#117 Minds Under Siege: Gabor Maté, Naomi Klein & Cecilie Surasky
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Maurizio Benazzo: Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome. My name is Maurizio
Zaya Benazzo: Benazzo. My name is Zaya Benazzo. Welcome, everyone.
Maurizio Benazzo: We are speaking to you from the unceded territory of the South Pomo and Coastal Miwok Indigenous Tribes, currently namely called Sebastopol, Northern California.
Yeah. And the title of the panel is Minds Under Siege. weaponizing trauma for war. And I want to introduce you to our moderator, Cecilie Surasky, that she will be moderating the panel today. Cecilie, she's a storyteller and a longtime movement builder, former deputy director of Jewish Voices for Peace and the current director of communication and narrative at Othering and Belonging.
So Cecilie, it's a joy and an honor to have you with us and looking forward to you driving this. Conversation. Thank you so much for being with us. Cecilie for your
Zaya Benazzo: strong and clear voice, for truth speaking, for justice, and for all you have done to support the movement. So welcome and thank you for being here with us today.
Cecilie Surasky: Thank you so much, Zaya and Maurizio Gabor and Naomi for this opportunity to have a really extraordinary and fiercely honest conversation. I'm sitting here, I'm at the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California at Berkeley. These are two greats. I can't imagine two better people to have this, this conversation with the great writer activist, Naomi Klein, who most recently wrote Doppelganger, and of course, Dr.
Gabor Mate, who has written with his son, Daniel, The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. For those of you who are new to this series, this discussion continues SAND's exploration of trauma, its nature, its impact on our bodies, future generations, how it shapes families, nations, and crucially, how we can move towards healing.
Zayan Maurizio, you've beautifully captured Dr. Maté's work in the film, The Wisdom of Trauma. I highly recommend that people see this which really looked at trauma at the individual level in many ways. And then When Olive Trees Weep, which documents the systematic trauma that is inflicted by the Israeli government on Palestinians.
Today, we're going to explore ideas that are raised in Naomi's book. Really groundbreaking October 24th, 2024 article on how Israel has made trauma a weapon of war. We will examine the manipulation of Jewish trauma and confront crucial. And I think for us on this panel, very deeply personal questions about how a state that was built expulsions, pogroms and genocide, a state that has proclaimed over and over never again could go on to commit genocide.
Over the last 15 months in Gaza, and I don't use that word. Lightly, it is the word that the world's human rights experts recognize is appropriate. And I also say this recognizing that the story goes back much further in the last 15 months, and we'll get into some of that. And while this might seem like a conversation that's about Israel and Jews and Palestinians, it's not only that, and not just because it's the United States that has supported and paid for this war.
These are questions that every single one of us must confront. In a world that is built on multiple histories of terror, where the past and present collide, where the experience of trauma, grief, isolation, and loss is increasingly just a breath away from every person on the planet. Our greatest hope for survival is to turn towards each other instead of on each other, and we must learn how to get ourselves out of cycles of dehumanization.
One of the most potent technologies we have for healing our deepest wounds is to tell stories about them so we can make sense and meaning of our suffering as a way not just to heal ourselves, but to prevent the suffering of others, and it is in that spirit of deep care and profound love for our Palestinian siblings and our Jewish siblings and our Lebanese siblings and all of our siblings.
And our recognition that our liberation is deeply entwined, that we are going to be engaging in this very, very vulnerable, fiercely honest conversation.
I also want to say, I want to just dedicate this discussion, as we begin, to the countless women, men, and children, and living beings who have lost their lives, to those who are reunited with their families today, those who are struggling to survive and rebuild, And who will go on enduring who need our support to our ancestors who have endured the unimaginable and whose wisdom guides us.
and to future generations who deserve better and in whose names we must do better. So I'll just start by opening up and say we're friends here. I got us started. You don't really need me now to, to continue. I will ask you questions to move along. We will go for about an hour and at the end of that hour, we will take or 45 minutes.
And at the top of the hour, we will take questions from the audience. My only concern or request is that we move towards, I would say, instructions for world building and healing for our audience. I know it's not that simple, but it is very easy to have a conversation like this and not know where to go.
You are the people, I think, who can also help us know where to go. So I want to start with Gabor. Both to, to establish some of the terms when we talk about collective trauma and trauma, what it is, what it does to us, and the specifics of the story. This is a story of the weaponization of Jewish trauma and what you can offer for that.
Gabor Maté: Sure. Well, thank you, Cecilie. Let me begin by a quote from you that is cited by Naomi in her book, Doppelganger, where you said that It's re traumatization, not remembering, there's a difference. So there's a difference in remembering recalling what happened, and then how we employ that memory, or how we are affected by that memory, or how we embody that memory.
In, in the yogic understanding of the intellect, there are different components. There's memory, there's discernment, there's awareness, and then there's identity. And identity is what we identify with, and it's identity that actually wields the intellect. So that how we identify what we identify with will very much determine the uses to which we we, we put our cap capacity to think.
Let me, let me give you an example. Normally order a wonderful article for The Guardian. I think it was October the fifth, and she had a response. I don't know if you saw it, but it's from a, somebody his name is Noam Shimmel and he's a lecturer in global studies with an emphasis on human rights at the University of California, Berkeley.
So exactly where you're at, Cecilie. This guy, teaches human rights. And his response to Naomi's article was, it is not for Naomi Klein from her place of privilege and safety, far from the sadistic violence and destruction of October the 7th, to lecture survivors, survivors, on how to tell their story, to whom, and in what context and forms.
But this guy's got an intellect, but he's completely enslaved to his identity as a
It's really interesting how that works, because he lives in a place of safety. He lives far away from Palestine. He lives far away from Israel, and he thinks it's perfectly okay for him to have opinions,
but not for Naomi. Where does that come from? It comes from an identification with a sense of Jewish victimization. So identity and what we identify with drives how we think about something, and that identity is often unconscious. So that's the first point. The second point is, if I said to you, Cecilie, there were over 1, 200 Jewish people killed as a result of a violent assault, what do you think of?
Well, we think of October the 7th. And we're constantly told that October the 7th was the largest murder, or the most, you know, it's the greatest crime committed against Jews since the Holocaust, since the Nazi genocide. Well, let me tell you something. Between 1976 and 1983, in Argentina, nearly 1, 300 Jews were killed by the Argentinian junta.
That was supported by Israel and by the Americans. Nobody talks about those Jews. Jews made up 1 percent of the Argentinian population. They made up 12 percent of the victims of the junta that were killed. Do you hear anybody ever talking about it? No. No. Because they don't fit in to the identification of Jews being victimized for being Jews.
