours to Hebron to see what the conflict does to the lives of the Palestinians. Every time I visited one of these places, it would hurt me how a nation could behave so inhumanely to its brother. But all I had during those times were rhetorics from either side. The discussions is always charged with emotion, naturally so, but with almost no attempt to understand the other side’s perspective.
On one such trip in Hebron (which our guide described as "the tour of conflicting victimologies"), we had the opportunity to speak to a settler spokesperson. During that trip, I wanted to ask some very specific questions to the settler-spokesperson to understand their side of things. In the process of searching for some facts that the two sides seem to disagree on, I came across this book.
Rich Forer’s book is so far the hardest book I have read. As the summary suggests, Richard Forer was a very pro-Israel Jewish person who was really hurt when his closest friends were critical of Israel’s policies. To support his emotions with valid arguments, he decides to do his own research to see if the critics of Israel have any substance in their claims. He was a person who desperately wanted to find facts supporting his pro-Israel stance. The entire book is about what this fact-finding mission did to him, and his insights into the conflict.
I read most of the book on my flight from Israel as I was heading back to India. There were points in the book where I had to put down and calm myself because I couldn’t stand that the place that was home to me had been so cruel to its neighbours. This is the first book where I was really choked up. The whole thing reminded me of my last conversation with an Israeli friend when we spoke about the Hebron trip when I told him it was very depressing for me and he joked “Depressing for you? You are leaving tomorrow! I have to live here!”
There is so much I want to say about this book. Besides the research he did about the conflict, he covers every aspect of what I wanted to know in Richard Forer’s personal story. He deals in detail about how he was completely torn apart when he discovers that his love for Israel had made him completely blind to the oppression of his neighbours by his own people. You can feel the identity crisis he went through on this realisation, and the clarity that settles in once he was no longer in denial and could see facts for themselves. He also talks about how he was perceived by his closed friends as a ‘self-hating jew’. Almost every page in my kindle has some highlighted sentence or paragraph.
I can go on and on. All I can say is that this is a book that should be read by everyone. I will just conclude with the last line in this book where he quotes his friend.
On one such trip in Hebron (which our guide described as "the tour of conflicting victimologies"), we had the opportunity to speak to a settler spokesperson. During that trip, I wanted to ask some very specific questions to the settler-spokesperson to understand their side of things. In the process of searching for some facts that the two sides seem to disagree on, I came across this book.
Rich Forer’s book is so far the hardest book I have read. As the summary suggests, Richard Forer was a very pro-Israel Jewish person who was really hurt when his closest friends were critical of Israel’s policies. To support his emotions with valid arguments, he decides to do his own research to see if the critics of Israel have any substance in their claims. He was a person who desperately wanted to find facts supporting his pro-Israel stance. The entire book is about what this fact-finding mission did to him, and his insights into the conflict.
I read most of the book on my flight from Israel as I was heading back to India. There were points in the book where I had to put down and calm myself because I couldn’t stand that the place that was home to me had been so cruel to its neighbours. This is the first book where I was really choked up. The whole thing reminded me of my last conversation with an Israeli friend when we spoke about the Hebron trip when I told him it was very depressing for me and he joked “Depressing for you? You are leaving tomorrow! I have to live here!”
There is so much I want to say about this book. Besides the research he did about the conflict, he covers every aspect of what I wanted to know in Richard Forer’s personal story. He deals in detail about how he was completely torn apart when he discovers that his love for Israel had made him completely blind to the oppression of his neighbours by his own people. You can feel the identity crisis he went through on this realisation, and the clarity that settles in once he was no longer in denial and could see facts for themselves. He also talks about how he was perceived by his closed friends as a ‘self-hating jew’. Almost every page in my kindle has some highlighted sentence or paragraph.
I can go on and on. All I can say is that this is a book that should be read by everyone. I will just conclude with the last line in this book where he quotes his friend.
“The only thing we can see with certainty about another country is that there must be many, many beautiful children there.”
August 24, 2016
On one of my early visits to Palestine my educational tour guide told me : Some people interpret 'never again' as this should not happen to 'us' ever again.
That statement has stayed with me ever since.
I was never more pained by a book. Richard Forer documents with legitimate sources the savagery of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine. With interviews he gives readers a glimpse into the mindsets of Palestinians, activists and even an Israeli settler woman who is now building bridges with the Arab community.
I would recommend this book to everyone, especially to Israel sympathisers. Because this book is not merely a series of chapters on the cruelty of the Occupation but about the transformation of an Israel sympathiser to a man of compassion.
While I read this book I kept wondering about only one thing: How could people who suffered the worst kind of discrimination inflict unreasonable and unwarranted injustices upon another community? How could they wipe out entire villages? How could they think it was okay to build walls around villages preventing people from accessing their own farms? Wouldn't they have wanted to make sure that they did not become the monsters they so feared?
A vicious cycle of fear mongering has given rise to people who not only justify Israel's military occupation but also think that the military occupation is the only solution. Forer says about his mindset prior to the transformation: "Fear prevented me from empathising with the pain of the Palestinians and it blinded me to the possibility that a country in which I had invested so much faith could administer such brutal and deadly policies." When he decided to examine his beliefs, he was left with real compassion and clarity.
Read the book without prejudice and bias and draw your own conclusions.
You will see in the end that there is only one narrative. As an Israeli friend once said: there is no dual narrative here. There is one oppressor and one victim.
That statement has stayed with me ever since.
I was never more pained by a book. Richard Forer documents with legitimate sources the savagery of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine. With interviews he gives readers a glimpse into the mindsets of Palestinians, activists and even an Israeli settler woman who is now building bridges with the Arab community.
I would recommend this book to everyone, especially to Israel sympathisers. Because this book is not merely a series of chapters on the cruelty of the Occupation but about the transformation of an Israel sympathiser to a man of compassion.
While I read this book I kept wondering about only one thing: How could people who suffered the worst kind of discrimination inflict unreasonable and unwarranted injustices upon another community? How could they wipe out entire villages? How could they think it was okay to build walls around villages preventing people from accessing their own farms? Wouldn't they have wanted to make sure that they did not become the monsters they so feared?
A vicious cycle of fear mongering has given rise to people who not only justify Israel's military occupation but also think that the military occupation is the only solution. Forer says about his mindset prior to the transformation: "Fear prevented me from empathising with the pain of the Palestinians and it blinded me to the possibility that a country in which I had invested so much faith could administer such brutal and deadly policies." When he decided to examine his beliefs, he was left with real compassion and clarity.
Read the book without prejudice and bias and draw your own conclusions.
You will see in the end that there is only one narrative. As an Israeli friend once said: there is no dual narrative here. There is one oppressor and one victim.
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