Naomi Klein: A “Trauma Industry” Has Emerged in Israel to Justify Gaza Genocide

More than a year since Israel launched its war on Gaza in response to the October 7 attack, we speak with the award-winning author, journalist and activist Naomi Klein, who says a “trauma industry” has emerged to keep Israeli society permanently in crisis in order to justify the country’s expansionist wars and human rights abuses. “Though the Israeli government likes to frame everything that is happening now as a response to October 7, this is a preexisting agenda,” says Klein, whose latest essay for The Guardian explores how Israel “has made trauma a weapon of war.”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: As we continue our coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, we turn now to look at “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war.” That’s a headline to a recent essay in The Guardian by our next guest, the award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein, who examines how memorials to the October 7th attacks have stirred support for Israel’s limitless violence.

She writes, quote, “It’s a simple fable of good and evil, in which Israel is unblemished in its innocence, deserving unquestioning support, while its enemies are all monsters, deserving of violence unbounded by laws or borders, whether in Gaza, Jenin, Beirut, Damascus or Tehran.”

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein is professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, the founding co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice. Her latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, is now available in paperback. She’s the author of many other books, including The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Naomi, it’s great to have you back in our New York studio, but horrifying during these times. If you can respond first to what’s happening on the ground in Gaza, in Lebanon, and then if you can relate it to this piece that you just wrote for The Guardian?

NAOMI KLEIN: Sure. Well, I think the first thing that we — what we need to understand, and I think we have seen this in the clips and in your previous interview, is that though the Israeli government likes to frame everything that is happening now as a response to October 7th, this is a preexisting agenda. I mean, this is the settler movement, Ben-Gvir. I mean, all of these figures have always wanted Gaza depopulated. They’ve always wanted to settle Gaza. They’ve always believed it is part of so-called Greater Israel. So does Netanyahu. It’s part of their coalition agreement dating back to 2022 — right? — that they want the whole thing, and also the West Bank, by the way.

So, you know, I’ve written before about how states of shock are often exploited very cynically to ram through a preexisting agenda. And I think that’s absolutely what we’re seeing. But in order for that to work, the state of shock needs to be continued, heightened. There can never be a recovery. So the Israeli society needs to be reshocked and kept in this kind of trauma loop. And that’s what this piece about the kind of trauma industry is about.

And I want to be very clear: People have a right to grieve their loved ones. This is not about families gathering in grief. This is not about the right to remember and honor. It’s about state-orchestrated and -manipulated trauma. It’s a memorialization from above — right? — not from below, for a very specific end. And people in the Netanyahu government have been very clear that really what they’re doing with the way they are telling the story of October 7th is creating what they call a new national identity. And it’s a national identity that uses the trauma of that day to create a story that fuses October 7th with the Holocaust, and then uses that as the excuse for the genocide that we’re seeing right now.

So, you know, when we think about the horrors, that you’ve already outlined today on the show and, frankly, every show — right? — the deliberate starvation, the torment of an entire population, the torture of an entire population, the deliberate humiliation — how do you — and I think we all ask ourselves this question: How are people able to rationalize it? Right? And they’re able to rationalize it because within their information bubbles, they are being fed this constant story of “this is what they did to you,” a whole industry of reexperiencing it.

I mean, what I write about in this piece is all of these immersive, so-called memorialization kind of technologies, so it’s not only people in Israel, but in the diaspora, who are encouraged to put on VR goggles and reexperience October 7th as if it happened to them, immersive tunnels where you can go into the Gaza tunnels. It’s really an attempt to transfer trauma far and wide.

And in a state of trauma, you don’t really think. It’s pure emotion. It’s pure reaction. You can’t be analytical. You’re not going to be empathetic towards others. It’s about monsterizing the other and fusing your identity with the people in those houses, at the Nova music festival, in the tunnels. It’s very deliberate. It’s extremely manipulative. And it’s how you turn off any compassion or empathy or sense of ethics or morals.

AMY GOODMAN: And just to be clear, you point out that a number of hostage family members, in response to the state memorializations, as you put it, on October 7th, said, “Do not use our family members’ names. We don’t want to be a part of this,” as they fight for —

NAOMI KLEIN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — their family members to be released and a ceasefire, an end to Palestinian anguish.

NAOMI KLEIN: Oh yeah. I mean, this is — the way in which the government is weaponizing, instrumentalizing the deaths on October 7th and the hostages, the people who are most opposed to it are the families themselves, right? So, I begin the piece with the fact that, originally, the government’s plans for October 7th was to have this huge public event in the south. There were going to be thousands of people, I think 7,000 people. And they wanted to have, you know, members of the families there to testify. And kibbutz after kibbutz that was really, you know, on the frontline, like kibbutzim like Be’eri, said, “We’re not participating in this.” Then family members said, “Not only are we not participating, you can’t use our child’s name. You can’t use their image,” which is to not say that they’re not grieving. They had their own private, dignified ceremonies, vigils, you know, for people who are still alive. They just didn’t want any part of the pageantry and the weaponization of the government. They didn’t — and that was withheld.

You know, of course, the way my piece has been responded to through the sort hasbara channels is, you know, “Naomi Klein says we don’t have a right to grieve,” ignoring the fact that it’s the families themselves who have the most to grieve who are actually objecting the loudest within Israeli society.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could say, Naomi — you know, you just mentioned, which your piece talks about at length, the conflation of October 7th with the Holocaust. First of all, what that makes possible?

NAOMI KLEIN: Right.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Some of the examples of the ways in which that’s happened through these different memorialization practices that you outline? And then, whether an argument can be made for whether this is not precisely a kind of a trivialization of the Holocaust, a kind of banalization of it, which is precisely what survivors and scholars of the Holocaust warned against?

