Israel Is the Macrocosmic Version of the Violent Family Living Next Door, AND The Abusive Relatives In Your Family System
- Karen Sole
- May 16
- 6 min read
Updated: May 18
The so-called world leaders are the dismissive adults you report your abusers to.
[First published ksole.substack.com GetConstellated. go there, free subscribe]
The Holocaust was the Holocaust. October 07 was horrific, murderous, inexcusable. Israel’s response, backed, funded and equipped mainly by the USA, is unspeakably bloody and disproportionate.
If you feel underlying anxiety and extensive unnameable feelings that are so beyond dread, abject sadness, depression, helplessness, and frustration; a kind of complex, mute, deeply embodied emotion that threatens to unhinge you, as you watch the relentless grinding down of an entire population, that’s healthy. That’s how I am right now. It doesn’t feel healthy, day to day, but you know, without that grief there won’t be any peace work. (paraphrasing Rae Abileah, social change strategist, Jewish faith leader, author, and editor for collective liberation. She is a trainer and project manager at Beautiful Trouble, and co-creator of the global Climate Ribbon art ritual. @raeabileah and Rodfei shalom/rabbis4ceasefire).
There is no cure for the unnameable condition that I am trying to describe, even if Netanyahu announced a reversal of policy today. (He won’t). We have witnessed the murder of 50,000+ people, thousands of them children, thousands of them women, almost all civilians.
And ‘the world’ stands by. Cheering. Excusing. Arming Israel. Mis-naming genocide as self defence. Looking but not seeing. Allowing Israel to weaponise the Holocaust. Demonising protest against the genocide. Demonising humanitarian support for Palestinian people and the Gaza strip. Lack of food will cure obesity. That has very recently been said by Netanyahu or one of his henchmen. There are words to describe that twist-up. But I won’t start.
And so we live with secondary trauma; minute, teeny tiny though it is in comparison to the cruelty and viciousness, torture and murder, hunger, fear, destruction, lack of shelter that the Palestinian people endure, day and night, and have endured for 19 months.
‘Family pathology rolls from generation to generation like a fire in the woods taking everything in its path until one person in one generation has the courage to turn and face the flame full on.’ Dr Terry Real, Healing Intergenerational Trauma Through Our Relationships, on Thomas Hubl’s Point of Relation podcast
It’s a while now since clear links were made between domestic terrorism and public terrorism, the men whose egos are so shrivelled, their hatred - of women in particular - so great that they annihilate their entire families and or go out and mass murder, usually women and children, or men of other cultures, ethnicities, or religions. We know that the men and boys who do so are radicalised aka fucked up by some of their experiences which drives them to ruminate and find further sources of negativity. No-one stops these boy-men before their hateful violence overwhelms them.
Sometimes they have been abused and humiliated as children. We understand that fact as certainly as we do not allow it as an excuse for murder.
When it is the entity that is the State of Israel exacting genocide on Palestinians and their land, the powers that be and swathes of populations say ‘oh there there, of course you have the right to go on killing and maiming, displacing and starving BECAUSE you suffered the Holocaust. Not, you’re doing it DESPITE the terrible lessons you learned, now stop! Who speaks against Israel’s genocide is not human but an antisemite, according to Zionists and their hangers-on.
The family that is Israel must stop terrorising the neighbourhood, stop killing the nearest neighbours, face the justice system created to maintain human rules for human behaviour on a global scale, make reparations, do the time, in whatever way the justice system decrees (stay home, have your weapons removed, control your Zionist citizens/children, dismantle offensive weaponry, and take down walls and checkpoints that restrict the freedoms of your neighbours, leave your neighbours in peace, stop stealing their homes, vacate their land and homes). First and foremost stop the killing. Step back (non molestation order), do not breach the rules and special orders (application of the global family law with real consequences for breaches).
