Over the past few weeks, we have had the privilege of learning more about the work of Rivers of Mercy, a humanitarian organisation providing healthcare and community support in Palestine. As a psychologist, what particularly struck me was not only the scale of need, but the growing recognition that alongside food, medicine, and healthcare, there is also a significant need for psychological support, mental health awareness, trauma-informed training, and community wellbeing initiatives.

To help introduce the organisation to our community, we asked the founder and team five questions about their work, the challenges they face, and how people, particularly those with psychological expertise, can get involved.

1. Can you tell us about your organisation and its mission? What inspired its creation, who do you support, and what are the main goals of your work in the West Bank?

Rivers of Mercy was founded by a UK-based nurse and Advanced Clinical Practitioner trainee whose connection to Palestine is deeply personal.

The organisation emerged from a combination of professional experience, faith, compassion, and personal loss. Its founder describes Rivers of Mercy not simply as a charity, but as something built from love, responsibility, and a desire to transform grief into a source of benefit for others. Inspired in part by the memory of her late husband, the charity seeks to create lasting good through service to vulnerable communities.

The organisation supports families living in poverty, pregnant women, newborn babies, breastfeeding mothers, elderly people, patients requiring medical treatment, and communities facing significant barriers to healthcare access.

Operating primarily in the West Bank, Rivers of Mercy focuses on more than emergency assistance alone. Its goal is to promote dignity, improve access to healthcare, support independence, and create hope within communities facing ongoing hardship.

A particular priority is maternal and newborn health. The organisation believes that no woman should go through pregnancy worrying about how she will access a scan, obtain vitamins, afford medical treatment, or secure enough food to support herself and her baby.

Their mission can be summarised simply: to reach people with mercy before hardship becomes crisis.

2. What are the main activities and services your organisation currently provides?

Healthcare remains at the heart of Rivers of Mercy’s work.

In the West Bank, the organisation supports a medical clinic that provides healthcare services, medication, consultations, investigations, maternal healthcare, and community outreach for populations who may otherwise struggle to access treatment.

One of its flagship areas of work centres on maternity care and maternal wellbeing. Rivers of Mercy assists pregnant women in obtaining ultrasound scans, provides vitamins and nutritional support, and identifies mothers who may require further medical care.

Another important initiative is the Breast is Best Programme, launched in 2023. Through this programme, breastfeeding mothers receive nutritional support, food parcels, and financial assistance. The underlying philosophy is simple yet powerful: supporting a mother supports a child.

The charity also delivers food aid, emergency assistance, medication support, and practical help for vulnerable families living in areas affected by isolation, checkpoints, and road closures.

Importantly, Rivers of Mercy has continued to provide humanitarian support in Gaza despite extremely challenging circumstances.

What stands out most, however, is the organisation’s commitment to seeing people rather than statistics.

Behind every number is a story.

Behind every medication package is a patient wondering how they will afford treatment.

Behind every supported mother is a family hoping for a better future.

This commitment to maintaining human connection and dignity remains central to everything the organisation does.

3. What are some of the biggest challenges facing the communities you work with?

While many healthcare needs may appear straightforward on paper, accessing healthcare in practice can be extraordinarily difficult.

Hospitals and clinics may be geographically close, yet checkpoints, restrictions, and road closures can transform a short journey into an impossible one. For pregnant women, elderly patients, and those requiring urgent treatment, these delays can carry serious consequences.

Alongside these practical barriers is the reality of widespread poverty.

Many families face impossible choices every day:

Do they buy medication or food?

Do they pay transportation costs to attend a healthcare appointment or provide essentials for their children?

No family should have to make such decisions.

Yet alongside these visible challenges lies another reality that often receives less attention: the psychological burden.

Communities are living with repeated experiences of trauma, bereavement, uncertainty, displacement, financial stress, and fear. These psychological pressures affect parents, children, healthcare workers, and entire communities.

The impact is cumulative.

Mothers carry it.

Fathers carry it.

Children absorb it.

Healthcare professionals witness it daily.

As psychologists, we know that mental health cannot be separated from physical health. Emotional wellbeing influences coping, relationships, parenting, resilience, recovery, and overall quality of life.