And actually, it's entirely possible that it was even a larger number. There may be even up to 3, 000 Jews that were killed by the Argentinian junta. Nobody ever talks about it because it doesn't fit into the trauma narrative of Jews as Jews. They were killed because they were progressive and the fascist regime saw them as a threat.
Cecilie Surasky: So how far back does this Trauma narrative go as a, as a form of identity growing up in Jewish communities. We learn about chosenness. There's an exceptionalism and the exceptionalism shows. And, and, and by the way, Judaism. We're not the only people, not the only religion that has that kind of a framework at all.
It also shows up in how we talk about the Holocaust. that it is uniquely and utterly metaphysically exceptional. And of course, all genocides are different, but is the mass murder of Jews, of humans, exceptional.
Gabor Maté: So I have a book here called Endless Holocausts. Mass death in the history of the United States Empire.
The Jewish identification with persecution is really interesting. First of all, if you look at the Old Testament It's significantly a genocidal document. The Jews were commanded to kill all the citizens, all the inhabitants of Palestine. Number one. Number two. During the holiday of of oh gosh.
No, it's not Pesach. It's, Which is the holiday when we rattle things and Purim. Purim, yeah. Purim. Seventy five thousand Persians were killed. And this is celebrated as a wonderful achievement, but we're still always the victims. Now, here's the reality. I can't go into all the history, but the whole Zionist story And it's actually a story that was developed in the 19th, 20th centuries, that the Jews were one people, one nation, that were expelled from Palestine, and were wandering around the world, hoping to get back to their homeland.
It never happened. There was no Jewish expulsion already at the time when the first was the second temple was destroyed in 70 AD, or when 80 years later, or 60 years later, there was the Bar Kokhba revolt. Most Jews were living outside Palestine and had been for hundreds of years. So it was never the case that the Jews were one people living in one land.
A lot of, a lot of, there were Jewish kingdoms in Arabia in the 4th and 5th centuriesJewish kingdoms. There were Jews living in India 2, 000 years ago. There were Jews that were converted to Judaism in the 7th, 8th centuries in Middle Europe, the Khazars. So to argue that there was this one people always persecuted that came from this land It's just not true.
And to argue that all these people that were converted. to Judaism, which is why most Jews in the world, historically speaking, have the right to come back to this ancient homeland. It's a modern concoction. And in order to justify that concoction, they had to create this image of this one persecuted people that came back.
You're expelled from that land. And one more thing I'll tell you here, really interesting. In 1922, I think it was, David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, at that time a prominent Zionist leader, and Yitzhak Ben Zvi, who became the second president of Israel, they wrote a book together. It was about Palestine.
And they pointed out that a lot of the Palestinian villages have ancient Hebrew names. And they argued that the original inhabitants in the land, never left Palestine, most of them. It's just that some of them converted to Islam. And so that the Palestinians, many of them, particularly the Falahim living on the land, were actually descendants of ancient Jews.
And they documented this in their book. But then they had to give that one up, and nobody talks about that anymore, because it Collides with the narrative of this one people. So what I'm saying is that the narrative of this traumatized, expelled, exiled people is itself a modern concoction. And it's necessary, and as Naomi points out in her article, to create this trauma perspective in order to justify the ongoing colonization of Palestine.
So in other words, even that Jewish identity as one people constantly persecuted is itself a concoction. Not that there wasn't all kinds of anti Semitism and anti Jewish violence throughout history, of course there was, but it's much more subtle and complicated than that. And finally, I'll just say that there have been genocides of the Armenians there were genocide of the Chinese in Indonesia.
There was the geno the, the person, Raphael Lemkin, the, the Jewish professor who came up with the term genocide, he identified the ex the extermination of a heretic sect called the Albigensians in France in the 13th century as genocide. So the uniqueness is itself a concoction. I think I'll stop here.
Cecilie Surasky: Naomi, you've been reading, you've been writing and thinking about these questions that Gabor raises for a really long time, and you've probably also lived them. What, what does this raise for you? And this question about the flattening of narratives, the use of narratives, the creation of identities?
Naomi Klein: Yeah. Hi, everyone. I'm very, very honored to be to be with you and a part of this thriving community, which I think we can tell by how many people have have tuned in and are also watching on other platforms. So thank you to the SAND's team for building this. Beautiful community. And I want to acknowledge that I'm speaking from unseated Musqueam territory, unseated and unsurrendered on the campus of university of British Columbia.
And just really happy to be in conversation with two old friends who I've learned so much from and would talk to them under any circumstances who, no matter who was listening and often do you know, I think that, that just what, what what Gabor ended on there is really. To me, the, the scene of the crime, right, around the, the, the foundational disremembering, misremembering of the Holocaust as, as absolutely outside of time and space.
Being why we are stuck in what I'm increasingly, you know, I think, Cess, you, you referred to it as kind of a loop, right? But we might also think of it as. this sort of spiraling down because a loop implies endless repetition in a way that doesn't change, but actually what we're seeing is a compounding, right?
So that it is, it isn't only it isn't static that as this, as it repeats, the victims become victimizers with all of the, the, the, the trauma of. of surviving genocide playing out in the way they become victimizers. And then there's nothing to stop it from continuing again, if we don't really confront the roots of what drives genocide in the first place.
Right. And so I think that you know, Gabor is taking us way further back to understanding that. Eliminationist Annihilator impulse, right? Which I think does have to do probably with concepts of chosenness purity that, that are not unique to our sacred text. That, that, that are in a lot of, you know, in, in, in, in arguably all the monotheistic religions, right?
That have this kind of need to have the single one God and wipe out. All the others, right? But what I will say about About the, the moment, the way the Holocaust was mis, deliberately misunderstood, right? It was not that nobody was pointing out that there had been other genocides, that there were other groups targeted, that the Nazis were directly learned from, and that you could draw a straight line from the Nama and Herrero genocide in what is now Namibia to the concentration camps inside Germany under Nazi rule.
And by a straight line, I mean that, you know, that Hitler read the race law developed in Germany's African colonies by Eugene Fischer when he was writing Mein Kampf, cited him. Fischer joins the Nazi party and trains Mengele. Like, it's not like, oh, six degrees of separation. It's no degrees of separation from from, from, A genocide inflicted on Africans in between 1904 and 1908, and the genocide inflicted by, by some of the same Germans, right?
But now under another regime 30 years later, right? So Why was that denied? Because it wasn't that nobody pointed it out. So many blacks scholars M. A. Cesar, W. E. B. Du Bois in India, Nehru in the 1930s was saying, this thing you're calling fascism is imperialism and colonialism, but now inflicted inside Europe.
And you had Cesar who was theorizing the, the, the way, about the way. colonialism corrupts the colonizer, right? And that it was inevitable that it would come home to Europe. And of course, it's, as Gabor pointed out, it started in Europe. So, so why was it misremembered if people were pointing it out at the time?
