On Projection, Orientalism, and the West's Dislocation From Itself
In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a spiteful elderly man finally reveals why he has long hated a certain person. He admits, rudely and without regret, “I played him a dirty trick. Ever since then, I have hated him.”
In other words, it’s not the other man that he hates, it is himself.
Psychological projection as we understand it today derives from the work of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who defined it as an unconscious process of disowning our own negative characteristics, or “shadow,” and offloading them onto someone else.
This means we move through the world without really knowing ourselves, seeing in others all our own unacknowledged faults. This process, said Jung, occurs on an individual level, on a community level, and on a national level.
Once seen, projection cannot be unseen as you become aware of just how fundamentally it shapes our society, our world, and our everyday personal interactions.
In recent months, I have watched with significant interest as the Gaza genocide has led more and more people to notice the role projection plays in the Western state. Take, for example, the currently ubiquitous phrase that, when it comes to the claims of the Israeli state, “every accusation is a confession.”
Two such accusations that Israel has long levelled at Palestinians are that Palestinians use “human shields,” and that they co-opt UN buildings, hospitals, and schools. Spoiler: Israeli soldiers have been repeatedly found engaging in both these acts, in the West Bank as well as in Gaza.
And last week, this tweet appeared in my Instagram feed:
Now, I’m not here to defend Hamas. I recognise their existence is a response, and yes a resistance, to Israel’s Occupation and siege. And I also see they have governed Gaza in an austere, theocratic manner that adds – not causes but adds – to the hardships inflicted on Palestinians.
But that’s neither here nor there for the purposes of this piece and I tell you this only so you know where my perspective lies.
It is true that had Hamas acted in this manner, this would certainly be the outcome. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers have not stopped at merely sharing footage of themselves frolicking in the lingerie of displaced and killed Palestinian women. They also upload footage of themselves gleefully torturing Palestinian prisoners.
And we are left scratching our heads, wondering if we are living in a completely different reality as the response of Western politicians is to ignore all of this and instead demonise anti-war protestors, ban keffiyehs, and condemn Palestinian resistance slogans.
Aside from the obvious responses such as racism and imperialism, how is it that our leaders see only the pain of their Jewish constituents – both real pain and perceived – and why does Israel get away with boasting about its own (war) crimes even as it boasts about “the world’s most moral army”?
In 1990, British historian and postcolonial theorist, Robert Young, published a landmark text challenging the West’s Eurocentrism and approach to history. This book, White Mythologies, includes an influential critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism.
Young is critical of Said’s work and sometimes this veers into nit-picking. For example, he says that Said contradicts himself by categorising Orientalism into two types: manifest and latent. To Said, latent Orientalism refers to the implicit, unchanging worldview that the West is superior to Islam and Arabs, and manifest Orientalism is the various, explicit forms that Orientalism takes. Young thinks that Said doesn’t explain how Orientalism can both change and stay the same. However, Said is clear that what is unchanging is the assumption of superiority and what changes is the action informed by this assumption. This can take the form of violence, or a paternalistic desire to “save” the Arab, or even the simple act of dressing like a native Arab while policing the separation of East and West.
But Young also presents an impressive argument in claiming that Said has overlooked a crucial aspect about Orientalism – that it was not just a misrepresentation of the East, but was also, in fact, a case of Jungian projection.
“[The] creation of the Orient, if it does not really represent the East, signifies the West’s own dislocation from itself, something inside that is presented, narrativized as being outside.”
The Orientalist fantasy is one where the West sees itself in an existential battle, a clash of civilisations even, with Islam and the Arabs. What Young adds to Said’s thesis is that this fantasy does not represent an external dualism between East and West but is in fact an inner battle: the West is at war with itself.
Carl Jung acknowledged that the West had a lot of work to do when it came to atoning for its colonial sins:
“Quite apart from the barbarities and blood baths perpetrated by the Christian nations amongst themselves throughout European history, the European has also to answer for all the crimes he has committed against the coloured races during the process of colonization. In this respect the white man carries a very heavy burden indeed.”
In other words, until the West is willing to withdraw its projections fuelled by the guilt and shame of colonialism, it will remain in a state of internal as well as external conflict.
The sad reality is, for all the harrowing images coming out of Gaza, the statistics of casualties, the bombed-out mosques, churches, homes, and schools, and for all the cries of countless orphaned children and bereaved parents, nothing seems to propel a meaningful difference to foreign policy.
The reason for this is not only because Palestinians are not white and because the West covets its land and resources. It is also because the Gaza genocide is the culmination of centuries of colonialism and millennia of antisemitism. No pain or punishment visited on the Palestinian people will ever be enough because the West is yet to consciously realise that what Palestine represents is within itself.
Europe has never meaningfully answered for the Holocaust or for its entrenched antisemitism. The Nazis were defeated, Germany was divvied up between communism and capitalism, Israel was created on the ruins of Palestinian villages and cities, and the world (thought it had) moved on.
Now, Europe is forcing Palestinians to answer on its behalf. In Jungian terms, Palestinians represent the Western dark shadow, its violent, merciless side that it refuses to admit to and foists upon Arabs so that it need not deal with its own guilt.
For those Israelis and, globally, those Jewish Zionists, not yet able to reconcile the trauma of the Holocaust and the European antisemitism that led to it, it seems to me that Palestinians act as a stand-in for Europe, an opportunity for revenge and victory and a chance to rewrite history.
This, I believe, is why Israelis insist on uploading those damning videos. They want a Western audience, they need a Western audience to witness this, because it is the West that is the real subject of this misdirected violence.
The mockery of Palestinians, the torture, the cruel notes scribbled on missiles, the attacks on aid trucks, the cheers as bombs hit their targets: all of these are a kind of belated vengeance on Europe even as Israel colludes with the West to project all of Europe’s sins onto Palestinians.
This is also why the colonisation of Palestine is both reminiscent of and at the same time unlike any other case of Western imperialism. Never before in its history has the West been so at war with its own conscience. And until this inner conflict is addressed, the West will never face what it is really doing in Palestine.
That it played Palestinians a dirty trick, and ever since then it has hated them.
Thank you for writing and sharing this
A great piece Ruby.