Following Captivity: Interview with recently freed Palestinian captive Bilal Odeh

Following Captivity: Interview with recently freed Palestinian captive Bilal Odeh
Produced by Royah TV

نداء

تعلن الشبكة العالمية الفلسطينية للصحة النفسيّة عن مبادرة للدعم النفسي للاسرى السياسيين في سجون الاحتلال

الذين يعانون من ظروف اسر قاسية واهمال على الصعيد الطبي والطبي النفسي. لذلك نتوجه لزملائنا الاطباء العاملين\ات في مجال الطب  

النفسي بطلب للمشاركة ببناء طاقم عمل مهني لاطباء فلسطينيين متطوعين ومتطوعات للعمل مع الاسرى السياسيين في سجون الاحتلال

"لا تتركوا الحصان وحيدا", لا تتركوا من حمل هم شعبنا على أكتافه

على المعنيين التواصل معنا على صفحة الشبكة

ملاحظة : سيتم اعطاء غطاء قانوني للاطباء والطبيبات. كما وستتكون مجموعة عمل للاطباء للتفكير سويا والمساندة بوجود فريق مهني من الشبكة العالمية الفلسطينية للصحة النفسية ومن اطباء نفسيين اصدقاء للشبكة فيالعالم.

مودتنا

زملاؤكم
في الشبكة الفلسطينية العالمية للصحة النفسية

سلسلة الندوات الحوارية في علم النفس التحرّريّ وسايكولوجية الإنسان المقهور

يوم الاربعاء الموافق ١٥ من اذار ٢٠٢٣
في تمام الساعة السادسة مساءً 18:00

التحرر الحقيقي ليس بالثورة فقط، بل في التحرر من إرث المستعمر

إن المناضل ليدرك في كثير من ألحيان أن عمله لا أن يقاتل القوى العدوة فحسب، بل كذلك حبات اليأس المتبلورة في جسم المستعَمر

فرانز فانون

إن التحليل النفسي التحرري يعمل على التعمق بفهم سيكولوجية ال نسان والجماعة من خلال تفكيك وتحدي وتحدي البنى والنظم الاضطهادية وسياقها النفسي-الاجتماعي -السياسي. كما يؤكد علينا فانون فإن نضالنا في العمل النفسي-السياسي يتطلب التحرر من إرث المستعمر، ومجابهة "حبات اليأس المتبلورة في جسم المستعمر". يأتي حقيقته الذاتية، وبالتالي التحرر من الاستلاب الذي تمارسه عليه المكبوتات النفسية علم النفس النضالي إلى تحرير النسان من خلال استرداد حق القول والكلام وصولاً إلى اكتشاف

من هنا
تدعوكن/م
الشبكة الفلسطينية العالمية للصحة النفسية
لحضور الحوارية التي تستضيف فيه
المفكر العربي والاخصائي النفسي مؤلف
التخلف الاجتماعي: مدخل الى سيكولوجية الإنسان المقهور والإنسان المهدور

ويشرفنا استضافة
البروفيسور مصطفى حجازي

في اللقاء الثالث عشر من سلسلة ندوات علم النفس التحرري الضوء على ترجمات فعلية للنظرية وسيكولوجيا الإنسان المقهور

ويشرفنا استضافة األخصائي االجتماعي الزميل
بلال عودة
ليلقي
الضوء على ترجمات فعلية للنظرية

وذلك في حلقة فكرية تُقام
يوم الاربعاء الموافق ١٥ من اذار ٢٠٢٣ في تمام الساعة
السادسة مساءً (18:00) بتوقيت القدس-فلسطين، على منصة
Zoom

تناقش الحوارية الديناميات النفسيه-الاجتماعيه وراء انهيار العمل الجماعي في المجتماعات المضطهدة - وتهدف إلى التعمق بالترجمات الفعلية للنظرية بواقعنا الفلسطيني، كتراجع عمل النقابات والتنظيمات السياسية والاجتماعية وانهيار المبادرات المجتمعية بعد انطلاقها. كما ستتطرق المداخلة الى طرح سبل ابطال الشعور بالعجز/ واللاحول في عمل المجموعات 

Meeting ID: 867 7902 4111

Passcode: 00000



Targeting an Arab Woman, by Dr. Lara Sheehi

This article appeared in Counterpunch on February 3, 2023

The Complaint
On the evening of January 11, 2023, I checked my university email to find The Washington Free Beacon asking me to “comment on” a Title VI complaint that they had knowledge was to be filed against the George Washington University (GW) by pro-Israel advocacy group StandWithUs the following day. The complaint alleges that GW “discriminated against first-year Jewish and Israeli students in its professional psychology program” (sic). As an Arab woman professor teaching in the United States, I am accustomed to demands to prove that I am not antisemitic as a precondition to engaging relationally. Similarly, as someone who has been involved in abolitionist and anti-oppressive movements in the field of psychology for years, I immediately recognized that I was the next target of choice. In recent years, right-wing advocacy groups have intensified their harassment, red-baiting and attack campaigns, vilifying academics (and clinicians) who critically engage settler-colonialism, white supremacy, anti-blackness, gender (especially trans issues), sexuality, disability, reproductive rights.

StandWithUs’ contrived complaint is a textbook example of how right-wing advocacy groups take advantage of today’s political climate with impunity. They released the complaint to a third-rate Breitbart-wannabe rag before the complaint was filed with the Department of Education. They redacted all names at the university save mine. This unambiguously showed their intention: not to advocate for students, but to manufacture controversy about my scholarship and activism around Palestine.

As the Center for Constitutional Rights has documented, defamation and harassment campaigns by StandWithUs gain traction because there is a “Palestine Exception” for academic freedom and free speech. While pro-Israel activists allege that carefully documenting the ways in which StandWithUs intentionally defames scholars, activists and students evokes age-old antisemitic tropes about Jewish conspiracies, the organization’s stated political intention, and the playbook it uses to whip up right-wing social media to intimidate and harass scholars is not a conspiracy. One only need look at its stated mission to see that it is a shameless fringe political activist group prosecuting a right-wing pro-Israel agenda. Their aims are documented as far back as 2015 by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).

StandWithUs opportunistically exploits those who might share their political views on Zionism. In my case, StandWithUs’ complaint stands out as particularly egregious and reckless, considering GW, my program, and I are in possession of ample written documentation, eye witness accounts, and evidence to easily refute every claim in their poorly written document. Their interest is not in student well-being but rather to slander, malign, and at the most basic level, create confusion that equates anecdotal allegations with fact. Galvanizing racist, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian tropes is not difficult in a post-/911 era. StandWithUs just had to redact every name but mine and let racism and sexism do its job.  

Facts Matter
Let me be unambiguous that StandWithUs, like other right wing activist groups, willfully misrepresents facts in order to smear, isolate, and defame its targets in order to convict them in the public eye before they are able to speak. I have been targeted specifically because I am an Arab woman whose scholarship and activism advocates for Palestinians and, in the process, critiques Israeli settler-colonial Apartheid. Because I am an Arab, StandWithUs can casually parse key information to create an inflammatory narrative in place of facts, relying on anti-Arab prejudice which remains robust in the United States.

Their campaigns of harassment and defamation rely on a tired technique and strategy. Take for example the tag line they have chosen for me, allegedly telling an Israeli student it was not her fault she was born in Israel. This salacious tagline is plastered across right-wing media sites, begging the question of my guilt. This is where they choose to begin their baseless complaint where they also unethically represent a brown bag lecture given by internationally renowned feminist and scholar, Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian. StandWithUs not only fails to mention that the brown bag was not mandatory, but also, that it was specifically held in the GW Elliot School of International Affairs building (not in our program’s space) so students would not otherwise feel obliged to attend. Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is an Israeli citizen herself, the Lawrence D. Biele Chair of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and recipient of the prestigious Gruber Women’s Rights Prize. Our department regularly hosts brown bags, announcing them on the program’s listserv (not in my class), and, unlike Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s talk, they are routinely held in our building, as was the case with the following brown bag about Veterans.

Co-hosted by our department and my newly launched Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab, Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian drew on recent work by Jewish Israeli scholars, Moriel Ram and Haim Yacobi, speaking about the ways in which the state of Israel, through IsraelAID (like USAID), launches mental and public health initiatives in the Global South as a means of developing soft power. Rather than exclusivizing Israel and alienating students as the complaint cynically asserts, students across cohorts lauded how the brown bag spoke to the ethical responsibility of clinical psychologists to recognize how they may be mobilized, even inadvertently, to serve state projects, no matter the state.

Consistent with their creative editing of facts, StandWithUs’ also selectively cherry-picked quotes from a classroom discussion that was held on October 3, 2022, following Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s brown bag. I devoted the entire class period to discussing issues raised by a few Jewish students regarding the brown bag, replacing the scheduled class lesson on troubling the “micro” in microaggressions related to Asian erasure and fatphobia, specifically. Contrary to what some have irresponsibly made claims about in public forums, I did so because I do not single-out Jewish students, nor unduly and unfairly task them with holding their concerns in a cynical hierarchy of suffering. Despite my being keenly aware of the ways that structural patterns have the tendency to repeat themselves consciously and unconsciously (here especially in erasing Asians and Asian Americans at this violent time in the United States), I still made the conscious choice to use this class period to discuss antisemitism.

If StandWithUs were to release what I believe is a recording of a clinical psychology class discussion taken without consent of me or any other student, the transcript would reveal that I absolutely and categorically agree that antisemitism is undeniably real. Not only did I highlight how this was a valid concern especially in the current neo-fascist backdrop of the United States, but also, but also, how as mental health clinicians, we have a special responsibility to be hyper-aware of this context as a pre-cursor to ethical practice. The transcript would also reveal that several students extended their empathy, their support, and their wish to understand more from the Jewish students who spoke. Not only did I encourage this relationality, but also praised it, noting that students were experiencing in real-time what we often discuss in the abstract. We further discussed what is it like for us to reach beyond our political and social identifications in order to connect with others’ pain, even if we do not share their worldview.

Because my pedagogical approach is attuned to the psychodynamics of emotional and psychological activation, I go out of my way to never “shut down” disruptive or uncomfortable topics. In doing so, I hope to model in collective conversation what it means for mental health clinicians to commit to an ethics of care that is not only reserved for our patients or those who pay for our services. Despite an alarming level of anti-black and anti-Arab racism that was sadly articulated by these students that day, I (and other cohort members) made countless efforts to “call-in” (and not shame) students who voiced their concern about the brown bag, an approach I attempt to model for all my students.

What the transcript would reveal is that the students catgeorically refused to engage in genuine discussion, eventually leading to an alarmingly disturbing comment: “after listening to that lady [Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian], I am certain that she would readily dance on the grave of my seven-year-old niece.” Or, a comment insinuating that Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a “terrorist” and “advocated violence against Jews.” In their words, their fear was linked to the fact that Palestinian children are terrorists-in-the-making because they throw stones at Israelis; and stones thrown by Palestinian children have been known to kill. I similarly remained patient and understanding even when the voluntary brown bag was likened to “a talk that would discuss how black men commit crimes”. Because of the inappropriate and relentless anti-Arab, Islamophobic, and anti-black tropes, several students attempted to de-escalate the combativeness by alerting their classmates that perhaps despite their intention, their message was clouded by racism and being lost in the process of berating a professor.

The complaint also consciously omits the time stamp of how after more than an hour of escalating racist rhetoric, one student erroneously insisted that the IHRA definition of antisemitism was the official adopted definition globally, citing President Trump. Throughout the discussion, a select few students claimed criticism of the State of Israel is in itself antisemitic, in any and all contexts. The belief that Zionism does not represent all Jewish people or that anti-Zionism should not be reduced to antisemitism is largely accepted in progressive circles, US law and public policy. Despite this, though purposefully omitted from the complaint, I went out of my way to explicitly distinguish between political Zionism (a political ideology and movement attached to a national state project) and spiritual Zionism (a religious movement within Judaism that has looked to Palestine as a locality for spiritual renewal while making no political claims to the land).

More importantly, student witnesses and testimonies from that class and from several other cohorts can attest that, quite contrary to exclusivizing any state, I teach them that as ethical clinicians we have the responsibility to criticize all state discourses without essentializing an entire people. In this first-year cohort diversity class, we had already discussed the mistreatment of Uyghurs in China, without resorting to Sinophobia; the Russian invasion of Ukraine, without resorting to Russophobia; the totalitarian nature of Iran and Saudi Arabia’s regimes, without engaging in Islamophobia; and the rise of Hindutva ethno-nationalism, without essentializing all Hindus or Indians.

As an American Psychological Association (APA) accredited doctoral program whose goal is to train ethical and culturally aware future-psychologists, my diversity classes are designed specifically to prepare students-clinicians for these types of reflective skills as well as reflections on the biases that their patients might experience from them. In keeping with a psychoanalytic orientation, my explicit intent and ethical duty, is to model, guide, and train students to contend with these biases, conscious and unconscious, and to practice, with guidance and attuned care, the very challenging and sometimes destabilizing process of troubling our own personal and political identifications. My pedagogical approach irrefutably contradicts the claims of identity-based targeting, as it is not reserved just for my Jewish or Israeli students. It is a contract that is made with all students, not as a matter of political agenda, but rather, a commitment to the field and to the wellbeing of our patients.

The pedagogical and clinical practice of making visible the psychic effects of oppressive systems and critically taking up issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, etc. is not new or fringe. In service of upholding their ethical commitment to first do no harm, to integrity, to beneficence, and to justice, this pedagogical approach is now established best practices not only in teaching a “diversity” course but as a feature within educating and training future clinical psychologists.

