Peace, Peace, But...
A Jewish prayer for the ill wishes them refu’ah shelemah / “complete healing.” Shelemah/complete is related to shalom/peace. Two prophets, George Orwell and Yirmeyahu/Jeremiah, offer troubling counterpoint.
The Party in 1984 declares: “War is Peace.” Yirmeyahu castigates “priest” and “prophet,” who - ignoring their mandate to promote public well-being - tolerate “lawless violence and havoc”; he exclaims: “They healed superficially [i.e., slapped a bandaid on] my people’s fracture [i.e., shattered body], announcing, ‘peace, peace,’ but there is no peace!” (6:13, 7, 14)
Yirmeyahu and Orwell are describing how social authority figures, who influence public sentiment and behavior, are deliberately misleading, falsifying facts and redefining “truth” in the process. One scene in Orwell’s novel illustrates the method of mental manipulation.
Winston Smith’s handler counsels: “You know perfectly well what is the matter with you. You have known it for years, though you have fought against the knowledge. You are mentally deranged. You suffer from a defective memory. You are unable to remember real events and you persuade yourself that you remember other events which never happened.”
The lecture continues: “Fortunately it is curable. You have never cured yourself of it, because you did not choose to.”1 Winston’s memory is fine, but he is being brainwashed.
Therapeutic gaslighting on the same Orwellian scale is increasing in today’s mental health field, where antizionists employ psychological terminology to vilify and ostracize Jewish colleagues and belittle Jewish patients.
In that totalitarian mind game, only Jews who toe the party line by renouncing Zionism as a delusional, “deranged” mentality will be capable of healing and reinstatement as members of the human race.
Identification with Israel is framed as “a psychological pathology - a mental illness to be diagnosed, treated and eliminated”2 through “Decolonizing Therapy.” “In a mind map diagram of a ‘colonized mind,’ Zionism is placed next to ‘rape culture’ and ‘genocidal tendencies’….”3 For, “[a]s long as Zionism continues, so will Israel’s mental health epidemic.”4
“[A]n assistant professor in [George Washington University’s] Professional Psychology Program” generalizes further; she “accuses all Zionists of having a ‘settler psychosis’ from which they must be ‘liberated’ in order to interact with ‘indigenous’ people.”5
Accordingly, ghosting Israelis and other Jews in the mental health care field - indeed, seeing to their “erasure” from it - is construed as psychologically understandable and authorized as professionally necessary.
These measures are intended, self-declared radical theorists and practitioners contend, to fix systemic flaws in standard methodology. Any rational critique of “Psychiatry’s Role in the Occupation of Palestine” demands, so the logic goes, “[a] critical understanding of psychiatry as a pillar of Zionism, dismantling Western mental health frameworks and depathologising resistance.”6
Within “the political context of colonization that cannot be separated from the reality of mental health in Palestine,” Palestinians’ mental health crisis must be “attribut[ed] to [Zionist]…settler colonial violence.…”7
If standard thinking among psychiatrists and psychologists supports Zionist aims, redefining terms - reversing their meanings - to support the elimination of Israel is the logical solution, which will give oppressed Palestinians psychic relief, bring peace to their body politic, and, by allaying Jews’ guilty conscience, offer them peace of mind!
But there is no peace.
This psychologistic malware, thinly disguised as analytical rigor, is designed to erase Jewish collective existence (i.e., Israel) from the planet’s operating system. The virus has infiltrated academic, NGO and government platforms and is spreading fast - replicating furiously - across the social media landscape.
Orwell warned of Stalinist totalitarianism in the post-World War II era. In our day democratic socialists, with whom he identified, have succumbed to the very same violent Marxist tendencies he decried. Yirmeyahu likewise was worried about the future of his society in which people pretended that war was peace.
He rightly warned the Jewish people of impending disaster that - given prevalent social injustice their leaders were complacently ignoring while offering false reassurances of “shalom” - was sure to strike. In our day many self-inflicted wounds caused by wrongs Jews have committed against each other threaten our collective security, but I believe that right now the danger to our survival is greater from external enemies than from intra-communal conflict.
There can be no refu’ah shelemah - no refu’at hanefesh urfu’at haguf / “healing of spirit and healing of flesh” - for the Jewish people as long as the healing profession itself is being hijacked by those trying, as Orwell might have put it, to toss Jewish peoplehood down the “memory hole.”8
https://files.libcom.org/files/1984.pdf , p. 142
As of the January, 2023 date of this article, that professor, Lara Sheehi, was “president-elect of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology, a division of the American Psychological Association.” / https://standwithus.com/news/george-washington-university-professor-accused-of-anti-semitism-says-zionism-is-a-mental-illness/ Note also this headline: “The psychology of denial: American Psychological Association struggles to confront antisemitism in its ranks.”https://jewishinsider.com/2025/07/american-psychological-association-antisemitism-jewish-israel/
https://dn721902.ca.archive.org/0/items/cpa-palestine-and-psychiatry-zine/CPA Palestine and Psychiatry Zine.pdf
https://files.libcom.org/files/1984.pdf , p. 21