"From The River To The Sea" revised

"Palestine will be free"

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Its Unconscious Meaning and Motor for this Antisemitic Genocidal Chant

War Blog Post #49

By

Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, Ph.D.

Recently I gave a copy of my The Jihadi Dictionary to a prominent neurologist here in Israel - Dr. D. Kidron. Neurology and Psychiatry have always been intimate partners in medicine and I thought perhaps she would find the dictionary of interest.

While thanking me, she spontaneously said - "I hope there is an entry on 'From the river to the sea', the antisemitic genocidal chant that the jihadis shout and its Islamic Masse und Macht rant along with them. The herd mentality prevails. As it has been noted, 99% don't know from which river to which sea. Their sadomasochistic drive seeks the annihilation and genocide of the Jewish people and the destruction of the State of Israel. They need a escape goat for their rage which exceeds murder itself; it is a rage from early childhood - not of this time not of this place.

I gulped hard when I heard Dr. Kidron say this and thought to myself - how did I miss not including such an entry in my beloved dictionary which took eight years to write? How now should I think about this chant's unconscious meaning? My thoughts turned to this entry in my dictionary:

The Maternal Communicative Circuit of Terrorism

“To counter Islamic suicide terrorism, then, one must recognize the core terrors of the terrorists as well as our own terrors: the terrors are about the mother. Since everyone has a mother, terrorism taps into the oldest, most archaic terrors that everyone relates to consciously or unconsciously. The suicide bombing attack accesses this immediate, nonverbal, and visceral communicative circuit that connects humanity." Everyone has his or her own “internal terrorist” into which the real terrorist hooks. (See Intrapsychic Terrorist Organization.)

“‘Thus, terror is also theater because it is intended to send a message. Contrary to common understanding, the message isn’t in the first instance political or ideological. It is psychological. Terrorism,’ writes Leo Braudy in his fascinating book From Chivalry to Terrorism. ‘It is “primarily symbolic and propagandistic,” [signaling] that all the high technology in the world cannot stop a determined enemy, even one armed only with primitive [emphasis added] weapons.’” I added to this idea the notion of a maternal communicative circuit in my first book, The Banality of Suicide Terrorism. “We are all plugged in globally since we all have mothers. This circuit is dependent upon tapping into our earliest nonverbal terrors linked to the maternal relationship and concerning dependency needs and abandonment. It is through this maternal network that terrorists play out their fantasies as we watch it through the media as if we were sitting in a global theater.” Terrorism is the ultimate theater of drama, and we get dragged into it unwillingly." p. 54

The River as Umbilicus*

Rivers are generally viewed as somewhat narrow flowing bodies of water in comparison to a lake, a sea or an ocean. The river in this discourse of the jihadis is also reminiscent of Hamas' tunnel system. Indeed, Hamas built a subterranean, (lege a concrete model of their unconscious mind) river system of tunnels. There have been attempts at flooding them.

Elsewhere in earlier blog posts I have connected the tunnel to the birth canal. The jihadis have such huge unmet needs that their desire to die is their means to "return" to their mothers because in their culture one does not "separate from their mother.

The image of the river cum tunnel cum umbilicus connects the jihadi to the womb. This seeking of the return to the womb is their fantasy of getting all their psychological needs met. They suffer from severe cognitive deficits. A good example of this is Sinwar.

The Sea = The Oceanic Fusion with the Mother

"There is a concept in psychoanalytic thinking called the oceanic feeling, “a term employed for a sense of expansion of the self beyond its customary temporal‒ spatial limits, leading to a feeling of merger with the universe at large. The feeling is believed to recall very early infantile states of being where all experience of time and space is coextensive with the subject’s ego. Hence, in adult life, the experience of oceanic feeling is considered a regressive phenomenon. Oneness of the self and its object world is regarded as a narcissistic illusion underneath which lurks split-off hostile destructiveness [emphasis added]. Less comfortable to the Western mind is the possibility that recapturing the infantile bliss of oneness with the universe might be a positive and transcendental occurrence.”

