See What You Made Me Do?

See What You Made Me Do?

It has been fifty years since Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Eric Burne wrote his famous  book on Transactional analysis entitled “Games People Play”.  This book made a huge impression on me as it did millions of other people.  Especially the games people play in human interactions around the world that Dr. Burne called “See what you made me do”.

This game of shifting the blame from one’s own actions to the fault of another person is not only played by individual persons, it can be played by entire nation states.  I am struck by the crude and murderous version of the game “See what you made me do” currently being played by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.  He denies any blame for Israel’s part for his obvious decision to kill every man, woman and child in Gaza rather than lift the siege that has been killing them slowly for the last seven years. 

 Unable to leave the territory, to import or sell their goods, to have their very food measured out in how many calories per person they would be allowed, what medicines if any they may be allowed to have, always surveyed by planes and drones,  the people of Gaza have indeed been confined to prison for seven years.  And when prisoners revolt from time to time as prisoners are wont to do, Netanyahu’s solution is simply to kill them.   As the median age of the population of Gaza is just a tad over eighteen years, with forty per cent of the population under fifteen, and as 77 per cent of the population being killed are civilians, this means an awful lot of kids in one small country are being piteously murdered.

 See what they (Hamas) is making  me do, Netanyahu screams to the rest of  the world as he orders more bombs, more rockets, more gun boat fire into Gaza.  A small territory that he has fenced in so that the Palestinians  can’t flee, where the kids can’t get out; the hospitals themselves are bombed, there is no place to hide inside the prison,  the Israelis are pushing them toward the center, toward a kind of mass killing center.  Making him do all this?  Hamas is making him do all this?

  All Netanyahu needs to do to stop this mass murder of children is to lift the damm siege.  He had made Gaza a nightmare for the people by depriving them of the fundamentals of life and dignity.   I say to Netanyahu “Lift the siege, you swine of a man, you traitor to the human race, you are a murdering hypocrite.  Yes, you, Netanyahu.  You are a disgrace to your own race.  It was Jewish thinkers and writers who helped educate me through the years, to whom I looked for knowledge and understanding of the world; writers like Freud, Eric Fromm, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Wilhelm Reich along with numerous others who left behind a rich, keenly intelligent and wonderfully humanistic vision of equally and peace that linger still.  Oh, and I almost forgot… Eric Burne , the founder of Transactional analysis was also a Jew.  I refute the accusation that anyone who criticizes Israel is anti-Semitic.  Jews who kill unnecessarily are the same as non-Jews who kill unnecessarily.  Lift the siege, Benjamin Netanyahu.  Or else the angry grandmothers of all races of the world will “swarm” you in your dreams.