GW has now colluded with StandWithUs’ misrepresentation of my classroom by being silent about a number of key issues of which they are well aware and about which they have supporting documentation that could have been used to publicly dispel these allegations. For example, unlike what is sloppily represented in the spurious complaint, my syllabus has no specifically dedicated Palestine content. Palestine is mentioned in passing in two readings. In one reading of which I am the author, Palestine is mentioned in my immanent critique of another seminal psychoanalytic article that takes up a case of an Armenian-Lebanese woman patient. In my critique, I explore how over-focusing on Arabness and Zionism might have been a missed clinical opportunity to reflect on the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust as a potential common experience between the family histories of the patient and the psychoanalyst. In the other reading, Palestine is momentarily mentioned in clinical transcript material from the author’s own therapy, a passage quoted in the complaint without context. The author’s critique of her therapist’s non-empathic statement is clinically important because it was made in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and the sentence that follows is of the author’s Jewish analyst saying, “at least Puerto Ricans have never been shot at like Palestinians. They aren’t being bombed.” StandWithUs is apparently also in the habit of silencing Jewish folks who criticize Israel.

Despite the fact that no reading on Palestine or Palestinians (or Israeli psychic and physical violence against them) appears on my syllabus, this exact “talking point” was used to disrupt and derail the learning of an entire cohort, again, in the October 31st class detailed in the complaint. Despite the fact that StandWithUs surely has my syllabus, as does my director, my program, and the Dean’s office, this false accusation remains repeated in the complaint, social media and professional listservs, yet one more untruth deployed to confuse a very clear issue.

The tactic to inaccurately represent my class, my syllabus, and my pedagogy, and the accusation that I create a hostile environment for Jewish students whom I target, falls in a long tradition of fomenting racially motivated hate against Arab scholars (especially Arab women scholars) who are engaged in Palestine solidarity work. Rather than engage my work on Palestine through rigorous academic scholarship or in reputable mainstream and scholarly venues, StandWithUs trudges out the hackneyed post-9/11 trope of the Arab “sleeper cell,” who is always imminently dangerous to Jewish people no matter how “reasonable” or “western” we may appear.

Disciplinary Charges
StandWithUs’ political agenda is much clearer with the knowledge of how my classes are specifically designed to encourage all students’ self-exploration as well as the explicit racist language that was used by a few students who are characterized as the aggrieved. Likewise, StandWithUs builds a false allegation that I “retaliated” against Jewish students, a claim that GW, the Dean’s office, and my program knows to be categorically false.

To start, a number of essential pieces of information are largely shelved by the complaint. Namely, the three diversity courses that I teach are zero-credit courses, which means the grade students receive does not affect their GPA. No one in this cohort got less than an A in the course. Despite this material evidence of non-retaliation, with disturbing tenacity, the complaint insinuates that I initiated “disciplinary charges” against all Jewish students in my class and that all were summarily “punished.” What is instead factual and well-known to student witnesses, the Program, and the University is that “remediation” was initiated after a semester-long, multitiered and extensively deliberated process because these students were disruptive, yelled at and berated a professor twice, and used explicitly pejorative, demeaning, inflammatory and racist language against black people and Arabs.

Our program has consistently referred to our remediation process over the past years, specifically, as “non-punitive” and preventative. Contrary to StandWithUs’ claims, remediation never appears on a student’s academic “record”, and certainly is not permanent. The Student Handbook also clearly states that an appeal process is available to any student put on remediation. Because our remediation process had in the past tended to be harsher and quicker when students of color were involved, my colleagues and I have been diligently trying to redress the procedure over the past years. The concrete changes we have made include assuring that the Director of Training and Clinical Director are not responsible for remediation plans. This was especially important for me, having been concerned about the undue coerciveness on students if the two people with the most evaluative power over their training were involved. Similarly, I advocated alongside other colleagues for a student’s academic advisor to never be directly involved in their remediation plans. This was explicitly intended to allow for a student to always have a stalwart advocate on their side. Finally, in recent years, we have moved to a two-person faculty panel that collaborates with students to co-create and sometimes even co-write a remediation plan that is individualized, tailored, and most importantly, helps attend to the differing goals each student might have. As a psychoanalytic program, we are especially attentive to giving students ample space to think deeply about the complex and sometimes contradictory positions they may hold in our program, in their cohorts, and in the world. Their remediation plans can include written reflections, experiential tasks such as watching movies or reading books in service of their larger learning, and/or ongoing conversations with their advisor. These tasks are meant to aid them in furthering their clinical and ethical responsibilities as well as thoughtfully engage about their impact on others.

As they are nothing but a one-issue pro-Israel activist group, StandWithUs was unwilling or unable to do due diligence to counter-check these allegations against me and the University. StandWithUs’ explicit and intentional misrepresentation of “disciplinary charges” and retaliation are extremely unethical and the University’s failure to clarify this falsity and process is irresponsible and opportunistic. This is especially the case because the Dean’s office was in close and continued conversation with me, our program Director, members of the faculty, and students from October until after the time students were alerted of their remediation.

I am perplexed and saddened that GW has not had the moral fibre and courage to repudiate claims which they know to be easily, empirically, and objectively refuted by an ample (electronic) paper trail (including comments on the aggrieved student papers and journal entries; temporary secondary faculty-oversight over their journal posts; emails between me and students, me and the Director, me and faculty, and me and the Dean’s office; minutes of faculty meetings, etc.). Perhaps more importantly, a classroom full of eye-witness students (as also reported to the Deans and an external consultant that was hired to attend to the “rupture” in the class in November-December) have been ignored along with letters of support and character attestation from students across all cohorts.

The Aftermath
Within a span of a few hours of the “story” being published by right-wing on-line outlets, social media, and then posted to my professional listservs, the public pillorying began. Trolls, ideologues, and right wingers concluded that, by merit of being Arab and engaging in scholarship on Palestine, I clearly must be not only an antisemite and “Jew-hating trash”, but an ISIS follower, a Hizballah operative, a Hamas agent, an Ayatollahist, an Iranian spy, and an Arab “Goebbels.” Trolls have called for my house to be visited, to “egg” my house “or worse,” in one exchange. In the most egregious cases, tweets (and emails) have called to have me publicly ridiculed, deported to Lebanon, and “sniped” or killed for being “treasonous.”

Well-known pro-Israel (and anti-BDS) activists from outside of psychology have begun to AstroTurf lobby to have me fired from GW, to have an ethics investigation lodged against me by my professional organizations, and to have me resign from my new position as President of the APA Division 39 (I assumed that role on January 1).

As many letters of support have already documented, I have been doxed, with my personal information, including my address, professional license, and personal email proliferated online. A letter-sending campaign to GW has been organized with the website proudly advertising “over 1200 letters already sent”. Accusations that the many principled statements in my defense are antisemitic because they allude to a “Jewish conspiracy” is a cynical defense, especially since the calls to discipline me are publicly stated by StandWithUs and StopAntiSemitism.org, a self-described “watchdog” pro-Israel vigilante group.This degree of external pressure on universities and administrators by these political campaigns is extraordinary, as recently noted in an urgent letter of concern and support for me penned by the Jewish Voice for Peace Healthcare Advisory Council. The pressure is intentional and sustained, having the intent to make universities rewire their own internal processes so as to quelch bad press, and in some instances, placate threats of retribution from donors. The playbook is not conspiratorial, as has been suggested, but rather, forthright and dogmatic. And, yet, because of the acrimonious mud-slinging involved, administrators cave and set precedents at alarming rates. We saw this most recently in the case of Kenneth Roth and Harvard, with the years long fight of academic Rabab Abdulhadi at SFSU, Shahd Abu Salama at Sheffield Hallam University, Shami Dallali’s dismissal from the National Union of Students, Jasbir Puar’s sustained harassment campaign at Rutgers, and most egregiously, Stephen Salaita’s specious firing which was adjudicated in his favor. There are countless others whose stories have not been made public for fear of greater retribution.

Throughout the Fall semester, the university administration and my program bent over backwards, going above and beyond their own due process to act with due diligence and care to adjudicate the disruptions in the class and attend to a few counter-claims against me. These claims retroactively located blame in my teaching and syllabus, but as StandWithUs’ complaint highlights, it my scholarship about and advocacy for Palestine that is on trial.

The University has abandoned its due process toward me. It has not replied to at least two formal DEI bias incident complaints that were filed on my behalf. More importantly, it has not had the decency to dispel publicly made career and life-endangering claims about me, even though it has extensive documentation of how I engaged in every good faith effort at de-escalation. In fact, I went out of my way to safeguard any potential, even if undue and incorrect, perception of retaliation against students. I did this despite documented discriminatory and isolating tactics toward me by some colleagues. All of this is documented in countless email exchanges and meetings, including with the Associate Vice Provost of DEI.

I am certain that the GW administration feels confident that a third-party investigation will disclose the same evidence that I document here in order to have an “objective” party exonerate them from the complaint. However, they fail to apprehend, or willfully neglect, the irreparable damage done by these smear and defamation campaigns. Inadvertently or through negligence, GW’s President has set a reckless precedent by lending even a modicum of credibility or legitimacy to right wing attack groups intent on curtailing academic freedom. This move not only pre-empts adjudication by the Department of Education, but encourages right wing political advocacy groups, empowering them to believe that their tactics of harassment and intimidation to silence critical voices yields results. Equally important, GW’s upper administration fans the flames of racialized and gendered abuse of faculty and students, dangerously mainstreaming the myths of single-issue political groups.

Why This Matters: Academic Freedom and the Disciplining of Women
In addition to what USACBI has determined is an egregious precedent regarding due process and academic freedom, GW’s reaction to the campaign against me has also given a semblance of legitimation, in the public sphere, online, and within my professional psychoanalytic circles, to baseless and defamatory claims against me. They have done so despite knowing the allegations to be categorically false after an entire semester of internal processes and documentation. The President’s choice not to wait for the Department of Education, but rather to “hot potato” the matter to an “independent third party investigator” rewards the hackneyed right-wing strategy to use political activism outside the classroom and, in my case, personal tweets to incriminate targeted scholars and “prove” unrelated allegations.

As a junior colleague, a woman of color and a decolonial scholar of race and oppression, I categorically reject the civilizational and sexist discourse whereby language on my personal social media accounts is under paternalistic scrutiny and used as “evidence” of my guilt. The disciplining of language is an old misogynist cudgel by which Black, Indigenous, and women of color, especially, are expected to, at best, reply to racism, sexism, and xenophobia with a gentile and “civil” reply. If we do not, we are actively punished—in my case very publicly—for refusing psychological and physical boundary crossings. The discourse of “professionalism” is also used as a civilizational technique to imperiously shame women and people of color and is intentionally deployed as a disciplinary tactic to stabilize patriarchy and whiteness. Those in psychoanalysis, ironically, also willfully forget the sordid history our entire profession has had in silencing, pathologizing, and disciplining BIPOC women’s bodies and minds.

StandWithUS intentionally activated these civilizational discourses that saturate our world. Releasing a handful of salaciously decontextualized tweets from among tens of thousands of others I have posted shows an awareness of the power of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism as well as sexism. Not surprisingly, even their attempts to criminalize me by way of tweets is as sloppy as their complaint, unethically cherry-picking content as their complaint.

They knew they had to splice my twitter thread to craft a narrative that would not be easily refuted by women let alone feminist and women of color. In the misrepresented thread, I recount my eight-hour detention at the King Hussein Bridge by Israeli border security who questioned me about my research project in Palestine. My detention is not what is striking here. The Israeli occupation forces who populate the border crossing routinely harass, detain, and intimidate researchers, activists, or professionals who may be critical of Israeli Apartheid. What is omitted by their unethical cherry-picking is that a male Israeli agent, acting as representative of the State—hence my use of blanket “Israeli”—specifically threatened to hit me if I did not sit down. After I told him to not talk to me like that, two other male agents threatened, demeaned, and harassed me. One specifically yelled at me, “I will send you back to Lebanon so that you can be raped and beaten by Hizbullah who will hang you by your hair from the ceiling”.

Relying on a “shock and awe” effect, StandWithUs and their right-wing trolls also neglect to take time stamps into account as necessary contextualization for someone’s—in this case, my—rightful anger. on August 4, 2020, I quote tweeted an Israeli Occupation Forces’ tweet (who, incidentally, were not as perturbed as StandWithUs and the trolls, as evidenced by their lack of response). This date may not have significance to many, let alone to anti-Arab racists in a rush to demonize me. And yet, it is indelibly etched in Arabs’ minds. It is the tragic and catastrophic day of the Beirut blast that killed hundreds of people and displaced hundreds of thousands in its wake.

For over two decades, Israel illegally occupied southern Lebanon. It remains an internationally recognized occupying power of Palestine and the Golan Heights in Syria. I became inured to Israeli war planes breaking the sound barrier as I played outside as a child, later when I went to school, and as I became politically active in college. In high school, Israel decimated a power plant less than a mile away from my high school as I sat for finals. In addition to previous Israeli invasions, I watched from my grandmother’s balcony as the largest bridge in Lebanon was bombed to smithereens by Israeli warplanes despite supposed “Hizballah fighters” being tens of miles away and my house being far from the front line.

During the 2006 invasion, I left Beirut, which was subjected to bombing and a refugee crisis for my parent’s home in our ancestral mountain hamlet, where I remained sleepless under the relentless sound of Israeli drones, helicopters and jets. Eventually, my family and I were evacuated from Lebanon, an inauspicious departure for graduate school with 10 kilos of belongings that I had deemed “most important” as we fled. Later that year, I told my psychoanalyst in DC that I dreamt of an engulfing fire; that my memories of Lebanon felt disjointed. I could no longer remember an intact Lebanon.

These stories to me, and countless others under occupation, feel cheap and demeaning to recount.

I have long resisted the fetishizing glances of a trauma industry ready to contour me/us as mere victims, worthy of care and support only through the legibility of our suffering. I am resentful of the coercive tactics of StandWithUs and all those who wielded their power to demand my narrative, my story, my trauma, as fodder for their racist fantasies.

My anger, in those tweets, and in what fuels my liberatory fire, is justified. My anger at an Israeli who threatens to have me raped and beaten angers me. My anger towards an Israeli male who threatens to hit me if I do not listen angers me. My anger against an occupying army and occupying state that has stolen so much from me, my people and my Palestinian siblings is not contextless, capricious or religiously based. It is a political anger.