This recognition lies behind Rivers of Mercy’s growing interest in expanding mental health awareness and psychological support initiatives. Their team recognises that responding to community needs requires more than medicine alone. It requires listening, understanding, and addressing the emotional dimensions of hardship as well.

Sometimes people need medication.

Sometimes they need food.

Sometimes they need financial assistance.

And sometimes they simply need to know that somebody, somewhere, remembers them.

4. Can you share a story that highlights the difference your organisation has made?

The stories that remain closest to the founder’s heart are often those involving mothers.

Pregnancy should be a time filled with anticipation, preparation, and hope. Yet for many women supported by Rivers of Mercy, pregnancy occurs against a backdrop of uncertainty and hardship.

Instead of planning for a new arrival, some women find themselves worrying:

Can I reach a hospital?

Can I afford a scan?

Do I have enough food?

Will my baby be safe?

In such circumstances, providing something as simple as an ultrasound scan, nutritional supplements, food assistance, or access to medical care can become profoundly meaningful.

What may appear to outsiders as a relatively small intervention can transform a mother’s experience during one of the most important periods of her life.

The founder speaks emotionally about receiving photographs and messages from families following these interventions. It is a reminder that somewhere in Palestine, a mother is holding her child, supported through the generosity of strangers who may live thousands of miles away.

For her, these moments represent the core purpose of Rivers of Mercy: transforming pain into mercy, and mercy into hope.

5. How can people from our community get involved and support your work?

This was perhaps the question that resonated most strongly with me as a psychologist.

The organisation is currently seeking support in many forms, and financial donations are only one part of the picture.

Healthcare professionals can contribute through education, training, programme development, and professional collaboration.

However, there is also a growing opportunity for psychologists, counsellors, psychotherapists, mental health nurses, wellbeing practitioners, researchers, trainees, and psychology students to become involved.

The psychological needs are significant.

Rivers of Mercy’s Programme Coordinator in the West Bank recently explained that two major priorities for the coming period are:

1. Supporting the mental health and emotional wellbeing of pregnant women, including both prenatal and postnatal wellbeing.

2. Training newly graduated local community trainers, equipping them with practical, trauma-informed approaches that can continue benefiting communities long after specific projects conclude.

This creates a unique opportunity for psychology professionals to contribute meaningfully.

Volunteers may be able to support training programmes, psychoeducational resources, mental health awareness initiatives, trauma-informed practice, community wellbeing projects, professional guidance, research collaboration, and capacity-building efforts.

You do not necessarily need to travel overseas to make a difference.

Sometimes a workshop, resource, consultation, training session, introduction, or partnership can have a substantial impact.

As psychologists, we frequently talk about resilience, wellbeing, community empowerment, trauma, hope, and recovery. Rivers of Mercy provides an opportunity to translate those concepts into practical action.

If you have expertise in mental health, psychological wellbeing, maternal mental health, trauma-informed practice, community psychology, health psychology, counselling, psychotherapy, or related fields, I would strongly encourage you to consider getting involved.

The organisation needs more than donations.

It needs skills.

It needs knowledge.

It needs partnerships.

It needs advocates.

Most importantly, it needs people willing to stand alongside communities facing extraordinary challenges.

If you are interested in volunteering your psychological expertise or learning more about Rivers of Mercy’s mental health initiatives in the West Bank, please get in touch. A small contribution of your time and expertise could help strengthen support for mothers, families, trainers, healthcare workers, and communities who continue to show remarkable resilience in the face of adversity.

Sometimes hope begins with simply deciding not to look away.

Apologies for the delay with this update; we took some time to reflect, rest and reorganise.

We would like to firstly extend our heartfelt thanks for those attending the conference. We hope you found the day beneficial and engaging. As organisers, it was such a delight to meet you all; this event has motivated us to continue the work we are doing and, hopefully, to arrange more face-to-face events in the future.

Those who were not able to attend but signed up, please know you still made a huge difference, from the ticket sales we were able to donate to Medical Aid For Palestinians.

On that note, we would like to share £530 was raised for MAP, and it was dedicated to you all. Please see the tribute letter below.

