Gal-On Diagnosed With Pre-1967 Amnesia

There may be hundreds of thousands of Israelis with the condition, which disproportionately affects those of Ashkenazi ancestry.

Meretz Party Chairwoman Zehava Gal-On was informed by neurologists today that she suffers from an inability to process events that occurred prior to June 1967, a party representative said today (Sunday).

Meretz spokesman Akki Bush told reporters that Gal-On had long shown symptoms of the condition, in which violence by Arabs against Israeli Jews is necessarily understood as beginning only with Israel’s pre-emptive attacks on Egyptian airfields in June 1967, which led to a stunning Israeli capture of territory from the hands of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria over the following six days. No awareness or comprehension of Arab violence against Israel as existential opposition to a Jewish state appears in Gal-On’s psyche.

Just this morning, Gal-On had said in an interview on Kol Yisrael radio that the current wave of Palestinian incitement and violence stems from the political stalemate surrounding efforts to end Israel’s control of some of those territories, as opposed to the refusal to accept Israel’s existence, a refusal that long preceded 1967 and continues unabated. As such, Gal-On remains convinced that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be arrived at by resolving the status of the territories seized in 1967, a task for which she says Israel bears primary responsibility.

Doctors examined Gal-On for several hours today, determining that a portion of her cerebrum is apparently structurally incapable of assimilating information pertaining to pre-Six-Day-War events. “We have yet to find a mechanism that explains the specificity with which information is not absorbed into the patient’s memory,” said Professor of Neuroscience Eli Tist of Shiba Hospital at Tel HaShomer. “Ms. Gal-On appears to have no problem retaining data about the 1990’s and the optimistic assumptions of the immediate aftermath of the Oslo Accords, when it seemed possible to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict through limited Israeli concessions. For some unidentified reason, however, she seems to view subsequent events solely through the prism of Oslo, despite its anomalous nature, given the developments in the decades before and since.”

Professor Tist noted that there may be hundreds of thousands of Israelis with the condition, which disproportionately affects those of Ashkenazi ancestry. Statistics indicate a higher risk of developing or inheriting the disorder in North Tel Aviv and certain sections of Haifa. “No demographic appears to be immune, but what little research there is suggests that extensive exposure to the mountain air of Judea and Samaria provides some protection,” he offered.

There is no known treatment proven 100% effective, says neurologist Hedda Perass of Ben Gurion University. “Sometimes these things clear up on their own, but the human brain is notoriously effective at protecting its existing structures to prevent drastic changes that might disrupt everyday functioning,” she explained. “Trauma has, on occasion, reversed such a condition – specifically, trauma perpetrated by certain existential enemies – but almost as often, such events have only made the amnesia more robust and insistent.”