Confronting Complexities
What happens when oppressed people find ourselves in an oppressor role?
Rachel: “I hate it when pro-Palestinian progressives ignore the terrible loss Hamas inflicted on Israelis.”
Dear Rachel, I have heard many Jewish friends and comrades voice this sentiment. I have felt twinges of it myself, as a Jew, when I hear my comrades in our work for a ceasefire in Gaza say things that feel like minimizing loss of Jewish lives.
I must emphatically note that every progressive activist I know, Muslim, Jew, or ally, has expressed horror and sadness for all the lives lost, Israeli and Palestinian, as well as calling for the safe return of all hostages.1
The problem is that it feels like no such assurance is enough. The condemnation of Israel’s assault on Gaza by much of the world, including fellow progressives, as aggressive, disproportionate collective punishment—which no objective lens can fail to confirm—is felt as discounting Jewish lives. Hence, seven months into Israel’s assault, I still hear Jewish comrades saying, “What about October 7?”
I think this response comes from a deep and difficult place shared by people who, although historically oppressed, now find themselves—ourselves—in an oppressor position. In this essay I explore this distress and its consequences as part of my ongoing look at our Activist Emotional Landscape.
It’s always worth reminding ourselves as we delve into sensitive topics that explanation is entirely distinct from justification; in many ways, they are opposites.
Jewish fear
When my Jewish comrades say, “What about October 7?” I hear them actually saying, “What about the Holocaust? What about the pogroms? How can we feel safe in this world that has historically proven so dangerous to Jews?”
Repeated experiences of persecution, expulsion, and massacre have led Jews to a profound sense of lack of safety in the world, and to generational trauma that affects even those of us who never experienced these atrocities directly.
In addition to feelings of insecurity and terror, the trauma of these horrific past experiences connects to an extreme sense of isolation and abandonment, the perception that during times of persecution the rest of the world ignores our plight, actively supports our persecutors, or turns away to avoid seeing what they’re doing. As I grew up and learned about the Holocaust, I felt confusion and pain as I wondered why no one did anything to stop that horrific slaughter. In a corner of my mind, that heartbreak persists.
Yet another aspect of the fear Jews live with is that of our entire population being scapegoated and blamed for numerous social ills. Many immigrant, culturally distinct, and newcomer populations suffer this form of persecution, yet it would be hard to find another people who, despite being a tiny percentage of the world’s population (less than .3 percent) are so visible and exposed on the world stage as are Jews.
In sum, repeated experience of being severely oppressed—segregated, stereotyped, scapegoated, expelled, and massively slaughtered—has instilled in Jews multifaceted terror and trauma.
Oppressed Peoples as Oppressors and Colonizers
After WWII and the Holocaust, in 1948, Israel’s stated purpose was to be a haven for Jews where such horrors could never be repeated. The watchword was, “Never again!” So said the British, the US, and other powers who triumphed in that horrendous global conflict and divided up the world according to their interests.
Sadly, these interests did not take into account the long-term safety of either the Jewish people or the 2 million Palestinians who already inhabited the land designated by Britain as the new Jewish homeland. It could have been possible, at that historical moment, for all people involved to decide how to live together in historic Palestine, a land ample enough2 for the indigenous inhabitants as well as Jews seeking safety and a fresh start.
This potential, we might say, has always existed in theory with settler colonialism. People expelled from Europe for religious persecution or economic necessity could have found ways to peacefully and respectfully coexist with the people already established in those lands.
But this did not happen. Instead, the world repeatedly saw the European settlers, backed by their greedy governments, violently take over the lands and wealth of original inhabitants around the globe, brutally exterminating and subjugating them.
Similar to Liberia,3 established as a refuge for Africans freed from enslavement in the US, the ostensible purpose for establishing the State of Israel in 1948 was to provide a haven for Jews after the Jewish population of Europe was decimated by the Nazis. Yet its function in the version of the global capitalist system that emerged after the war was as a colonial beachhead in that valuable part of the world. Rather than find ways to coexist with the longtime inhabitants, Zionists took over much of Palestine, expelling non-Jewish inhabitants to other countries and permanent refugee camps, not allowing them to return to their homes, and keeping them in a state of political and economic oppression.