Like who's in, like, it was not like, oh, we didn't know it was, it's a suppressed history. It's a buried history. It's a denied history because what would the, like, if we were to really confront it? What the Nazis learned from settler colonialism in the Americas, settler colonialism in Africa, in Asia then it would have meant that the heroes of the narrative, right?
The, the, the, the, the ally, the, the Americans, the, the, the the British would have to confront the Nazis. You know, themselves in the mirror, right? I mean, this is why César said, Hitler is, is your double. He's your twin, right? I mean, there's all, this is what got me interested in it when I was writing Doppelganger, was all this language of twin, twinness in the anti colonial understandings of fascism when it erupts in the 30s and 40s in Europe.
And so, And so none of this was part of my Holocaust education. Like I came to it embarrassingly late. I, I increasingly feel like this is the work of re membering. It is about putting the Holocaust back in time and space and really getting at the logics. Because if you, if you don't confront the way that colonialism and imperialism creates the Nazi project, then it becomes thinkable to call the creation of a settler colonial state in Palestine reparations for that, because you have exceptionalized it and said, actually, this, This, these atrocities, this horror, these crimes against humanity are about this mystical Jew hatred, right?
It's about, it's something outside of history. It's primordial, right? And you have like people like Claude, Claude Lanzmann talking about how there needs to be a ring of fire around the Holocaust. So there's a forbidding of comparison. And we're told that any comparison is de facto trivialization, right?
So I think we need to understand that this was a project. This was a political economic project, I think, to protect the spoils of colonialism. And it brings us to this deep, deep confrontation with the centrality of colonial pillage and theft to the, the, the, the You know, the, the, the, the core injustices of our world that are playing out in this moment where you have Donald Trump coming to power, you know, I mean, something like that may have gotten lost in the deluge of, of news yesterday was that he announced that A the highest peak in North America in in Alaska, which had had its indigenous name restored under Obama officially would go back to its colonial name, right?
So it's, it's a rage at remembering, like, and so, like, these are all parts of the same. The same war, in a sense, the same battle of worldviews, this, this banning of books about, about history in the United States that, no, we will put our colonial name back on the mountain. We will not understand what is beneath our country, right?
Is, is just this clinging to you know, to, to, to false histories. So I, you know, I think the, the other thing I would just say in response to what Gabor was saying was, You know, Gabor, when you, when you were, when you were talking about how some of these core stories about Jews, like, always having been persecuted, right, and, and, and always wandering the world like, I can feel, like, the, the ground shaking underneath me, right?
This is so much a part of, of, of, of Jewish education, right? And, and I, I'm sure some people tuning in probably felt a bit of that sort of vertigo of like, well, wait a minute, if I lose that story, who am I? Like, because we build our identities around stories, right? And when you're, when you have a story since before you can remember, right?
And then somebody comes along and says, actually, that story is wrong. I think that there's, Like the best case scenario is you feel a little bit wobbly, right? But I think a lot of people get angry when their stories get taken away, when their stories get challenged. And so I would just say. We are made of stories, and that if we are going to destabilize some of our foundational narratives, which we must, I think we also need to take very seriously the work of telling new stories, right, like telling new stories that we can, that can inspire us, that can map our way out of this because it's a big deal to take away the stories that make up the self.
And so that's just what I'm thinking about is like, we need to do this. We need to do both at the same time, or we'll end up with back more backlash.
Cecilie Surasky: Gabor, following on that and your response not only this question of what are these new stories we can tell and living in deep shame Is, is not a life sustaining story. We have to do something, but also what does it do to a person or a people to be inculcated in the story that Naomi is describing and that you are describing?
That like Judeo pessimism, the world hates you and will always hate you. What does that do to people?
Gabor Maté: The question we could always ask ourselves, and we don't ask it enough. Either personally in personal relationships or with the world. Or collectively, is who are we if we're not our stories? In other words, who are we essentially? Quite apart from our stories, regardless of what stories we tell, who are we without that story?
Okay. So one thing is to ask, you know, who are we without our stories?
And when you get down to it, we're human beings. And you know, in the Old Testament, when Moses asked God, Who are you? He says, I am that I am. And he doesn't give any stories around it. He just says, I am. That's a deep spiritual question that most people don't tackle, or who are they outside their stories.
But if you're going to tell stories, we're going to have to let go of identifications. Identification means, literally, idem, in Latin means the same, and fecera, to make. So when we identify, we make ourselves the same as a story. And in order to get at the truth, we have to disidentify. So it's not surprising.
I mean, there's been all kinds of, and Naomi knows this, and you know this, Leslie, all kinds of Israeli Jewish historians who today, experts on the Holocaust, Ross Segal, Omar Bartov, others, world experts on genocide, who are calling what happened in Gaza genocide. But nobody in the West talks about that.
Nobody in the West quotes them. You never find them. Very rarely. Omar Bartov did have an article in the New York Times. And all the other Israeli historians that have pointed out the misidentification. Of Jewish history and Zionist history with this victim image, they're disregarded because they threatened the identity that people have grown up with so that I am sure Naomi says to the any of us that are Jewish here and have occasionally had conversations with Jews who are either Zionists or friendly to Zionism or are just unaware.
It's not even that It goes one ear and out the other, it doesn't go in one ear, they can't hear because it threatens their identity. So, the problem with creating new stories is we have to let go of the identification and that's the most difficult thing, is to let go of the identity. And that identity, as we've been talking about and as Naomi points out in her Guardian article, is rooted in trauma, in a trauma story.
And those of us that speak outside that story. We're seen as either traitors, or sellouts, or self haters, or insane. And that's the challenge. And of course, this happens in a context where, again, as Naomi points out, it's a colonial mentality that infuses North American and Western thinking on these subjects.
And that colonial mentality does not permit the narrative. of the colonized to enter into the conversation. So you go to a country like Germany, where you'd think they'd know something about genocide, you'd think they'd know something about injustice and oppression. It's almost forbidden in Germany to speak about Palestine.
They've learned nothing. Nothing. And, again, I'm talking about identification here. So, I'll stop here. Now, on the And, of course, what we haven't said anything about is the tremendous trauma that's just been inflicted on the Palestinians. I mean, there were articles in the, in medical journals 20, 25 years ago about how traumatized Palestinian children were.
This is before Operation Cast Lead, before Operation Protective Edge, before the current horror. And these kids were already severely traumatized. What can we imagine is going to happen in the future? I'll stop there.
,
Cecilie Surasky: I want to I think we have to keep returning to that question and maybe in a circuitous route, get back there and and I want to bring this to the issue of structures and Naomi and what you wrote about and, you know, our. Good friend Johnny Powell always says we go hard on structures, soft on people because structures are actually the things that carry so much, most, the majority of the harm and they can be invisible.