Any anger that I express also pales in comparison to the violence of colonial, settler colonial, and imperial forces that have decimated the Middle East in the course of my lifetime. It pales in comparison to the internal and foreign policies of the Global North that have wreaked havoc on the most vulnerable people and their environments, especially in the Global South. It pales in comparison to the ways that language and comportment of women (especially women of color) are disciplined when they threaten to destabilize cisheteronormativity, patriarchy and whiteness. Even if decontextualized, the language of my tweets pale in comparison to the organized and systemic violence done to my siblings today from Jenin, to Nablus, to Jerusalem, from Pakistan, to Puerto Rico, to Iraq, to Kashmir, to Haiti, to Memphis, Jacksonville, Ferguson, Flint, Atlanta, Wet’suwet’en, Standing Rock, and all other spaces in which life is vibrant and deliberately targeted for swift erasure.

The objective and irrefutable facts do not support StandWithUs’ specious claims that I target my Jewish and Israeli students. They do not support the unethical and dangerous allegations that I am antisemitic and retaliatory. What the facts, in glaring clarity do support, is that, like others before me, StandWithUs exploited students’ political beliefs and targeted me because I am an Arab woman who is involved in scholarship and activism for Palestine and Palestinians.

Lara Sheehi is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine.

#FreeAhmadManasra Campaign

Suggested Action in Support of
#FreeAhmadManasra
Campaign

Dear visitor, 

Thank you for visiting the website of the Palestine-Global Mental Health Network (PGMHN).  We have devoted this page to provide you with suggested action in support of the campaign to free Ahmad Manasra.  

PGMHN would be grateful if you would kindly consider the following action:

1. Signing the #FreeAhmadManasra petition.

2. Publicize the petition on your social media platforms.

3. Follow our Facebook page. Also, follow us on Instagram and Twitter

4. Distribute the PGMHN statement wherever you have an online presence.

5. Write to the following Israeli ministries demanding the immediate liberation of Ahmad Manasra

   1. The Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs contact information:
      Meir Cohen – The Minister of Welfare and Social Affairs.
      Address: P.O.B 915, 2 Kaplan St., 9100801 Jerusalem
      E-Mail : sar@molsa.gov.il
      Phone : 02-6752523
      Fax : 02-5085555

   2. The Ministry of Justice contact information :
      Gideon Sa'ar – The Minister of Justice
      E-Mail : sar@justice.gov.il
      Phone – 073-3925527
      Fax – 026285438
      Sunday-Thursday 09:00-13:00

   3. The Ministry of Health Contact information :
      Nitsan Horovitz – The Minister of Health
      E-Mail : sar@moh.gov.il
      Address : 39 Yermeyaho St., Jerusalem.
      Postal address: P.O.B 1176, Jerusalem.
      Zip Code: 9101002,
      Phone : 02-5081325
      Fax – 02-5655993
      Telephone service
      Sunday-Thursday 08:00 – 16:00.

بيان "الشبكة الفلسطينية العالمية للصحة النفسية" حول مقتل الناشط الفلسطيني نزار بنات و قمع حرية التعبير في فلسطين

تدين "الشبكة الفلسطينية العالمية للصحة النفسية" بأشدّ عبارات الإدانة جريمة تعذيب وقتل الناشط السياسي والمعارض نزار بنات على يد من يمثلون السلطة الحاكمة في الضفة الغربية. وما يفجعُنا في هذا الحدث هو مقتلُ إنسانٍ وخنق صوتٍ حرّ و وأدُ حرية التعبير الذي بات نهجًا متكرّراً في الواقع السياسي الفلسطينيّ المنقسم من ملاحقات لناشطين، وقمع لمتظاهرين، واعتقالات سياسية وترهيب لافراد مجتمعنا وعائلاتنا، كما والتغاضي عن محاسبة عادلة لجرائم استهدفت المرأة والطفل. ان اغتيال نزار بنات هو انتهاك فُرص الوحدة الفلسطينية التي رأينا بشائرها في أيار 2021 ، حين توحّد الشعب الفلسطيني المشتّت في كافة أماكن تواجدِه على فلسطين التاريخية امام الهيمنة الإسرائيلية؛ وحدةَ عزّةٍ قومية وسياسية شجاعة

كمختصّين في العلوم النفسية نعلم أن أحد أعمق وأعنف التبعات النفسية لصدمة الاستعمار هو استدخال أدوات المستعمر واستخدامُها تجاه أبناء جلدتنا، كمن يمارس تجريح الذات عجزاً عن مواجهة العنف الخارجي الممارس عليه

إضافةً إلى استشراس النزعة التدميرية والتشويهية للذات الفردية المتجلّية في لجوء فئات منتفعة و أخرى مندسّة من المجتمع الفلسطيني إلى تمزيق  النسيج الاجتماعي والوطني و إسالة الدماء الفلسطينية في  مظاهر  بلطجيّة بائسة مردُّها مشاعر الاستسلام أمام المحتلّ. كمهنيين ننبّه إلى أن آليّات التماهي مع المعتدي إن سادت و تسيّدت ستؤدي إلى استبدال الجندي الإسرائيلي بمستبدٍّ آخر من أبناء جلدتنا في احتلالٍ جذريّ وعدميّ لفكرة التحرر لأنّ الحرية لا تتجزأ، فحريّة الإنسان من حرية الوطن

يظل ميزان التحرّر في المجتمع الفلسطينيّ العابر للحدود الجغرافيّة والسياسيّة محكوماً بضبط وترشيد ممارسة السلطة على اختلاف صورِها وفق  بوصلةٍ إنسانيّةٍ و أخلاقية و قانونيّة  دقيقة ونقديّة للذات  الفرديّة و الجمعيّة قبل كل شيء
ندعو صنّاع القرار في فلسطين إلى ضرورة التيقّظ للدوافع والآثار النفسية النكبويّة للاقتتال و الانقسام الفلسطينيّ و انهدام الثقة بين الشعب ومواصلة النضال من أجل التحرّروقيادته، و إلى اعتماد مواجهة ومحاسبة الذات أساسًا راسخًا لتوحيد الصفوف الفلسطينية في مواجهة ومحاسبة المحتل 

ان النقد الذاتيّ والتعدديّة الفكريّة وحرّيّة التعبير والأدوات الديمقراطيّة المحتكمة إلى معايير أخلاقية ثابتة وعادلة، هي الركائز الأساسيّة لدعم الصمود والمرونة والصحّة والحصانة النفسيّة لشعبنا أفراداً وجماعةً و مشروعَ تحرّر لا يمكن  أن يُفشل, أو يُقتل.

سلسلة الندوات الحوارية في علم النفس التحرّريّ وسايكولوجية الإنسان المقهور

يوم الثلاثاء 29.06.202
الساعة السابعة والنصف مساءا

تتشرف الشبكة الفلسطينية العالمية للصحة النفسية بدعوتكم/ن للقاء العاشر من سلسلة ندوات علم النفس التحرري والنقدي, حيث نرى بسلسلة الندوات ان عملية بناء فكر متحرر, ناقد على واقعه وفعال فيه, تتطلب الاصغاء الى الذات بلحظات الازمات التي تتطلب منا اعادة ترتيب النفس من جديد, قوى الانا والقدرة على التعامل مع ضغوطات الواقع

ندعوكم الى لقاء تحاوري للمشاؤكة بالتجارب, الافكار والمشاعر اصداء الاحداث العدوانية الاخيرة التي تعرض لها شعبنا بكل مكان والتفكير بدورنا كأفراد وكجماعة من المهنيين بمجال الصحة النفسية عندما حياة الافراد تكون بتهديد مستمر لكن نرى المجموعة تنتفض وتجابه

لقاؤنا يوم الثلاثاء 29.06.2021

الساعة السابعة والنصف مساءا

لنا لقاء,

كونوا بخير

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Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian analysis of recent events

Today:
Extended Radio Podcast (KPFK.org, 90.7FM)
at
11:30 pm Palestine time
4:30 pm US EDT
1:30 pm US PDT

The Violence of Apartheid: Israel’s Continuing Assault in Palestine

Today, SWANA Collective members Rana Sharif and David Lloyd talk to Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who has been a regular guest on SWANA Region Radio, about the unfolding events in her home city of colonized Jerusalem and across Palestine. Professor Kevorkian is Lawrence D Biele Chair in Law in the Institute of Criminology of the Faculty of Law and a professor in the School of Social Work and Social Welfare at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Global Chair in Law at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of many important articles and books, including most recently Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding and Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear, both from Cambridge University Press.

Given the importance of these events and Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s analyses, we have created an extended podcast of this interview that will be posted on our usual platforms. This show is co-hosted and co-produced by SWANA collective members David Lloyd and Rana Sharif.

The conclusion of the Muslim Holy month of Ramadan this week, which coincides with the Palestinian commemoration of the Nakba, or Catastrophe, has seen not the customary celebration of Eid al-Fitr, but a vicious upsurge of Israeli violence against Palestinians across historic Palestine. For some time, Israeli police have been suppressing demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrar in occupied East Jerusalem against the eviction of Palestinian families from their homes by a right-wing settler organization as part of Israel’s continuing effort to dispossess and displace Palestinians all over ‘48 and the West Bank. Israeli police also barred Muslims from celebrating Ramadan at the Damascus Gate and from reaching the venerated Al-Aqsa Compound in the Old City and violated its sanctity with tear gas, noise bombs, and military incursions into the holy site. Across Israel and the West Bank, violent settler mobs have reacted with fury against growing Palestinian protest and engaged in ugly attacks on the persons and property of Palestinians who are supposed to be their fellow citizens.

In response to these violations, Hamas and other militant organizations in Gaza have fired barrages of rockets that for the first time have succeeded in penetrating Israeli defenses and striking far from the Gaza border. These responses to Israeli violence were met with a full-out assault by Israel’s armed forces in which they have already massacred at least 139 Palestinians, most of them women and children, in Gaza’s open-air prison. As always homes, schools, and other civilian infrastructure have been pounded in accord with Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine which advocates for the destruction of civilian infrastructure in violation of international law.
Nonetheless, we have been treated to the customary spectacle this week of a mealy-mouthed US President and his appointees pronouncing on Israel’s right to self-defense while ignoring their closest ally’s endless violations of international and humanitarian law and the Palestinians’ own legal right, as an occupied people, to defend themselves and oppose the occupier. But as Palestinian protest spreads across all of Historic Palestine, including in the cities of Haifa, Acra, Lyd and Tel Aviv, and throughout the diaspora, it is clear that they are not waiting for a US president’s permission to exercise that right once again.
The events of the last weeks may have provided the sparks for open conflict, but must be seen in their wider context. In a month when the respected international human rights organization Human Rights Watch issued a report that showed that Israel is conducting an apartheid regime across the whole of historic Palestine, “from the river to the sea”, Israel’s violence must be seen in the context of its ongoing practices as a settler-colonial state committed to the expansion of its territory and the displacement of Palestinians by every possible means: killings, dispossession, terrorization. Human Rights Watch’s detailed report confirms what Palestinians themselves and their global solidarity networks have been saying for years. It is based not on the Israeli myths about democracy or “disputed territory” parrotted by our mainstream press, but on the facts on the ground that constitute what the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court describes as “inhumane acts … committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

Israel’s daily practices, to which it gives the name of hafrada, separation or segregation in Hebrew, give ample evidence of its conformity with that definition, whether we consider the siege and assault on Gaza, the separate and unequal infrastructure of the West Bank, or the ongoing evictions of Palestinian families in Occupied East Jerusalem. This is the daily experience of Palestinians wherever they live, from the refugees denied the right to return or even to visit their homelands to the Palestinian “citizens” of Israel who live under more than 60 discriminatory laws. However much Israeli politicians and their staunch Zionist defenders, including the Biden administration, bluster about the definition, the steady examination of the facts confirms that Israel is an apartheid state. In the end, their only response can be the censorship and defamation of the messengers and violence against Palestinian protest and self-defense.
If you miss our live broadcast on kpfk.org, you can listen to this show and our previous shows as a podcast: https://anchor.fm/swana. You can also follow our updates on Facebook and Instagram. We thank you in advance for sharing!

