THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE: In a time of global turmoil
surrounding refugee crises in many areas, it is easy to lose sight
of the fact that the Palestinians compose one of the largest
refugee populations as well as the most longstanding refugee
population in the world. Of the 11.6 million Palestinians
dispersed worldwide, 4.5 million individuals live today in
stateless insecurity within the Israeli-dominated Occupied
Palestinian Territory, a geographically discontinuous,
increasingly fragmented, and ever-shrinking area including the
West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. The displacement of the
Palestinians from their homes by Israeli forces, beginning in 1948
and continuing through the present moment, is fundamentally a
consequence of a single factor: the Israeli ambition to clear the
land for its exclusive use by Jewish/Israeli people. The
catastrophic impact of this ambition has been endured by
generations of Palestinians who have suffered the devastating
ongoing military, political, economic, social, and ideological
assault necessary to secure this land. The historical and current
conditions for Palestinians, involving nearly 70 years of
systematic ethnic cleansing and apartheid control in the name of
political Zionism, thus pose an enormous moral challenge.
The list of human rights abuses perpetrated by the government of
Israel in its present occupation of Palestine forms a catalogue of
terror: the killing and breaking the bones of defenseless
demonstrators, arming Israeli settlers to commit acts of violence
against Palestinians, bombing of hospitals and schools, home
incursion and demolition, the use of toxic gas, mass arrests,
detention, and torture—including the torture of children. It is
estimated that since 1967, one third of all Palestinian men have
been held in detention by Israeli forces, often without charges
being brought against them and not infrequently for decades.
Almost all of such detainees are mistreated and torture is so
common that the physical and psychological consequences of torture
by the Israelis form an important public health problem in
Palestine. More insidious forms of community reprisal imposed by
the Israelis involve the deliberate, systematic, and massive
destruction of the economic, agricultural, educational, and legal
systems in Palestine as well as the maintenance of total control
over its road-ways, water, air space, human movement, and natural
resources. The deliberate effort to decimate the leadership of
Palestinian society through specific targeting of Palestinian
journalists, attorneys, human rights advocates, community
organizers, and legislators—including prominent mental health
professionals and their families—has been an especially malignant
aspect of Israeli policy.
The violent displacement, containment, and devastation of the
people of Palestine could never have been achieved without the
astronomical and ever-increasing quantity of military support
given to the government of Israel by the United States—more
cumulative military aid since the end of World War II than to any
other country, estimated to be nearly $100 billion
dollars—motivated by its own geopolitical interests in the Middle
East. And this war of tanks and fighter jets has been justified
through a war of words, a well-financed propaganda campaign which
portrays the Israelis as brave victims defending democracy and the
Palestinians as dehumanized dangerous fanatics.
The distortions of fact undergirding pro-Israeli propaganda and
the details of Israeli crimes against humanity have been
documented by tireless reportage by the United Nations, by human
rights organizations such as Amnesty International and
international organizations against torture, and by international
scholars and journalists; an increasingly vocal number of Israeli
organizations and courageous individuals in Israel speak out
against the oppression of the Palestinian people by their own
government and its pernicious effects on Israeli society as well
as Palestinian society. Movements to educate and persuade the
global public in solidarity with the Palestinian community have
emerged in many places, dedicated to exposing the violent
aggression, racism, and violation of international standards of
human rights perpetrated by the state of Israel.
THE ROLE OF MENTAL HEALTH WORKERS: Mental health professionals,
skilled by training and experience to listen to agendas hidden
beneath the surface, have the potential to defuse the power of the
pro-Israeli propaganda narrative through distinguishing fantasy
from fact and through identifying the motivating denial,
self-interest, and self-deception behind its assertions. One such
propaganda position, fundamental to the worldview of political
Zionism, asserts the inherent “specialness” of the Jewish people:
special in their history of victimization in Europe, the Jewish
people require an ethnocentric militarized state which is beyond
criticism and exempt from international law. While playing on the
guilt of the West for its passivity and collaboration with the
Holocaust of World War II, the questionable assertion of Israeli
specialness presents a seemingly-innocent surface while
obliterating moral accountability for the covert colonialist
greed, entitlement, and ruthless violence of the Israeli
government by equating all criticism with anti-Semitism.
Another propaganda position is the oft-heard “liberal” view that
Israeli violence—although lamentable—is mirrored and justified by
the threat of Palestinian violence; the questionable assertion of
symmetry presents a surface of tragic inevitability with an
apparently even-handed dispersal of blame and empathy on both
sides, while covertly normalizing and supporting the status quo.
And overall, the mental health professional will recognize in the
Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinian people the contours
characteristic of abuse dynamics: the abuse itself and the ensuing
relentless campaign to undermine the credibility of the victim, to
destroy the victim’s self-respect, and to delegitimize and silence
the victim’s narrative. By identifying propaganda manipulations
such as these as politically motivated distortions, rather than
self-evident truths, mental health professionals can elevate the
level of reality-testing within discussion of Israel and occupied
Palestine.