Israel is not alone in this, but has become expert at - DARVO - a term typically applied to domestic situations. Here is a description from MedicalNewsToday:
‘Deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender (DARVO) is a tactic a person may use to deflect responsibility onto an individual they have abused. It is a form of manipulation a person may use to discredit a survivor’s experience.’DARVO is a technique a person may use to shift responsibility for an abusive incident onto the survivor of the abuse. It may also help the person who perpetrated the abuse deflect some of the responsibility and blame onto the survivor.A person may use DARVO to avoid punishment or repercussions for their actions.A study from 2022 looked into the experiences of 89 women who experienced sexual assault while at college. Researchers found that almost half of the participants experienced DARVO tactics from the person who abused them when they had further contact with them.
DARVO comprises three behaviors:
Deny
A perpetrator of abuse may deny that they have done anything wrong. They may minimize the feelings of the person they abused. For example, they may tell the person they have abused that they are:
overly sensitive
blowing things out of proportion
being ridiculous
Attack
When a perpetrator is accused of wrongdoing, they may attack the credibility and character of the survivor of their abuse. They may bring up incidents from a person’s past to discredit their accusations.
A perpetrator may state that the survivor of their abuse:
is a liar
has mental health issues
consented to what happened
has a history of making false accusations
They may also use gaslighting to confuse the survivor of their abuse. Gaslighting is when a person manipulates another person into doubting their own reality. It may cause a survivor of abuse to second-guess what happened.
Reverse victim and offender
A person may state that the survivor of their abuse is actually the one who perpetrated it. Their aim is to discredit the survivor while making it seem as though they are the one who has been abused.
For example, the perpetrator may lie and state that the survivor of their abuse is:
out to get them
trying to make them look bad or ruin their life
trying to get custody of their children
trying to get money from them
jealous of them
angry that they rejected them’
MedicalNewsToday deals with it because people affected by DARVO can develop severe mental health problems, i.e. DARVO is a serious mind-fuck. But isn’t Israel a macro exemplar of DARVO, and supreme perpetrator of mind fuckery along with death and destruction? That is my thesis. It is also my thesis that the extent of abuse and violence in a domestic or micro version, once apprehended ,would not be allowed to continue, definitely should not be allowed to continue - someone would be brave enough to turn and face the flames. Ireland, Spain and South Africa have tried.
Thomas Hubl (thomashubl.com)described a moment in a truth and reconciliation event for descendants of the victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust, when it became apparent that both groups of descendants experienced the same trauma, to the same extent, that the energy in the room changed. But those people are not the same as current politicians. Germany behaves like the abusive uncle cheering on newer generations of perpetrators, mistakenly believing he must champion his erstwhile victims, as they too become abusers, no matter what.
Israel is the apparently unimpeachable former victim turned rampant perpetrator, blessed only with protectors, not stopped by flame facers, or only ones they murder.
My first impressions of ‘world affairs horror’ came via the Nigerian civil war, or Biafra situation, in the form of posters depicting small emaciated children (‘Biafra babies’) in advanced states of malnutrition. Although the Vietnam War and various others have intervened, I never dreamed I would see, literally see, day by day, the genocide that has taken place since October 2023.
Do we really need experts to tell us that it is genocide? Does it matter if it technically is or isn’t genocide according to a code that some politicians drew up? Can we just know that what we see with our own eyes is wrong, should not be allowed to continue, should not have been allowed to continue, any more than a man who beats his wife and children or kills his neighbours for small infractions of the fence should be free to carry on, regardless of some supposed ‘provocation’?
It is all relational stuff, it all affects everyone who knows, who sees, who recognises brutality or denies it, who doesn’t explicitly know but feels it, now and through future generations across the world.
Copyright Karen Sole
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Karen Sole is a member of the International Institute for Complementary Therapists, and of the International Systemic Constellations Association (isca-network.org), and a member of ANZCI, the Aotearoa New Zealand Constellation Incorporated. She took her first training from Yildiz Sethi yildizsethi.com of familyconstellations.com.au. Karen's profile can be found on the above organisational sites. She participates in monthly professional supervision, facilitator member constellations of ANZCI, ISCA, and informal international groups of experienced credentialed facilitators.
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