NAOMI KLEIN: Right. Yeah, I think it’s extraordinary, because one of the things that is happening from the same people who are trivializing the Holocaust in this way, they’re also — if you say what’s happening in Gaza is genocide, you know, they’ll throw their arms up in horror and say, you know, “That is impossible,” despite the immense scale and the deliberate plans and all of the markers, the announcements of intent — now, I’m not going to go into that. But they think nothing of saying that October 7th was — as if 80 years had not passed, as if it was not another continent, as if it was not another group of people, as if the power dynamics were not flipped on their head, that this day just grafts onto the Holocaust, as if it was 1945.

And so, this goes from everything from the Shoah Foundation adding another chapter — so, the Shoah Foundation, which is, you know, an incredibly important archive of testimonies of Holocaust survivors, now has added testimonies from survivors of October 7th. March of the Living tours of Auschwitz, now you hear from survivors of October 7th. So it’s a total conflation of these events. You know, in the piece, I tell a kind of extreme story of — they call it an art project. I wouldn’t call it an art project, but it’s some — it was a bizarre kind of stunt of taking — creating a juxtaposition of the iconic memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in Berlin and hanging a pair of mocked-up bloodied pants that were to symbolize sexual violence on October 7th and suspending them over that memorial with drones and then saying “Never again?” — question mark — as if this is all the same event.

Now, Nermeen, you asked about: Well, what are the implications of this? The implications are that if you do conflate these events, of course, it justifies any response, right? And more than that, if you cast Palestinians as Nazis, if you create this continuum, this absolutely false continuum, then it actually, post facto, does a lot more work than that, because then, if Palestinians are Nazis, then the original crime in the creation of the state of Israel, which is the Nakba, which is the mass, forced ethnic cleansing, displacement of hundreds of thousands, more than 700,000, Palestinians, who had nothing to do with the Holocaust, is, like, after the fact, justified, right? So, if they’re Nazis, then the original crime that Israel can’t look at in its founding is sort of, after the fact, justified. This is the psychology of it. Of course, it makes no sense. But this is why it’s very dangerous, and it’s why we’re seeing this acceleration of kind of finish-the-job Nakba from Israeli politicians.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to ask, Naomi — one of the people that you cite in your piece, I mean, on the question of grief and grieving, is historian Gabriel Winant, whose piece in Dissent, which you take from, is headlined “On Mourning and Statehood.” It was a response to Joshua Leifer, a journalist, in the same journal, in Dissent. But I’d like to read a short excerpt. This is not what you quote, but it’s from his original piece. He writes, “The genuine humane sentiment that it is possible to grieve equally for those on both sides is, tragically, not true. One side has an enormous grief machine, the best in the world, up and running, feeding on bodies and tears and turning them into bombs. The other is starved for grief.” Now, Gabriel wrote that piece less than one week after October 7th. Now it’s over a year, over 42,000 Gazans killed. If you could elaborate on this? Because this is something that people have struggled with, you know, because, as you said earlier, people have a right to grieve what happened on October 7th, and yet there is this massive discrepancy.

NAOMI KLEIN: Massive asymmetry in who’s grievable, right? I mean, this is Butler’s term, Judith Butler’s term, that within a vastly unequal, white supremacist society, you have lives that are treated as more grievable than others. And so many justice struggles are about asserting that every life is grievable. And so, I mean, the Black Lives Matter movement is about asymmetrical grief in so many ways.

I mean, personally, I don’t think — I think there’s sometimes this idea that you can tell people not to grieve, because — you know, to sort of balance the scales. I don’t think grief is a very obedient emotion, from my experience. It’s highly disobedient and unruly. And I think it is dangerous, actually, to tell people that they can’t have the emotions that they’re having. I think it’s more constructive to try to redirect those emotions into a project that is liberatory, that is in solidarity, you know, create containers for grief that are not the weaponized containers or instrumentalized containers that are using that grief and turning it into a justification for genocide. So, you know, I have respect, but disagreement, with that position. But we need to wrestle with it.

You know, in the piece, I also quote a scholar, a Lebanese Australian scholar, Ghassan Hage, who talks about how he felt this pressure to grieve those deaths in a certain way after October 7th, in a way that he described as “supremacist mourning,” which had encoded in it the idea that these lives were more important, more precious than Palestinian lives, Lebanese lives. And that’s what we must reject on all counts.

The other thing that’s been pointed out many times is that you can’t really mourn when the bodies are still piling up, when there are bodies still under the rubble, when cities are being turned to dust. Mourning is something, actually, that you do once it’s over. And it’s not over.

AMY GOODMAN: You also quote Marianne Hirsch, a professor emerita at Columbia University, and you end your piece by applauding the group, Israeli Palestinian group, Zochrot, which means “remembering.” Talk about both.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah. I mean, Marianne Hirsch is a wonderful scholar of different forms of memorialization and the way in which these sort of top-down — this top-down pageantry memorial creates a false experience, a sort of — she doesn’t use this term, but a prosthetic trauma.

The remembering, you know, if you break down the parts of the word “remembering,” it’s really putting the pieces of the self back together again. And the work of Zochrot, which is — you know, they’ve been doing work for many years, which is really about putting the pieces — like, Israel is based on erasure — right? — erasing the presence of — it’s every settler-colonial state — the United States, Canada, Australia. They’re all about erasing the original Indigenous presence there, renaming towns, denying that there are burial grounds. So, it’s actually the opposite of memorialization that happens. And so, what would real remembering mean in violent settler-colonial states? And it would be actually putting the pieces of the self back together again, which is this deeper form of remembering.