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Over the last eight months, public statements and conversations about Gaza have stalled on one word: resistance. Today, as the student movement continues to capture our attention and teaches us about embodied solidarity, any person who speaks out against injustice is committing resistance. And normally, social workers are leading the charge when it comes to calling out injustice. So why not now?
As a clinical social worker, I am schooled in a profession that teaches us to build bridges and promote dialogue. On a personal level, this absolutely has value. It is important to see our neighbors for more than the bumper stickers they choose or the politicians they endorse. And it is important for our clients to make space for compassion towards their partners, friends, and family members. But any self-respecting social worker will tell you that none of that can exist in a power vacuum. It is not the responsibility of a mistreated child, for example, to create a safe space for dialogue with abusive parents. And it would be wildly unethical to ask a survivor of domestic violence to sit down in a sanitized therapy office space for a gentle dialogue with their perpetrator. All of us who practice in this field should be intimately aware of the harm we could cause if we blatantly ignored the power dynamics in the room.
So why are we so tied to this idea that the “civil” way is the only way? In the situations above, under our mandate as social workers, we would have no qualms showing resistance. That might look like making a report to the authorities, connecting a family with supportive intervention services, or advocating for shelter and safe housing. All of these are forms of resistance, by which we say that the status quo (living in a violent home) is unacceptable and the person in question deserves a better, safer environment.
Stripped of the Western-fueled politics that define our interests in the region and investment in labelling rebellion as “terrorism”, the situation in Palestine today is simpler than we are allowing it to be. It is very simply a story of resistance. The context is still absolutely critical in understanding the arc of history that has brought us from historic Palestine to a modern-day fractured land, where the state now known as Israel* is riddled with settlements and governed by those who would happily sustain a violent, humiliating occupation. But the context is where people seem to get tripped up, falling into platitudes about how it’s “such a complicated conflict.”
And so I come back to my original point. Why do we demand of Palestinians a passive, peaceful mode of resistance (or no resistance at all) when they are facing violent oppression? (Noura Erakat addresses this issue brilliantly in her piece on “The Violence of Demanding Perfect Victims.”)
When it is convenient for us, resistance is not a dirty word. It’s a rousing call to action, an idealistic sentiment. And yet when it comes to reality, we grant ourselves the right to pass judgment on how a people under oppression should most appropriately show their dissatisfaction with their oppressors.
I can think of only two reasons for why we get stuck in this circular logic. One — that there is a gross underestimation of the power, scope, and intentionality of the destructive Israeli occupation. That many Americans truly don’t know or don’t believe how far-reaching Israeli control has gone. That it sounds exaggerated when we say, with full support from eyewitnesses and survivors, that Gaza has been under blockade for years, with food, exports, borders, even fishing controlled. That Palestinians in the West Bank experience suffocating restrictions on their freedom of movement. That as an American visiting Palestine, I was allowed to travel freely to and from Jerusalem in a way that native Palestinians could not. That children are consistently and arbitrarily detained for the most minor of offenses, and held in Israeli court with no fair trial.
The other reason is our glorification of peace. As much as resistance has become a dirty word, “peace” is a seductive one. It projects such wholesome innocence to talk grandly about how all we need is so-called “peace in the Middle East”. However, it seems to be the favorite tactic of Western figureheads — from politicians to celebrities to leaders in the mental health fields — to skip the part about justice and go straight for peace.
Going back to my earlier example: Isn’t that the same as asking the disenfranchised person — the child in an abusive household, or the person suffering intimate partner violence — to quiet down and learn to coexist with the offender? How can we ask an entire oppressed population to agree to a peaceful coexistence when there is still active injustice? As social workers, is it not our responsibility to first remedy the power structures that create inequity and injustice — in this case, a highly developed, brutally implemented, and richly-funded system of Israeli apartheid — before we ask for a more palatable pathway to peace?
We talk endlessly in direct service work about fidelity to evidence-based models, finding a “gold standard” to guide clinical excellence. What about our fidelity to the underlying purpose of this work, which in my mind, is the affirmation of our collective responsibility to one another? In these past months, my own views on Palestine — (which would already have been considered “radical” by many prior to October 7th) — have reshaped and grown through the wisdom of Palestinian and Palestinian-allied voices. I have been challenged by brave and brilliant colleagues to understand why a liberatory framework has to go so much farther than I have ever gone in my own perspective on clinical social work and mental health. Among other things, to quote from Psychoanalysis under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine, it has to unmask and undo the part that psychoanalysis plays in “accepting the permanence of settler-colonial structures, including the maintenance of Israel as an ethno-state, the codification of mass land theft, and the willful acceptance of the subjugation of the Palestinian people” (p. 128). As social workers, we of all people should be willing to rethink our broken systems if we intend to participate in a profession where we interact daily with the convoluted harms of that system.
