Content notes: genocide, death, dying, torture, abuse, intergenerational trauma, violence, terrorism, psychological terrorism

Written by Abla Abdelhadi for Disability Disability Project, published April 16th 2024, CC BY-NC 4.0

When I was asked to write this piece I agreed, saying I wanted to write something about my mental health (or lack of) as a Palestinian witnessing Genocide on my people from Jordan. Yet when I started writing about the Genocide on Gaza my brain would completely shut down, I’d get really anxious. I’d write a bit then I had to take very long breaks. Initially I wrote an entire piece about the atrocities committed on my people, writing so many details of horrific things that were happening. I think it was my sense of obligation and survivor’s guilt mixed in with all the trauma that made me feel I owed it to my people to tell the world everything they’re experiencing. As if my words could save my people, or as if my words could  inspire a revolution to bring down the colonizers ruling the world. It became such a huge task in my head and so painful I just couldn’t really write anymore. It was then, when I started writing, that I realized the degree to which my brain was really traumatized and that I had lost my ability to focus and do things that are usually easy for me to do. 

Yet my intention was to write about mental health, not to detail the Genocide. I worked with my therapist for several weeks  accepting that it is okay to write about how the Genocide is affecting my mental health without needing  to describe the atrocities happening every day. My therapist was very gentle in reminding me that I should not be forcing myself to write things that were too traumatic for me, especially since that was not the focus of this piece. It was painful, I became quite depressed and it took a lot longer than anything I’ve ever written.  It’s not at all easy for someone who is traumatized with severe PTSD to write about the Genocide of my people. I am thankful to the editor for being patient with me during this long process. In the end that piece will remain unpublished but it will serve as a reminder of how traumatic it can be to write about your own people being massacred. 

When addressing anything about the Israeli Genocide, we must always centre the voices of Palestinians in Gaza. While my people are trying to “survive” bombs, snipers, torture, and famine, it doesn’t feel appropriate at this time to reach out to my fellow Palestinians and ask them how their mental health is! So I speak only on my behalf as a Palestinian living in the diaspora. I have no right to even imagine how my people in Gaza are feeling. Saying they are in Hell is too simplistic a way to describe their situation; they are being subjected to psychological terrorism. It’s no coincidence Israel bombed the only psychiatric hospital in Gaza! 

Every time I sat down to work on this article the anxiety inside me would well up, I’d feel a sense of dread, I would get sick to my stomach and I would have panic attacks. My hands shake as I type,  there’s a heaviness in my chest and back, and it feels hard to breathe. I’ve worked within disability justice movements giving workshops and talking about mental health for over a decade. I’m also writing my memoir and have been writing for decades. But writing about the Israeli colonizer’s Genocide on my Indigenous Palestinian people in Gaza seems impossible and extremely painful. My brain just freezes, as if I’ve never written anything before in my life. Even discussing the state of my mental health (or lack of) seems impossible. I don’t think we have the adequate language to describe how one feels witnessing the atrocities of a Genocide on one’s people. I have been tweeting about massacre after massacre almost every day for six months. Yet I cannot find adequate language to signify how it feels to witness the horrors and atrocities from afar. It’s very difficult to explain, but if I were to describe my mental state I’d say it’s a combination of pain, shock, sorrow, grief, anger, outrage, sadness, trauma, helplessness and a lot of guilt. Added to that is a sense of dystopia and everything feels surreal while also being very painfully real. 

My brain is constantly worried about our people in Gaza. I have a constant sense of dread waiting for the next atrocity that will strike my people. I don’t think of the future anymore; time no longer has meaning, I don’t keep track of days, I keep track of massacres. I can barely function, the minimum things I usually do for myself daily seem really hard and pointless at the same time. When I realized I was struggling to write this article because of trauma, I couldn’t even admit that or ask for help, I felt I had to write it for my people and I was frustrated by my lack of focus, I blamed myself, I felt like I was too weak, that I was failing my people if I didn’t complete the article. It was helpful that the editor gave me several extensions and told me to take care of myself before getting back to writing. Otherwise I would not have been able to write at all. 