Palestinian people have resisted this occupation and the economic and political oppression that has accompanied it. Their resistance has taken different forms, both nonviolent and deadly, mostly from a position of weakness that has never came close to threatening the existence of Israel as a whole.
This resistance, forms of which invariably arise in all colonized places, is met by the conquerors, in an equally unvariable pattern—with narratives dehumanizing the colonized and justifying colonizer domination by declaring themselves more holy or intelligent or in other ways more deserving of the wealth and lands they have usurped.
In the case of Israel, continually repeated in schools, media, and everywhere else, is the narrative that Palestinians are inherently terrorists who want to destroy Israel and Israelis. The flip side of the narrative is clearly expressed in theme song from Exodus, the 1960 blockbuster Zionist epic, “This land is mine, God gave this land to me.” I still hear that song playing in my head, with its rousing music, often considered “the second Israeli anthem.”
The relentless conditioning of Jews to believe they are entitled to the land of historial Palestine, and that they are surrounded by ruthless enemies out to destroy them, depicts every act of Palestinian resistance, large and small, violent and not, into an existential threat against which all forms of defense are permitted.4
Note a key difference among these fears Jews face. The first three fears described above stem from being targets of oppression; the fourth arises from the role of Israeli Jews as oppressors.
Oppression is the Glue
Deep down, every human knows it is wrong to purposely hurt or steal from others. We also know it is wrong for some to have much while others are deprived. From the time we are tiny we can recognize when something is not fair.
And yet, as our societies got more complex they became increasingly unjust, with a few accruing much of the power and wealth created by the work of the many. The only way people consent to this is by being subjected to oppression, the glue essential to holding together an unfair, exploitative society, consisting of force—hurting people, physically and in other ways--combined with fiction—myths that justify injustice.
The thing is, oppression is carried out by people who occupy the oppressor role in a given situation—the jailor, the boss, the soldier. Ironically, those in such oppressor roles are nearly always oppressed themselves in other ways.
These people cast in the oppressor role are surrounded—straitjacketed—by myths proclaiming that 1) we are superior to the oppressed people and hence we deserve to take their lands, wealth, even their very bodies, and 2) the oppressed are innately evil and dangerous; in fact, they are lesser humans (if human at all). Hence we are justified in doing absolutely anything at all to keep them down, up to and including exterminating them.
All of us conditioned into the oppressor role have been forced to swallow this poison. Deep down, we all know that discriminating, exploiting and massacring another people is wrong, so we feel tremendous guilt and fear of retribution, which leads to lashing out with increasing savagery in an effort to preserve our safety.
As a Palestinian comrade said recently, “How many Palestinian deaths will it take for Israelis to stop feeling unsafe?”
The answer is that it is impossible to kill our way to safety, just as it is impossible to bomb our way to peace.
Being Cast in an Oppressor Role
No person or cultural group is innately an oppressor. Combinations of carrots and sticks, cloaked in myths and lies, especially about ourselves, pervade our environments, train us to perform the various oppressor roles circumstances have slotted us into by virtue of having been born male, or light-skinned, or wealthy, or a US citizen. Or a Jew in Israel.
Structural divisions in society are very real, as all who attempt to resist them learn, yet at the same time people may be both oppressor and oppressed despending on social circumstances. A White working-class person is oppressed vis a vis the corporate owners, power brokers, politicians, and plutocrats comprising the ruling class. Yet that same White person, if male, is in an oppressor role regarding females; in some situations, even females of the ruling class.
A White female is in an oppressed role in relation to the males that surround her, especially if they are White, yet she is in an oppressor role in relation to people of the global majority.
In the US and Europe, Hindus from India encounter oppression stemming from skin color, accent, and other attributes, yet in India they are generally in an oppressor role vis a vis Muslims.
Children and minors are in an oppressed role because they lack social and political power, but within that group children often act oppressively toward one another. In fact, children play at much of what their elders do, including acting out oppressor roles.