بيان حول تصعيد العنف الاستعماري في فلسطين ومقاومته

نحن  مهنيّات و مهنيّي الصحّة النفسيّة  الفِلَسطينيّين، المُستهدفين وعائلاتُنا كسائر الفِلَسطينيّين في بلادِنا من المنظومة الاستعماريّة الاستيطانيةّ الصهيونيّة في جميع أنحاء فلسطين التاريخية، إنّنا و إذ نحيي صمودَ شعبنا ومقاومتَه النبيلة و الباسِلة جماعات و أفراداً من اجل  إحقاق حقّه بالبقاء والحرية و العدالة والكرامة، نعبّر عن بالغ قلقنا إزاء  الآثار المدمّرة للعنف الاستعماريّ المتواصل على السّلامة الجسديّة و النفسيّة لأبناء مجتمعِنا

يواجه شعبُنا الفلسطينيّ  في الوطن في هذه الأيام تصعيداً همجياً  جديداً  للنكبة المستمرّة و الحرب الاستعماريّة و التي تشنّها دولة الاحتلال عليه منذ اكثر من سبعين عاماً. مُدَجّجةً بترسانةٍ عسكريّة فتّاكة لا تتوانى عن استخدام الأسلحة المحرّمة دولياً، و بترسانةٍ أيديولوجيّة عنصريّة قِوامُها نظامُ فصلٍ عنصريٍّ و تطهيرٍ عرقيّ  لأهل البلاد الأصلانيين، تستعر  الحكومة الاسرائيليّة في قتل الفلسطينيين و  اغتيال إنسانيّتهم و مظاهر سيادتهم على  بلادِهم و أرض أجدادِهم.  نتج عن الهجمات الاسرائيليّة الوحشيّة على غزّة  المحاصَرة منذ 15 عاماً الاف الاصابات منهم الاطفال والنساء. هجمات استهدفت الفلسطيني كفرد وكمجتمع، استهدفت البشر و الحجر،   و  دمّرت المساكن و المشافي و ملاعب الأطفال و المنشآت الحيويّة و الحضاريّة  و الجماليّة في البقعة الاكثر اكتظاظا في العالم، "أكبر سجن على وجه الأرض". وصلت حصيلة الحملة المستعرة الحالية لارتقاء  اكثر من مئة واربعين شهيد وشهيدة فلسطينيين منهم عشرات الاطفال والنساء  وابادة بيوت وافناء الحياة وتدمير الارض

في الاسبوع الاخير و ردّاً على سياسات التهجير القسريّ ومنع حريّة العِبادة للمسيحيين والمسلمين  على حدِّ سواء في القدس، جاء الحراك الشعبيّ الفلسطينيّ رافضاً لكل مظاهر العنصرية و  الاضطهاد المُمَنهج. و في الوقت الذي نادى فيه الفلسطينيّ بحقّه الراسخ و الشامخ بالحياة الحرّة و الكريمة على تراب وطنِهِ،  كان  المستعمِر-المستوطن يهتف "الموت للعرب"، مدعوماً من المؤسّسة الحاكمة و شرطتِها التي أطلقت العنان  لعصابات اليمين المتطرف الفاشية  لبثّ الرعب و ترويع المواطنين و تخريب و حرق الممتلكات و انتهاك حرمة البيوت. لم يقتصر الامر على المناطق المحتلة سنة 1967 بل امتد الى داخل مدن الساحل الفلسطينيّ  والقرى العربية في دولة الاستعمار، بما يذكرنا وبقوة، باعمال العصابات الصهيونية أبّان نكبة 1948. كما وان  ادخال فرق ( حرس الحدود  الاسرائيلي ) والتخطيط للاستعانة بالجيش الاسرائيلي في القرى والمدن، ما هو الا إعادة الفلسطينيّ للمربعات الاولى: مربع النكبة ومربع نظام الحكم العسكري ومنظومة المراقبة والملاحقة والاستلاب.

وما قد يبدو للوهلة الاولى كفوضى سياسية او كصراع مدني عفويّ تقوده فئات متطرفة هو في الحقيقة نتاج منظومة استعمارية صهيونية مخططة، تثابر  سياسياً و إعلاميّاً و شعبيّاً على تشييء الإنسان الفلسطينيّ، غير الامن حتى في بيته، وموقعته خارج إنسانيّته وحتى نزعها عنه، وتجريمه،  تمهيداً لإهدار دمِه،  و إفنائِه جسداً و  نفساً و روحاً. منظومة  تعمل على توكيد واعادة انتاج فكر الثنائيات المشطورة-  جدلية ومنطق المقدس مقابل المدنس فإما قاتل او مقتول.  يغذي فكر الاستعلاء العرقي والسيطرة على الذوات الفلسطينية وعلى الارض والحياة السياسات النكروبوليتية للاستعمار الاسرائيلي، ويظهر جلية في تصريحات شخصيات مركزية داخل مؤسسات دولة الاحتلال والتي نسبت صفات دونية للعربي لكونه عربيّاً، فأصبح التصريح بالتفوق العرقيّ نهجا علنيا حتى بالاعلام محليا ودوليا دون ايّ ارتداع.

يتمادى الاسرائيليّ  واعلامه في عنفِهِ الاستعماريّ محتكِراً دور الضحيّة دون التوقف ولو للحظة لقراءة رواية الفلسطيني، الطفل القتيل،  المستهدف جسديا ورمزيّاً من خلال تشويه ذاكرته التاريخيّة و تمزيق نسيجه الاجتماعيّ و بنيانه الثقافيّ و كينونته الإنسانية

نحن نؤكد ان استمرارية الصوت والفعل للشعب الفلسطيني شبانا وشيبا وسعيهم سويا  لنيل الحرية ليس حق فقط بل دليل ايضا على ثبوت و صمود وجلد نعززه كمهنيي صحة نفسيّة

من موقعنا المهنيّ و الإنسانيّ نناشدُ المجتمع المهنيّ  الذي ننتمي إليه و زملاءَنا في العالم و ندعوهم إلى  التمسّك بقراءة عميقة، غير  مشوّهة و غير مشطورة للواقع الاستعماريّ في فلسطين، و لتبني موقفٍ اخلاقيٍّ و عمليّ واضح يخرج من محدودية الدور الموثق او المحلل فقط بل ينحاز لقضية الشعب الفلسطينيّ الانسانية والعادلة، يرفض اللاانسنة واللاطفلنة والاستلاب.  و إلى الضّغط على مؤسساتهِم وحكوماتِهم لوقف العدوان الاسرائيلي الحاليّ  على شعبنا،  وتوفير الحماية له ومحاسبة دولة  الاحتلال والفصل العنصري ورموزِها. 

كمهنيين نتوجه الى العاملين في مجال الصحة النفسية في كل مكان، طالبين منهم ان يفصحوأ عن رأيهم بجلاء ضد عنف دولة اسرائيل، وتقنيات ارهابها، واستلابها، وفي الوقت ذاته اعادة تأكيد مسؤلياتهم لاخذ خطوات جدية والعمل ضد الوحشية الاستعمارية. نحن نحثكم للتنظم و العمل و التحدث والكتابة ضد المنظومة العقابية المُعرقَنة، وممارساتها التي تشكل قضية مقلقة اخلاقيا لمعالجين وباحثين نقديين في الصحة النفسية. ان ما يفوق السبعين عاما من التطهير العرقي للفلسطينيين على ارضهم لتهويدها،، اضافةً الى العنف اللا متناهي وانتهاك قدرة و حقّ الفلسطيني في الحياة الكريمة و التواصل مع اهله وارضه و الحركة و الانتماء، يحمل اثاراً وجدانية ونفسية جمة على الذات الفلسطينيّة  حاضراً ، و على البقاء الفلسطينيّ مستقبلاً

ان الوقوف كمتفرجين صامتين، في هذه اللحظة بالذات من نضال الفلسطينيين من اجل الحرية والبقاء، ليس خيارا للاخصائيين في الصحة النفسية. ان الصمت والتفرج  الحياديّ يساهم في تكريس ايديولوجيات وجرائم النظام الاستعماري الاستيطانيّ العنصريّ

فحين يعمل اخصائيّو الصحة النفسية ب" حيادية " او "كمهنة قائمة على السلطة" ومعتمدة عليها، فانهم بذلك ينتهكون قواعد الاخلاقيات المهنية التي تقوم عليها مهنتهم، ليصبحو ذراعاً لخدمة الدولة الاستعمارية وامتدادأً لقوتها

من اجل منع تحويل مهنتنا الى شريك مساند للمستعمر، ومحرك فعال في السلب، والقتل، والنهب، وتقطيع أواصر الشعب الاصلاني، ندعوكم الى تسمية عنف الدولة والاشارة اليه وبوضوح، والتحرك فورا للتدخل لوقف فظائعِه، واتخاذ موقف واضح من اجل الانهاء الفوري للاستعمار

A Statement Addressing the Escalation and Resistance of Colonial Violence

We are Palestinian mental health professionals targeted individually and collectively, in our own country, by a Zionist settler-colonial rule that spreads its violence throughout historic Palestine. As we salute the noble and courageous steadfastness of our people who persevere in their fight to exist on their land in freedom, justice, and dignity, we also express our profound concern in the face of a relentless colonial violence aimed at destroying the physical and psychological wellbeing of our communities.

In this moment, the Palestinian people are facing yet another escalation of the ongoing Nakba and colonial warfare, which the occupying forces have waged for more than 70 years in our homeland. These forces have mobilized a lethal military arsenal, including internationally-banned weapons, which they do not hesitate to use against our men, women, and children. From its inception, the settler-colonial Israeli regime has been based on a racist ideology of segregation and ethnic cleansing against the Indigenous people of Palestine. The Israeli government indulges in murdering our people, annihilating our humanity, and destroying our expressions of sovereignty over our ancestral land. The brutal Israeli attacks against Gaza, besieged for more than 15 years as the largest open-air prison on the face of the earth, has resulted in thousands of human casualties, among them women and children. These brutal assaults have targeted individuals and communities, life and land, and destroyed homes, hospitals, playgrounds, as well as other vital social, civil, and cultural infrastructure. The current vicious attack that started less than a week ago, has resulted in over 140 deaths, among them women and children, destroying homes, land and life.

During the last week, and as a response to the continued forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and the prevention of freedom of worship to Christians and Muslims alike in occupied Al-Quds/Jerusalem, Palestinians across geographies have arisen to refuse all aspects of racial discrimination and systematic oppression. While Palestinians have called for a firm and deep-rooted right to exist in freedom and dignity in their ancestral soil, Israeli settlers and right-wing fascist gangs, supported by government and police forces, are cheering “death to Arabs”. These forces aim to instill terror among the Palestinian population, burning and destroying Palestinian property, and violating the privacy of our homes. These attacks have not been restricted to 1967 occupied territory, but have also targeted Palestinian cities within the settler state, acts reminiscent of Zionist gangs during the 1948 Nakba; they a powerful reminder that these forms of racial terror are not an aberration, but formative of the settler colony. Further, the inclusion of the state’s “security” agencies to quell the popular uprising as it spreads, among them border security and the Israeli military, and the government’s permission to act against Palestinian citizens of the state, in cities and villages, has reminded us of the early stages of uprooting and state cruelties, and the system of surveillance, dispossession, and militarized occupation.

What might look at first glance as political chaos, or a civil conflict led by a group of extremists, is the result of a well calculated settler colonial machinery that operates politically, both at the local and global level via media and its populace. Embedded in this machinery is a project to objectify Palestinians, pushing and maintaining them at the limits of humanity, if not outside it. Such objectification and otherization intensifies Palestinians’ sense of insecurity in their homes and land, while maintaining their criminalization, animalization, and demonization in service of their elimination. The Israeli state’s racialized ideology coupled with its domination over Palestinian bodies, land and life exists to nurture a binary necropolitics that insists on a sacred and profane logic. That is, there are those that should be killed, and those that always and forever possess the right to maim, kill and eliminate. Such logic was apparent in formal Israeli statements maintaining the exclusivity of the Jewish Israeli, and the demonization of the disposable other. This logic of exclusivity and supremacy embedded in state’s racialized logic can be also detected in Israeli media coverage that consistently frames settlers as permanently and persistently victims. This framing ignores Palestinian ordeals, and historical memory alongside present narration. Not even the narration of a Palestinian child’s dead body, unchilded and targeted by the Israeli colonial racialized regime of control can nudge the narrative. Make no mistake that the state’s denial of historical and present injustices and memories, coupled with the dismemberment of the Palestinian social, cultural, and spiritual fabric are all forms of intentional, racialized dehumanization to situate Palestinians outside the limits of humanity.

As mental health workers, we call on professional health providers everywhere to speak out against the Israeli state’s violent technologies of terror and dispossession, and simultaneously re-imagine their responsibilities to act against these colonial cruelties. As mental health professionals we urge you to speak, to organize, and to act against the racialized disciplinary and eliminatory practices that pose major ethical concerns for critical mental health professionals and action oriented scholars. Over 70 years of the State’s ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians Judaize the land, coupled with the unending violation of Palestinians’ survivability, connectivity and belonging, carries major psychological and emotional ramifications in this moment, and for the future of Palestinian survivability.

Being a silent bystander at this critical moment in the Palestinian freedom struggle is not an option for mental health workers, as it helps to maintain the ideology and criminalities of settler colonial racialized governance. When mental health professionals act as an ‘authority-based-profession’, they violate their own code of ethics, and can become the operating arm of the colonial state, an extension of its power.

To refrain from turning our mental health profession into an accomplice to dismemberment, murder, and dispossession of an Indigenous people, we call on you to name this violence, and act immediately in whatever capacity you can to intervene, to stop these atrocities, and take a stand for immediate decolonization.

Reimagining Childhood Studies: Childhood’s Refusals?

Webinar organized by University College London

In this webinar, (see video below) the notion of ‘refusal’ is taken up to explore its value and utility for Childhood Studies. Refusal, in the work of political anthropologist and Indigenous Studies scholar Audra Simpson, is both a research sensibility and decolonial act that presses the limits of a liberal politics of recognition. With the help of three distinguished scholars, in this webinar the following is considered: What does refusal mean in the context of critical childhood studies, given the thorny problem of power-laden generational relations and oppressive infrastructures of listening? In taking up refusal’s challenge to shift our unit of analysis away from marginalized peoples and pain narratives, what are the institutions, modes of power, and mutating forms of capitalist realism that demand exploration, interrogation, and reimagining in childhood studies?

Calls for Papers: Gaza Mental Health Program

Call for Papers

GCMHP’s 8th International Conference

Entitled:

“Mental Health in Gaza Strip: An Area Populated by Refugees”

(Online Conference)

7-8-9 June 2021

Palestine – Gaza Strip

Contact Information
Ms. Nadia Madi the conference coordinator, Tel:(00972-8-2641511) (00972-8-2641512) (00972-8- 2641513), Mobile: 00970599586853, Fax: 00972-8-2641510, e-mail: pr1@gcmhp.net, website: www.gcmhp.ps  

Introduction:

The 8th International Conference entitled "Mental Health in the Gaza Strip as an Area Populated by Refugees", aims to share and present the most important findings of research products and scientific papers in the field of mental health. The conference also aims to create a cross-border dialogue that gives space to exchange experiences and the latest research and scientific developments in the field of mental health in Palestine and the Gaza Strip in particular. Hence, Gaza Community Mental Health Program announces the start of receiving abstracts of research papers within the conditions mentioned in this announcement and in line with the themes covered by the conference as shown below.