And we are trained as humans to look at people and say, you're a good person, you're a bad person, but we are all enmeshed in these structures. And the thing I think you did so well. So incredibly in this article that was so meticulously researched, I thought I knew this topic. I did not at all until I, I read what you surfaced from invisibility from the shadows was a structure and active structure and system of deliberate traumatization.
And you talk about some of the, what you saw, some, some of the findings and how that relates to what's happening.
Naomi Klein: Yeah. I mean, I can try. And and I would say that. I mean, there's a, there's a way in which even talking about this feels obscene in the context of what Gabor just said. They're related, though, that, that this, that, that the structures that, that I was reporting on in the piece about how, What I call trauma transference, not re traumatization, right?
Because trauma, re traumatization implies that you experience the original trauma. It's the discourse of sort of PTSD and re triggering, right? But what, What I was reporting on in the piece was how the very real trauma experienced by people directly impacted by October 7th, what was disseminated around the world and kind of transferred from, from, from bodies, From one body to the next, right?
In these like VR reenact, like, like you can, it's all of this discourse around immersive, immersive experience, right? So you go to an exhibition where you're made to feel like you're at the Novo Festival, all the sound and video and you know, piles of, of lost items and some of and, um, the, the, the curators will explain that they want you to feel like you that like like you experienced the trauma yourself and people come out saying I feel completely traumatized right or a quote unquote verbatim play that is just you know text messages and audio messages from October 7th and people say I feel like I was there.
It was like it happened to me, right? That is deliberate. And it happened extremely quickly. And the reason it happened quickly is because it followed the well worn grooves of the way in which the experience of the Holocaust has been create, created like these immersive experiences, like a walk in cattle car and things like this.
Right. And, and the reason why it's related to The the atrocities and the ongoing genocide in Palestine and as you know, we were talking before it's in a sense it's, it's, it's widening and moving under this so called ceasefire to the West Bank. I mean, it was already there, but now it's escalating in the West Bank is.
That the more the trauma of October 7th is repeated on this kind of a loop and spread to more and more people around the world not only to Jews in the so called diaspora, but, but, but anybody who, who, who You know, there was, there, there were these screenings of the, the, the, the most, the Israeli government organized these screenings almost immediately, they cut together a kind of a highlight reel of the, of the worst of, of October 7th in order to put people into this highly traumatized sort of unthinking space Is that when you're doing, when you're in that state, you're not really capable of compassion for anyone else.
Right. You feel like it's happening to you. So one of the things that I was most struck by was the emergence of this October 7th, what's, what's sometimes called dark tourism. Like it's, it's bringing people to the site of the Nobel music festival, bringing them to kibbutzim, like Bari, Bari that, that you know, Which have like the Israeli government doesn't want these sites to be rebuilt, they want that to turn them into what they're calling heritage sites, and it's all modeled off of March of the Living tours.
And in fact, they're now being packaged together. So you go to Auschwitz, and then you take a plane and you go to to Israel, and then you go and you walk through the parts of the kibbutz that are still in rubble, you go to the Nova music festival, and you have this the This get this bodily experience of continuity, as if they're as if it's the same.
Right. And what was what I was really struck by a report by Maya Rosen for Jewish currents about the she went on several of these, these tours, and she said, that she could actually feel the reverberations of the bombs in Gaza. But people who were in their trauma state and they couldn't act, they couldn't, they couldn't tell, admit to themselves that it was happening.
Right that that and and so we have to understand that this trauma transference industry is about not being able and here I am like I have no business talking about this with Gabor present like but like it what I know from. Good trauma therapy is that it tries to take you out of that state, right? Like it tries to say you're safe now.
Right. So, I mean, my question is for, for like Gabor is somebody who has worked with, with traumatized communities. It's like, what is this? Like, it seems like it is the opposite of everything we know about what. Good treatment of trauma is, like, it's like you would study it and do the exact opposite on a massive scale.
So you try to disseminate trauma. Yeah,
Gabor Maté: Exactly. So when I work with Indigenous communities in Canada, which I do a lot, we have to acknowledge the history. The history, I don't have to tell anybody here, is atrocious. And the present is atrocious in so many ways. The work of trauma healing is precisely to help people disidentify from their traumatized identification.
That you're, trauma literally, trauma literally means wound. That's what the word means. And nobody is their woundedness. Everybody's got the capacity to heal. That's just part of human nature. That's a human, that's part of life.
Trauma healing is about helping people find that capacity for healing or wholeness within themselves despite what happened to them. Whereas what you're describing in that article is getting people to identify with what happened to them and with a particular version of what happened to them. Now, let's acknowledge a couple of things.
There is something unique about the Nazi genocide of Jews in that, so the, the Nazi genocide, insofar as it was directed against young children and babies and the elderly, it wasn't against any threat and it wasn't to gain territory or what it was literally to obliterate, um, an imagined threat.
It was sort of like the, the epitome. Or everything you can say about a traumatized consciousness inflicting trauma on others. So we have to acknowledge that, that there was something unique about that. There's nothing quite like that in history that I can think of. At the same time, it did happen in a historical context.
And it happened in a certain place. And as you said, Naomi Hitler actually looked to the American West as a model. Yeah, he consciously said so, and he looked to the Armenian genocide and he said, Hitler literally said, nobody talks about the Armenians anymore. The world will get over this too, you know, so that even though the anti Jewish genocide did have some unique ideological features.
It was it did happen in the context of history, so it doesn't put it outside of history and the attempt is always to put it outside history and go back to your comment. Naomi trauma healing is to help people disidentify from their history to find the strength in themselves in the present moment, not to keep telling them that you're constantly victimized.
You always will be. You always have to be vigilant and defensive and hostile. That's not trauma healing, that's entrenching of trauma. And as regards to people that go to these exhibits and they say, I'm re-traumatized. Well, they might have experienced pain, grief stress. That's not trauma, not everything that's painful and stressful and grief.
And, and, and griefful is traumatizing. Traumatizing is when you are wounded all over again. And this Jewish identification with this trauma narrative wounds people from one generation to the next and that wounding begins as soon as school begins or even before. And that's what we're dealing with here.
And it begins around the holidays, where every generation people rise up against us. It begins with, it's okay to kill or to see the killing of Egyptian firstborn for our own salvation. That's perfectly okay. It's okay to inflict plagues on other people. That's perfectly okay because we're so traumatized with such victims.
And by the way, I got news for you. The Egyptian captivity never happened. No such thing. There were no Jews in Egypt that were in captivity. There was no exodus from Egypt. There's zero archeological, historical, or philological evidence for it. It never happened. And I could go on and on about just that. So again, it's a question of concoction of stories that keep people within the trauma framework.
I'll stop here.