Being cast by society in an oppressor role and conditioned as such is not a personal choice, any more than being oppressed is a personal choice. In both cases, we internalize a whole set of messages about ourselves that reinforce these roles, against which we must struggle at least as hard as the external situations we find ourselves in.
Yet none of this is foreordained, and we have the capacity to either go along with oppressor/oppressed roles or work to overcome them. It should be clear that oppressor role refers to social structure, not to individual behavior or capacity to decide whether to accept or resist being put into a given role.
That said, the process for meaningfully, that is, materially overcoming the oppressor role is quite different from the process of casting off the oppressed role, and must be treated distinctly.
We know a fair amount about the processes and risks of oppressed people rising up against oppression. We know less, and are more confused, about rising up to cast off the chains that being conditioned as oppressors forges around our hearts and minds.
This is the avenue we need to explore to understand the often disproportionate and seemingly irrational reactions to oppressed peoples’ liberation movements on the part of people who are generally sympathetic to such struggles, but who have a lot more trouble being so when the struggle is against an oppression they themselves have been conditioned to participate in, such as men when it comes to women’s liberation, people of European descent regarding the liberation of people of the global majority, or Jews faced with the struggle for Palestinian liberation from Israeli domination.
It should be noted that independent of all our beliefs and emotions is a global social structure of inequality that makes use of religion, identity, and such to manipulate, confuse and divide us, without caring a whit about them except as tools to get the people who do care, who in fact have their very identity bound up in such beliefs, to support forces contrary to their basic interests—such as cheering on the completely absurd notion that the way to secure a safe and good life is to massacre your neighbors.
Casting off the oppressor role
Tackling our own conditioning as oppressors—whether as a member of a ruling class, a dominant gender, or a colonizing people—is a complex undertaking. It is, nonetheless, perfectly possible. As noted above, none of these roles is innate.
For starters, we must recognize that the reality outside our heads may be vastly different from that represented inside our heads by the myths, the media, and the words of politicians. We can begin to get a true picture of that reality and begin chipping away at the internalized oppressor mess inside our minds by listening to, and believing, people in the oppressed group, when they tell us what they are going through.
And we must recognize that feelings of defensiveness, anger, fear, and many others will come bubbling up as we look at this reality. It is not our fault that our oppressor conditioning may cause us to feel bad and sometimes to lash out; but it is our responsibility to acknowledge and do what’s necessary to overcome it.
Rachel, I hope this will help convince you—and me!—that we are not to blame for our confused, angry reactions, which come from our oppressor role, but that we need to recognize them, and most important, commit to confronting them as part of the larger struggle to eliminate the oppression.
Tellingly, Muslims and allies of Palestinians are required to strenuously disavow Hamas and its October 7 attack, or face severe retribution. Jews and allies of Israel, in contrast, generally aren’t obligated to repudiate Israel’s disproportionate assault on Gaza; they certainly are not punished for failing to do so.
In 1948 Palestine’s population was less than 2 million, “of whom 68% were Arabs, and 32% were Jews (UNSCOP report…)”
Liberia was established as a place to send freed people of African descent by US colonists who were against slavery but did not want a free Black population in the US. The settler colonial dynamics this set in motion in that country eventually led to deadly civil war where roughly 250,000 people died.
Asserting that some Jews always lived in that area in no way justifies the takeover and expulsion of other people (such as Bedouins and Arabs of several groups), and declaration of a state that excludes a large portion of the indigenous population or relegates it to an inferior position.
This is well thought with much to ponder. One thing I think is missing is the class perspective. I don't buy into the idea of "white privilege". White workers are oppressed by the bosses, just not as oppressed as their brothers and sisters of color. Bosses use racism and sexism to divide workers so we cannot organize to fight back against their oppression. In terms of Israel and Hamas, I tell people I do not pick either side. Both Palestinian and Israeli workers need to unite against both sets of bosses.
"Deep down, we all know that discriminating, exploiting and massacring another people is wrong, so we feel tremendous guilt and fear of retribution, which leads to lashing out with increasing savagery in an effort to preserve our safety." Yes, it all is so crazy. Thank you for this thoughtful essay on how it is systems, not inborn behavior, that we're grappling with. And systems can be changed.