In the hushed, penumbral interiors of late 1970s Europe, Polish Swiss psychologist Alice Miller crystallized a chilling chronicle of the human soul, uncovering a truth that the modern world remains desperate to suppress.
She realized that the most profound expressions of human evil are rarely the products of innate malice, but are instead the tragic harvest of deep emotional suffocation.
This phenomenon, which Miller termed “the Drama of the Gifted Child,” describes the authentic self’s surrender to the dictates of parental expectation.
In this drama, a child endowed with an uncanny sensitivity to their caregivers’ needs learns to negate their own interior reality to ensure their survival. To protect against the abyss of abandonment, the child constructs a “false self” – an impressive psychological fortress of excellence, power, and perceived invulnerability.
The price of this structural brilliance is the strangulation of a tear that was never permitted to fall. Today, Miller’s insights transcend the clinical setting, offering an exacting lens through which to view our national and regional pathologies.
What the Middle East has effectively become is an expansive waiting room of victims who have transitioned into executioners.
These are nations that, having endured profound historical trauma, have donned an armor of steel, missiles, and ossified ideologies. They inhabit a reactive shell that attempts to externalize an internal hemorrhage, preferring to set their world ablaze rather than confront the frightened child in the mirror.
This is the bleeding armor: a state where pain is weaponized as a driving force and defense is indistinguishable from destructive aggression.
Israel and the “false self”
Cast as the Middle East’s gifted child, Israel emerged as a nation defined by an extraordinary, almost desperate, alertness. Its identity was forged to satisfy two demanding parental figures: a Western world into whose ranks it yearned to be admitted, and the haunting memory of the vulnerable Diaspora Jew.
This was a psychological rectification gone wrong, seeking to bury the ashes of the past beneath the persona of the invincible Sabra.
Israel developed a facade of impenetrable technological prowess, presenting itself as the Start-Up Nation characterized by a security-focused arrogance that masked a core of existential anxiety. We built a flowering garden in the desert, convinced we had reached the end of history.
The rupture of October 7, 2023, particularly within the ruins of Kibbutz Be’eri, marked the catastrophic shattering of this false self. Be’eri risks becoming our modern Karbala – the Iraqi site of old, where the drama of omnipotence collapsed under the boots of chaos.
In those moments, the child who believed itself all-powerful was suddenly rendered defenseless within the clinical coldness of the safe room, hunted and exposed.
Within this wreckage, the impulse to forge a new, even thicker armor of rage has been sown; yet, there also exists a precarious window for the construction of a mature identity – one that no longer requires the denial of its own fragility to exist in sovereignty.
The Shi’ite mirror: The society of the oppressed
Across the border, the Iranian-Shi’ite system reflects this same pattern of identity rooted in trauma and grandiosity. The Shi’ite ethos is anchored in the concept of al-Mustadh‘afin – the society of the oppressed.
This narrative draws its lifeblood from the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD, where the massacre of Hussein ibn Ali established a foundational myth of eternal victimhood.
The 1979 Islamic Revolution successfully appropriated this ancient sense of grievance, transforming the cry of the oppressed into the roar of a predatory lion.
For the regime in Tehran, nuclear ambition and regional expansion serve as a grandiose false self – an artificial compensation for a deep-seated sense of historical inferiority.
Rather than healing the wound of Karbala, the regime perpetuates it, using the sanctification of suffering as fuel for perpetual war and a destructive cult of death.
The warning: Preventing an ‘Israeli ta’ziyeh’
As a researcher of the Shi’ite soul, I must offer a stark warning against the adoption of these psychological patterns into the Israeli spirit.
We must remain vigilant against the transformation of October 7 into an Israeli Karbala – a myth of eternal victimhood that feeds an endless cycle of vengeance.
In Shi’ite culture, the grief of Karbala is institutionalized through the rituals of ta’ziyeh, which turn suffering into an existential essence.
Israel must refuse the creation of a local ta’ziyeh that sanctifies the wound rather than the solution. Turning pain into a new armor of rage is a psychological trap of the highest order.
If we allow October 7 to become the sole justification for our national existence, we will be sucked into a loop where the past is not a memory shaping the future, but a bleeding wound dictating acts of self-destruction.
The path to healing: Mourning as an act of sovereignty
National healing demands a fundamental cognitive shift: the conversion of reactive anxiety into mature mourning.
While anxiety is a primitive survival mechanism that triggers outbursts of rage, mourning is a courageous acknowledgment of loss.
We must agree to mourn for Be’eri and for our shattered national euphoria, not as a pretext for the next conflict, but as a catalyst for its resolution.
This requires relinquishing the seductive, yet paralyzing, status of being the only victim in the room. True sovereignty is not found in an imagined immunity from suffering, but in the solemn responsibility of managing it.
A society that cannot mourn remains trapped in a childish state, governed by the impulse for revenge. When we agree to mourn the child we thought we were – the invulnerable and omnipotent child – we no longer need to suppress the other to feel secure.
A path to peace: A dialogue of scars
Genuine peace will not emerge from the signing of cold, technocratic contracts, but from a dialogue of scars.
This vision requires a leadership that possesses the fortitude to lay down its false self – to reject the empty promises of total victory or divine redemption – and stand before both its people and its enemies in recognition of shared pain.
What this constitutes is a rejection of grandiose myths in favor of a simple, human reality. A dialogue of scars does not ignore the history of violence; rather, it views those scars as the only honest starting point for a future.
It requires the moral courage to recognize that the enemy is also a victim of the same historical drama of negation.
Peace will arrive when national identity is no longer defined through the prism of war, but through the capacity to build from the ruins.
Conclusion: Laying down the bleeding armor
Ultimately, we must return to the child. The transition from lethal drama to lived reality requires us to relinquish the bleeding armor and look at the wounded child on the other side of the fence.
On a human and emotional level, when we dare to peer past the steel, we discover that the child of the other is, in many ways, similar to ourselves in their fears and wounds.
This recognition is not an admission of weakness; it is the ultimate source of moral strength and true sovereignty.
Redemption does not reside in the weight of the sword, but in the grace required to let tears flow without turning them into blood. Only when the tear is permitted to fall can we choose life and exit the cycle of destruction.
The writer, a PhD, is an expert on Iranian culture and religion and is a member of the Bama Tova organization.