Naomi Klein: I just wanted to jump in on a couple of points. One, you know, I had a really interesting conversation with Gabor's son, Daniel for their excellent podcast, Bad Husbara a few months ago. And. You know, Daniel, who, who co wrote the myth of normal with, with Gabor.
And we were talking about. the instrumentalization of trauma around statecraft, right? That part of it is that, that there is this, you don't stay with the trauma. It immediately gets turned into a political purpose, right? So, I mean, I remember this from, from, from my own education. It was like, Immersed in the horror.
They hate, they've always hated us. They will always hate us. You know, exposing kids far too young to, to really graphic details. And then, you know, the, the Israeli national anthem and happy ending, right? So it's just like, it slaps it on, onto the, onto the horror and makes it okay. Right. And this is something that I, you know, I know that anybody who has, you know, Very personal experiences with trauma knows and that's most people and some people more than others It doesn't there's no happy ending and you know, and this is what Daniel and I were talking about is that actually?
we live with it our whole lives and we have better days and worse days and And it's this kind of Hollywood ization of the Holocaust, right, where it's like absolute horror, but here's the happy ending, right? And so if you've never actually confronted what it means, then the idea of losing the happy ending is also incredibly destabilizing, because then it, then it forces a reckoning that never really happened, because when something is instrumentalized, you're not really staying with it.
You're not really doing that work.
Gabor Maté: You're not grieving.
Naomi Klein: Yeah, you're. Yeah, because you're just the feelings are just a plot point, right? They're just, they're just it. There are means to an end. Well,
Gabor Maté: if I jump in, Naomi, for a moment apropos of what you just said, the Hollywoodization, the happy ending, Steven Spielberg, of course, who runs the Shaw Project, and whom, who, that you'd reference in your article, he directs this film called Schindler's List, which itself is a distortion of what actually happened, but, but most of the film is in black and white when it takes place in Poland.
At the end of the film, It gets colorized, and all these people are marching towards Israel in pure living color. I mean, there could not be a better, a better example of what you just said.
Naomi Klein: Look, there's a lot to talk about, including injured masculinity in a lot of this, because I think about somebody like Claude Lanzmann, who made, you know, the original miniseries Shoah, and He, and, and here I want to, first I just wanted to quickly say, this is now being re inscribed again with yet another Hollywood blockbuster called The Brutalist, which if you haven't seen it, please don't, it's terrible, but it re inscribes this same narrative of Endless persecution, injured masculinity that we saw in, in Exodus, right?
Talking about rape in the camps and immediately put your hand on the Bible and square allegiance to the Irgun. That's your therapy, right? Now once again, in Brutalist. Spoiler alert, another male rape, and another fix it with Zionism, okay? So, that, Hollywood's working overtime right now on this, and, and it's very important that we understand it.
But I want to return to this point around here there is no why. Okay, so that is a phrase that Primo Levi, who was a, was a, was a, was a Holocaust an Auschwitz survivor, he was quoting a prison guard. That, that that was what they said if any, if any of the prisoners of Auschwitz asked what was happening or what was hap or why, the answer was, here there is no why.
Right? So then, Lanzmann appropriates a term from a, from, from, from an Auschwitz guard and applies it to the Holocaust as a whole. So this is part of the forbidding of comparison is you're not actually allowed. We haven't been allowed to really try to understand this beyond primordial Jewish hatred, right?
So I would actually, I don't know if I want to disagree or just, you know, question, this, this, this idea that there wasn't an economic reason for the Holocaust in the same way that there was a clear economic reason for colonialism, what you were saying earlier, Gabor, like you know, that's something Arendt said, that's a distinction Arendt made at the time.
But I also think that, that, that we need to spend more time questioning it. Like we, we need to ask the why. And if we ask the why, I think we might, we might find some whys around, okay, You know, 1929, capitalism experiences its greatest crisis in history. You know, we're a decade out of the Russian Revolution and it, you know, communism is spreading around the world.
There was, even if it wasn't the same kind of Colonial pillage, although certainly Jewish property was pillaged, there was certainly a need to have an internal enemy to save capitalism, right? And the way the Nazis made a distinction between Jewish capitalism and which was the perverted capitalism and real good capitalism, right?
They need like, like, I think the Holocaust saved capitalism in, in lots of ways, which is why the German industrialists aligned with the Nazis. And frankly, the images that we saw yesterday at, at, at, at inauguration with, with the billionaires lining up behind Trump were eerily reminiscent of that moment.
So I think there was a why. And I think it was, I think it was, I think it was a huge economic reason on a kind of macro scale.
Gabor Maté: Listen, to, to, to be clear, there's all kinds of economic, social, political reasons. Oh, for German anti Semitism, for Nazis, and, and ultimately for the Holocaust. All I said, there was no immediate gain in, in that particular killing of Jewish children.
You know, and by the way, let's recognize something. The Nazis did not set up to murder the Jews. They set out to marginalize them, and Hitler's idea was to expel them, send them to Madagascar or some other place, and it's, we can go back to Palestine here because the it's not that the Israeli state or the Zionist project wants to kill all the Palestinians, they just want to expel them.
They'll just kill as many as they have to. But, you know, so that even the Nazi genocide didn't start off with a genocidal intention. But then it has, as you said earlier, any colonial or any imperial project's got its own internal logic. And if you look at the genocide that's recently taking place, Israelis would be quite happy, when I say Israelis, I mean the Zionist establishment, would be quite happy just to see all the Palestinians go to Madagascar.
But if they won't, we'll kill as many as we have to.
Cecilie Surasky: Thanks, Gabor and Naomi. I want to ask questions about what is called for today, maybe in an almost a parallel reality where Palestinians have all of the support they need and, and Jews and Israelis. What does a state built around actually, what does it look like to have a state that actually deeply cares about healing of trauma?
What is that? I don't know if we know what that looks like, but I want to go to questions of the audience. Let's do that. With an eye to world building and healing, what is your advice on balancing creating new or authentic narratives to disarm the weaponized ones, or just to stand on their own? Do we need to counter to stem the tide of hate and self harm, or do we generate truth that can hold and sustain us?
Naomi Klein: I mean, this question around narrative. I think there, I think, I don't think we should, I mean, choosing whether we repair the, the ones that, that, that got us into this mess versus telling new ones. I mean, I think it's really
it's a, it's not a rupture. It's not like, I don't think we abandon everything we ever knew and, and we're never going to be a blank slate. So I think we're, I think Often it's a work of reinterpretation. You know, we've talked about the Passover story. There's another way of, of, of telling parts of that story that are really about like Jewish Egyptian solidarity and feminist heroism and, and, and, and raising children who are not European.
Blood children as your own. I mean, there's, there's different parts of history that we can pull out. But you know, considering how much we're looking back at these old stories, I do think we need to look forward. And, and, and it's always sort of part of an excavation, you know, Gabor was saying about you're not, you're.
