Richard Forer is a former AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) member with ultra-Orthodox relatives living in Israel. He is the author of Breakthrough: Transforming Fear Into Compassion - A New Perspective on the Israel-Palestine Conflict, which is available at Amazon. Recently, he was a member of an Inter Faith Peace Builders delegation that visited the Gaza Strip from November 5 to November 11, 2012. To invite Richard for speaking engagements, book signings or interviews, please contact him at rich_forer@yahoo.com. His website is www.richardforer.com



Yago: Recently you spoke at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) about your book, Breakthrough. Transforming Fear into Compassion – A New Perspective on the Israel-Palestine Conflict. You shared your personal transformation towards a new understanding of your identity and of the Israel-Palestine conflict. This blog aims to deconstruct the energy of enslavement that penetrates today’s world in many dimensions. In your witnessing, you expressed openly how we can become enslaved by rigid ideologies, wrong perceptions of the world and the illusion of being separated from the world. The energy of enslavement can destroy the beautiful gift of our humanity. Listening to you, Martin Luther King Jr.’s words resonated deep within me: “As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery.” I would like very much to welcome your own journey in this blog. My first question is related to the very origins of your life and how the “indoctrination” took place. What do you remember from your childhood that began shaping your mind and identity in a clear dualistic way? What role did the collective unconscious of the Jewish people play?
Rich Forer: Children are more receptive than adults, more innocent. As children, we take on the beliefs of our parents and teachers, our collective of ethnic and/or religious groups, and our society. Although much of our learning is taught to us directly, many of the ideas we incorporate are taught to us indirectly. For example, we absorb beliefs that are expressed, subtly or not so subtly, through feeling, especially the feelings of our parents or other caregivers. Just as we unconsciously model our speech and physical patterns on these caregivers, our view of the world is likewise influenced by these models. We begin to develop an internal logic, a way of seeing the world that is influenced by the people and institutions around us. This logic has a quality that is unique to each individual. It also has a quality that is unique to the society or collective each individual grows up in. For example, when I was a kid I attended Sunday school. I remember seeing, probably in my first-grade classroom, photographs of David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann. Ben-Gurion was Israel’s first Prime Minister and Weizmann its first President. At that time, about nine years after the end of the Holocaust, the atrocities perpetrated upon the Jewish people were very present in the minds of Jews. Most of the Jewish adults I knew had relatives or friends who were killed in the Holocaust. I absorbed their ideas, their knowledge of the terrible suffering of the Jewish people, their horror that human beings are capable of such acts of hatred. When I would look at the photographs of these great men, who had created the one safe haven for the Jewish people, I saw men who wanted to protect and save life, not men who wanted to destroy it. These were the leaders of our people and they were making sure that another Holocaust would never again happen. Along with this thinking, this way of interpreting the information that I, a kid, had available, there seamlessly arose the view that Jews would never do to others the shocking things that Adolf Hitler and others had done to Jews. After all, it never occurred to me to want to do such things. And the Jews I knew were basically caring people, so it obviously had never occurred to them to do such things. They were ipso facto incapable of committing such crimes. What they were capable of was planting millions of trees and turning an arid desert into a land of milk and honey.  With a childlike faith in the goodness of my people, it was a natural progression in thinking to presume that the non-Jewish world, much of which had remained silent while Jews were being murdered, was different than the Jewish world. In other words, for some inexplicable reason, or perhaps because we were special, Jews were more humane than non-Jews. When I looked at Israel, it was obvious that Jewish soldiers were merely defending their land from the irrational hatred of those who, like Hitler, wanted to harm us. Our internal logic colors the way we see the world. It leads us to interpret the world in ways that reinforce our mind’s conception of reality. The logic of my youth continued basically intact into my adult life. So, when I heard that Israeli soldiers had killed children and other civilians, I automatically responded with skepticism if not outright denial. My “logical” mind explained what really must have occurred, which is that these children and civilians were killed because Hamas or Hezbollah, whoever the enemy was, embedded their soldiers within civilian populations. Children were killed not because of Israeli bullets but because these organizations were so filled with hatred they were willing to sacrifice their own children in order to murder Jews. This is how the unexamined mind projects its content onto the world and creates the way the world is constituted.