In Fratricide in the Holy Land, Avner Falk explores the psychology underlying the Arab–Israeli conflict. In twelve chapters he addresses the unconscious role of the nation as a mother, defensive group narcissism, historical hurts, narcissistic injury, denial, projection, splitting, externalization, and lack of empathy as major processes that shed light on the conflict and explain the behavior of each side.

“Reality is in the eye of the beholder”—the title of the second chapter—is a major idea in the book. Israel's “independence” day is for Palestinians “naqba” (disaster) day; likewise the terrorist for the Israelis is a freedom fighter for Palestinians. Based on Freud's idea of the compulsive repetition of past trauma, each side conceptualizes the present reality according to its own his trauma. Accordingly, Jews are haunted by the Shoah and the Palestinians by the naqba.

In chapter 3 Falk analyzes the behavior of Ariel Sharon based on his childhood experiences. He claims that Sharon's parents have “difficult characters” (p. 37) and caused chronic tension with their Arab neighbors, which brought about the boy's social ostracism and humiliation by his friends. His mother Vera was “aggressive, suspicious, and rigid” (p. 39). She was either a volcano of rage or cold and remote. Ariel felt that she did not love him and that she was living in another world (p. 41). Ever since, he engaged in a series of continuous wars. “It is not an accident that Ariel Sharon became a warrior…War—both within his family and outside it—permeated his early life” (p. 39). Falk describes Sharon's character as emotionally unstable. He can be nice and smiling, but he can also display uncontrollable outbursts of rage, a trait that characterizes people with borderline personality disorder (pp. 47–48). In addition, Sharon is described as a person who tends to deny, project, and externalize responsibility (p. 59) and who displays obsessive and narcissistic perfectionism (p. 63).

Sharon experienced a series of personal losses (his first wife and son) but, Falk contends, was not able to mourn. Falk claims that Sharon has engaged in military action as a substitution for mourning, following Fornari (1974), who analyzed such behavior as “the paranoid elaboration of mourning.”

In chapter 4 Falk turns to Yasir Arafat. He attributes many of Arafat's characteristics to his mother's death when he was age four, then to Arafat's father's rejection, when he sent young Arafat to his maternal uncle in Jerusalem. Here, Falk has adopted psychological analyses produced by other Israeli scholars. Some have claimed that Palestine replaced Arafat's idealized lost mother (Kimhi & Even, 2003, pp. 365–67), and others claimed that Jerusalem and Palestine became the idealized good mother while Israel took the role of the hated parents (Hart, 1994, p. 77). Arafat's personal feelings merged in his unconscious with the collective Palestinian Arab feeling of humiliation and victimization. He unconsciously displaced his painful private feelings onto the “cruel Israelis” who had “kicked the poor Palestinian Arabs out of their homes” (p. 85). Although this explanation seems reasonable from a psychoanalytical perspective, it undermines and denies objective reason, such as the occupation and the Israeli aggression that made many Palestinians, who typically adopt a collective identity, and regardless of their childhood, enlist for the Palestinian cause and against the occupation.

In chapters 5 through 8 Falk claims that both Palestinians and Jews harbor deep narcissistic injuries and are traumatized survivors and refugees (p. 90). Each side lives in a different psychological reality fixated on its own historical hurts, losses, and injuries. Demonizing and denying the humanity of the other is described as a major defense mechanism used by each side to justify aggression against the other. Splitting, projection, and externalization are other defenses that may explain the behavior and attitude of each side in the conflict. Despite the interesting analysis of the psychology of the two sides, the author at times conveys the impression that he assumes a priori symmetry between two sides where one is occupier, the other occupied.

In chapter 9 Falk elaborates on the idea of loss and claims that because the two sides have not mourned their historical loss, they are therefore stuck in the past. In his opinion “the inability to mourn is a key psychological factor in the Arab–Israeli conflict” (p. 134). He again assumes symmetry, despite the fact that the Holocaust was not perpetrated by the Palestinians whereas the naqba was by the Israelis—in this case Palestinians react to the direct and present oppressor (Israelis), whereas Israelis, according to this notion, displace their attitudes to their oppressor (Nazis) onto Palestine and Palestinians. The problem with describing the two sides as mutual victims of their losses is that no one is then responsible for his aggression toward the other.

In chapters 10 through 12 Falk analyzes the worldviews that determine each side's attitudes and behavior. He emphasizes honor and Islam in the Arab mind and the Jews' sense of historical helplessness that makes them long for the Land of Israel as an infant longs for its great, good mother. In an attempt to explain the extreme Jewish right wing, he writes, “Those who feel damaged or incomplete within themselves try to make themselves whole by expanding their motherland, with which they unconsciously identify” (pp. 175–76). In his conclusion, Falk takes issue with rationalist scholars who claim that the conflict has objective historical reasons.

In my opinion, the debate between the rational and psychological explanations should not be in terms of either/or, but rather both/and. The Arab–Israeli conflict is too complicated to be understood based on only one level of processes. Of course, there are objective historical facts and these facts are perceived differently among Arabs and Jews. At the same time it is too simplistic to claim that each side has its own psychology of loss, denial, and externalization while denying the fact of Israeli occupation. Within this objective asymmetric reality the two psychological realities are also asymmetric, and both the objective historical reality as well as the psychological realities should be considered.

This book is very interesting, clearly written, and organized; it challenges the rational explanation of the conflict and provokes new thoughts and attitudes. It is a valuable contribution to theories of conflict resolution and group psychology, and it is recommended for politicians and students of political and social sciences.