Stern: A film that casts light on Israel's early history and its 'dark side'
The idea of the shadow is now a ubiquitous trope in popular culture. This is evident in our familiarity with expressions such as "the dark side" or the idea of having "demons within".
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung developed this concept in the early 20th century, dividing consciousness into what one allows oneself to express in day-to-day life and what one keeps hidden from view, often involuntarily.
The shadow is the repository of undesirable impulses and everything that can undermine the image a person or society presents to the world.
In his essay Wotan, Jung describes the German nation becoming possessed by the spirit of long-denied destructive qualities that finally erupted through the figure of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi movement.
Watching the ongoing genocide in Gaza, one cannot help but think about Jung's theories and the psychological mechanisms requisite to the frenzy of death and destruction inflicted on Palestinians.
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What strange spirit has possessed those who release a hail of bullets on a six-year-old child trapped in a car, murder journalists and unleash attack dogs on disabled and elderly people?
The past often contains repressed instincts and memories, which is why so much psychotherapy focuses on childhood introspection.
Is that where this current destructive spirit resides and can casting a light help bring Israel's shadow to the surface?
My friend and colleague, filmmaker Hossam Sarhan, is the lamp bearer in this instance.
His documentary film Stern, which he produced for Al Jazeera, explores Israel's "dark side" - one it prefers buried in history but which reappears frequently in the creation of the terrorist Palestinian "other" and its ruthless military campaigns in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
The documentary centres on Avraham Stern, founder of the Stern Gang, a splinter group of the Zionist Irgun militia known for its hatred of the British occupation of Mandatory Palestine.
Stern, a Polish immigrant who moved to Palestine in the 1920s, advocated for increased Jewish migration and the expulsion of the "foreign" British presence from what he considered Jewish land.
His hatred towards the British was so intense that he was willing to negotiate an alliance with the Nazis to expel them from the mandate.
Stern's militia attacked British and rival Jewish targets even as the Second World War raged on. Other Zionist factions, such as the Irgun and Haganah, had instituted a moratorium on attacks against the British while they fought the Nazis.
After a series of deadly bank robberies and shoot-outs, the mandatory authorities caught up with Stern, capturing and killing him in 1942 at the age of 34.
At the time, his actions were a source of embarrassment to the Zionist movement, and the Haganah went as far as hunting down members of his group.
How is it, then, that Stern is remembered as a freedom fighter in Israel, with postage stamps issued in his honour and a village named after him?
Unwanted truths
Evident among some of the film's Israeli interviewees is a feeling of discomfort with inconvenient truths and the possibility that the heroes of the Zionist movement may have had a "darker side".
This denial necessitates the rehabilitation of even those willing to collaborate with Nazis.
There is an acceptance among them that Stern did violent things, but always within the context of the greater good.
Stern's son Yair, for example, plays down his father's overtures to the Nazis as an insignificant episode aimed at helping save Jews in Europe.
He argues that Stern could not have known about the Holocaust, as the Nazis had not formalised their mass killing of Europe’s Jews until shortly before the elder Stern's death.
Yair even dismisses confessions by Stern gang members of their efforts to collaborate with Nazis on the basis of possible duress during interrogation by the Haganah.
Put succinctly, there was never any real intent to act immorally; if there was, it was exaggerated or missing the point.
Of course, Stern is just one example of a Zionist figure rehabilitated after the establishment of Israel.
The late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's Irgun militia was responsible for the King David Hotel bombing in 1946, which killed 91 people - including British officials, Arabs and Jews.
Despite its culpability, the Irgun was absorbed into the Israeli army after the establishment of an Israeli state. Its crimes against civilian Arabs and even Jews were erased from the record or reluctantly accepted as a necessity of an independence struggle.
Both the willingness of Zionists to collaborate with the Nazis and kill civilians are unwanted truths that have no place in Israel’s national self-image.
But while willful forgetfulness and sympathetic reinterpretation can leave unsavoury episodes out of the narrative, history never disappears and neither does the underlying behaviour that causes shame and discomfort.
The inclusion of Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in the film is particularly poignant in this regard.
In works such as The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappe has exposed truths that Israel would prefer to keep buried.
The "uncovered" truth in Pappe's book reveals that the expulsion of Palestinians during the Nakba was a deliberate and coordinated effort organised by the most senior Zionist leaders, who subsequently replaced this reality with their own myth of Jewish survival against a foreign Arab onslaught.
Pappe's reminder in the film that Stern must have been aware of the years of Nazi persecution of Jews before his contact with them is a sharp rebuke of attempts to downplay that aspect of his legacy.
In Jungian psychology, the shadow is expressed in its most destructive forms when it is not integrated into an individual or society’s self-perception. An inability to accept our own violent and "dark" past results in the displacement of these unwanted traits on to others.
In the case of Israel, this other is the Palestinian.
It is the Palestinian who cuts deals with dark forces, not a freedom fighter like Avraham Stern.
It is the Palestinian who usurps land that does not belong to him, not the settler.
It is the Palestinian who blows up buildings, not the Irgun or the Israeli army.
It is the Palestinian who rapes, not the Israeli soldier.
The basis of any confrontation with the past is honesty, and if Israel is unwilling or incapable of approaching its history sincerely, the truth will exist irrespective.
Stern is available to watch on Al Jazeera English from 12 August.
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