You're not your trauma, right? And, and, and I think that part of it is about knowing who you maybe were before that rupture point too, right? My friend, Molly Crabapple has written this exquisite book. It'll be out in a year, I think, and she's revising it now on the Jewish labor bund called here, well, the working title is here, where we live is our country.
Which was a Boone slogan, and it's this idea of doykat, here ness and I think there's something in this idea of really committing to here, and what it would mean, not only for Jews, but in, I think we all have traditions, ancestral traditions, of here ness, of truly loving one another. Where we are and understanding those systems of reciprocity.
And I think there's that, that, that decolonization and. And taking leadership from Indigenous people is a huge part of this. But I think we also need to find our own ancient traditions around, around this. And, and pool our collective wisdom and tell new stories, not just revert to old stories. And, you know, when I look at, Not to come back to the horrors of Inauguration Day again, but, you know, when I look at these would be space colonizers, you know the, and that lineup of tech billionaires with Trump, none of them believe in this planet.
You know, they are willing to torch it, literally torch it, when you look at Trump's executive orders and the rolling back of every climate policy. I mean, they are arsonists, and it intersects with their apocalyptism, their end times ism, their Christian Zionism. Some of them are like, literalist, Bible literalists, and they're actually excited about the end times and the worst things get.
The more it's a sign that it's all going to burn and they can't wait because you know the group of the chosen people are going to be lifted up in an elevator to a golden city in the sky. But that's just a biblical version of what these guys are actually building down here with their gilded bunkers and the fact that their extreme wealth makes them think that they're gods.
So I think we need to understand. The perversions of that narrative and what it is actually producing, like, in terms of the sort of narrative grooves that makes a guy like Elon Musk believe that he can go to Mars, right, or, or this so called long termism ideology that the Silicon Valley people believe in, some of them around like, well, well, everyone's going to die anyway, so we just need to protect a few, like, these are, these are, these are these same Biblical stories, right?
But just secularized. Meanwhile, AI, which they're all You know, tripling down on is really about creating a kind of a mirror world of this world by sucking all the water energy jobs out of it. So this is an apocalyptic vision of the world. It is about there ness. It is about putting all of their hopes in some other place than this beautiful sacred place.
And so I think that there's a story that needs to be woven. That is really about committing to this world. And I think it's a, it is a multi racial, multi generational, multi faith story that also is about liberating all of our spiritual practices from these state projects that are, that have perverted them and destroyed them.
So, those are a few ideas for, for stories.
Gabor Maté: Just, just a couple of quick points. One is what you said Naomi about reclaiming history. So you mentioned the Bund, which was this large Jewish labor socialist organization in Eastern Europe, Poland, and so on, much larger than the Zionist movement was. And when you look at the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, the top leader was a left wing Zionist Mordechai Anayelowitz.
After he was killed, the second in command was Merrick Edelman. who was a bond or a Jewish socialist. Now, Edelman is one of the few who survived. He fought against the Nazis throughout the war. And after the war, he became a cardiologist, a very principled man. He supported and joined the solidary labor movement against the communist government later on, but he was the lifelong supporter of Palestinian rights and the Palestinian struggle.
He's never mentioned in Jewish historiography. In Israel, there are no streets and no kibbutzim and no squares, no statues. In other words, they whitewash out of history anybody who doesn't fit in with the Zionist narrative. And so I think that we have to reclaim history from that point of view, number one.
In terms of the future, you know, I think it's more like what Naomi said at the very end of her contribution here. For me, it's not a matter of narratives, it's a matter of consciousness and who's telling the narrative and we're heading into dark times. Is to go through these dark cycles. We've been through them before.
Can we hold on to our sense of ourselves beyond just what happened to us and be beyond just what our minds tend to believe. Can we have a deeper connection to everything? I mean, when you talk about commitment to the earth, you're talking about commitment to reality and to the world. And can we find that in ourselves?
I think much as I, much of my life resisted sort of spiritual path as a kind of a cop out from the real world. You know what? I no longer see it that way. I think at this point we really have to look for our two essential selves. Because that's the only thing that's going to get us through. We're going to be heading into dark times.
I mean, today's executive orders, or yesterday's executive orders, is just the beginning. And it was bad enough even before Trump returned to power. It's going to be dark times. Can we hold on to our faith, to our trust in each other, to our, as Gramsci famously said, our pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will.
I mean, I think that's the key.
Cecilie Surasky: Thank you, Gabor and Naomi. I'm going to go now to Video I see, I'm, I'm figuring this out. So I have, I'm going to have 2 folks, Evelyn, and then Linda has questions and then we'll go back to the Q and a box. So we'll put you on 1st and then I think we'll have Linda.
Evelyn: Thank you so much for your contribution, all three of you.
What I'm struck with is the role of compassion in trauma, and I think what I'm not hearing in this conversation is, what I'm hearing is a binary, compassion for one side, and I'm not advocating that we only have to be compassionate towards the Jewish people, but I'm suggesting that, to have that compassion for us as a people.
And at the same, I think that there, I truly believe there will be more integrity. In that, and I think that the movement will be more held, held in greater respect and regard if we can hold compassion for our own people, and I'm speaking as a Jewish American, and has lived in Israel for 13 years, and I feel very deeply.
With all my work with Palestine Museum, U. S., Palestine Museum of Natural History in Bethlehem with Mazin Qumsiyah, building these meaningful, meaningful relationship. It comes from a deep place, thinking about my own people and what's best for my own people. So I'm wondering what remarks, I'm, I'm welcome to hear your thoughts.
Gabor Maté: Well, first of all, I think you're pointing to something very real. When we're confronting such horrors as being, has been inflicted on the Palestinians for the last three quarters of a century in the name of Jews, in the name of my name, in all of our names, my tendency is to get in touch with all kinds of anger.
And
and,
and sometimes the compassion is lacking from the way I speak about things. So, first of all, thanks for pointing that out. Okay, number one, and I've taken responsibility for that, you know, when I can. Number one. Number two. In my book, Myth and Normal, I talk about compassion, and the, one of the compassions, one of the levels of compassion is the compassion of truth.
Now, I firmly believe that Zionism is going to be seen as a major disaster in Jewish history, by Jewish history, in the not too distant future, not necessarily in my lifetime, but certainly it will be. It will be seen like. The zealots whose activities led to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD.
So the most compassionate thing I can think of is to tell people, this is, wake up, this is what's going on. The direction that you're going in is leading into disaster. It's leading to the drying up of your soul and the creation of a catastrophe. I'm not going to go into the reasons. But you know, Hannah Arendt said in 1942 that it's insanity for the Zionists to put their trust in foreign powers far away and completely alienate the people in, amongst whom they have to live.