A few other things to mention;

• If you have not subscribed already to our newsletter, please do so here ukpsychologistsforpalestine.substack.com/ - this is where we share our regular podcasts, articles, and opportunities!

• If you would like to get involved by writing articles, speak on the podcasts, or suggest speakers/writers you can email us on ukpsychologistsforpalestine25@gmail.com

• If you have not done so already please fill in the conference feedback survey here; ukpsychologistsforpalestine.substack.com/survey/8064703

• We are not sure how long ticket tailors email will be active post event. So please e-mail us directly!

• And finally please keep up your research, advocacy and activism- this may be a long journey to justice but we are in it together!

Until next time,

UKP4P

In this episode, Dr Jolel Miah is joined by Prof Roberto De Vogli, Associate Professor at the University of Padova and author of Selective Empathy: The West Through the Gaze of Gaza. Together, they explore the psychological mechanisms that shape how individuals and societies respond to human suffering, asking why empathy is often extended selectively rather than universally.

Drawing upon psychology, global health research, and contemporary events, Prof De Vogli discusses the themes of his book, including moral double standards, institutional silence, bystander behaviour, and genocide denial. The conversation examines how political narratives, cultural conditioning, and power structures can influence public perceptions of conflict while also exploring the psychological consequences of collective moral disengagement. Ultimately, the episode challenges listeners to reflect on empathy, responsibility, and the role psychology can play in understanding some of the most pressing moral questions of our time.

About Prof. Roberto De Vogli

Roberto De Vogli is an Associate Professor in Global Health and Psychology of Power at the University of Padova, and a former Vice-Director of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Padova. Before returning to Italy, he worked as an Associate Professor at the School of Public Health, University of Michigan, and as an Associate Professor at the Department of Public Health, University of California, Davis. He also worked as Senior Lecturer in Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London. His education includes a PhD and a Master in (Global) Public Health (and Public Policy) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA.)

Prof De Vogli worked internationally and consulted for UN agencies such as the World Health Organization and the World Bank, as well as international non-governmental organizations in Guatemala, Mexico, Russia, Tanzania, and Vietnam. He is a former member of the Globalization and Health Knowledge Network of the World Health Organization, Commission on Social Determinants of Health, and UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Peer Review College. He is a member of the Alliance for Sustainability and Prosperity (ASAP), addressing the need to reorient economies and societies around the aim of promoting sustainable wellbeing.

Prof De Vogli is the author of numerous publications in the fields of social determinants of health, political economy, psychology, and ecological economics. He has published in major peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, The Lancet, and British Medical Journal. Some of his manuscripts have been covered by media outlets, including the BBC, The Guardian, The Independent, NBC, and The Los Angeles Times.

He is the author of three books. In 2013, he published “Progress or Collapse: The Crises of Market Greed” (Routledge). In 2025, he authored “Managing and Preventing Pandemics: Lessons from COVID-19” (Routledge), a topic already covered in a TED Talk delivered in 2021. In 2026, he published, both in English and Italian, “Selective Empathy: The West Through the Gaze of Gaza” (Brill, Critical Social Studies & Haymarket Books for Changing the World), a text that tackles the emotional and moral double standard of the international community in its response to the genocide in Gaza, calling for empathy “beyond borders.” He has another book coming out this year, co-edited with Rossella De Falco: “Wellbeing and UN Sustainable Development Goals” (Edward Elgar).

Extended Podcast Description

In this compelling conversation, Dr Jolel Miah sits down with Prof Roberto De Vogli, Associate Professor at the University of Padova, global health scholar, and author of Selective Empathy: The West Through the Gaze of Gaza.

The discussion centres on a question that lies at the heart of both psychology and ethics: Why do some forms of human suffering evoke widespread compassion while others are met with indifference, silence, or denial?

Drawing on decades of work in global health, social epidemiology, and the psychology of power, Prof De Vogli argues that empathy is not always applied equally. In Selective Empathy, he contends that Gaza has exposed what he sees as one of the defining moral crises of our era, revealing profound inconsistencies in how suffering is acknowledged, reported, and responded to within Western political, media, and intellectual circles.

