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Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation
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When I first watched the trailer of the prize-winning film All That’s Left of You by the brilliant Palestinian American filmmaker Cherien Dabis, tears streamed down my face and my heart raced. The nearly three-minute video opened the wound of decades of displacement, unending tragedy, and the collective trauma Palestinians have passed down through generations. In the film, Dabis traces the life of a three-generation family from the devastating Nakba in 1948 to the present day, while Israel tightens its grip on the West Bank and completely flattens the Gaza Strip.
But the ongoing catastrophe imposed on Palestinians is neither confined to cinema nor reducible to a time-bound trauma; it challenges the very conventional Western psychological frameworks used to understand suffering under ongoing colonial violence.
Dr. Mohammed Khattab — a firsthand witness — sorrowfully described the Nakba “hell gates” opening on Palestinian life. It marked the root of a broader catastrophe in which over 750,000 Palestinians living in historic Palestine were expelled from their homes to the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, or across the diaspora. More than 500 villages were destroyed, leaving Palestinians homeless on May 15, 1948. Since then, Israel has denied them their right of return.
Khattab, born in 1945 in Beersheba, was displaced during the Nakba to the Gaza Strip. He recalled: “I cannot remember what my life looked like before the Nakba. I can’t remember anything beyond losing my stability. It feels as if my memories only began to bleed the day we were expelled from our home.” He described how, as a 3-year-old child, his mother carried him and his brother in panic, fleeing inevitable death. “Scared and parched, we walked through the night until we reached an area between Al-Maghazi and Al-Bureij refugee camps in Gaza,” he said while sobbing.
“I cannot remember what my life looked like before the Nakba.”
Living through successive Israeli aggressions — the Nakba, Naksa, the 1956 war, the First and Second Intifadas, the last six wars between 2008 and 2023, and the current ongoing genocide — Khattab said, “This has further deepened the traumatic and unjust memory I have painfully carried.”
When I asked him how he has adapted in order to survive, both as a doctor and a father, he replied, “I have not.” Khattab described the Nakba as a ghost that continues to define his family’s lives, a turning point that shattered what was once whole.
“I have recounted my experiences to my students and colleagues, and before tucking my children into bed, in an attempt to uplift their morale and affirm that our right of return is not relinquished — sooner or later, it is inevitable.”
He paused, his expression heavy with disbelief: “Little did I know that I was also ingraining their Palestinian identity through trauma.”
The Nakba cracked open a wound that could never truly heal, but instead became inherited as a living legacy across generations.
The Nakba cracked open a wound that could never truly heal, but instead became inherited as a living legacy across generations.
Reflecting on what many Palestinians describe as another catastrophic Nakba between 2023 and 2025, Khattab said, “Since the first days of the genocide, I felt the horrifying memories of the 1948 Nakba replaying, but in a more brutal, devastating, and bloodcurdling way.”
As Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has forcibly displaced over 2 million Palestinians from their homes, killed over 75,000 people, destroyed more than 80 percent of residential buildings, and seized over 53 percent of Gaza’s land, Khattab told Truthout: “Today marks the 78th anniversary of our Nakba, compounding with our 2023–2025 Nakba. I am 81 years old, yet the profound sense of humiliation, helplessness, and homelessness embedded in our collective memory has never been felt so intensely before.”
For a 40-year-old journalist who wished to remain anonymous, the trauma has shaped both his existence and his profession. His grandparents were arbitrarily expelled from Al-Majdal during the Nakba. “I learned about the Nakba from my grandparents, who shortly passed away due to the severe distress of losing their homeland,” he said. “I came to understand it later through history classes at UNRWA, and eventually through my journalistic work, where I conducted many interviews with survivors of the Nakba.”
He paused, then added in a broken voice, “I cried my heart out with every horrendous story I bore witness to. Israel used killing as a weapon to cleanse Palestinian land of its Indigenous people — through field executions, the torture of pregnant women, and systematic abuse.”
The journalist continued: “Few from the generation that witnessed the Nakba firsthand are still alive, while a new generation is now witnessing another egregious annihilation firsthand. In between stand us — carrying deep-seated trauma from the past, ongoing suffering in the present, and an uncertain future.”
“Few from the generation that witnessed the Nakba firsthand are still alive, while a new generation is now witnessing another egregious annihilation firsthand.”