But of course, Zionism could not have survived unless it did that. So inherently, it's a project that's going to end in disaster. So I think that's very compassionate to let our fellow Jews know, listen. The direction you're going in is not only causing unspeakable suffering for these other people, it's going to be a catastrophe for us as well.
Let me just go back to a question of tone though, and because it's true, it's sometimes difficult for me, I don't know what it's like for Cecilie and Naomi, to maintain a kind of compassionate softness towards my own people when I see them supporting such horrors. That's on me, and you're very right to point it out, okay?
Naomi Klein: Yeah, I think, I think it's a good, I think it's a great point, Evelyn, I, I mean, I, I do believe Cecilie framed us in a really beautiful way, so I just want to acknowledge that, not defensively, but just say that we did begin from a place of, of deep compassion and, and I, and you know, in terms of the article of mine that keeps getting referenced, you know, I, I, I, I start with the families who didn't want their trauma weaponized in this way, who told Netanyahu to get lost, who boycotted all their official you know memorializations precisely because it had nothing to do with their loved ones.
So I apologize for not reiterating that, that it's not about, you know, saying you can't mourn. It's about the weaponization, instrumentalization of trauma. I've been critical, you know, of parts of the solidarity movement here that you know, have, have, have sort of. denied that right to grieve of, of, of all people, you know, but I guess I don't totally identify with the, with your framing of my people and their people.
Like maybe I'm too much of like a, whatever you want to call it, a humanist or whatever, but you know, I did grieve the, the, the, the, the, the killings on October 7th. I wrote a piece for the guardian that was quite controversial. Stand with the child. Not the gun, no matter who's child, no matter who's gun, and that's the way I see it, you know, I didn't grieve those, that the people who were killed on October 7th, because they were my people, I grieved them because they were people, you know, and I'm not, I, I I and I want to ask that of the left, of, of the movements that I'm a part of.
And I also want to say, I've never, like, as, as, like, I absolutely feel what Gabor was expressing about the pain of having a genocide petuated in the name of our safety and the need to separate ourselves. But at the same time, I've also never felt more Jewish. So I'm filled with contradictions in that I've never felt more apart.
of a Jewish community than I have over these past horrific, what now 16 months, because of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, who have created containers for my Jewishness, you know, and so much love for Cecilie for being one of the people who built that organizations, who held us not just as opponents of what Israel is doing, but gave us spaces to have seders in the streets and, you know, and, and, and to, to, to, to, To retell our to reimagine our ceremonies in ways that felt meaningful to us.
So thank you. It's complicated.
Cecilie Surasky: Thank you so much. I appreciate all of you. And I appreciate your question, Evelyn. And I'm going to go on to Linda.
Linda: . Hi, everyone. Thank you so much. This is a really enlightening. And Naomi and Gabor, you've both been a huge influence on my life for a very long time. So I feel very privileged to be here. I'm a Palestinian in the Diaspora. I am a storyteller and a filmmaker and it's really meaningful for me to be in a, in a Jewish space and to hear this, this perspective and, and the way you frame the, the weaponization and you talk about this history.
And I'm wondering. You know, what can we like as Palestinians, what can we learn? What lessons can we take from this in order to help our community who's obviously undergone, has been undergoing and undergone this This huge traumatic experience. So how can we help them and each other to heal and tell new stories?
Because I agree that we need to, we need to tell new stories. And I think so much is about narrative and, and building stories in the future to, to counter all the hate. So I'm wondering what your perspective is on that.
Gabor Maté: I am very reluctant to give advice to Palestinians because
Well, I'm just reluctant to do that. If I had a wish, because I mean, we're under such pressure, such threats, this constant assault, not just in Palestine, but in the United States as well, and in the Western world in general,
it'd be the height of arrogance for people not in your situation to tell you what to do. So I really think that and, and there's so much that I've drawn by way of inspiration in Palestinian resident, resilience and sumud and their dances, their songs, your poetry. Your sheer commitment to life. There's a lot that you could teach the West and the rest of us.
If I had a way, she would be this. I mentioned Eric Adelman and I don't know how you're going to feel about this, but Merrick Adelman was this Jewish leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising who supported Palestinian struggle all his life. When he died at age of 90, barely anybody in Israel even mentioned his death, but he was critical of the Palestinian struggle because of the suicide bombings and the attacks on civilians.
If I had a wish, and I'm not telling you what to do, if I had a wish, I wish I heard more Palestinians talk about how that's not what we stand for. And that's, I mean, I can understand it. I'm not saying I don't know where that comes from. And that Palestinians did not initiate the terrorism in Palestine. I know all the history, but at the same time, if I had a wish, it'd be a bit more recognition of some of the aspects of the resistance that have horrified people around the world.
and have fed into the Zionist narrative. I say this with some hesitation, but since you ask, that would be a wish. How do you feel about that?
Participant: I, I I agree with you to be honest, and I think it's easy for me as somebody in the diaspora who has the distance, who hasn't, you know, experienced living under occupation. It's very easy for me to be able to, to see that, and I'm not sure, I mean, when I go to the West Bank or, or speak to family or friends that live there, it's obviously their experience is so much more complicated than mine, but, but I do agree that there is sometimes a lack of self reflection and self critique because we are so swept up in our own victimization and injustice against us.
So and I, and I do, and this is a conversation I have, not to speak too long, but this is a conversation that I have with other filmmaker friends who are Palestinians, who in the diaspora, especially that we need to tell new stories about us also. It's, you know, it's, we've been telling the same story over and over again, and obviously it hasn't worked.
So we need to tell new stories, we need to tell different stories about joy, about love, about life, and not just about injustice. And, you know, and part of that is facing uncomfortable realities. So I, I do agree with you.
Gabor Maté: By the way, I don't know if you realize, but that photograph behind you of the Beatles crossing the street there, there's a version of it online in color with John Lennon holding a Palestinian flag.
Participant: I've seen it. I've seen it. And my Palestinian children are sitting on the floor listening to this conversation.
Gabor Maté: All right.
Naomi Klein: Linda, one thing I would just, you know, thank you so much for, for, for, for being part of this conversation. Which has been so beautiful, by the way, I'm already sad for it to end. I, yeah, I mean, I think that the. It is so difficult to have the kinds of conversations that, that we're talking, you know, like I was just mentioning the, the, in the, in the middle of a genocide.
And I have so many, you know, Palestinian friends who have you know, been in this state and, and I think that, you know, many of us in, you know, in, in the movement have this feeling of like, okay, first we have to get through this and then we're going to have, have some of these more difficult conversations.
And I think that's entirely appropriate. The difficulty, of course, is what, what Gabor just said about, you know, if we really are entering, if this is an era, not an event, right, then we have to develop the skills and we're not the first people to have to do it, to have those very difficult conversations in the teeth of it, right?