Throughout the conversation, Prof De Vogli discusses the psychological processes that shape public perceptions of conflict, including nationalism, cognitive bias, moral disengagement, and bystander behaviour. He explains how cultural and political narratives can create powerful blind spots, limiting our ability to empathise with those who lie outside familiar social, national, or ideological boundaries.

Dr Miah and Prof De Vogli also explore the motivations behind the book and the challenges involved in publishing a work that directly confronts mainstream narratives. The discussion opens broader questions about academic freedom, censorship, institutional power, and the responsibility of scholars and professionals to speak out during periods of humanitarian crisis.

A significant part of the conversation focuses on the devastating psychological consequences of war, particularly for children and future generations. The discussion examines trauma, displacement, grief, and the long-term mental health burdens that continue long after the headlines have faded.

The episode further explores the concepts of genocide denial and the inversion of victimhood, with Prof De Vogli arguing that understanding historical context is essential for making sense of contemporary conflicts. He reflects on the role of media narratives, public discourse, and collective memory in shaping perceptions of justice and responsibility.

At its core, Selective Empathy is not simply about one conflict. As Prof De Vogli explains, Gaza serves as a mirror through which broader questions emerge about humanity itself. What happens when empathy becomes selective? How do ordinary people become bystanders to injustice? And what role can psychology play in helping societies recognise and challenge these patterns?

For psychologists, students, mental health professionals, and anyone interested in the intersection of morality, politics, and human behaviour, this episode offers a thoughtful and challenging exploration of empathy, conscience, and our shared responsibility in an interconnected world.

About the Book

Selective Empathy: The West Through the Gaze of Gaza takes readers to the heart of what Prof De Vogli describes as the greatest moral crisis of our time. Combining political analysis, psychological research, global health data, personal testimonies, and underreported evidence, the book examines how compassion is often extended selectively rather than universally. Through the lens of Gaza, Prof De Vogli challenges readers to confront questions of moral consistency, social justice, and what he calls the need for a renewed sense of universal empathy and emotional decolonisation.

We are delighted to introduce the speakers for the upcoming UK Psychologists for Palestine Conference, along with the titles of their talks. This year’s programme brings together a rich and diverse range of voices, offering thoughtful perspectives that reflect both the depth of the subject and the breadth of our audience.

In the spirit of listening, learning, and bearing witness, we warmly welcome attendees from all backgrounds and faiths to join this important conversation.

You can find full details of the talks in the flyer below, along with a link to book your place. After costs all proceeds from the event will go to Medical Aid for Palestine, supporting vital work on the ground.

We encourage you to secure your place early to avoid disappointment, and to share this event with others who wish to engage more deeply with Palestinian experiences and ongoing realities

Book Your Ticket

Summary

Discussion explored institutional complicity regarding the Palestinian genocide via autoethnographic research and critical psychological inquiry.

Institutional Silence and Complicity
Research critiques how academic institutions inflict moral injury by maintaining silence on the Palestinian genocide. Active silencing strategies and the Palestinian exception reveal hierarchies in institutional empathy.

Psychological Toll and Methodology
Autoethnographic analysis documented systemic gatekeeping and the intense psychological impact of witnessing real time atrocities. Public institutional inaction stands in stark contrast to documented evidence of violence.

Accountability and Future Advocacy
The analysis challenges institutions to align actions with core values of justice and human rights. Sustained advocacy remains essential as history ultimately demands accountability for institutional failures.

About Dr Aneeza Pervez

Dr Aneeza Pervez is a Betty Behrens Research Fellow at Clare Hall and a Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She is a social and developmental psychologist whose work sits at the intersection of education, moral development, belonging, peer relationships, and social justice. Her research is concerned with how children and young people understand care, kindness, fairness, exclusion, and responsibility within everyday relational and institutional contexts.

Her article, Witnessing Silence: The Palestinian Genocide, Institutional Complicity, and the Politics of Knowledge, extends this wider commitment to relational ethics by examining the moral and political consequences of institutional silence in higher education. Drawing on autoethnographic reflection and critical scholarship, the article considers how academic institutions, professional communities, and knowledge-making spaces respond when Palestinian suffering is rendered marginal, contested, or unspeakable. It asks what it means to work in education, psychology, and children’s rights while witnessing the destruction of Palestinian life, childhood, schooling, and futurity.

