Sacrifice and grit, not healing culture, can help deal with Gaza traumas

There is an impulse to see all harm through the lens of healing. This is a particularly liberal impulse in modern mental health. It locates the process of recovery within individuals—their immediate environments, at most—even if their issues are structural. But Gazan genocide has affirmed the limits of this therapeutic culture.

When the genocide escalated in 2023, it caused a stir among concerned mental health professionals. How do we support Palestinians in and outside of Gaza? Networks of counselling and therapy services developed. Many even offer Arabic as an option. Yet the Zionist project maintains its violent occupation of Palestine; its air, naval and land blockade continues to suffocate Gaza. So, after two years of genocide, what have our mental health efforts amounted to?

Trauma tends to play a significant role in this opera. Palestinian mental health professionals, like Dr Samah Jabr, long criticised Eurocentric trauma discourse for Palestinians. Simply put, trauma discourse tends to localise experiences in the past, when Palestinians are experiencing continued violence in the present.

It would be the same if someone witnessed an assault in public, and their only interest in the matter is the traumatic impact it has on the victim. But trauma discourse does something else: by focusing on individual experiences, it may serve to deflect from processes of justice and accountability.

The Grenfell atrocity reveals this process clearly. The preventable fire prompted the largest trauma mental health response in European history. Meanwhile, accountability for the fire has been all but thwarted. In fact, the flammable cladding continues to be used for buildings across the UK. This highlights the incredible juxtaposition between mental health investment on the one hand, and justice and accountability on the other.

This phenomenon can also be observed following mosque shootings. There has been concerted governmental efforts to roll out mental health strategies for Muslim communities, following attacks. Yet, as I previously observed following the Quebec City shooting, there hasn’t been any accountability for the political discourse which legitimises Islamophobia. In fact, almost 10 years on, Quebec politicians are still trying to ban the hijab as we speak.

Returning to Gaza, none of this is to say Palestinians are not deserving of support—they certainly are. But healing within an unjust system does not inspire changes to the system. In fact, it does quite the opposite.

Ultimately, those upholding racist politics are quite happy for its victims to receive support, as long as this doesn’t challenge the status quo. As such, we encounter a strange dynamic whereby many strive to support Palestinians, yet shy away from opposing the aggressor, let alone naming it—the Zionist settler-colonial project.

Hunger strikers and the significance of sacrifice

It goes without saying, Palestinians are very capable of supporting their own, if they had the chance. The issue is not the lack of Palestinian empathy, skills or determination. Rather, the issue has always been the Zionist multi-billion-dollar industry of death. Elbit Systems—the manufacturer of drones which plays an integral role in the genocide—is only one tentacle of this industry. But it belongs to us, here in the UK.

This sets the backdrop for the bravery of the Filton 24. These are a collective of incarcerated individuals who engaged in Britain’s long-standing tradition of direct action. They are in prison for disrupting—even if only momentarily—the machinery of death, focusing on Elbit Systems. Elbit has lost billions of pounds as a result.

In turn, the Filton 24 political prisoners have been imprisoned without trial or bail for over a year. Many went on hunger strikes, demanding immediate bail, the right to a fair trial, ending censorship of their communications, de-proscription of Palestine Action and the shutting down of Elbit Systems. Several, like Heba Muraisi and Kamran Ahmed, were at risk of imminent death.

And they are not the only ones demonstrating such sacrifices. In the months following Palestine Action’s proscription, a dystopian reality has arisen: thousands of people, many of whom are elderly and disabled, have been carried away by the police for holding signs stating: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”

This movement, led by Defend our Juries, is an exhausting expense on London policing, revealing how preposterous the state’s repression of Palestinian activism really is.

The state maintains authority on structures of violence and healing alike. This is what makes hunger strikes so powerful. Given the liberal attention to healing and rehabilitation within structures—where freedom is violently curtailed and agency is stripped away arbitrarily—the hunger strikers take back control in the one arena the state assumed dominion—their bodies.

In a context of oppression, this is an incredible feat. In doing so, they disrupt the liberal edifice of healing and reflect our collective hypocrisy. And they re-centre sacrifice as a means of resistance for us all.

The word sacrifice rarely arises in mental health communities, even within politically astute circles. Rather, our collective strategy almost immediately centres on processes of healing. Sacrifice, if it appears, remains an individual choice; it is rarely understood or mobilised as a collective strategy.

Returning to our therapeutic culture, it is clear that the desire to help Palestinians remains strong, while our impulse to heal reaches a cul-de-sac. The issue, of course, is that individuals are increasingly imprisoned or disciplined for seeking paths outside the liberal framework of healing.

Many of us now confront strange tension whereby we are attempting to heal through the trauma of genocide, while the settler-colonial violence remains ongoing and justice unattainable.

Conscientious mental health professionals would do well to remember: we are not at the service of our mental health disciplines or its institutions (including the NHS). The hunger strikers revealed what it means to stand in solidarity with our fellow humans—and it didn’t take place in a therapy room. Most likely, if mental health groups disrupted the industry of violence, they would be banned too.

Moving beyond healing

The truth is, the limits of mental health has always been known, echoed on the streets of every major city: no justice, no peace. We are not going to ‘therapy’ our way through injustice. It requires action and sacrifice. The hunger strikers are beautiful examples of this.

Make no mistake: the UK government is directly responsible for the incarceration and legal abuse of political prisoners. In fact, British ministers continuously cited the prosecution of the Filton 24 to justify the government’s proscription of Palestine Action.

Yet, after 17 months behind bars, the first six of the Filton 24 were not convicted by a jury of their peers on 4 February, 2026. This demonstrates that the British public overwhelmingly disagrees with the charges against direct actionists. Such an outcome is precisely why the UK government is trying to remove trial by jury in the first place.

Yet, while five have now been released on bail, many remain egregiously imprisoned—including hunger strikers. It is time for everyone to ask themselves: how can we truly stand with Palestinians, when we forsake those who risked their liberties to save them? And how do we progress from an impulse to healing the consequence of structural violence, to stopping it altogether? For those of us in the UK, I would argue our political prisoners of the Filton 24 have shown us the way. The least we can do is see to it their objectives are met.

Dr Tarek Younis is the Racial Justice Researcher at Healing Justice London and Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Middlesex University. He researches and writes on Islamophobia, racism in mental health and the politics of psychology. He teaches on the impact of culture, religion, globalisation, and security policies on mental health. He recently published a report entitled The Violence of Liberal Racism: What Palestine Reveals About British Mental Health Care.

Follow Tarek on X/Instagram: @Tarek_Younis_

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