We can't delay it endlessly, right? Because, because the, the fact is.
It's only some people who are censoring themselves, right? There's lots of people who are talking very loudly from a very particular point of view and not worried about criticizing other people and including other Palestinians. And so, you know, I teach university students and I'm very aware of how Quickly, a discourse can just become the dominant discourse, right?
You know, if you're, if you're 20 and you got involved in politics last year, then this is the only discourse you, you've seen. So all the people who've been saying, Oh, we'll talk about it later. We just have to get through this. That wasn't legible to a whole generation now that has gotten, that has gotten involved in politics.
The only thing legible were the people who had no compunction about trashing their own. Right. So that is something we have to, I just think we have to. I think it's less about having the fights with each other and more about building the alternative spaces that we want, making it legible, giving people a choice of a different kind of tendency to, to join.
You know, and I think lots of people are, are, are, are starting to do that and, and are ready to do that.
Cecilie Surasky: Thank you. Thank you, Linda, so much. We're gonna go to, we're, we're coming to the close. I, I, we clearly need another eight hours to, to have these conversations, but I'm gonna invite Yasin I, I see, I see your image. To ask your question, I think it would be a great question to close with Hassan. Yeah.
Maurizio Benazzo: Hi. Yeah, I, I have a, the question and I also, as a Palestinian diaspora, wanted to make a, sorry, sorry,
Zaya Benazzo: sorry. Hello? Yassine, we're gonna bring Yassine hold on, let's add a spotlight. There it is. Okay. Yassine, can we unmute you? There you are.
Participant: Hello. Very nervous asking the question just because I think I, I think like others have been very inspired by Gabor and Naomi, so short of breath, but I want to get my question out.
So take a breath.
Cecilie Surasky: We can all take a deep breath together.
Yasin: Thank you. So I'm, I'm my, my father's Egyptian born in Cairo, Muslim. My mother's a British Jew. I live in London. This conflict has been a part of my life since I was three years old. It's the reason they divorced is because of this conflict.
I'm also a therapist. And so I'm, one thing that's really stood out to me from this conversation today is what Gabor mentioned earlier about how much of this is unconscious in terms of the responses that a lot of Jews across the world are having. The defenses, there's so much here that's unconscious.
And my question basically just is, if so much of this is unconscious, and if we're being honest, most people in the world, most, so many Israelis and Jews and Palestinians won't have trauma, long term trauma therapy, healing work, like, how do we, I'm not expecting a concrete answer, because I've sensed that it's just not concrete, but how do we move forward if so much of this is unconscious?
Gabor Maté: Well, you can't penetrate people's unconscious by any kind of a frontal assault of reality, truth historical facts. None of that will be absorbed or penetrate. So don't try to do what you can't do. I think we're talking about a long term project here. I think we're talking about, go back to Naomi's analysis, a systemic situation where we're looking at.
A whole colonial imperial structure that keeps generating more and more traumatized people who keeps escaping into their unconscious or defended by their unconscious from facing reality.
The good news is that more and more people are waking up. As the crisis of the system deepens, so is increasing the number of people who are asking questions, who want a different explanation, who are open to a different narrative, who are willing to examine themselves. I don't think we're going to have the agenda of breaking into people's unconscious.
What our agenda is, I think, as I understand it, is just to keep the light of truth burning, and then people will gravitate towards it in time.
And you know, that great Jewish rabbi, was it Hillel, who said that the task is not yours to finish? Well, he said that 2, 100 years ago. That task of healing the world, it's not finished. But look at all the people. We've made inspiring and essential, indispensable contributions to keeping that light burning.
In nature, in our own small ways, that's what we can do. And we can't force anything, you can't hurry history, we can't will other people's transformation. But we can keep speaking, and as somebody pointed out with as much compassion and as truth as possible. And have some faith that eventually more and more people will be ready to open up.
That's what I have to say on that.
Cecilie Surasky: Naomi, would you like to bring us home in the morning?
Naomi Klein: Yeah, I think, I mean, such a profound question. And, you know, we're not gonna, we're not gonna win every battle, right, on this. But I do think that, Just the, you know, I've been in this space for a long time of the, the Jewish side of the solidarity movement.
And It's just been such a, it's been a huge generational shift, right? So I can't believe that it isn't possible to change consciousness. And then you think about what's happening inside families, you know of parents being confronted with it by their own children, you know, which is often you know, what we know from the climate, from the climate issue is that kids are the most likely to change their parents minds.
For some reason, particularly daughters. So. So there, so, so I think this is, I think part of why it's important to make visible the infrastructures that make people afraid, like you're, you're afraid because people want you to be afraid, right? Now, some people will never respond to that, but I think some people will, right?
Especially if it's paired with, With a lived bodily experience of another kind of safety and solidarity, which is why movement building matters, because when we build movements, when we build beautiful movements, and we build movements based on real principles of solidarity and compassion and the sanctity of life.
When people participate in those movements in their actual bodies, in the actual world, they get new memories, right? That can counter the stories that we've been telling, right? And, and so the culture that we, that's, you know, why it matters, the culture that we build in movements and why, even when we feel very tired and defeated and overwhelmed, which is exactly how we're supposed to feel when we're being bombarded from all directions, which is why they're using this shock and awe strategy.
We have to build movements and we have to invest in that culture, which will give people some other types of experiences to draw on.
Cecilie Surasky: Thank you, Naomi. Thank you, Gabor. Thank you, Yasin. And I, I end with this note that I got from, from one of you who's watching, please, please, please. Can we have a part two to this conversation? We are almost out of time and there's so much more to learn. So maybe we can consider that.
Naomi Klein: I would do it in a heartbeat.
Gabor, I don't know about you, but like I'm looking at some of these questions that are going unanswered and just feeling like I hope we're archiving them and you know, I don't know. I would love to. This is such a special community. Thank you so much. And I really apologize for to everyone who didn't get their question responded to.
Gabor Maté: Well, perhaps if we do do it again, we can devote the whole time to dealing with people's questions.
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Gabor Maté: And yeah, anyway, listen, you guys, I got to run for another engagement. So thank you, Naomi, Cecilie, Zaya and Maurizio, everybody who participated, contributed. Hope to see you next time. Bye.
Cecilie Surasky: Thank you so much.
And, and Danzi, next time, if we do it again, which we will, you're our first question. Thank you. Bye all. Thanks
Zaya Benazzo: all. Thank you so much. Thank you, Naomi. Cecilie, for the wonderful hosting and thank you to the SAND team for making this event possible. Lisa, Carlos, Jeanric, Michael, Sara. Thank you, everyone. And this will be continued.
We'll hope to, yeah, we'll have a part two session conversation. Thank you, everyone.