1. Background 

GCMHP has a long-standing and a leading role in addressing mental health and human rights issues that affect the wellbeing of the Palestinian community. This leading role was strengthened through implementing model procedures, protocols and research to support improved delivery of evidence-based mental health services guided by the principles of justice and human rights. 

Since its establishment, GCMHP organized seven international conferences, the latest of which was the one held under the title “Mental Health Without Borders” on the second and third of November, 2019.  In this conference different community issues including psychological resilience, impact of psychological trauma and human rights violations on the mental health of the Palestinian community and the role of international solidarity and the role of scientific research were addressed, in addition to the needs of mental health service providers. The conference was attended by about 646 local and international participants from mental health and psychosocial background. 

The 8th international conference comes as a response to the local demand to know more about the psychosocial consequences of the hardships among refugees in the last two years. In addition to exchange knowledge between local and international academics, mental health professionals, decision makers, intellectuals and researchers. 

The outputs of this conference will contribute to forming a roadmap for active organizations working in the field of mental health and psychosocial support in the Gaza Strip. GCMHP plans to hold this conference as an interactive online event, benefiting significantly from not being restricted to a single place or location, as these gatherings take place through the use of the internet. Anyone who wishes to attend the event can join from anywhere around the world so long as they have an online device and internet connection. The conference is to be held over 3 days from the seventh to the ninth of June 2021.

1. Target groups:

The target groups include local and international experts, mental health and human rights professionals and activists; researchers and academics; as well as service providers and any other stakeholders.

1. Conference Themes:

The conference is seeking submission related to the following three main themes:

• First: Socioeconomic conditions in the Gaza strip.

• The impact of the blockade and human rights violations on the social and economic situation.

• The impact of Covid-19 on the social matrix, economic situation and the educational process.

• Social stigma with reference to mental health during Covid-19 

• Second: Mental health conditions of the population in the Gaza strip

• Mental health for psychosocial workers and service providers.

• Mental health for women. 

• Mental health for the vulnerable (the elderly, children and people with disabilities)

• Third: MHPSS services/interventions available in the Gaza Strip; gaps to be bridged.

• Psychosocial interventions in the Palestinian context. 

• Challenges faced by organizations in providing services.

• The role of mental health therapy and supportive supervision in improving services.  

• The role of scientific research and local and international organizations in developing psychosocial interventions and bridging the gap. 

On the margins of the conference – Special session

A special session is held to provide a space for non-specialized organizations to share their experiences in providing interventions. Special experiences are to be presented too in this session.  

Abstract submission guidelines:

• The due date for submitting the abstracts is April 20, 2021. 

• The abstract should be preceded by the paper title in English, should be written in Times New Roman characters, size 12, single-line spacing, and shall not exceed 200 words.

• The abstract should include: (the aim, methodology, results and conclusion).

• The presenter’s name should BE WRITTEN with bold characters.

• Abstracts should be submitted by email to the following address: gcmhp.conf.2021@gmail.com

• Note: submitted abstracts will be evaluated by the Scientific Committee. If abstract is accepted, author agrees to send full text paper, including related call for paper, results, tables, figures and references. 

تسجيل اللقاء السابع من سلسلة ندوات علم النفس التحرّري والنقديّ

أصواتُ الأطفالِ الفلسطينيين/ات ضدَّ السِّجنِ البيْتيّ

البيتُ كمُعْتَقَلٍ، والطفولةُ كحيِّزٍ للحَوْكَمَةِ الاستيطانيّةِ الاستعماريّة

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Palestine Studies: Roundtable ON MENTAL HEALTH AMID COVID-19

Roundtable

ON MENTAL HEALTH AMID COVID-19

WEEAM HAMMOUDEH, SAMAH JABR AND MARIA HELBICH, CINDY SOUSA

The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the devastating and disproportionate effects of structures of violence that produce vulnerability in communities of color globally, including with respect to mental health-care provision. While coping and resilience are dominant mainstream frameworks to understand mental health in crisis—both in Palestine and elsewhere—the three contributors to this roundtable were asked to offer a rejoinder to that approach. They reflect on the pandemic as an opportunity to revisit how we understand and advocate for critical approaches to mental health in Palestine in the midst of prolonged crisis.

WEEAM HAMMOUDEH: On 14 March 2020, Mai Alkaila, the minister of health of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, was interviewed on Al Jazeera’s Arabic-language news channel. Asked by the host if the limited number of Covid-19 cases in the Gaza Strip could be considered one of the “positive consequences” of the blockade—the implication being that living in a state of wide-scale isolation due to siege was protecting the Palestinian population of Gaza from the pandemic— she responded that there was of course nothing positive about occupation. In a global moment where lockdowns and quarantines have been instituted to protect people from the novel coronavirus, many memes and posts have circulated on social media with variants on one that read, “Dear world, how does the lockdown feel? Sincerely, Gaza.” Such posts were presumably meant to serve as a reminder that the people of Gaza have been struggling with isolation for more than a decade and to elicit sympathy for Gaza’s population. In addition, I began to notice more and more that Palestinians were being sought after for advice on how to deal with lockdown.

As a Palestinian woman social scientist working in public health and living in the West Bank, I found such social media, news, and mass media representations unnerving, notwithstanding the fact that they may have been well-intentioned. Within the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, such representations reinforce the notion that Palestinians are somehow less vulnerable to quarantine and closure, and they practically fetishize an assumed innate Palestinian ability to adapt to confinement that has suddenly become a useful trait during the pandemic. For once, it seemed like Gazans had a leg up! While such representations superficially allude to the broader conditions many Palestinians, especially those in the Gaza Strip, live under, they often reinforced the idea that Palestinians either had an innate superhuman ability to be resilient (read: passive adaptation1) or that throughout the world, people were getting a taste of what Palestinian “victims”

Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XLIX, No. 4 (Summer 2020), p. 77, ISSN: 0377-919X; electronic ISSN: 1533-8614. © 2020 by the Institute for Palestine Studies. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2020.49.4.77.

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have grown accustomed to. Even in their most well-intentioned forms, such representations serve to strip Palestinians of their agency, reify the idea of Palestinian resilience as inherent rather than active, and reduce Palestinians to the state of victims in need of sympathy.

While this may be an oversimplification, the implicit pitfalls of such representations are reminiscent of some common characterizations of Palestinians in mental health research. Mental health researchers often engage with Palestinians as traumatized victims or take for granted their resilience. In what follows, I will reflect on the need to expand the scope of mental health research and praxis while drawing on some insights from ongoing research in Palestine. I argue that while it is essential to take context and people’s subjective experiences into account, we need to move beyond the common tropes used to characterize Palestinians and the Palestinian psyche, engage with the complexity and contradictions of their conditions, and resist the urge to essentialize or reinforce Palestinian exceptionalism.

Mental health is a key area of concern for public health, and especially so in contexts of protracted conflict and chronic crises whose negative effects on mental health have been well documented in the literature.2 Mainstream approaches to mental health investigations have focused on coping, on the trauma experienced by survivors, and on resilience as key areas of study.3 But despite their salience, scholars, practitioners, and activists have increasingly challenged the use of such concepts and, more broadly, the mainstream approaches they stem from, calling for critical and contextually relevant approaches.

In the Palestinian context, trauma and resilience in particular have been at the center of discussion and critique: on the one hand, the emphasis on trauma-based approaches, and particularly post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which tend to pathologize individuals and render a large proportion of the Palestinian population as individually “traumatized” and hence in need of psychiatric treatments and therapies; and on the other, an overemphasis on Palestinians’ resilience or invulnerability, which overlooks multiple forms of social suffering resulting from decades of occupation and settler colonialism and implies that the function of resilience is to improve the capacities of Palestinians to adapt to dire and unjust conditions rather than to resist them.4 Both the victimization and the valorization miss the target.

These binaries are also echoed in the representations I invoked at the beginning of this essay. Thinking through my own frustrations on the topic, I recognize that they stem in part from what has become an almost visceral reaction to the mischaracterization of my own subjectivity, a mischaracterization that I find suffocating and confining. I do not want to be portrayed as a victim, nor do I want to be tokenized. Such representations also miss the messiness and imperfections of struggle; the nonlinear oscillations between ease and disease, as Rita Giacaman has noted;5 and the subtle and not-so-subtle forms of communal agency and resistance that are essential to the contextually relevant conceptualizations of mental health that Nadera Shalhoub- Kevorkian outlines in her work.6

Experiencing the Pandemic in the West Bank

As part of ongoing research, colleagues and I began conducting interviews in the West Bank about the uncertainties around Covid-19. We heard from people about their fears, anxieties, and

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worries concerning their own safety and, perhaps more importantly, the safety of their loved ones. They described feeling as if they were walking “into the unknown”7 or “through a forest filled with beasts.”8 Some talked about financial concerns, worries about reaching services or the adequacy of available services, the difficulty of being separated from loved ones, and of having to accept that one must stay away from them in order to protect them. As in many places around the world, there were many expressions of uncertainty about the future, about day-to-day survival, and putting food on the table, among others. In a context with limited institutionalized safety nets and chronic political uncertainty, such worries were only amplified.

At the same time, interlocutors talked about the reignited hope they felt as a result of blossoming local initiatives (many of them youth-led), of cooperation between local organizations that did not normally work together, and of partnerships centered on people helping each other—whether the provision of food and supplies to those in the greatest need, helping to organize the distribution of medications to people with chronic conditions, including mental disorders, or other creative ways of connecting without having to be physically within reach. One young woman remarked that such initiatives and the community response acted as a reminder “that good still exists.”9 For those who participated in them, such initiatives provided them with a sense of purpose and meaning, which in turn became a source of psychological strength.

Thinking through our interlocutors’ experiences, with all of their complexities in a context where “we have to tackle two pandemics,” as many put it—Covid-19 and occupation—the binary types of representation referred to earlier and the related mental health approaches that are generally deployed among the Palestinian population felt even more inadequate. Our interlocutors emphasized action, connection, and the right to justice and to a dignified existence in an equitable society free of corruption. Such an understanding in turn raises the following questions: Where do agency and social solidarities fit into mental health approaches and definitions? Are feeling down, anxious, or even depressed antithetical to resilience and resistance? What would a mental health praxis centered on justice and dignity look like?

As we have seen repeatedly in Palestine, the application of trauma-based diagnostic criteria to a population living in a context of protracted occupation, settler colonialism, racism, and apartheid renders whole groups of people “ill” and in need of treatment. Conflict, and especially protracted conflict, affects the very foundations of society, posing threats to human security and well-being,10 and causing damage or strain to social, physical, and environmental infrastructures.11 Stressful social and material conditions, including poverty, malnutrition, and the weakening of social ties and networks, worsened by conflict, can lead to less visible forms of social suffering, ill-being, and deprivation, both collectively and individually.12 Despite the pervasiveness of these forms of social and collective suffering, trauma-focused models ignore such manifestations of ill mental health because they do not fit diagnostic criteria. At the same time, preexisting diagnostic tools and measures are often used without questioning their relevance and validity. As Samah Jabr reminds us, when talking about the use of the PTSD label in the Palestinian context, “there is no ‘post- traumatic’ safety. The phenomena of avoidance and hyper-vigilance are considered to be dysfunctional psychological reactions in a soldier who has returned to the safety of his hometown. But for tortured Palestinian prisoners, such symptoms are reasonable reactions, insofar as the threat lives on; they may be re-arrested and tortured again at any time.”13

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Covid-19 has in many ways become a global trauma. In a post-pandemic world, will we start labeling hypervigilance with cleaning practices as a dysfunctional psychological reaction? Would we approach the consequences of Covid-19 on our collective psyche through the individual therapy approaches that dominate mental health practice? Resilience implies steadiness, an ability to bounce back to where we were before the pandemic. Would that really be what is best for our mental health—especially given that this pandemic has shown that even a presumed biological “equalizer” such as this virus only lays bare and reproduces existing inequalities and disparities in health, as well as social and economic conditions?14

We frequently face multiple exposures and vulnerabilities, and we need approaches that allow us to examine the multiple layers and interactions between them. This is particularly true in contexts of chronic conflict like Palestine. In recent years, researchers have developed ecosocial and multilayered approaches to examining health outcomes, including mental health, whereby the multiple levels or layers of effects, including biological, ecological, and social organization are taken into account.15 In the Palestinian context, Giacaman has elaborated a similar approach that attempts to examine a web of causation that includes biological factors and social determinants, including the conditions in which people live, as well as the broader political determinants of health, which can include war, racism, political economy, factionalism, and colonialism—in other words, the broader structures that shape the conditions under which we are born, live, age, and die.16 Such approaches are important because they allow us to examine the intersections of vulnerabilities or exposures.17 As the literature has increasingly shown, people can live under multiple forms and layers of oppression, or have multiple sources of vulnerability at once.

In the Palestinian context, for example, emerging research is showing that people who are more exposed to acute forms of Israeli military violence may also be more likely to be poor.18 If we take an example from the United States, Black people are often found to have worse health conditions and poorer mental health. Many analyses that account for race tell us as much. But being Black is not the underlying condition that predisposes Black people to worse health outcomes: the structures of racism are. As Alyasah A. Sewell has shown,19 racial disparities in health are rooted in political and economic processes, such as redlining, for example, in the U.S. context. This is an important distinction because it allows us to put our finger on the root causes of ill health and disease, rather than merely observing that Black people exhibit worse health outcomes and statuses than their white counterparts. The same is true for Palestinians in Jerusalem, as compared with their Jewish counterparts. To recap, such approaches allow us to identify the structural conditions in place that continue to create disparities in health or produce ill health.

It is not adaptation to oppressive structures that we need but rather resistance to them. While the current moment is filled with uncertainties and challenges that can have negative effects on mental health and well-being, especially in the context of the ongoing Nakba, this pandemic has shown that adapting to oppressive structures only exacerbates disparities. We need critical mental health approaches now more than ever—critical approaches that allow us to engage with complexity without losing sight of structural causes. Rather than numbing the pain of our individual wounds, what is needed is a mental health praxis rooted in social justice, one that seeks to strengthen communal solidarities and that identifies and addresses the structural (political and social) causes of collective ill-being at their root. Healing in a mental health praxis embedded within social

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justice and liberation becomes a call to action, an effort toward reconstructing a world that fosters our mental well-being.

