I am a mental health clinician working in a college counseling center at a state university. I am a middle-aged, white, cisgender female who uses she/her pronouns and am aware of my unearned privilege in these respects. I am also the daughter of a Jewish German father who, along with many of our relatives, were refugees from Germany, who fled to various parts of the world including the United States, Australia and Israel. Others were murdered by the Nazis.
Generational trauma is embodied in me and around me. I am struggling with what, if anything I can say publicly that is meaningful in some way and with acknowledgement of my own blind spots and ignorance. Horrible atrocities are occurring in Israel and Gaza (not new).
My despair here focuses more on the climate of attack that seems to now persist in my country, the United States, and how woefully short our mainstream discourse on this conflict falls.
College campuses can be simply a geographical microcosm of larger communities, but they are a location that is specifically focused on the undertaking of learning and exploration on many, many levels. For some, like first year students as well as seniors, it is a moment in their lives of great transition, of the whole deck of cards being thrown into the air and not yet knowing where the cards will land.
One’s sense of self can become challenged. This is not a bad thing — it facilitates growth. AND, it is really difficult and can create increased vulnerability. This is especially true perhaps for first generation students who are the first in their families to navigate the intersection of the sometimes-oppressive educational system and the crazy financial obstacle course to which, in this country, it is yoked.
Now, add on, in the current context: What if you are a Palestinian-American student here and you receive news that relatives have been killed in the last two weeks, and you have no way of being with family there, and meanwhile there is rising tension and fear on the campus on which you used to feel relatively safe?
Or, what if you are Jewish and have come to college after a year in Israel, and you made many close friends with other teens there, before returning home to the U.S. Now some of those friends have been murdered, but somehow you are being called a terrorist by someone who used to be a close friend (this friend being another student studying in the U.S., coming from an entirely different country in the world with a history of colonization) because they saw something on TikTok that equated Israel with colonization, and this triggered something in their unprocessed generational trauma. Now you are not friends, and this is a great loss.
Or, what if you are a Jewish or Palestinian student who holds beliefs and values that actually differ from the majority of other students who are Jewish or Palestinian?
There is a powerful energy that emanates from late adolescents/early adults (crossing all gender/ethnic/class delineations) that has to do with identity formation, with figuring out who one is and how one might be in this world in relation to others. Idealism, passion and meaning are forged from this energy; it is a beautiful thing.
What happens when this moment in one’s human development intersects with social media — whatever the forum (i.e., TikTok, X, IG, FB, CNN, FOX News, on and on and on)? There is a bright hunger for knowledge and for interaction with the world that becomes overly vulnerable to, and targeted by, the laziest, most profit-driven (whether financial or ego-profit) pernicious and reactionary posturing and coding there is to be found.
How can we adults support younger people who are faced with this cacophony of voices and signs? How can we disrupt the targeting?
All that any of us who are here now and witness to what is happening (as opposed to the millions who have been persecuted and murdered over the last 3,000 years or so, or to those who now actually live in the Middle East), have any kind of control over is how we approach and enter the dialogue, how we show up and engage.
Language matters. How can we, as adults, model a dialogue in which there is room for “standing with” all the humans that are trying to live in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and all the surrounding areas? How can we articulate our support for our respective kindred people, and hold aggressors accountable, without resorting to hate speech and bigotry?
This may sound naïve, but it is not the same as calling for a solution to the conflict, it is merely calling for adults to tune in with one’s natural capacity for curiosity, connection and compassion when responding to the impulse to engage. It is, I believe, a positive impulse that can be the fuel for resisting oppression, for survival and for connection.
On the other hand, statements such as “Jews are terrorists” or “Jews are colonizers,” or “all Palestinians want to murder Jews” or “Palestinians are terrorists” or “all Arab Muslims are {fill in with whatever fallacy of composition}” are articulations of ignorance and fear that weaponize language, masquerade as “resistance,” and hide behind a pretension of “identity.”
I have not physically experienced the history that leads up to the current acts of war. This is not embodied in me. (For instance, to modernize it, I have not had to grow up with a safe room as a given in my housing structure, to protect me from air assaults. Or, I have not grown up in a place where the sounds of missiles exploding is routine.) But it seems necessary to remember that both Jews and Palestinians are indigenous to the region and both groups have experienced persecution and diaspora. Both groups have been oppressed.
It seems important to underline, for those of us who are engaged in the conversation about the current conflict, that the collective, generational traumas of two groups of people are living side by side and intermixed, with the collective unconscious of each group perceiving the other as the oppressor/abuser/perpetrator. If all humans have an instinct to resist oppression, the means by which we do that are too numerous to catalogue. It is so difficult to hold space for more than one narrative; it almost seems to be the bane of our existence to do so.
Perhaps invoking the concept of Beginner’s Mind when facilitating gatherings and conversations on campuses about the conflict in Gaza/Israel might be useful. Shunryu Suzuki (1989, 22), Zen monk, wrote that “When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can learn something… When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless… The most difficult thing is always to keep your beginner’s mind.”
How can leaders and other adults on campuses encourage and model “a non-defensive posture for learning in which participants open themselves to the experiencing as if for the first time?” A stance such as this does not require silencing, or silence, by the way, and can embrace the multivariance of experience. Beginner’s Mind can be a framework which can facilitate meaningful, active dialogue.
Mercer, in discussing Beginner’s Mind for teaching and learning, writes, “[T]aking up a novice’s stance may be a much more layered phenomenon than it appears at first glance because it is not only about the content of knowing. It is also about the affective and embodied experience of knowers.”
This embodiment and accompanying affect can encompass the generational trauma(s) that are not wholly conscious. How can we model being authentic about what we “know” (i.e., what we have experienced or what we have innate empathy for, not just what we read or hear) while simultaneously remaining open to not knowing, thereby creating an opening for reflection and, ultimately, change and movement?
The voices and actions of students in reaction to the current conflict in Israel/Gaza/etc. are simultaneously a reflection of societal stasis as well as manifestation of a desperate plea for change. This is an opportunity, a moment in time, to honor this plea for change by way of creating active spaces and pauses in our usual routines. These intentional spaces and pauses could celebrate the dialectic of multilayered experiences, could be away of embracing those spaces where seemingly opposing variants meet.
It is our moral responsibility to lean into, keep safe, protect, and actively listen and respond to students’ voices, not to shame, punish, silence or disenfranchise them.
“These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased,” – Rainer Maria Rilke.
Caroline Loewald Farnham lives in West Hartford.