During the first few weeks of the Israeli colonizer’s Genocide, I never imagined human beings could do to such things to other human beings. After witnessing so many massacres and my people’s martyred bodies, dismembered bodies, bodies under the rubble, I went into a state of complete shock. I wasn’t able to sleep or eat or do anything. I kept waking up to check the news and tweet, I felt I had to tweet about every atrocity right after it happened. Within the first two weeks I saw my psychiatrist who prescribed sedatives after we discussed how my nervous system was on the verge of collapse. I’ve never had to take sedatives for prolonged periods, yet I am still taking them after six months of Genocide. I feel blessed and also privileged to have a great Palestinian psychiatrist and therapist in Jordan. They are both supporting me to survive the trauma of this Genocide. It really helps having a mental health team that is Palestinian and has a great justice analysis and approach to mental health and in terms of understanding colonialism from a radical perspective. It’s clear for Palestinians in the diaspora like myself  our brains haven’t fully processed every aspect of this ongoing Genocide. The horrors Israel is committing with the help of the US and Western colonizers are beyond what the brain can comprehend. I think this is intentional, this a form of psychological terrorism designed to disable generations of Palestinians. 

I feel very blessed to have my amazing mental health team because even in Jordan it isn’t easy to find psychiatrists/therapists who understand disability justice and how it is connected to the liberation of Palestine from Zionist occupation. I feel privileged because I’m financially able to access  mental health care. I lived most of my life on Algonquin Territory in colonized Canada, and I had a fantastic therapist there who helped me work through issues of childhood abuse and the violence I survived. He was understanding and  nonjudgmental with me but as a White man there’s no way he could understand the  this Genocide the way my Palestinian mental health team here in Jordan do. 

About three months into the Genocide I started to pass out after looking at videos of massacres or the scenes of torture coming out of Gaza. At this point both my psychiatrist and my therapist strongly recommended I reduce the number of hours I spend following the news from Gaza because it was more than what my body could cope with. Even though they both keep encouraging me to try to leave the house more, I am mostly still isolating. It’s very difficult to see people living their lives as if there isn’t a Genocide happening in Gaza. It wasn’t until I started writing this article and having difficulty with it  that I realized I am prone to breakdowns and depression and anxiety because I am a survivor of childhood abuse and patriarchal as well as police violence. It feels like a luxury to know I’ve been psychologically disabled from trauma and that  I’m more prone to breakdowns, depression or intense trauma responses. How weird is that?

It’s become clear to me forcing myself to tweet so much and witness every massacre and atrocity on my people in Gaza that these expectations came from a strong feeling of solidarity with my people. I think Palestinians in the diaspora feel a sense of moral obligation, solidarity with and devotion to our people. I personally feel it so much that I wish I was in Gaza with my people. It’s not fair I’m safe while they’re being slaughtered. So for 6 months I have been in this state of holding my breath until my people are safe. This is really heavy psychologically. This psychological heaviness has not left me for one second since the start of the Genocide, and this is a major part of what I work through with my therapist, and she actually feels the same. My heaviness is a form of depression, but it’s a depression like I’ve never felt before. It’s too heavy to even be called depression. 

I no longer am the same person, I never will be.  Watching these heinous atrocities on your people is soul-crushing, but then seeing the world do nothing to stop it is another level of pain. I feel like this world is not safe in any way for Indigenous Palestinians. Knowing Western colonial governments want to erase our existence is terrifying and enraging at the same time. The collaboration of most Arab governments with Israel and the US is also a huge betrayal. I am just pain and sorrow and grief attached to flesh and bones. I know my people are in Hell in Gaza and I cannot protect them. I know the whole world has betrayed my people in Gaza. And I will never forgive anyone who was silent and complicit in this Genocide. This rage inside me will burn forever. As fucked up as we feel, as traumatized as we are, liberating Gaza and all of Palestine, from the River to the Sea, has become the only goal we have in life. Nothing else matters. 