Aneeza’s broader scholarship is grounded in a commitment to careful listening, ethical responsibility, and the documentation of experiences that are often minimised or institutionally displaced. Across her work, she is interested in how educational spaces can either reproduce harm through silence and abstraction, or become sites of relational accountability, care, and justice. Her research has been published across education and psychology, including work on children’s prosociality, international student belonging, emotionally based school avoidance, and collaborative research practice.

Details of Podcast…

Introduction to the Research and Speaker: Host Jolel welcomes Dr Aneeza Pervez to the podcast to discuss their paper, “Witnessing Silence: Palestinian Genocide, Institutional Complicity, and the Politics of Knowledge”. The paper examines how academic institutions sustain colonialism and inflict psychological harm through silence, drawing on Galtung’s theory of structural violence and Butler’s concept of “grievable lives” to critique selective institutional engagement regarding geopolitical crises.

Background and Motivation for Study: Dr Pervez, a social developmental psychologist with a long-standing academic history beginning in 2008, explains that their work typically focuses on belonging, ethics, and morality within institutions. While their research usually centers on children’s well-being, the silence of academic institutions regarding the events in Gaza motivated them to document their personal experience of moral disillusionment.

Moral Injury and Institutional Silence: Dr Pervez describes experiencing “moral injury” when the values that institutions purport to uphold—such as safeguarding, equity, and social justice—are ignored in the face of the ongoing Palestinian genocide since October 2023. This disconnect between the empathy taught within academic professions and the actual inaction of those institutions serves as a central theme of the research.

Active Silencing in Academia: Dr Pervez defines “active silencing” as the exclusion of specific griefs through institutional policies regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (EDI) or workplace harmony. They argue that while other causes receive institutional support, there appears to be a “Palestinian exception,” where academics are discouraged from speaking about specific injustices.

Student Support and Institutional Gaps: Following the events of October 7, Dr Pervez reports that their university failed to provide comprehensive support to all students, leaving many to feel isolated. When the university only directed Israeli students to support resources, Dr. Pervez stepped in to act as a point of contact for all distressed students, witnessing firs-thand the mental strain caused by the institution’s refusal to create space for dialogue.

The Palestinian Exception and Comparative Discourse: Jolel and Dr Pervez discuss the phenomenon where critics attempt to deflect focus from the Palestinian cause by citing other conflicts, such as those in Sudan, Congo, or Ukraine. Dr Pervez acknowledges these other global crises but notes that these comparisons are often used to dehumanize Palestinians and justify the lack of action regarding the Palestinian genocide.

Colonial Roots and Dehumanizing Narratives: The conversation shifts to the historical context of the conflict, with Dr Pervez emphasizing that the situation stems from 1948 colonization and the division of land. They critique media and institutional narratives that frame Palestinian children as complicit in their own deaths or as subhuman, arguing that these tropes are used to justify violence.

Methodology: Autoethnography: Dr Pervez explains the use of autoethnography as the methodology for their paper, describing it as a qualitative research method that uses personal experience as a starting point to understand broader institutional and social phenomena. By reflecting on their own experience of isolation and analysing public correspondence from their institution, they were able to document systemic processes of gatekeeping and professional pressure.

Institutional Accountability and Core Values: Dr Pervez highlights that the paper questions the integrity of institutions that claim to uphold justice and academic freedom but fail when tested by complex political realities. They argue that by refusing to address the Palestinian genocide, these institutions reveal a hierarchy of humanness, where only certain lives are considered “grievable” and worthy of protection.

The Psychological Impact of Witnessing: Jolel and Dr Pervez discuss the intense psychological toll on those exposed to real-time footage of violence via social media. They describe the eerie, surreal experience of watching people film their own deaths, which stands in stark contrast to the denial or gaslighting occurring within public and institutional discourse.

Historical Documentation of Atrocities: Dr Pervez notes that the real-time documentation of these events—including evidence of sexual assault and other abuses—creates an undeniable historical record. They emphasize that this period is unprecedented, as even high-level humanitarians are being silenced or seeing their reports suppressed by their own organizations, despite the availability of clear evidence.