SAMAH JABR AND MARIA HELBICH: Since the beginning of the pandemic-related crisis, the mechanisms of occupation have not let up in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt). Both Palestinian livelihood and service-related structures have continued to come under attack by Israeli settlers, with incidents resulting in injuries or property damage increasing by 80 percent since 5 March 2020, when the first cases were detected in Bethlehem.20 Anxieties and fears caused by the novel coronavirus have only exacerbated already-existing vulnerabilities.21 The current pandemic has further impacted the fragile health system, which is almost entirely dependent on international donor funding. Geographical and social fragmentation also impede the development of a coherent and effective response to the virus. The West Bank is fragmented by settlements, the so-called separation wall, and restricted military zones; the Gaza Strip is contiguous but sealed off by an ever-tightening blockade. Because different authorities are responsible for different parts of the oPt, this fragmentation has made a coherent, nationwide response to Covid-19 impossible in practice. Testing sites across the West Bank, for example, are regulated by the Ramallah-based Ministry of Health, while testing centers in East Jerusalem are operated by Israeli authorities.22 Communities and families are cut off from each other and from essential services, with fragmentation and isolation severely affecting the psychosocial well-being of Palestinians. Safety, community cohesion, and cultural identity, which are already deeply undermined by the occupation, are now even more tenuous as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.23 And given that the pandemic has neither changed the conditions of occupation nor even resulted in a let-up of violence against Palestinians, it has been particularly challenging to respond to mental health needs during the crisis. While the Mental Health Unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health (MoH) came up with a five-step mental health response plan at the beginning of the pandemic, the MoH’s most urgent priority was to ensure that the health system would not collapse under the weight of the novel coronavirus’s rapid spread.24 Thus, for example, the Palestinian National Rehabilitation Center, a major mental health services facility in Bethlehem, was transformed into a Covid-19 center, leading to the discharge of patients in need of the center’s specialized services.25 The measure was in line with the traditionally low political priority the Palestinian government accords to mental health issues.

Due to the diversified field of mental health care in Palestine, coordination between different actors has proven difficult, as demonstrated by the attempt to establish a national helpline, a proposal made by the Mental Health Unit to the MoH. By the time approval for such a helpline was secured, a number of hotlines were already being operated by local and international nongovernmental organizations, which, in the scramble to do something palpable, lacked standard operating guidelines as well as referral systems to guarantee that patients in need would reach specialized services. To address this issue and ensure that patients received quality services, the Mental Health Unit put in place a weekly open webinar in mid-March 2020 by way of offering mutual support and peer supervision to mental health professionals from both local and international organizations.26 In an unparalleled situation such as the pandemic, it became obvious that there were no ready answers and that reflection and communication between

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different mental health actors were essential to respond to mental health needs. Some thirty to thirty- five people participated in these open meetings. Participants were provided with newly emerging information and current data about the pandemic; emphasis was placed on ensuring that the interventions and suggestions of international actors were appropriate to the local context and challenges of Palestinians living under occupation; and an effort was made to support and strengthen mental health services and the competencies of those working in the field. To illustrate, in the case of Palestinian Bedouin communities that do not necessarily have internet access or even reliable phone connections, different approaches were necessary to reach patients in need of mental health services. Later on, the Mental Health Unit came up with a list of ten criteria that needed to be met in order for a hotline to be licensed.

Stigmatization and Blame

Having a forum for supervision and professional exchange was especially important as the effects of pandemic-induced stigmatization and blame became apparent in our clinical work. When faced with an invisible threat like this virus, which spreads due to the behavior of people, the social perception of the disease is likely to be expressed through prejudice, stigma, and blame of individuals and communities.27 While most people banded together in solidarity and support, stigmatization was easily observed in the blame that was laid at the door of marginalized groups, in particular. Laborers working in Israel, who were already vulnerable due to the Israeli authorities’ failure to test them and ensure their treatment before their return home,28 were singled out by the media, which depicted them as “threats” to the general public inside the oPt whom others should avoid. Such depictions circulated anonymously on social media or the messaging service WhatsApp, making it difficult to hold to account those responsible for the reports. One laborer ended up isolating in his car, where he slept for fear of infecting his parents, to widespread media coverage and celebration.29 Commending the behavior of this particular laborer might very easily lead to implying that those who do not take the same drastic steps were risking the lives of others. Another example of the devastating effects of stigmatization was the attempted suicide of a woman after a media spokesperson identified her publicly as breaking the quarantine and infecting thirteen other people.

Refugee camps, particularly Dheisheh in Bethlehem and Nur Shams close to Tulkarm, were also singled out as areas of unlawfulness where people were not adhering to physical-distancing rules.30 The focus on refugee camps is interesting because they were not the only places where people did not follow mitigation regulations, by a long shot. However, the media, and particularly social media, shined the light on refugees, blaming them for spreading the virus while ignoring the fact that asking people in refugee camps to stay home and social distance placed an impossible burden on them, given overcrowded living conditions, both inside individual homes and within the space of the camp. Blaming refugees comes more easily because they are at a disadvantage and thus an easier target.

Another example of stigmatization could be observed during the recent spike in Covid-19 cases in the West Bank.31 When two jewelry stores in Hebron and Nablus were characterized as places of infection, Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCIs) were blamed, as it is customary to buy jewelry for weddings in the West Bank. In a statement to combat the spread of the virus, Palestinian

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Authority prime minister Mohammed Shtayyeh appealed to such visitors not to come to the West Bank.32 His appeal provoked widespread social media reaction, blaming the PCIs for spreading the virus. The psychosocial effects of this phenomenon become apparent in the behavior of individuals: for instance, in light of the recent accusations, a PCI known to one of the authors changes his accent every time he is in the West Bank in order to hide his background.

The pandemic has also highlighted the need for a participatory approach and public awareness that is based on explanations and respect instead of orders and authority. A participatory approach involves working together with community or religious leaders in engaging people from a wide spectrum of expertise and social backgrounds to meet with the community and educate them about the necessary measures. This is particularly important in the context of Palestine due to the fragility of the health system and the lack of confidence in political figures. We would therefore argue that an approach by policy makers that focuses more on community engagement and that appeals to the individual’s personal responsibility in fighting the virus would have been beneficial. While this was done relatively well at the beginning of the crisis, confusion resulted from a premature lifting of restrictions quickly followed by a reversal during the Eid al-Fitr holiday, which resulted in several confrontations and ultimately the injury of two men.33

In an attempt to answer to the need for educating the public about the pandemic and to preserve maximum transparency in the issuance of regulations and restrictions, the Mental Health Unit has been speaking out in radio interviews and via other media channels on how to fight the misconceptions and rumors surrounding the stigma of contracting the virus. In regard to the stigmatization of laborers, the need for physical distancing was, for instance, stressed, while at the same time the public was advised to stay socially connected.

Toward a Solidarity and Advocacy Approach

The Covid-19 pandemic has called attention to the need for public health-related interventions founded in advocacy, solidarity, and prevention to deal with the pandemic and fight the spread of the virus. Mental health professionals in the oPt have long been arguing for a more comprehensive approach to mental health, one based on a model of professional solidarity that addresses not only individual suffering but its underlying causes. As I have written elsewhere, “A diagnostic approach [that] fail[s] to take the context into consideration, is short-sighted at best. It is cowardly because it attempts to ‘treat’ the individual and not the pathogenic context.”34

Mental health professionals have therefore been urging international organizations working locally to base their approaches on human rights and social justice, instead of solely on medical indicators, and to emphasize the role of cultural, socioeconomic, and political factors that perpetuate and reinforce social injustice and human suffering. In an environment of prolonged conflict and crisis, it would be negligent to focus solely on a diagnosis that individualizes and victimizes people suffering from collective trauma. A distinction needs to be made between the mental health of those that are mentally ill and in need of specialized treatment and responses to political violations that happen daily in the oPt due to the Israeli occupation.35

The consequences of the Israeli occupation do not only have an impact on individual mental health but also encompass legal and geopolitical spheres. Thus, any attempt to strengthen the

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mental well-being of Palestinians must consider interventions by moral and legal authorities of international stature, as is for instance the norm when working together with legislators and judges to enforce laws protecting victims of domestic violence. Justice for the Palestinian people and the restoration of dignity can only be achieved when the work is not done in a political vacuum but in cooperation with legal, political, and human rights organizations.36

While national and international efforts to place greater emphasis on mental health needs during the pandemic serve as an opportunity to strengthen the mental health system in Palestine, we would argue that the virus should not distract from the political system of injustice that will remain even after this pandemic has passed. It is therefore essential to focus on the effects of the Israeli occupation on the mental health of the Palestinian people and to advocate for their national and human rights. Otherwise, the experiences of Palestinians will be pathologized and their responses medicalized while the status quo of the pathogenic context remains the same.37

Demands for equal rights and justice need to be put at the center of health efforts. Given that we can see a discourse on advocacy and solidarity like never before in the public health sphere, we are hopeful that an approach that strengthens collective solidarity and advocates for those that have been subjected to all manner of violence will also be possible in the future.

CINDY SOUSA: Evidence is growing about the lasting effects of Covid-19 infection. It is not only the physically manifested components of Covid-19 that must concern us, but also the varied ways the pandemic influences mental health. It elicits a profound fear of death and illness for ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities; and it fosters within us suspicion of coworkers, friends, neighbors, and even groceries and packages as vectors of disease. This period has also incited massive uncertainty related to how long we will have to endure the virus and the economic, social, and psychological costs of the measures to prevent its spread and mitigate its effects.

Yet, there is so much more to the mental health sequela of Covid-19 than stress and grief on the level of one individual, or even of one family. To really consider the impacts of Covid-19 on mental health, we must understand the disease and the conditions surrounding it within critical approaches that move us away from individual pathology to an understanding of well-being as profoundly communal and deeply tied to politics.38

When we talk about the collective crisis arising from this pandemic, one of the most crucial points is the variance of Covid-19 across lines of power and privilege. There are particular communal mental health effects arising from how the disparities related to the pandemic result not from accident, but directly from oppression and structural violence: assaults that are “built into the structure and show up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances.”39 Access to health itself varies—as does access to the health care, food, childcare, education, and economic security that characterizes our experience of health in general, and especially during the pandemic. We are half a year into Covid-19, and it is clearer than ever: the collective and political contexts of health determine outcomes.40

What’s more, the predictability of uneven effects across populations is at the root of the collective grief surrounding the Covid-19 crisis. I write this from the United States. Much like the context of many U.S.-based communities, within Palestine, contemplating the spread of the pandemic elicits tremendous collective despair and rage. These shared emotional reactions

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stem from rightly situating the effects of the pandemic within its particular cultural and historical contexts of ongoing, deliberate structural violence. The disproportionate effects of both the illness and the social and economic costs of Covid-19 are yet additional collective assaults against populations that have already endured so many.

Indeed, the unequal distribution of Covid-19 infection and death is not new, and not surprising. It’s been foretold.41 From a public health perspective, we know that the particular vulnerabilities specific communities face within this pandemic are not the result of accident or personal choices, but of deliberate arrangements of power—predictable parts of the structural violence many communities have confronted for generations. While most recently made visible by Covid-19, disparities are regularly seen in other patterns of disease.42 The ability to foretell disproportionate health consequences of disease—and have those assertions met with silence from governments and the global community—is itself a form of mass trauma.43 This profound silence is, in the language of our times, a collective gaslighting with ramifications not only for the physical health of entire communities (as risks of disease are downplayed and ignored) but also for the mental health of populations.

So, what are the antidotes to the despair arising from yet another health crisis whose roots can be located within systematic oppression?

We must tell the truth about the ways disproportionate health risks are rooted in arrangements of power. To do so requires a staunchly political frame.44 When we specifically turn to the mental health effects of Covid-19, we must consider how populations make meaning of the impacts of this disease, including the economic despair and social isolation that accompany it. In Palestine, differential access to factors that protect and promote health results from decades of Israeli occupation, which has included not only military occupation but also the deliberate de- development of Palestinian infrastructure,45 including that of public health.46 Settler colonialism also has direct psychological implications as a distinct form of historical trauma characterized by intentional, ongoing assaults on collective well-being, identity, and survival.47

Using a lens of collective, historical trauma tied to settler colonialism inspires particular attention to resistance and the ways this resistance feeds collective resilience.48 Elsewhere, scholars have called for an understanding of resilience that situates the concept within deep political, social, and economic contexts.49 Resilience is not static, something to be achieved, or a trait that we have or don’t have. Rather, as has become somewhat commonplace to conclude, resilience is a process. Waking up every day in a pandemic has made clear the dynamic nature of resilience, as people the world over face continual health and economic crises and uncertainty, as well as profound loss: of community and socialization, of place, and of schedule. Particularly within the Palestinian context, resilience is best understood as a lively, highly political, intensely communal process that does not represent an aberration, but rather a part of the dynamics of oppression and resistance.50

Daily acts of survival in Palestine have always reflected and built agency, power, and connection.51 These factors—solidarity and action—underlie healing, as liberation psychology instructs.52 From the rapidly expanding body of liberation psychology scholarship,53 we can derive many lessons. Collective resilience depends on community characteristics such as cohesion, group identity, and a shared history and culture—rooted and reflected in stories, songs, poetry, food,

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customs, and cultural symbols. Particularly, but not only, when we consider the massive individual and collective stressors posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, we must take heart in the power of endurance, built on trust and collectivity across multiple, highly permeable levels—personal, family, neighborhood, cultural, and political body—and work to bolster these.54 The work of early anticolonial mental health scholars such as Frantz Fanon and Ignacio Martín-Baró (one of the pioneering minds in liberation psychology) reminds us of the redemption of political struggle, and of the mental health benefits of asserting collective power, sovereignty, and health.55

For all kinds of well-being, we must not let the Covid-19 crisis be another opportunity for health imperialism and the disaster capitalism that already proliferate in locations of ongoing occupation.56 On the contrary, as we are seeing, the political dimensions of disease also give rise to renewed opportunities for action and solidarity—as illustrated by the most recent Black Lives Matter protests that originated in the United States and quickly became global. This movement, like the ongoing movement for freedom in Palestine, very much brings to the fore the dynamic push-and- pull of grief and healing, and the potential to counter despair through insisting on collective dignity, action, accountability, and care.

