“Colonial Trauma”: Dr. Samah Jabr on the Psychological Toll of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

This is probably the worst chapter in recent history in the confrontation between a colonized population and their colonizer.

Uh, it is definitely the worst chapter, uh, we have lived of, uh, the confrontation between Palestinians and Israelis.

What's happening is man-made deliberate political violence made intentionally to traumatize people and change their way of thinking.

Dr. Jabr explains that Israel's colonial violence includes bombardment, siege, torture, starvation, and repetitive displacement with the aim of erasing any hopeful future for Palestinians.

She describes how typical Western terms for trauma don't account for the particular ways in which Israel's violence has an ongoing impact on Palestinians as individuals and how it is a collective trauma against the Palestinian people as a whole, emphasizing that this trauma is exacerbated, but it's often ignored and dismissed by the world.

Dr. Jabr calls this colonial trauma.

I like to use the umbrella term of the trauma of colonization because it includes all of the above.

So colonial trauma or the trauma of colonization is deliberate, intentional, it's collective, cumulative, and it affects the trajectory of the Palestinian people and affect several generations to come.

I think that everything is designed to break the will of individuals and to break the collective agency of the Palestinian people.

That's the objective of colonial trauma.

It is to inject helplessness and despair in people so that human beings, the colonized subjects, will become shadows of human beings who are not capable of resisting or challenging the plans of colonization.

Dr. Jabr elaborates that the usual language and the conventional diagnosis and terminology in the field of mental health fail to describe what we are experiencing in Palestine now, and in particular in Gaza.She says, "Because you cannot describe the agony and anguish of a mother who lost all her children to bombardment as depression or as a grief reaction."

This is not the usual grief reaction of a person who finishes the usual life cycle.

So, uh, let me try to use a language different than the conventional, uh, psychiatry language.

I think we are facing complicated grief, despair, agony, and there is existential threat.

There is, um, also anticipated fear because the experiences have been so repetitive, abandonment, and betrayal, uh, because the world and the international social contracts and, uh, human right, uh, regulations have failed to stop this from happening.

So I think that what we are experiencing is shattering our trust in the world and, uh, in humanity to a great extent.

And really, uh, people always ask me about the impact of this.

We don't know the impact.

It's difficult to predict the impact because this is like man's inhumanity to man is not something new, but the extent of it and the duration of it, uh, while the world knows what is happening and not interfering, interfering effectively to stop it, is an unprecedented experience.