Gabor Maté Used To Be A Zionist, Here's What Changed His Mind

As a Jew, Gabor Maté explains what he saw in occupied Palestinian territories when visiting.

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Throughout human history, we have always changed our minds about things in the long run. But in the short term, it can be a lot harder. So while we are capable of changing our minds in the short term, what does it take?

I would suggest a willingness to do so, curiosity, a sense of safety in the body, and good faith (being fair as we explore). All key ingredients in my teachings around Embodied Sensemaking.

What does it look like when we don’t employ those qualities?

We call people names when they disagree with us. We refuse to include pertinent facts in our narrative and instead sweep them under the rug as if they don’t exist. We ignore the fact that our body sends a signal of resistance and defence (clenching and twisting), which shapes the cognitive bias we enter into - all while pretending we’re being objective.

These are just a few layers of what occurs. We can also mention ideology, echo chambers, algorithms etc.

With Embodied Sensemaking the invitation is to settle the body, notice it, pay attention to where resistance comes in, and get curious about why it’s there so we can stay at the table and make sense in good faith - with honest true curiosity. This helps us steer clear or be aware of our cognitive bias, and keep going. It helps us stay in a connected and curious mode, vs. a defensive and attacking mode.

Ya, it takes work, but it’s our birthright to feel and explore this way. Our culture is so divorced from our natural self and we are so cognitively oriented that we’ve lost sight of how to make sense more deeply. It’s probably been like this for thousands of years. We kill each other, burn books, and hide information just to hold onto the old or maintain power.

Book burning during the English Revolution of the mid 1600’s.

All of this leads to what I want to point to regarding an important and controversial subject - the Israel and Palestine conflict and the Israeli government’s current genocide of the Palestinian people.

Gabor’s Shift

Gabor Maté is a Canadian doctor who has spent several decades focused on nervous system health and trauma. As a result, he sees personal illness, behavior, conditions, syndromes, etc. in a different—more complex way— that looks at what drives these things rather than judging them as bad or wrong.

The complexity of his thinking, willingness to look at deeper layers, and attunement to himself and emotions in the process help him look at tough things in a more meaningful light to make sense of them.

As I have suggested via Embodied Sensemaking, this process of exploring what drives us doesn’t have to stay stuck in clinical settings, it can be applied to how we make sense of our history, society, and future. This is the entire thesis of my work with Collective Evolution. But it takes some skill building to truly do it.

In the clip below, Maté describes his history of being a Jewish Zionist, and how that changed over time and through experience and gaining greater perspective.

This clip is a reminder for us to stay humble and ask: when it comes to any situation we feel so strongly about, what would it take for us to change our mind about it? If we can’t name something, it might mean we hold the idea too tightly. Further, if we want another to be open to changing their mind about it, how might we approach it?

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Transcript

“I was one of the Zionists. I grew up places a young adolescent and into my late teens early 20s really believing that dream of the Jewish state. And of course, missing from that dream was the nightmare that was being inflicted on our Palestinians to create that Jewish dream.

As somebody already said, there was no way to create an exclusive national state for one people when there was another people already living there. So all the cruelty and all the dispossession, it had to happen and it did happen. And at that time it was justified as “well we were so hurt we were fighting for our survival.” OK if that was ever true, and I no longer agree with that point of view, if it was ever true it's certainly not true now.

After the first Intifada, I visited the Palestinian territories I cried every day for two weeks that I had actually bought into this nightmare because even then it was horrible the cruelties the daily brutalities of the occupation. The injustice of it. The sheer effrontery that I as a Jew born in Hungary could land in Tel Aviv airport tomorrow and claim citizenship where some Palestinian who was born there had ancestors rooted in there and they can't even visit as a refugee. The sheer injustice of it.

I travelled around the Palestinian territories with the medical delegation these days when demonstrators in Hong Kong throw stones at the police or demonstrators in Myanmar use slingshots against the army the New York Times celebrates them. When Palestinians throw stones at the police they're criminals whose army is justified to suppress.

I have something in my hand here I'm gonna knock it on the table. This is one of these so called “rubber bullets” that I picked up in the occupied territories that was shot at the heads of Palestinian kids. Rubber bullet? It’s metal encased in sheer plastic. So this is how fair that fight is.

When something like the current situation happens what people never hear about is the daily background. Daily, Palestinians are marching to the border demanding the right to return.

Now tell me, if I have the right to return having been born in Budapest with my ancestors maybe 2000 years ago having lived in the Middle East, why don't the Palestinians have the right to return? But when Palestinians demonstrate peacefully and they are shot and killed, their deaths are not even recorded in the newspapers here.

So my heart really hurts when I see this happen and people say “You support the Palestinians, you’re a Hamas supporter.” No you're not. But Hamas is nothing compared to the terrorism of the Israeli government. We're talking about a government capable of killing 20,000 civilians in Lebanon in 1982 and then we complain about Palestinian terrorism?

So what's lacking in this conversation is a complete lack of perspective. One does not have to support the policies of Hamas in order to stand up against this injustice. Nor does one have to support the policies of anybody to admire the resilience of the Palestinian people.”