David Gerbi
The violent pogrom of October 7 was a new trauma in the history of the Jewish people. Since 1948, with the birth of the State of Israel, there had been no massacre of Jewish civilians of such scale, both in terms of numbers and cruelty. For those who may have already forgotten, I would like to remind that in a single day the terrorist organization Hamas massacred 1,200 innocent and defenceless people—Israelis and foreigners, Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Entire families were devastated, women were repeatedly raped, children were burned, and the young people attending a festival celebrating life, peace, and love were mowed down by machine guns. Two hundred and forty people were taken hostage, paraded like trophies through the streets of Gaza amid crowds cheering. Even lifeless bodies were targeted and desecrated.
International solidarity with Israel lasted only briefly. When Israel acted to neutralize Hamas—who continued to launch missiles and refused to release hostages—it was widely condemned.
Hamas initiated the war with the massacre on October 7, fully aware that it would trigger an Israeli reaction. In an unacceptable inversion of reality, the world judged Israel the aggressor and Palestinians the victims.
Following this, fueled by antisemitic propaganda, a global media pogrom erupted, spilling into streets and universities. Scientific conferences, art exhibitions, musical and sporting events were boycotted—intended to delegitimize the very existence of the State of Israel.
It wasn’t difficult to ignite this hatred, because for centuries it has simmered beneath the surface, always ready to resurface. We, Jews, are accepted only in the role of victims, and if we respond to aggression, we are condemned. We are the only people denied the right to defend ourselves, because the world hates the Jew who fights; it prefers the Jew who suffers. We are denied the possibility of freeing ourselves from this role of victims; we must demand recognition of our right to exist and to self-defense. Every Jew must have the right to live in safety, in Israel as well as anywhere else in the world. Today, to those who wish our death, I answer with the words of Golda Meir: “I prefer your condemnation to your condolences.”
I am aware that all that is happening brings mourning and suffering to both the Israeli and the Palestinian peoples. I feel deep sorrow for the Palestinians. Ending the war would be simple: release the hostages and stop launching missiles. However, Hamas’s ideology invokes martyrdom and has no regard for life, sowing hate and considering the sacrifice of Palestinian lives as necessary to achieve its sole aim: the destruction of the State of Israel. Its communication strategy has proved extraordinarily effective; they have succeeded in turning bloodthirsty terrorists in the collective imagination into celebrated revolutionaries, emulated as martyrs for freedom, simply because their enemy is Israel—the quintessential Jew.
The issue of collective, archetypal anti-Jewish hatred remains unresolved. No other conflict in the world is scrutinized as Israel’s is; the suffering of other peoples is not met with the same empathy shown to the Palestinian people. Meanwhile, people conveniently forget that Hamas used funds intended for the welfare of Palestinians to build an extensive underground tunnel network and to purchase missiles and other weapons—using schools and hospitals as arms depots with the complicity of UNRWA, using innocent civilians as human shields, and suppressing any dissent with death under its dictatorial regime. Hamas’s goal is not to bring happiness and prosperity to the Palestinian people, but to destroy Israel. With better leadership, Gaza could have become another Mediterranean jewel—a small but flourishing enclave with a promising future. Instead, the sight of the ruins of Gaza and the Palestinians who have died breaks my heart. The masses of displaced Israelis and Palestinians who cannot return home, living in fear and uncertainty about the future, trouble and sadden me.
Since October 7, feelings of grief, anguish, shock, and helplessness are common among Jews everywhere. Each of us experiences these emotions differently, according to our personal history.
I am one of the 800,000 Jewish refugees from North Africa and the Middle East: Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Libya. In these Muslim countries, we lived under Sharia law as dhimmis—second-class citizens—forced to flee to save our lives when Jews dared defend themselves and assert their presence on the international stage. No one took to the streets or universities to defend us. We Jewish refugees received no support or assistance from any United Nations organization, unlike Palestinian refugees for whom UNRWA was specifically created. We are “the refugees” because we did not make enough noise. We did not shout our grievances. We did not become terrorists because it is not our nature. Instead, we invested time and energy in the honest work of rebuilding our lives, contributing to the development of the few countries that welcomed us.
But this is the time to make our voices heard. Very few know our history of persecution, flight, and exile, our suffering, our difficult uphill struggle to rebuild new lives in new countries. We were stateless, deprived of our dignity and possessions. While the world lamented the fate of Palestinians, no one bothered to recount our stories or reflect on the abuses and traumas we endured.