He recounted the beginning of the 2023 war in distress: “I covered scenes of displacement where the shock unfolding on displaced people’s faces was unspeakable. The echoing question everywhere was: ‘Another Nakba, again?’”
He sighed, then added, “The state of panic is ongoing among both the young and the elderly. Persistent trauma has chipped away at their already fragile lives; mortality rates among elders have significantly risen, while many young people are suffering from severe psychological disorders.”
Abdallah Abo Shamla, a 29-year-old, third-generation refugee and supervising psychologist, explained that transitional trauma could be transmitted both psychologically and epigenetically, reinforced by environmental factors. “The silent trauma was passed down to me while I watched my father and grandfather doing their best to protect us and offer every possible means of relief, all while fear throbbed in their eyes. Now, the same cycle is recurring once again,” he said.
“My child, who is supposed to live a normal life — free from the buzzing sound of drones, deafening explosions, and the rattling of helicopters — may not be cognitively aware of what is happening, but he adapts to the frightening reactions I unintentionally show,” he said, adding, “I may not tell them what I feel, but they can sense my fear for them and my overwhelming desire to protect them.”
Abo Shamla shared with Truthout that he first researched this topic in detail back in 2019. “I conducted interviews with around 40 to 50 people who had witnessed the Nakba firsthand. While listening to their lived experiences, I felt overwhelmed by a traumatic memory that no history book had ever inflicted on me. It sparked a series of critical questions beginning with why: Why was all of this inflicted on Palestinians? How did the Palestinian cause reach such an abyss? Why has the world remained silent, allowing it all to unfold with impunity?”
He paused and added in a broken voice, “Each time I met the elders, I was struck by their belief that the Palestinian soul has no weight in this colonial world. Since then, that sentence has echoed in the back of my mind each time I began to question why Gaza is left alone.”
Pre-genocide psychological rehabilitation sessions that Abo Shamla conducted were aimed at recovering from the Nakba and the aggressions that followed, while also exploring a Palestinian identity that had been obstructed and reshaped by it. “I participated in many projects that aimed to document the historical injustice imposed on our grandparents, and beyond that, we were inspired to discover how music, agriculture, and occupation shaped their lives before the Nakba,” he said.
Yet silence was an integral part of these sessions. “Our grandparents suddenly stopped recounting and entered a state of reliving the experience again and again,” Abo Shamla said. “Beyond silence lies all the speech. And when a grandparent pulled himself together after that silence and resumed speaking, it seemed, in psychological terms, as if he had plunged a knife into his chest and continued.”
“Accumulated trauma from loss, displacement, grief, and starvation leaves no room for prior trauma. There is no time to grieve the loved ones you have lost.”
According to Abo Shamla, the genocide in Gaza has profoundly redefined Palestinian traumatic memory. It has been reduced to the struggle of surviving daily life — securing food and caring for one’s family. “Accumulated trauma from loss, displacement, grief, and starvation leaves no room for prior trauma,” he said. “There is no time to grieve the loved ones you have lost.”
The concept of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been widely critiqued for its limitation in fully accounting for populations who are in persistent exposure to continuous conflict and recurring trauma, while lacking proper safe spaces for recovery. In response, South African anti-apartheid mental health activists developed a new term: continuous traumatic stress (CTS), which acknowledges an ongoing dynamic of trauma, not built from past static repositories.
Abo Shamla and his colleagues support the concept of CTS. He stated that Gazans are living in a continuous state of complex trauma, marked by the accumulation of successive traumatic events.
“We are currently all experiencing this,” he said, “even after the ceasefire. The PTSD framework is not applicable in the case of Gaza. People remain in a persistent state of survival and ongoing trauma. In my opinion, Gaza would need at least 20 years to begin to reach a post-traumatic phase, during which trauma would still be transmitted to future generations, even among those who did not directly witness the genocide.”
All of this broke the mythical image of Palestinians as legends or heroes for Abo Shamla. “Trauma is deep-seated, yet there is no time to live it fully or move on from it. So we are forced into resilience,” he said.
He gave an example: “If you allow yourself the chance to recover, time will pass and you will find yourself starving, unable to answer your child crying for food. This is the mindset of every Gazan. This is how we are turned into heroes in the eyes of the world. As a psychologist, I am bound to say that trauma becomes part of Palestinian identity and historical legacy until the last breath.”
In the memory of the Nakba, Khattab reflected, “The Nakba started in 1948 and has continued ever since, and now it is reaching its peak.”
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