thoughts on Israel and the middle east

The purpose of my next book is to use reason to reinterpret our negative thinking and hopefully see things in a more positive light.  I had a patient ask what I thought of the recent turmoil in the Middle East and its effect on Israel.  Historical records reveal the Jewish presence in the area that is Israel going back thousands of years. The Jews were expelled and killed resulting in a diaspora.  Hitler's Holocaust led to recognition that Jews had no safe place to go and were not wanted in the rest of the world. Also that over the centuries they were displaced from their original homeland in the middle east.
 Growing up, learning of the Holocaust and reading Robert Frost's poem, Death of the Hired Man, I was struck by the line, "home is the place where, when you have to go there they have to take you in."  The Jews clearly didn't have this place until Israel.

The dictators in the Arab world have used the presence of Jews in Israel as a distraction from their subjugation of their people.  But you can fool only some of the people some of the time.  The closest to a rational argument against Israel has to do with the displacement of the local Arab population during the division of Palestine between Jordan and Israel.  Interestingly Jordan which was to be the Arab partition isolated the displaced refugees and only since the Israeli occupation of additional territory has the emergence of semi-autonomous Palestinian region emerged.  Interestingly, fellow Palestinian Arabs didn't feel they had a home either as monarchs and dictators chose to use them as pawns, kept in refuge camps rather than treat them like family.  Critics fault Israel for wanting to keep a Jewish state (I say homeland) likening it to apartheid.

I think that the closest analogy is to the creation of sovereign native nations within the United States after our Native American holocaust.  These were lands given to the former inhabitants of the area often displacing local residents.  No one suggests that Indian nations allow non tribal members to vote or call it apartheid.
One hopes that the citizens of the newly liberated Arab nations recognize the distraction that the Israeli conflict has been and reduce their interference of honest negotiating for a two state solution. In this case a new Palestinian state may emerge similar to the demilitarized sovereign Indian Nations in the US, creating a home for both families-Jews and Palestinians, who are clearly scions of the same stock.

So what does this do with psychiatry?  The anger associated with this conflict causes people to get depressed and leads to prejudice that hurts others.  When one sees things from a different perspective we can have more empathy for others reducing tension and grief.