It would be remiss to write about resistance without mentioning Palestinian prisoners. In the U.S., social workers are among the tireless advocates for prison reform, for creating a less carceral society, for restorative justice. We know full well that our system often makes cruel and inequitable decisions about who should be detained or arrested, creating ripple effects of trauma and fracturing families. The same trauma, the same fracturing, is present in any society that attempts to solve problems by incarcerating those it considers dangerous to its violent social order. This makes it all the more critical that we educate ourselves on what it means to be a Palestinian imprisoned by Israel (the life and death of Walid Daqqa, imprisoned by Israel for 38 years, is just one recent example). Violence is not confined to the use of physical force, and the Israeli system of arresting children, separating families, and holding people in a state of limbo with “administrative detention” policies is absolutely and unquestionably a form of violence.
I know the elephant in the room is the matter of armed resistance. Here is where we are supposed to draw the line — and in doing so, we are only reinforcing and permitting the supremacy of the oppressor. Because basically, what it means to say armed resistance “under no circumstances” is to say that, no matter what your oppressor does to you, you cannot fight back in any real, consequential way. You may fight back through diplomacy, which will be stalled because the U.S. cannot be an honest broker when it comes to holding Israel accountable in any way. You may gather in collective acts of protest, like the Great March of Return in Gaza in 2018, but you will be killed for that too. You may leave Palestine and cede your rights and connection to your ancestral land. Or you can resist in the fullest meaning of the word — fighting back, taking actions that demolish the oppressor’s status quo — because when a system of oppression is injected all the way into your bones and your heritage, your body becomes a part of the resistance. And part of getting unstuck from trauma is breaking through the freeze response. And yet all those who are judging Palestinians for resistance to occupation are essentially asking them to stay trapped both physically and psychologically in a freeze state.
Resistance is so often conflated with aggression and perceived as indiscriminate violence, but there is a key difference. Where violence seeks to show off power, enforce control, and eliminate dissent, resistance is the collective mobilization of the will to survive. It contains the impulse to protect, preserve, and reclaim, whether we are a child reclaiming a deserved sense of safety at home or a population reclaiming access and connection to a deeply rooted homeland.
When you live through severe and lasting trauma, that does not inherently cause a lust for violence. What it creates is a shattering of the self, a desire to be whole again. For an individual, that looks very different than for a nation — but nations need to heal from collective trauma too. In the words of Palestinian psychiatrist Dr. Samah Jabr, “living, existence, is jihad. It counters and contradicts exile, all the forces of occupation. Living in dignity maintains the coherence and unity of Palestinian social fabric” (quote taken from Psychoanalysis under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine, p. 95).
Like many of us in this field, I am often asked why I became a clinical social worker and therapist. And my best answer is because I was — and still am — drawn to the values that social work is supposed to embody. We are mobilizers, organizers, system-shakers, advocates, case managers, child welfare workers, educators, caregivers, and more. We cannot in good conscience embody our direct-service roles in an apolitical, apathetic way. We cannot rally loudly around one liberatory cause and fall silent during another. We cannot stand back and privilege the psychological safety of our peers over the decimation of our Palestinian colleagues and kin.
I strongly encourage each of us to challenge our biases about the inherent wrongness of resistance and to consider instead, what would it take for you to get to that place? How many people would you have to lose? How many times would you need to be denied a permit to access medical care? How many nights would you have to go hungry? And consider that when we condemn Palestinian resistance, we ignore every single violation on human dignity that has been endured over decades, across generations — unable to breathe, move, learn, love, and grieve freely.
It is time to stop shaming the resistance because the pretense of peace is supposedly more “humane.” Instead, let us acknowledge the opposite: peace without justice is inhumane. Ignoring the very justifiable reasons for resistance is inhumane. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “there can be no peace ultimately without justice, and there can be no justice without peace.” If we want a humane solution, we need to make room for resistance as a legitimate part of the discussion. Without it, we are left to create artificial shows of coexistence that do nothing to truly change the violent dynamics of power that Israel exerts over Palestinian livelihood.
*Footnote: This language is drawn from “Psychoanalysis Under Occupation,” where Lara & Stephen Sheehi offer a consistent practice of referring to “the state now known as Israel.”
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