I arrived in Rome in 1967 and I am grateful to Italy, which welcomed our community of 5,000 Jewish Libyan refugees. Today I am an Italian citizen; I grew up in a climate of freedom and democracy, I worked from the age of twelve, and I studied to become a psychoanalyst, finally healing my own refugee trauma. And yet, in recent months, I have witnessed once again—here in Italy, as in Tripoli in 1967—Arab demonstrators shouting the same hatred, “Edbah El Yahud” (“Massacre the Jews…”). I was appalled. How can I again be a witness and victim of Arab hatred in a democratic country like Italy? How is that possible?
My latent trauma from the anti-Jewish uprising I experienced as a twelve-year-old in Libya resurfaces abruptly. The memory is quite vivid.
It was June 5, 1967; war had broken out between Israel and the Arab countries. I hear the mob’s furious chants outside our home: “Edbah El Yahud”—“massacre the Jew, massacre the Jew.” We are hiding, in total silence to avoid detection. Six children and our parents, alone, shutters closed, stifling heat, very little food: 40 days and 40 nights. I relive the terror of being killed, as sadly happened to many Jews who couldn’t return home before the pogrom began. Flashbacks to the torched homes and shops of Jews fill my mind. I remember the smoke filling the streets; I see the haze through the shutters, I smell the suffocating odor of the burning building across from us. I recall my parents’ faces: calm toward us children but full of anguish, fear, helplessness, and faith in God.
After days of endless anxiety and uncertainty, we were granted salvation: a swift escape with one suitcase and 20 pounds per family. We had to leave our homeland, our possessions, our cemeteries, which were later desecrated by the construction of highways—cemeteries that held the victims of the 1945, 1948, and 1967 pogroms.
Just like October 7: burned homes, men, women, and children massacred, pregnant women disemboweled. One hundred ninety-three dead, including my relatives. The roots of this conflict are far too familiar to me: an ideology that, for generations, has sought to oppress, marginalize, and eliminate the Jewish minority in the Middle East and North Africa. The current violence perpetrated by Hamas is the latest manifestation of this fanatic, extremist, terrorist ideology.
Since October 7, 2023, my life has once again changed; my sleep is no longer peaceful as before, and my subconscious asserts itself more forcefully through dreams.
On February 19, 2024, I had a dream. In the dream, a single sentence appeared in English: “We hate the Jews. I am Jewish, why do you hate me?” I woke up soaked in sweat, the question pulsing in my temples: why have Jews been hated, persecuted, expelled, killed, and humiliated in every era? First by Pharaohs, then by Babylonians, then by Romans. Titus’s troops looted and destroyed the Second Temple of Jerusalem.
You can still see, carved on the Arch of Titus, the sacred menorah carried on the shoulders of defeated Jews into Rome. The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE marked the beginning of the diaspora—the dispersion of a people without a homeland, at the mercy of the whims of their rulers, exiles who for two thousand years directed their prayers toward Jerusalem, to the Temple, the holiest site for Judaism, despite the fact that only the Western Wall—the Wailing Wall—remains. Two thousand years of expulsions and persecutions, accusations and pogroms, all based on lies about killing Christ and poisoning wells, Jews portrayed as greedy usurers, power‑hungry pursuers, and child murderers. Jews have always been demonized, excluded, and persecuted. We are the “other” above all. This age‑old hate toward Jews culminated in the Holocaust, leaving six million dead and entire communities lost forever.
The list of persecutions, expulsions, and genocides is staggeringly long, yet despite everything, survivors have always managed to rise again. But such a painful past has left wounds deeply embedded in the Jewish collective unconscious. In response to the tragedy of October 7, I found solace in the Passover song, which recalls the liberation of Jews from slavery in Egypt: Veisheamda—“In every generation, there are those who rise against us to destroy us, and God saves us from their hands.” Thanks to the promise God made to Abraham.
Unfortunately, the victims of wars and persecutions are often paralyzed by trauma, feeling constantly in danger and unable to react, frozen by fear. I grappled with the legacy of my painful past to find answers… As Jung said: “We only transcend what we confront.” We can turn away from what we inherited or face it, hoping to move forward and prevent that trauma from being passed to future generations, causing them pain.
I have decided to abandon the role of victim. I made this decision after reliving my trauma for the first time. On September 11, 2001, watching the Twin Towers engulfed in smoke, I felt weak: the smoke reminded me of the burning houses in front of mine in 1967. That immense pain led me to seek a place far away to retreat, to find inspiration and peace. I could no longer remain silent. I had to tell my story because there is no greater agony than carrying a painful, untold story within oneself.