Coextension, is an important concept for jihadi terrorism because of the psychological splitting that masks the appearance of the unconscious, which remains functioning in the background. People remain unaware of this dynamic. The conscious is coextensive with the unconscious. The above psychological definition is applicable to the terrorist mind and its tendency to fuse with everything and everyone. But the term also captures and articulates the terrorist’s underlying criminality and destructiveness. Coextension can be thought of as representative of a primitive mental state. The political strategy and the unspoken unconscious dialogue of dependency is acted out through imagery, selection of targets such as a maternal hospital and the targeted object that elicits envy and hence the attack. The strategic political goal is coextensive with the unspoken hostile and destructive maternal communication. This is desperanto speaking." The Jihadi Dictionary, p. 51-52

"Palestine will be free"- Breaking free from the psychotic mother

The meaning of the second part of the chant "From the river to the sea" can be understood quite easily. Freeing Palestine doesn't mean the territory of the land though that is acted out concretely. Unconsciously it is an attempt to severe the tie and gain independence from the psychotic paranoid Palestinian mother who has been chronically abused all her life beginning as the devalued little female. I do not seek to blame the mother rather I am attempting to explain the unconscious dynamic and motor of this horrendous chant that has caused so much bloodshed targetting Jews in Israel and globally. Hamas and all of Gaza with very few exception are inhibited cognitively because in their culture they have the unconscious taboo of separating from the mother. They do not go through an individuation separation stage in early development by the age of three. Therefore they can not see the forest from the trees and they remain severely bonded traumatically and violently to their mothers.

Paranoia is a psychosis. The sages of Isaiah 5 exclaimed " Woe unto them who call evil good and good evil." This passage demonstrates and underscores a psychotic world in reverse 180 degrees. In a shame honor culture its unfortunate inhabitants lie. There are no personal boundaries and they project their rage outwards.

The nation-state has long been understood in psychoanalytic thinking as a representation of the mother and her body. Freedom seeking is a quest to individuate and separate from the psychotic mother.

Hence "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" is nothing more unconsciously as a quest to seek internal freedom from their mothers who are embedded in this nefarious shame honor culture in which the female is constantly abused. As Golda Meir noted, nothing will be better until the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.

To conclude

While no dictionary can ever be complete and an entry for "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" would have been helpful, we can see how the tools can still be found in The Jihadi Dictionary by returning to the theme of the mother and its unconscious imagery in which the suffocating bond of the mother remains intact for the jihadis and the rageful crowds for they too wear their cognitive deficits on their sleeve.

My colleague Arshad Mahmood has put it so well by naming his new forthcoming book the English translation of his Urdu text, Cultural Suffocation. Such murderous rage and its accompanying violence are the upshot of a culture that doesn't permit separation from one's mother, masking the devaluation of the female. The psychological fusion is debilitating with the chaos and rage of their internal world projected outwards on to the canvas of the living. They are envious of us, the Jews for embracing life and not death for seeking to make the world a better place through tikun olam . Since they are unable to achieve this, their fantasy is to seek shelter in the womb of their mothers! Unconsciously they want to return to the safety of their mother's womb where all their unmet psychological needs will finally be met, allegedly. Hence traveling from the river back to the sea, desperation in the chant can be heard beyond its words, arousing and displaying psychotic impulses that terrify us and tap into our internal maternal terrors from early childhood. We all have them.

However, to know and understand how this psychotic crazy making and very lethal chant works, is the first step in tackling the unconscious root problem of political terrorism of the jihadis -- to deflate their attempt at terrifying us. This is why the unconscious piece submerged behind and hidden remains however in clear view by making such a maternal link. If not, we will remain in a state of paralysis and denial, precisely what happened with regard to the intelligence failure concerning the tragedy of October 7th. Why you may ask? It remains very difficult and challenging for male macho counter terrorist experts to know their own internal maternal terrors and hence Hamas easily hooked into their denial. May we know better times. May the hostages be released immediately

*Another instance of the umbilicus imagery can see seen in "The imagery of the tether as umbilicus recurs throughout jihadi violent behavior, such as the cruel immolation of the Jordanian pilot, Muath Al-Kasasbeh by the Islamic State." The Jihadi Dictionary, p. 244

#Bring them home now