Security
A sense of fear heightens the need for security. This fear may stem from a physical or psychological threat to an individual and their group. Security includes human welfare needs, human rights, physical, emotional, spiritual and economic well being. Security does not only refer to the fear of threat to one’s physical being. It can include the sense of security of the individual’s or collective’s identity, in the present and in the future. The degree of security one needs is a result of fear which is a function of past experiences including traumatic events in an individual’s or group’s past. If an individual or a group feels fear whether because of a physical, mental, or existential stress, they will find it difficult to trust again (Redekop, 2002). The feelings of fear and the resulting needs for security can be communicated through generations and within a collective and even transferred from a real threat or past traumatic experience to another perceived threat. Security needs can even be contradictory. For example, a group may have to trade one type of security such as economic security to guarantee another type of security such as physical.
Both Israelis and Palestinians have very similar security needs with Jews having suffered collective threats in the past and Palestinian security currently being threatened. For Palestinians, the trauma of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) still impacts their collective consciousness (Bekerman & Sonnenschein, 2010). The majority of Palestinians became displaced refugees at this time which still has not been solved. This collective trauma still impacts their culture today with the majority of the descendants of these Palestinians still trying to return to what is today Israel. When Israeli settlers take over a house in East Jerusalem, Palestinians view the act as colonialist expansion to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their native land and a threat to their security.
Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza have been under conditions of active violent conflict at various periods since 1967 with Israeli soldiers conducting raids in populated Palestinian areas searching for combatants. These include house searches where soldiers destroy personal property, shooting at civilians and civilian homes, injuries and deaths of combatants and civilians when the army targets combatants, as well as humiliating treatment at the hands of soldiers (Giacaman, Abu-Rmeileh, Husseini, Saab, & Boyce, 2007).
Israeli Jews and Jews around the world have a collective consciousness related to anti-Jewish violence particularly in Europe. For 2000 years, European Jews at various periods were unable to work in specific professions or live in specific areas, they paid higher taxes, and were attacked, killed, accused of crimes they didn’t commit, culminating in the Holocaust where six million Jews were killed. Jews from around the world carry these traumas with them and view all new potential threats through this lens even if their descendants did not experience these traumas. When a Palestinian kills an Israeli, Israelis view Palestinians as the new anti-Semites who are killing Jews simply for being Jews (Massad, 2000).
While both groups surprisingly share a need for security, the Israeli need is much more acknowledged and evinced by both Israelis and internationally, possibly because of the longer historical need for Israeli security and that Palestinians seem to concentrate on other need satisfiers.