Gaza reshaping life and imagination beyond Palestine

"I live out by O'Hare. Every time a plane flies overhead at night, my hands shake. I'm looking for a place to hide. And then the sirens, the police and ambulance sirens. I know they're not there, but it feels like soldiers are just outside the window. We used to watch them walk up and down the road by my grandparents' house, and we weren't to say anything. They'd harass everyone, beat people up, including my grandpa. We were supposed to stay inside. My cousin was killed."

This is what a patient told me last November in Chicago, home to the largest number of Palestinian people in the United States.

"I haven't felt like this, had nightmares like this, since I was a kid," he added.

Global South in Solidarity

Since the Israeli bombing and other military operations in Gaza began following the Hamas attacks on Oct 7, a global movement has emerged, particularly from the Global South, in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Tens of millions of people have marched through the streets of cities across the world, protesting against Israeli atrocities in the Gaza Strip.

In the US, the ruling class and closely linked media have typically portrayed such expressions of solidarity, if acknowledged at all, as simply a matter of vague ideological kinship or abstract anti-US or anti-Israel sentiment, often taking recourse to misleading accusations of anti-Semitism to explain it all away.

But by doing so, they ignore its historical roots and the ongoing truth to which this movement testifies: There is a deep psychic and visceral connection that binds countless people from diverse backgrounds to the gruesome oppression of Palestinians and to the enabling indifference to it shown by so many North American and European observers.

"I'm trying not to watch it, to look at the videos and the pictures of little kids trying to wake up their dead siblings, but it's impossible to avoid — and I don't want to avoid it. It's the truth. It's their truth, but it's also mine and my family's. But I just can't deal with it," another patient said.

Yet another said: "You leave, thinking it'll be better. But it doesn't stop. It just changes. Now you get to watch and pay for it rather than be stuck underneath it. I don't know which feels worse."

Shared experiences of intergenerational ordeal

When viewed through the psychiatric and psychoanalytic clinic, it's clear that, for many, behind their solidarity with the Palestinian people today lies shared experiences of intergenerational suffering stemming from the legacy of ongoing US and European imperialism overseas and racism within.

With social media allowing for an unprecedented level of worldwide proximity to an unfolding genocide after more than four centuries of colonial violence has generated a compounding reservoir of trauma passed from generation to generation on every continent, the images and cries of devastation in Gaza evoke much more than sympathy.

They are triggering a profound sense of personal resonance. Many Pakistani, Iraqi, Afghan, Yemeni, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Irish, Haitian, Somali, Rwandan, Black and Indigenous American, Filipino, Puerto Rican, South African, Colombian and other nationals are now, like my patient, experiencing planes above or feeling cops walking outside their windows as if they're part of one big murderous machine that they know very intimately.

From my vantage both as a clinician and political anthropologist, the protests against US-backed incessant assault on Gaza reflects an emerging revolutionary subjectivity born of massive trauma now coalescing around a singular stage of cruelty. This isn't about individual empathy, an imagined identification with the other as if you are the same as them — a sentimental virtue so often celebrated by white liberalism to validate its sense of its own righteousness while conveniently erasing both history and the otherness of the other and evading any responsibility for stopping violence.

It is instead about a collectivization of otherness in a rejection of the Euro-American "rules-based international order" that has always depended upon the creation and subordination of supposedly threatening racial, ethnic and sexual others to justify itself.

Identifying with the paradigmatic other

The identification at play in this collectivity is not with Palestinians nor with Palestinian culture, per se, but rather with the position of the paradigmatic other that the Palestinian people have for so long been forced by Euro-American hegemony, and the Israeli state the latter created and whose military it props up, to occupy.

Consider, for instance, how the label "terrorist" has so frequently been indiscriminately thrown at Palestinians, from small children to poets, such that US commentators and Israeli officials can unabashedly dismiss, by using these terms, the entire population of Gaza as deserving of death. For migrants vilified as rapists and drug smugglers or Black people called thugs in order to rationalize xenophobic violence and racist policing, for example, such practices are very familiar.

It is in this context that queer, trans, Indigenous and Black communities in the US have joined diverse Arab, Muslim, Asian and Jewish communities around the world, including within Israel, to protest Israeli violence and the US administration's shameless support for it.

What unites these individuals and groups is not a shared religion or ethnicity nor a cultural worldview but an embodied knowledge of what it feels like to have one's loved ones — present and past — ostracized, demonized and violated simply because they have been marked as a threat to Euro-American power and associated white-supremacist norms. This deep knowledge that derives more from the truth of feeling than from any explicit ideology or identity is now fostering a shared ethical refusal to accept the perpetuation of such violence against others.

Otherness and its history demand grief

As the writer Viet Thanh Nguyen observed, otherness and its history demand grief. Our ethical challenge in the face of colonial violence and its legacies is to expand grief, "to make it ever more capacious, rather than reducing it to a singular sorrow. Capacious grief acknowledges that the trauma of the other is neither singular nor unique — that there are other others out there with whom we can share the burden. Perhaps only by expanding our grief will we be able to leave our trauma behind. In sharing our burden … of otherness, we might also transform that burden into a gift."

In accounts shared by my patients, students, colleagues, and friends, especially those from marginalized backgrounds, I see this revolutionary subjectivity and the solidarity it fuels taking shape and gaining force.

It's not just about acting on moral principles or historical knowledge of Israeli occupation and Euro-American complicity in a project of ethnic cleansing; it's also about reclaiming power over oneself, taking in one's own family and communal history as confluent with the present, and reasserting the felt truth of one's being and that of one's ancestors in the face of radically dehumanizing violence. It is a refusal to be passively swept along by the systems of oppression that surround us and to which the US government, in particular, continues to display a bipartisan commitment.

The burgeoning internationalist movement to free Palestine from violent oppression is not a trendy, transient political cause, as many cynical observers have claimed. It is a collective ethical awakening and formation of an affective community derived from a growing postcolonial consciousness — a transnational reckoning with the still-reverberating legacy of colonial violence and neocolonial manipulations. It is a rekindling recognition that struggles for justice and freedom are necessarily interconnected in both space and time, spanning continents and generations.

The voices rising and feet marching each weekend in solidarity with Gaza more than half a year into the slaughter of its communities are not only protesting the specific injustices perpetrated against Palestinians. They are challenging the very foundations of a global economic and associated moral order built on exploitation and the systematic devaluation of some lives to prop up the plainly false image of postcolonial Europe and North America as emblems of benevolence and freedom.

The task of freeing Palestine is simultaneously a task of freeing ourselves, of making a world characterized by — in the words of the families of Israeli hostages beseeching Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end his violent campaign against Gaza — an ethics of "everyone for everyone".

Despite the slogans, we are not all Palestinians. We are instead all radically different from one another, with unique life histories, places in the world, and ways of desiring and living. And it is because of the differences that constitute each one of us and how important it is to protect them that the struggle for Palestinian liberation has become the defining ethical and political matter of our era.

Its consequences are already reverberating far beyond any single territory or people, and they will demarcate the lines of global ethical-political struggle for the coming generation — one that will not remember our present political leaders kindly.

The author is a US psychoanalytic clinician and political anthropologist of law, psychiatry and public health. The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

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