It’s been collective trauma on top of collective trauma for decades, but this Genocide on Gaza is definitely beyond trauma. Palestinians are collectively terrorized. While Palestinians in Gaza are in survival mode, they have been posting everywhere they can for the past six months to show the world the atrocities of the Zionist killing machine. As @Omar_Gaza expressed in a thread on twitter in the first few weeks of the Genocide, “Reaching my mental breaking point. Among all the loss in civilian lives, destruction & atrocities committed in #Gaza, we are embarrassed to share our dire mental health status. It’s been 18 days & counting. #CeasefireNOW People with mental health issues, bipolar, #Autism, #PTSD, etc… are already suffering enough, they have to go thru extreme conditions, crowding & lack of access to basic needs & mental health support which is detrimental. Most of #Gaza children & adults already suffer mentally.” 

Palestinians in Gaza are psychologically traumatized, in complete shock and disbelief that the world has left them behind. As @abrahammatar, a doctor I follow from Gaza said, “We are losing interest, in a very bad mood, having negative thoughts, fear and anxiety, we suffer from emotional and physical fatigue, loss of energy, appetite and hope, we feel blue, cold and sleepless. {WE ALL HAVE OF THE CRITERIA OF DEPRESSION}.” He is pointing out that everyone in Gaza has the symptoms or criteria of depression, which is definitely to be expected for people under Genocide. Finding the words to express the horrors of what they are experiencing must be so hard, @Hind_Gaza just said “I think I am traumatized” and @Mai_Gazan simply posted “Depressed.” 

I experienced police violence, criminalization, torture and institutionalized psychiatric violence and racism for eleven days in the US for being publicly “too happy” while having my first manic episode as a Palestinian woman while my Mom, rest her soul, was receiving treatment for cancer. That violence in the US disabled me from being able to work a full time job for over a decade. I cannot even imagine how my Palestinian people in Gaza will heal psychologically, or if they can heal at all  from such a prolonged atrocious level of psychological terrorism. Collectively all Palestinians are traumatized, but our people in Gaza have lived trauma after trauma and this Genocide will traumatize them and all of us for generations to come. We will definitely never be the same people we were before.

I’m expected to live in a world that wants me to disappear, a world that says violence against me is acceptable, that atrocities against me and my people are acceptable. I feel battered. I feel like my soul has been shattered, my heart broken, and they will never heal. We Palestinians, like our fellow Indigenous peoples around the world, will not be deterred from struggling for justice. In our struggle for justice we will also need to heal. There is no mental health under colonialism; there is no mental health under any and all forms of oppression. Which is why we always should centre Disability Justice frameworks in all our liberation struggles.

I have to accept the powerlessness I feel watching my people get slaughtered in front of the whole world. I also have to accept that being neurodivergent means I cannot handle or survive witnessing this Genocide like others may be able to.  I have to accept that being disabled by trauma means I may not be able to write brilliant articles. I have to accept that being traumatized and neurodivergent isn’t a betrayal to my people. I’m holding it together because as long as my people in Gaza are struggling to survive, I also have to struggle to survive. May this Genocide and the psychological terrorism imposed on us end soon. 

About the Author

Image description: A Palestinian Jordanian woman in her 40s with dark curly hair, purple glasses wearing her Palestinian kuffiyeh over her shoulders as well as a necklace of the map of Palestine, behind her on the wall is an embroidered map of Palestine

Abla Abdelhadi is a Palestinian Jordanian, born in Nablus Palestine but has lived most of her life in Turtle Island on Algonquin Territory. She is a survivor of childhood abuse and patriarchal family violence. She has worked in social justice movements, including Palestine solidarity and BDS movements, for a long time. Abla has also worked on integrating disability justice frameworks into social justice movement work after she was criminalized and tortured in the US by ableist racist police. She now lives in Jordan and is writing her first book, a memoir about surviving violence from a disability justice framework.