The Israeli artillery turned from roaring to humming, and the bombs coming down from heavy rain to drizzle. A ceasefire it was called, albeit mostly a one-sided aggression.
President Trump declared an ‘end to the Gaza war’ in early October, and Gazans received the declaration with hope and doubt. Some saw it as a most needed room to take a breath and reflect, a psychological respite. Others were not too sure, as the scale of destruction that Israeli troops left behind was ungraspable.
What both sides agree on is that springing back to normality could prove tricky, as abnormal as that normality before the genocide was. At the heart of all that, looms the question of psychological recovery. If this is at all possible.
Certainly, Palestine has been a hotbed of psychological distress for decades. A land where recent traumas, Israel’s occupation and oppression, and transgenerational traumas of the 1948 Nakba, coalesce to create the perfect psychological storm. And Gaza, is the eye of the storm.
In addition to the above stressors, the Strip has been under Israeli blockade since 2007, and the target of multiple fatal military campaigns. The majority of its inhabitants are the descendants of Palestinians expelled or who fled from their homes in what became Israel in 1948.
As of June 2023, the World Bank found that 71% of Gazans showed symptoms of depression, compared to 50% in the West Bank. Earlier reports registered that 38% of young people in Gaza considered suicide at least once.
The mental health situation for children was particularly severe. A 2022 report found that four out of five children suffered from variable degrees of depression, grief, and fear. After 7 October 2023, the situation turned from a crisis, to a tsunami of psychological torment.
Death as a relief
I observed the situation closely, talking to Gazans and comparing their plight to existing literature on conflict-based psychology. Expectedly, extreme anxiety, depression, or PTSD are present in almost everyone I know in the Strip.
Protective apathy was particularly prominent among many people I interviewed (or casually spoke to), who seemed to be apathetic about living. Some even outrightly stated as much. For them, death was an escape from the torments of daily killing, displacement, hunger, and extreme dehumanisation.
“I wish they’d nuke us and get it over with” is the phrase I heard repeatedly.
This ‘apathy’ is considered protective because it separates one’s tortured soul from its exhausted physical body, liberating one from irresolvable suffering.
Incidentally, the phenomenon was first registered during the Holocaust, and was termed ‘the Muselmann syndrome’. It’s not mental illness, but an extreme reaction to extreme circumstances. Inmates in the Nazi concentration camps were so physically and psychologically depleted, that they looked at their imminent death with apathy, saw it as salvation from suffering and liberation from the oppressor’s control over their fate.
For decades, Palestinians coped with the suffering that Israel inflicted on them by attributing martyrdom to death. Or by thinking of death as necessary for eventual collective freedom.
In the post-October 7 Gaza, however, this meaning was lost. Indeed, death was so widespread, and has taken place on such an unimaginable scale, that it no longer holds sanctity. Grievance was suspended or rushed to make room for individual survival.
The ease with which Israel practices its mass killing made both life and death seem meaningless. Individuals found it harder to attach a value to life, or rationalise death. Apathy acted as a coping mechanism not only to escape the unbearable pain of loss, but also the inability to justify it.
One father I spoke to told me that he wanted to die because he couldn’t bear the shame of losing his ability to grieve. It made him feel less human. His three children were killed in an instant by an Israeli airstrike. “As if they never existed,” he said.
Another Palestinian said that there was nothing sumud or heroic about living through a genocide. “The mass killing shattered one’s value as human, that you start to believe you are nothing”. Death to him was one way to reclaim his humanity.
No peace
Theoretically, the end of the genocide promises some psychological recovery. And protective apathy may give way to reflection and reassessment given the ‘imminent danger’ has lessened. But for the traumatised Palestinians, there are enormous hurdles to account for. It starts with unfulfilled grief and does not end with the uncertain future.
For grief to run its course it requires an effective end to hostilities. However, Tel Aviv continues to habitually violate the ceasefire and threatens to resume the genocide.
And if grief has been granted a narrow window with the fragile ceasefire, it remains limited by Gaza’s deteriorated social support system. Israel strategically wiped out or fragmented whole families. It destroyed physical communal sources of sustenance and support, like mosques, churches, schools, hospitals, and even cemeteries.
Add to that the roughly 9500 missing under the rubble, and thousands others assumed abducted by the Israeli army, whose families are yet to obtain closure.
With grief hindered and closure in short supply, the psychological outlook does not look promising.
The impact of the genocide will extend to future generations. Palestinians not yet born will suffer through the epigenetic intergenerational transmission of trauma. Furthermore, they will probably come to age or be born into the same traumatic circumstances of occupation and dispossession as their parents and grandparents. In other words, they will re-enter the same trauma loop, with the addition of unhealed, fresh genocide memories and reverberations.
Everything points in this direction. Gaza today has ‘the largest orphan crisis’ in modern history, according to Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. It also has the world’s largest number of amputee children per capita. All within the world’s largest known massacre of children.
“What do you expect these children to do when they grow up?”, I was reminded by another Palestinian in Gaza, who explained that it was clear Israel massacred children en mass to cripple future generations’ ability to retaliate.
He added: “but they missed a few Moseses,” referring to the Pharaoh killing of the newborn Hebrew boys, only to end up raising the child who eventually brought about his demise.
The dust may be starting to settle in Gaza, but collective depression is taking over, and this will likely turn into collective rage. Any traditional methods of psychotherapy can only go so far when it comes to the post-genocide reality. Because breaking the cycle comes mainly through dismantling the layers of grievance. Anything less than this is just a temporary sedative.
Palestinians must be given a tangible path to a meaningful future and existence, and this starts with resolving decades of injustice. The first step is to hold Israel fully responsible for its crimes, or at least set a path towards the sort of accountability that was delivered through the Nuremberg Trial. This should manifest hand in hand with the reconstruction of Gaza, as well as granting its victims reparations.
The trajectory of restitution must move backwards in time to the core issues that led to the genocide in the first place, ending the occupation and paving a genuine road to an independent Palestinian state. The alternative is augmented trauma, unbridled rage, and continued revenge. Unsustainable, and illogical.
Dr Emad Moussa is a Palestinian-British researcher and writer specialising in the political psychology of intergroup and conflict dynamics, focusing on MENA with a special interest in Israel/Palestine. He has a background in human rights and journalism, and is currently a frequent contributor to multiple academic and media outlets, in addition to being a consultant for a US-based think tank.
Follow him on Twitter: @emadmoussa
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