In addition to bringing insight to discourse on the occupation,
the mental health community is in a unique position to properly
assess the gravity of the immense psychological and social damage
being inflicted by the occupation through a professional
understanding of the emotional consequences of war, occupation,
and pervasive insecurity and especially through the viewpoint of
child development. Through these lenses, the overt atrocities
which now achieve public prominence in viral internet video clips
(such as Israeli soldiers beating a Palestinian child) can be
placed in a larger context of overall violence, racism, social
fragmentation, detention without due process, unemployment,
impoverishment, malnutrition, family dysfunction, humiliation, and
human misery and the devastating everyday impact of all of these
factors on the psychological well-being. The psychological assault
of 1948 was simple—designed to instill fear with the goal of
inducing Palestinians to abandon their homes; but the
psychological assault of today is sophisticated—designed to
destroy Palestinian morale, to induce a state of passive
hopelessness, and to undermine the sources of individual, family,
and social cohesion. The goal today is to achieve the pervasive
psychological isolation and surrender in an entire captive
population which has nowhere to go and to crush Palestinian
resistance at its roots in the human spirit.
The effects of the occupation on all sectors of Palestinian
society is thus the driving force for a major burden of mental
health distress afflicting millions of individuals, a distress in
which very high rates of common psychiatric disorders such as
depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder have been
documented. But unlike the damage to a community in the wake of an
earthquake or a flood, the harm to the Palestinian people includes
and exceeds the domain of acute injury; the Palestinian people
have suffered from chronic injury inflicted by chronic injustice.
Under occupation, the people of Palestine face a purposefully
inflicted degradation of the entire system of meaning which has
given them identity as a people. Not only individual selves but
the collective self has been damaged. We are challenged as healers
to think in new ways to develop comprehensive theories and
practices appropriate to this context.
In our view, the mental health community is especially equipped to
be active and proactive in addressing these clinical and—at the
same time—moral challenges both in our daily practice whenever
these issues arise and beyond, through our professional
organizations and activities. Our professional skills as active
listeners, as clarifiers of contradictions, as confronters of
confused thought, as persuaders in the community and care-givers
to the suffering, and as defenders of justice for the vulnerable
and the victimized—these skills prepare mental health workers to
be useful in multiple ways in the struggle against the occupation.
We encourage mental health workers first to do no harm: for
example, to speak out against the participation of fellow
professionals in roles which advance the practices of the
occupation, such as assisting in the development of
“interrogation” techniques. In addition, we encourage mental
health workers to join projects to open the scope of debate, to
witness, to document, and to engage in research addressing the
occupation and to seek out partnerships with Palestinians to
expose the full extent of its consequences. There is great need to
support Palestinian initiatives that provide direct mental health
services for patients and foster forms of community life which are
genuinely therapeutic for the Palestinian public. As mental health
workers, we have skills as clinicians and trainers which may be of
practical use on the ground.
But just as no mental health professional would treat a victim of
ongoing incest or torture without “calling the authorities,” no
mental health professional can treat a victim of occupation in a
vacuum. Our duty to report abuse is part of our professionalism
and in many instances is codified in statute as our legal
obligation. The abuse must stop or all of our therapeutic efforts
will be meaningless or perhaps even harmful, because victims of
abuse need justice in the world as well as therapy. The treatment
of victims of violence is thus multi-disciplinary in its essence,
because outside forces such as the police and the court systems
are required to restore fundamental rights to the injured parties,
acting in coordination with mental health as a discipline. It is
consistent with our mandate as healers that we integrate public
health agendas which examine and take action to address the root
causes of human suffering. Therefore human rights must matter to
mental health workers, requiring activism in response to their
violation and disregard.
The psychological and psychiatric consequences of the Israeli
occupation are not only mental health events but legal and
geopolitical events; restoring mental well-being requires us to
call for the intervention of moral and legal authorities with
international stature. Just as professional organizations in
mental health have cooperated with legislators and judges to
create and to enforce laws protecting the victims of incest, rape,
and family violence, thus too the mental health community must
work in mutually supportive ways with legal, political, and human
rights organizations to seek justice for the Palestinian people
and restoration of its human dignity.
Thus, as concerned professionals, we may need to move beyond the
confines of our accustomed professional roles and to act as a
group in support of movements to achieve a genuine transformation
in Israel and in occupied Palestine that respects the human needs
and human rights of all who live there. We must commit ourselves
not only to work as clinicians for the liberation of the
individual but for the liberation of the community. We call upon
mental health professionals to engage in sociopolitical solidarity
with the people of Palestine as a therapeutic position. Dedicating
ourselves to this work while the occupation continues will give us
the insights we will need in the future, as facilitators involved
in the process of reconciliation. Laying down a foundation of
involvement during a time of crisis prepares us for participating
in a resolution to the crisis that will bring genuine redress,
justice, and full civil rights to the people of Palestine.
(Samah Jabr MD and Elizabeth Berger MD, M.Phil)
Samah Jabr MD is a Psychiatrist and writer living in East
Jerusalem
Elizabeth Berger MD, M.Phil is a Child Psychiatrist and
writer living in New York.
MENTAL HEALTH WORKERS’ PLEDGE FOR PALESTINE
http://ukpalmhn.com/mental-health-workers-pledge/
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