About the Contributors

Weeam Hammoudeh is assistant professor at Birzeit University’s Institute of Community and Public Health, where she is also the coordinator for the Mental Health Unit. Her areas of academic interest in- clude the impact of political and social transformations on health, psychosocial well-being, and demo- graphic processes, particularly in conflict areas; her research also examines the ways that health systems and social institutions develop and shift in relation to political, economic, and structural factors.

Samah Jabr is a psychiatrist practicing in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. She is currently the head of the Mental Health Unit at the Ramallah-based Ministry of Health. She is also a mental health and devel- opment consultant to international organizations and the author of Derrière les fronts: Chroniques d’une psychiatre psychothérapeute Palestinienne sous occupation (Paris: Hybrid Pulse, 2018).

Maria Helbich is a clinical psychotherapist who specializes in gender-based violence and trauma and was working in the oPt until recently. She has offered mental health services to survivors of violence in a victim protection facility, as well as in child protection and women’s centers, and has also worked in Lebanon.

Cindy Sousa is associate professor of social work at Bryn Mawr College. In her scholarship, Sousa promotes understanding about the conditions of underlying health, using a lens informed by femi- nist and critical race theories that prioritize the social, environmental, and political contexts of well-being. Currently, she has several ongoing projects focused on the challenges, strengths, and strategies of families during war and the refugee experience.

ENDNOTES

1 By this I mean a type of resilience attributed to Palestinians as a result of adaptation to their situation as a trait rather than the result of an active and complex process.

2 Rochelle Ann Burgess and Laura Fonseca, “Re-thinking Recovery in Post-Conflict Settings: Supporting the Mental Well-Being of Communities in Colombia,” Global Public Health 15, no. 2 (2020): pp. 200–219; Weeam Hammoudeh, Dennis Hogan, and Rita Giacaman, “Quality of Life, Human Insecurity, and Distress among Palestinians in the Gaza Strip before and after the Winter 2008–2009 Israeli War,” Quality of Life Research 22, no. 9 (November 2013): pp. 2371–79; Hanna Kienzler, “Debating War-Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in an Interdisciplinary

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Arena,” Social Science and Medicine 2, no. 67 (July 2008): pp. 218–27; Duncan Pedersen et al., “The Sequelae of Political Violence: Assessing Trauma, Suffering and Dislocation in the Peruvian Highlands,” Social Science and Medicine 67, no. 2 (July 2008): pp. 205–17; Kenneth E. Miller and Andrew Rasmussen, “War Exposure, Daily Stressors, and Mental Health in Conflict and Post- Conflict Settings: Bridging the Divide between Trauma-Focused and Psychosocial Frameworks,” Social Science and Medicine 70, no. 1 (January 2010): pp. 7–16.

3 Said Shehadeh, “The 2014 War on Gaza: Engineering Trauma and Mass Torture to Break Palestinian Resilience,” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 12, no. 3 (September 2015): pp. 278–94; Miller and Rasmussen, “War Exposure”; Rita Giacaman, “Reframing Public Health in Wartime: From the Biomedical Model to the ‘Wounds Inside,’” JPS 47, no. 2 (Winter 2018): pp. 9–27.

4 Rita Giacaman, “Reflections on the Meaning of ‘Resilience’ in the Palestinian Context,” Journal of Public Health (2019): pp 1–5, available at https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2d97/bb8c2a1ef2a630 52806ea06b6adc77e7e337.pdf?_ga=2.14645169.721236282.1596047591-1026684673.1596047591; Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Gun to Body: Mental Health against Unchilding,” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 17, no. 2 (June 2020): pp. 126–45; Samah Jabr, “What Palestinians Experience Goes beyond the PTSD Label,” Middle East Eye, 7 February 2019, https://www. middleeasteye.net/opinion/what-palestinians-experience-goes-beyond-ptsd-label.

5 Giacaman, “Reframing Public Health in Wartime.”

6 Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Gun to Body.”

7 Phone interview with interlocutor, 18 May 2020, Furush Bayt Dajan, Jordan Valley.

8 Interview with interlocutor, 18 April 2020, Bayt Jala.

9 Phone Interview with interlocutor, 7 June 2020, al-Bireh.

10 Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, eds., Social Suffering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Kienzler, “Debating War-Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

11 Duncan Pedersen, “Political Violence, Ethnic Conflict, and Contemporary Wars: Broad Implications for Health and Social Well-Being,” Social Science and Medicine 55, no. 2 (July 2002): pp. 175–90; Pedersen et al., “The Sequelae of Political Violence”; Miller and Rasmussen, “War Exposure.”

12 Pedersen, “Political Violence, Ethnic Conflict, and Contemporary Wars”; Pedersen et al., “The Sequelae of Political Violence”; Miller and Rasmussen, “War Exposure”; Burgess and Fonseca, “Re-Thinking Recovery in Post-Conflict Settings.”

13 Jabr, “What Palestinians Experience.”

14 Rochelle Burgess, “COVID-19 Mental-Health Responses Neglect Social Realities,” Nature, 4 May 2020, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01313-9; Faheem Ahmed et al., “Why Inequality Could Spread COVID-19,” Lancet Public Health 5, no. 5 (May 2020): p. e240.

15 Nancy Krieger, “Theories for Social Epidemiology in the 21st Century: An Ecosocial Perspective,” International Journal of Epidemiology 30, no. 4 (August 2001): pp. 668–77.

16 Giacaman, “Reframing Public Health”; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Gun to Body.”

17 Giacaman, “Reframing Public Health”; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Gun to Body”; Krieger, “Theories for Social Epidemiology”; M. Brinton Lykes and Erin Sibley, “Liberation Psychology and Pragmatic Solidarity: North–South Collaborations through the Ignacio Martín-Baró Fund,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 20, no. 3 (2014): p. 209.

18 Tracy Kuo Lin et al., “Food Insecurity in the Occupied Palestinian Territory: Reflections in Light of the COVID-19 Lockdown,” LSE Middle East Centre (blog), 31 March 2020, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/ 2020/03/31/food-insecurity-in-the-occupied-palestinian-territory-reflections-in-light-of-the-Covid- 19-lockdown/.

19 Abigail A. Sewell, “The Racism-Race Reification Process: A Mesolevel Political Economic Framework for Understanding Racial Health Disparities,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 2, no. 4 (October 2016): pp. 402–32.

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20 United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), “Occupied Palestinian Territory: COVID-19 Emergency Situation Report 7 (28 April–4 May),” 5 May 2020, https://www. ochaopt.org/content/Covid-19-emergency-situation-report-7.

21 World Health Organization, Health Conditions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem, and in the Occupied Syrian Golan, 1 May 2019, https://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/ WHA72/A72_33-en.pdf.

22 OCHA, “COVID-19 Emergency Situation Report 7.”

23 Rajaie Batniji et al., “Health as Human Security in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” The Lancet 373

no. 9669 (2009): p. 1138.

24 For more information, see Samah Jabr, “Planning Forward in the Midst of Crisis,” This Week in Palestine, no. 226, June 2020, 52–58, https://www.thisweekinpalestine.com/wp-content/uploads/ 2020/05/Jun-2020-266.pdf.

25 Jabr, “Planning Forward,” p. 53.

26 See Palestinian Ministry of Health, “Wizarat al-suhha: Bada’na bi bina’ fariq tadakkhul nafsi li muwajahat ja’ihat corona” (Ministry of Health: We have started building a psychological intervention team to tackle the coronavirus pandemic), 12 May 2020, http://site.moh.ps/index/ ArticleView/ArticleId/4892/Language/ar.

27 Roberto Mezzina et al., “Mental Health at the Age of Coronavirus: Time for Change,” Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 29 May 2020, p. 2, https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/ s00127-020-01886-w.pdf.

28 Al-Haq et al., Joint Urgent Appeal to the United Nations Special Procedures, 14 April 2020, p. 2, http:// www.alhaq.org/cached_uploads/download/2020/04/14/200414-joint-urgent-appeal-on-palestinian- workers-final-1586888219.pdf.

29 BBC News, “Trindingh: Li-himayat walidihi min kuruna, Falastini ya ‘zil nafsahu al-ayam fi sayyara” (Trending: To protect his parents from coronavirus, a Palestinian cut himself off for days in his car), 14 April 2020, https://www.bbc.com/arabic/tv-and-radio-52286225.

30 See for instance B-News, “Qarar har al-harakat fi al-‘ayd . . . bayna l-Iltizam wa-l-fawa” (The decision to ban travel for Eid: Between accountability and chaos), 24 May 2020, http://www.bnews.ps/news/ 5eca333f30a1984683040d74 or Wattan, “’Isabatan khilal munawashat bayna muwatinin wa-l-ajhiza al-amaniyya bi-mukhayam al-duhaysha, wa l-muhafiz yaqrir tashkil lajnah tahqiq fawriyya” (Two injuries occurred during skirmishes between citizens and the security services in the Dheisheh camp, and the governor had decided to form an immediate investigation committee), 23 May 2020, https://www.wattan.net/ar/news/310081.html; Palestinian Refugees Portal, “Mudun wa mukhayamat ad-diffa al-gharbiyya taksir qararat man‘ iqamat salat al-‘Ayd” (West Bank cities and camps reverse decision to prevent Eid prayer from taking place), 24 May 2020, http://refugeesps. net/post/14133.

31 Al Arabiya, “Coronavirus: Highest Daily in West Bank COVID-19 Cases, More than Doubles in a Week,” 23 June 2020, https://english.alarabiya.net/en/coronavirus/2020/06/23/Coronavirus-cases-in-West- Bank-rise-by-more-than-double-in-one-week.html.

32 WAFA News, “Bayanat ra’is al-wizara al-duktur Muhammad Ishtayya hawwala al-Ijra’at al-jadida li- muwajiha tafshi firus kuruna” (Prime Minister Dr. Muhammad Shtayyeh’s statements on the new measures to cope with the spread of the coronavirus), 20 June 2020, http://info.wafa.ps/ar_page. aspx?id=NSwQbGa27782621823aNSwQbG.

33 Arabi21, “Amn as-sulta al-filistiniyya yusib shabin bil-rassa ‘ala khalfiyyat hazr korona” (Palestinian Authority security forces shot two young people in the wake of the coronavirus ban), 24 May 2020, https://arabi21.com/story/1272629.

34 Samah Jabr, “Resistance and Resilience in Palestine,” interview by Samantha Lavergnolle, Beyond the Frontlines, September 2017, https://beyondthefrontlines.com/samah-jabr/.

35 Rita Giacaman et al., “Mental Health, Social Distress and Political Oppression: The Case of the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” Global Public Health 6, no. 5 (2011): p. 555.

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36 Samah Jabr and Elizabeth Berger, “The Thinking behind a Mental Health Workers’ Pledge,” UK Palestine Mental Health Network, 12 November 2015, https://ukpalmhn.com/2015/11/12/the- thinking-behind-the-mental-health-workers-pledge/.

37 Samah Jabr, “Professional Solidarity with Palestine: A Mental Health Imperative,” Middle East Monitor, 29 November 2018, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20181129-professional-solidarity-with- palestine-a-mental-health-imperative/.

38 Derek Summerfield, “How Scientifically Valid Is the Knowledge Base of Global Mental Health?” BMJ 336, no. 7651 (2008): pp. 992–94; Brian Barber et al., “Politics Drives Human Functioning, Dignity, and Quality of Life,” Social Science and Medicine, no. 122 (2014): pp. 90–102.

39 Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): pp. 167–91.

40 Monica Webb Hooper, Anna María Nápoles, and Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, “COVID-19 and Racial/Ethnic Disparities,” JAMA: The Journal of the Medical Association 323, no. 24 (2020): pp. 2466–67; Mary T. Bassett, Jarvis T. Chen, and Nancy Krieger, “The Unequal Toll of COVID-19 Mortality by Age in the United States: Quantifying Racial/Ethnic Disparities,” Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies Working Paper Series 19, no. 3 (2020).

41 Sandra Crouse Quinn and Supriya Kumar, “Health Inequalities and Infectious Disease Epidemics: A Challenge for Global Health Security,” Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science 12, no. 5 (2014): pp. 263–73.

42 Paul E. Farmer et al., “Structural Violence and Clinical Medicine,” PLOS Medicine 3, no. 10 (October 2006): p. e449.

43 Osama Tanous, “Coronavirus Outbreak in the Time of Apartheid,” Al Jazeera, 24 March 2020, https:// www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/coronavirus-outbreak-time-apartheid-200324151937879. html.

44 Mohammed AlKhaldi et al., “Health System’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Conflict Settings: Policy Reflections from Palestine,” Global Public Health 15, no. 8 (2020): pp. 1244–56.

45 Sara Roy, The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: The Institute for Palestine Studies, 2016).

46 Rita Giacaman et al., “Health Status and Health Services in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” The Lancet 373, no. 9666 (2009): pp. 837–49.

47 Cindy A. Sousa, Susan P. Kemp, and Mona El-Zuhairi, “Place as a Social Determinant of Health: Narratives of Trauma and Homeland among Palestinian Women,” The British Journal of Social Work 49, no. 4 (June 2019): pp. 963–82; Teresa Evans-Campbell, “Historical Trauma in American Indian/Native Alaska Communities: A Multilevel Framework for Exploring Impacts on Individuals, Families, and Communities,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 23, no. 3 (March 2008): pp. 316–38.

