In a July Haaretz article commemorating the first
anniversary of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, which killed more than 2,250 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in
51 days, journalist Khaled Diab quotes Palestinian psychologist Hasan Zeyada of
the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme: “Gaza has endured multiple losses –
what we call multi-traumatic losses. People in other places usually endure a
single loss: the loss of a home, or a family member, or a job. Many Gazans have
lost them all.”
And while Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD) is often the focus of discussions of the psychological
repercussions of conflict, Diab summarises the observation by various experts
that “talk of post- or pre-trauma is futile, since trauma is constant and ongoing”.
In addition to attending
professionally to the victims of this Israeli-induced brand of eternal trauma,
Dr. Zeyada is personally well acquainted with the phenomenon. Last August, the
New York Times reported on his “challenging new patient:
himself”. Six of the psychologist’s close family members, including his mother,
had just been wiped out by an Israeli airstrike.
Operation Protective Edge
came to an end on 26 August 2014. But the diagnosis of collective psychological
suffering in the Palestinian coastal enclave is open-ended, and serves to
compound the more tangible suffering that attends the regular Israeli release
of large quantities of ordnance in the direction of human bodies.
Meanwhile, the concentrated mental and physical battering
inflicted upon the population of the Gaza Strip can in itself be seen as a form
of psychological warfare, designed to forcibly erode the Palestinian identity
and the will of the Palestinians to exist as such. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.