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A quote has been circulating: “As we free Palestine, Palestine frees us.” A common theme I have been witnessing and discussing with friends in diaspora is experiencing our parents and grandparents, survivors of the Nakba, talk about their experiences for the first time. We have also been talking about our own Palestinian identities and experiences in Palestine and the diaspora.
In early October, I was sitting with my elderly father who was glued to the news on his computer screen, watching the bombing and saying on repeat “this isn’t just something that happens on TV. I lived this in 1967.” Since October, I have learned about my father’s childhood, a conversation that was previously always shut down or dismissed. I learned about how his family was expelled from our home city of Khalil (colonized as Hebron) and internally displaced to Al Quds (Jerusalem) as refugees. So many puzzle pieces of my family history began coming together in my adulthood and in my father’s seventy fifth year of life, where he sat his adult children down and shared his own stories for the first time.
In the wake of UNRWA funding being suspended by much of the global North, I learned that my dad and his family, as internally displaced refugees, lived on UN aid his entire childhood. I learned that bread and cheese was all they ate for years. I learned that my grandmother, an expert at sewing, would do her best with a needle and thread to tailor donated clothes from UN aid to fit each of her nine children at various ages and stages. Thinking of how the Nakba uprooted my family and forced them to depend on aid for many years rings in my ears even louder this week as the attack on World Central Kitchen aid workers results in the further suspension of food and necessary aid to Gaza, bringing me back to writing this piece.
While the genocide and atrocities are being live streamed for the first time in history, the Nakba survivors – respecting that the intensity and vileness of tactics has increased with technological advances – are for the first time in their lives, given the opportunity to say, “me too.” As I conceptualize trauma as a therapist, I consider how much trauma, especially collective, colonial, and identity-targeted trauma, gets stored away as the victims of trauma have learned to suppress their experiences.
In today’s Palestine freeing those in diaspora, integral pieces of our history are being freed from the bodies and minds that previously imprisoned them. I say this compassionately considering the ways in which colonized bodies and minds inadvertently function to serve the colonial entity, and as the colonizer silences us, we in turn silence ourselves. I think of my own moments of silence around my Palestinian identity as I navigate Zionist spaces. From a trauma lens, silencing ourselves is a response rooted in survival. For many of us, loudly identifying as Palestinian puts us in harm’s way, and we have learned to be silent for our own safety. For others, our trauma flood gates are built high and strong, as our trauma has been pushed down to prevent flooding our nervous systems and to enable the survival and resilience that Palestinians are known for.
During this genocide, countless Palestinians shared amongst themselves that they have never been prouder and louder about their Palestinian identity. The way that Palestinians in Gaza are currently using their voices through the live streaming of their own genocide has facilitated unprecedented mass media conversations on Palestine through social media and other global spheres. Today, Palestinians are not only saying “me too,” but they’re also saying “not anymore.”
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