48 Cindy Sousa and David J. Marshall, “Political Violence and Mental Health: Effects of Neoliberalism and the Role of International Social Work Practice,” International Social Work 60, no. 4 (2015): pp. 787–99.

49 See Giacaman, “Reflections on the Meaning of ‘Resilience’”; Michael Ungar, “The Social Ecology of Resilience: Addressing Contextual and Cultural Ambiguity of a Nascent Construct,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 81, no. 1 (January 2011): pp. 1–17; and Cindy Sousa et al., “Individual and Collective Dimensions of Resilience within Political Violence,” Trauma, Violence, and Abuse 14, no. 3 (July 2013): pp. 235–54.

50 Giacaman, “Reframing Public Health in Wartime”; Brian K. Barber, “Annual Research Review: The Experience of Youth with Political Conflict—Challenging Notions of Resilience and Encouraging Research Refinement,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 54, no. 4 (April 2013): pp. 461–73.

51 Lori Allen, “Getting by the Occupation: How Violence Became Normal during the Second Palestinian Intifada,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 3 (August 2008): pp. 453–87.

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52 David J. Marshall and Cindy Sousa, “Decolonizing Trauma: Liberation Psychology and Childhood Trauma in Palestine,” in Conflict, Violence and Peace, ed. Christopher Harker and Kathrin Hörschelmann (Singapore: Springer, 2017), pp. 287–306.

53 Lilian Comas-Díaz and Edil Torres Rivera, eds., Liberation Psychology: Theory, Method, Practice, and Social Justice (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2020); Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman, Toward Psychologies of Liberation (Baskingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

54 Ling San Lau et al., “COVID-19 in Humanitarian Settings and Lessons Learned from Past Epidemics,” Nature Medicine 26 (2020): pp. 647–48.

55 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1965); Ignacio Martín-Baró, Writings for a Liberation Psychology, ed. Adrianne Aron and Shawn Corne (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

56 Naomi Klein, “Video: Coronavirus Capitalism—And How to Beat It,” Naomi Kelin’s personal website, 16 March 2020, https://naomiklein.org/coronavirus-capitalism-and-how-to-beat-it/.

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Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian Wins AMECYS 2020 Book Award

The Association of Middle East Children and Youth Studies (AMECYS) awards Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding (Cambridge 2019) its book award.

In its award announcement, the AMECY committee notes the book’s significant contribution to understanding how children are used as political capital by those in power in society.  The committee writes, “Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, as an academic and activist living and working in East Jerusalem is not a distanced observer of the society she is studying but an engaged participant with a commitment to witnessing and sharing the experiences of Palestinians in Israel, and of Palestinian children in particular.” The committee lauds the book’s contribution “both to the academic literature on children and childhood in the Middle East and to an engaged and activist politics of the present.”  

You can listen to an interview with Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian on her book  here.

Arab normalisation is another attempt to defeat the Palestinians psychologically

Dr. Samah Jabr
September 24, 2020 at 11:57 am | Published in

Middle East Monitor

Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and foreign ministers representing the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the “Abraham Accords Peace Agreement” in Washington DC which normalises their relations at the expense of Palestinian national and human rights. US President Donald Trump hosted the ceremony and has claimed that these deals are just the beginning and that there will be other countries making similar agreements very soon, ending Israel’s isolation in the region and thereby excluding the Palestinians.

The Arab League refused to back the Palestinians and voted down a resolution denouncing the normalisation deals. Earlier, Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law, had toured the Middle East to meet with Arab leaders, even those in post-revolution Sudan, which had been promised an end to sanctions and removal from the list of terrorist states if it follows in the UAE’s footsteps. By seeking to buy more friends in support of the Israeli occupation and boost his record of achievements, Kushner hopes to deliver more votes to “Trump the peace broker” just in time for the US presidential election in November, all at the expense of the Palestinians.

In order to reduce the cognitive dissonance for the Arab masses, this political process has been synchronised with a public relations and social media campaign promoting a “fascination with Israel”. Supporting this effort is the broadcast of stories and films in Arabic celebrating the humanity, beauty and progressive nature of Israel. This discourse completely deletes the Palestinian narrative and the undisputable suffering of the people over many decades. Indeed, it is a campaign that smears the reputation of the people of Palestine, denies Israel’s brutal occupation and asserts that Palestinians willingly sold their lands and homes to the Zionist state. This fake narrative asserts that the Palestinians and their complaints are a drain on the Arab world and promotes the hash tag #Palestine is not my cause. All of this is taking place while Israel is demolishing Palestinian homes, killing unarmed Palestinian civilians and arresting Palestinian children in the midst of both normalisation with Arab states and the Covid-19 pandemic.

READ: Palestine says 100,000 virus swabs damaged by Israel

All Palestinian political parties have condemned the US-brokered accords as a “stab in the back”. The Palestinian Prime Minister described them as “black day in the sad calendar” of Palestinian history. They are indeed another attempt to defeat the Palestinians psychologically.

The Palestinian people are undoubtedly outraged by the normalising Arab states and the helplessness of their own representatives. I’ve seen Palestinians weeping in the streets at seeing the flags of the normalisation countries projected on the walls of Jerusalem. They view the deals as a treacherous betrayal of the Palestinian cause and a belittling of Palestinian and Arab sacrifices over many decades.

I understand that the Palestinian Authority is not against normalisation in principle, but is, rather, against a process of “normalisation” that excludes them as participants. It is one of the ironies of the current process that the Palestinian representatives during the Oslo years have paved the way for Arab leaders to move towards their own normalisation with Israel. Moreover, the PA apprehends that the current normalisation prepares the way for Mohammed Dahlan to replace his adversary Mahmoud Abbas as PA President, being a loyal ally of the US, the UAE and Israel.

Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas in New York, US on 11 February 2020 [Tayfun Coşkun/Anadolu Agency]

The official call for a “day of rage” on 15 September was not observed by many Palestinians, since many people are fatigued by political hypocrisy and doubt that public mobilisation has much impact on the regional and international world order. Over the Oslo decades, Palestinian representatives — through both conscious and unconscious motivations of their own — have weakened community resilience within Palestine substantially. Legitimate Palestinian resistance was undermined by the absence of democratic processes. Now the Palestinian representatives appear to have recognised that they are powerless within international politics and, as a result, are attempting to revive a Palestinian revolutionary discourse as a means of hiding behind the spirit of the ordinary people.

The very name “Abraham Accords” is misleading and masks the colonial nature of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. By presenting it as a religious conflict between the “Abrahamic faiths”, Israel erases the political rights of the Palestinians; the occupation is hidden beneath the notion that conflict resolution is about interfaith understanding. The reality is that the enemies of democracy and human rights in the Arab world are realigning themselves in a coalition that tramples Palestinian rights. In doing so, they are destroying the Palestinians’ future by withdrawing support from within the Arab world. This process undermines the cultural connection between Palestine and the larger geographical and historical context. Palestinians already feel like orphans; the new normalisation only adds to their sense of abandonment by the bigger “Arab brothers”.

READ: This is what the Palestinians need to do to confront Arab normalisation

The ongoing discussion involving yet more Arab countries preparing to announce normalisation with Israel is even more damaging and confusing for Palestine. The Palestinian experience has some parallels with a woman enduring a mass sexual assault; that the crime is done under the protective cover of the group makes the experience even more psychologically damaging.

Nevertheless, let Israel toast its new friends among Arab dictators and enjoy the blessings of the Arab League in the knowledge that these “representatives” do not actually represent anyone, least of all the Arab people. The masses, in fact, remain loyal to Palestine, but are exploited by their regimes that are willing to betray both them and Palestine in return for political and military support from Israel and the US.

When all is said and done, Israel must still deal with Palestinians resisting the occupation at the nominal border fence surrounding the Gaza Strip; at the Dheisheh Refugee Camp in the occupied West Bank; among the Eisaweyeh Jerusalemites; and with others who remain undefeated psychologically. These people and places will remind the Israelis of their unfinished business with Palestinians and the decades of their exploitation of the people and the land. Palestinians have been fighting for their national and human rights for generations and will continue to do so. In a struggle which now takes the shape of a US-European backed but Israeli-led invasion of the Arab world, Palestine remains on the front line in the struggle for justice.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

يدعو متحف فرويد جميع الأخصائيين الفلسطينيين حضور مؤتمره مجانا

 يتشرف متحف فرويد،  لندن دعوة أي فلسطيني متخصص بالطب النفسي حضور مؤتمر المتحف مجانا كضيف للدكتور مارتن كمب. 

لمن يود الحضور الرجاء مراسله الدكتور كمب على

Martin.kemp59@gmail.com 

تاريخ المؤتمر

١٩ و ٢٠ ايلول ٢٠٢٠

٢٦ و ٢٧ ايلول٢٠٢٠ 

عنوان المؤتمر 

Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere: Social Fault Lines

للمزيد من المعلومات عن المؤتمر الرجاء زياره موقع المؤتمر

هنا 

Recording of Cafe Palestine: Violence against Palestinian Women - an intersectional struggle

The seventh Cafe Palestine from Nazareth on 11 July featured feminist peace activist, writer and editor Nabila Espanioly speaking about domestic violence within the framework of intersectional struggle could be found here

The Cafe opened with live music from from Gaza organised with featuring a father and daughter duo, Mohammed and Reema Al-Habbash playing oud and qanun. The music at Cafe Palestine is supported by PalMusic UK. PalMusic is currently running an appeal in support of the Edward Said National Conservatory for Music located in Palestine. You can support the appeal here:
https://www.palmusic.org.uk/palmusic-uk-urgent-appeal/

PalMusic are also organising an online concert with 3 Palestinian musicians and a panel discussion "Navigating Isolation Through Music" on Sunday 26 July. More details are available in the attached flyer. More info is available here:
www.tinyurl.com/palmusic1

Resisting Occupation and Pandemic: mental health in Palestine now.

For original article visit https://mondoweiss.net/2020/07/the-twin-challenges-to-palestinian-mental-health-of-occupation-and-pandemic/ 

On June 25, 2020, the Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council cohosted with founding members of the Palestine-Global Mental Health Network a webinar titled “Resisting Occupation and Pandemic: Mental Health in Palestine Now.” The panel was moderated by Lama Khouri,  a psychotherapist working with children and adults in New York and featured Samah Jabr, a psychiatrist practicing in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Yasser Abu Jamei, Director general of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, and Manal Abu Haq, a clinical social worker and psychoanalytic psychotherapist working in Ramleh, Historic Palestine.

The presentations focused first on the realities of the corona virus pandemic for Palestinians, the lack of functioning well-funded health institutions (with adequate beds, staff, medication, ICU beds, ventilators, etc.) surviving under occupation and siege, the lack of adequate testing, the challenges facing populations with high levels of poverty, lack of water and electricity, and crowded living conditions where social distancing is a challenge.  

There is the added vulnerability of Palestinians living with high levels of diabetes, hypertension, obesity, anxiety and depression, and in Gaza the level of Israeli aggression and over 30,000 wounded Gazans recovering from the Great March of Return. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship face a host of challenges related to their second class status within a racist Israeli society and the unequal distribution of resources by Israeli authorities. 

This has all been heightened by the cut-off by the Trump administration of US aid to UNRWA and the WHO, by the thousands of Palestinian laborers working in Israel and bringing the virus home, the thousands languishing in Israeli prisons, and by the almost total inability of Gazans to obtain health care outside of the Strip.

Palestinians have been protected by being a relatively young population and by the strong social ties and family bonds that characterize Palestinian society. Ironically Gaza has been protected by being almost hermetically sealed from the rest of the world. Therapists face the challenge of dealing with similar issues (anxiety, depression, panic, and post-traumatic stress disorder-although it is never really post) as their patients face, and by the inability to establish a safe space in a place that is inherently unsafe.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health (MoH) has been active in establishing testing, quarantines, and educating the public and providing an important mental health response to the pandemic along with other NGOs in accordance with WHO and international standards. The MoH realized quickly that prevention and emotional support was critical because of the limited availability of tertiary care and general resources.

There is, nonetheless, much to be done. Dr. Jabr wrote, “Athough Palestinians have survived previous episodes of collective anxiety, restriction of liberties, uncertainty, and loss, the pandemic uncovers a historically-neglected mental health system which is currently facing a double struggle of COVID-19 and the ongoing Israeli occupation. Yet, this crisis can be used as an opportunity to correct the wrongs and advocate for strengthening the mental health system in Palestine.” 

Here are some links recommended by the panelists:

• The UK-Palestine Mental Health Network organises a fortnightly Zoom meeting called Café Palestine. 

• Middle East Monitor: Covid19 in Palestine: Palestinians’ Double Struggle against an Epidemic and Apartheid (Dr. Samah Jabr): http://www.dci.plo.ps/en/article/15049/April-22,-2020—Middle-East-Monitor-Covid19-in-Palestine-Palestinians%E2%80%99-Double-Struggle-against-an-Epidemic-and-Apartheid-(Dr-Samah-Jabr)#

• Planning Forward in the Midst of Crisis: Toward Strengthening Mental Health Services: https://www.thisweekinpalestine.com/planning-forward-in-the-midst-of-crisis/

• Toward Strengthening Mental Health Service: shttps://www.thisweekinpalestine.com/planning-forward-in-the-midst-of-crisis/

• The Palestinian Ministry of Health Is Doing Its Best: https://www.thisweekinpalestine.com/20533-2/

• Diyar Academy for Children and Youth is launching at storytelling workshop, Kisati, for children in Bethlehem to help them process their experiences during COVID.  If you have an interest in supporting this project we are still fundraising for it: https://creativevisions.networkforgood.com/projects/16418-creative-visions-fiscal-sponsorship-through-the-checkpoint

• Funds for the work of GCMHP can be sent to through www.gazamentalhealth.org

• Sister organization: USA Palestine Mental Health Network:  https://usapalmhn.org/

• Interview with Dr. Jabr in “This Week in Palestine.”

Ireland and Palestine: the language and law of (de) colonization