At Esalen, in California, I wrote every day by the ocean, gradually freeing myself from my burdens, finding the courage to break free from our ancient and deeply rooted culture of silence. That is how my book Builders of Peace: Story of a Jewish Refugee from Libya was born. In Zurich, I met a colleague who, after hearing my story, told me about a place in California—the Esalen Institute. Later, on an anthropological trip in the Venezuelan Amazon, I met a friend who told me about Esalen again, then another friend in Los Angeles mentioned the same place. Then I had a dream about a great bear, I called the institute and asked about it, and they spoke to me about the “Bear Medicine” workshop run by Native Americans. Believing in synchronicity and that everything comes from Jung, I decided to go there for the first time in 1995 and continued every year. Until I realized I should go for a writing workshop (I wasn’t a writer before then) and stay at a nearby place for writers—the Growing Edge—where my book was born and where also the intention to return to Libya took shape exactly one year later. Having completed my book, I imagined that the suffering of persecution, wars, and fears would no longer touch me. I was wrong.
With great bitterness and dismay, I discovered to my sorrow that antisemitism not only resurfaced but, like a virus, is now spreading everywhere—even among my Italian psychoanalyst colleagues. I responded to the October 7 massacre by working on a scientific project between Italy and Israel and was tasked with organizing a conference on trauma and healing in Rome, scheduled for June 9, 2024. After repeated trips to Israel (at my expense) and months of collaborative work, with the program already agreed between Israeli psychoanalysts of NIJA (New Israel Jungian Association) and Italian psychoanalysts of AIPA (Italian Association for Analytical Psychology) and ARPA (Association for Research in Analytical Psychology), my Italian colleagues canceled the conference at the last minute due to the uncomfortable and dangerous presence of Jews and Israelis, postponing it to an unspecified future date without setting a follow-up meeting with me or a specific future date for the conference.
I thank, by contrast, personally and on behalf of the Israeli Psychoanalysts’ Association and LIRPA (Italian Laboratory for Research in Analytical Psychology), which actively, culturally, and spiritually supported the initiative of the conference at the Einaudi Foundation on trauma, which nonetheless took place later. I can only testify to their conduct, consistent with the principle of integrating opposites not only at the individual level, but also collectively among peoples.
My Israeli colleagues were astonished by this reversal. This decision was particularly discouraging considering that the founders of AIPA, Ernst Bernhard and Gianfranco Tedeschi, were Jews. Today, AIPA has only one Jewish member, Alessia Anticoli, who—enthusiastic about the initiative—was profoundly saddened when she discovered why the conference was canceled. Alessia Anticoli was very helpful in curbing antisemitism within the Jung Institute and supported me in creating the new convention. My colleague Barbara Cerminara, an Italian Jew living in the United Kingdom and descendant of Holocaust victims, was also greatly shocked and was very helpful in supporting me in organizing the new convention. I suggested clarifying to my colleagues that this was not about supporting the political and military line of the Israeli government, but about discussing trauma and healing. After the statement—“It was not canceled, only postponed”—I have not received any reply to this day.
What logic is at work here? Certainly not the one advocated by C. G. Jung, who founded all his psychological-analytical thought on the synthesis and overcoming of opposites. The theory of opposites by the Swiss psychoanalyst is based on the principle of inclusion and transcendence of opposites. I wonder: can antisemitism prevail to the detriment of scientific debate, at the expense of research and progress? But we are used to moving forward, and this day—in the prestigious venue of the Einaudi Foundation, with the institutions that supported us and the speakers who honored us with their presence—is concrete proof of that. We will continue to regard culture and research as spaces for dialogue, debate, and reconciliation.
I am a Boneh Shalom, a builder of peace, and believe it is essential to always keep the door open to dialogue, to respect different ethnicities, religions, and identities, especially for the sake of future generations. To those who wish for peaceful coexistence, I answer as Ben Gurion said: “Those who don’t believe in miracles are not realists.”
In light of the history of the Middle East from 1948 to today, the Abraham Accords of September 15, 2020—signed by Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, followed by Morocco and Sudan—represent a gentle miracle already achieved. Allow me to read the opening declaration. It reads: “We, the undersigned, recognize the importance of maintaining and strengthening peace in the Middle East and throughout the world on the basis of mutual understanding and coexistence, as well as respect for human dignity and freedom, including freedom of religion…” This declaration fills us with hope, a major step toward normalizing relations between Israel and Arab countries.
Four years on, the Abraham Accords still represent a beacon of hope for Middle East stability. We all hope for the end of hostilities, the end of suffering, and the resumption of diplomatic efforts toward peaceful and fruitful coexistence between two states, the State of Israel and Palestine. What seems utopian today may become reality tomorrow. This is my commitment as a Jew born in an Arab country, tired of wars, vendettas, and recriminations. The dream of a former refugee who, beyond his own intention, became a fighter for the defense of freedom, democracy, and human rights. I feel Jungian precisely in homage to the projectuality of inclusion instead of division and consequent persecution.
I’ll conclude with a saying from our Torah sages: “Who is the strongest person? He who makes his enemy into his friend.” Shalom! Salam!
David Gerbi