Future Outlook and Final Message - In concluding the discussion, Jolel and Dr Pervez reflect on the importance of continued advocacy, noting that history suggests empires and systems eventually collapse and face accountability. Dr Pervez leaves listeners with a final message to remain steadfast, urging them not to lose hope and to continue fighting for the people of Palestine, as this support is essential for the future of humanity.

Save the Date for UK Psychologists for Palestine Conference

📍 Location: Dallow Centre, Luton

📅 Date: Saturday, 11 July 2026

⏰ Time: 9:30am – 5:00pm

• Registration opens at 9:30am (with tea and coffee)

• Full agenda to be announced soon

• Please note this is an person conference.

Reserve Your Place

Spaces are limited, and interest is expected to be high.

We hope you find this useful and insightful and if you like to come to our conference 11th July 2026 then click here for more information.

On Saturday 11 July 2026, psychologists, researchers, practitioners, and allies will come together at the Dallow Centre in Luton (9:30am–5:00pm) for the first-ever UK Psychologists for Palestine Conference—a landmark event that places psychology at the heart of global justice, mental health, and humanitarian solidarity.

Why This Conference Matters…

The psychological impact of conflict, displacement, trauma, and systemic inequality is profound. Yet, conversations that centre Palestinian mental health through a psychological lens remain underrepresented.

This conference creates a vital space to:

• Critically examine the psychological dimensions of the Palestinian experience

• Explore how theory, research, and practice can respond to real-world injustice

• Amplify voices and perspectives often marginalised in mainstream discourse

This isn’t just an academic gathering—it’s an opportunity to connect knowledge with purpose.

What to Expect…

🧠 Academic Insight

Hear from leading psychologists, researchers, and mental health professionals as they explore Palestine through critical, cultural, and applied psychological perspectives.

🌍 Meaningful Connections, Community and Solidarity

Connect with like-minded professionals, students, and activists. Whether you’re looking to collaborate, learn, or contribute, this space is designed for dialogue and partnership. This is more than a conference—it’s the beginning of a network. A space for building relationships that extend beyond the day and into ongoing work and impact.

❤️ A Supportive Environment & Direct Impact

Your experience matters. Food and refreshments will be provided where possible, allowing you to focus, engage, and connect. Each £25 ticket (including a meal) contributes directly to humanitarian aid. All profits, after event costs, will be donated to Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP)—ensuring that your attendance creates tangible support where it’s needed most.

Be Part of Something that matters to all of us…

As the first event of its kind in the UK, this conference marks a significant step in bringing together psychology and global advocacy. It is an opportunity to reflect, challenge, and act—collectively.

Whether you are an academic, student, practitioner, or simply someone who cares deeply about mental health and justice, your presence matters.

Save the Date

📍 Location: Dallow Centre, Luton
📅 Date: Saturday, 11 July 2026
⏰ Time: 9:30am – 5:00pm

• Registration opens at 9:30am (with tea and coffee)

• Full agenda to be announced soon

• Please note this is an person conference.

Reserve Your Place

Spaces are limited, and interest is expected to be high.

👉 Book your place now and be part of this historic first step.

The recent mobilisation of Gaza flotilla activists has drawn significant global attention, not only for its political implications but also for the profound psychological dynamics it reveals. Reports from participants describe deeply distressing experiences, including detention, mistreatment, abuse and sexual torture (from some activist testimonies), which have sparked ethical concern and emotional responses worldwide. From a psychological perspective, these actions can be understood as more than protest—they represent an attempt to symbolically and, in some cases, materially approximate aspects of what Palestinians are perceived to endure under blockade conditions. While it is important to approach such testimonies sensitively given their potential impact on readers, they nonetheless raise crucial questions about human motivation, moral courage, and collective identification. This article examines three psychological dimensions that may help explain why activists undertake such high-risk actions. These include empathic identification, collective solidarity, and moral witnessing. Together, they provide a framework for understanding the deeper meanings behind flotilla activism. Importantly, this is not an exhaustive explanation, but rather a starting point for psychological reflection.

The first key concept is empathic identification and perspective-taking, which helps explain why individuals move from passive concern to active engagement. Activists involved in the flotilla appear to engage in what psychologists call moral imagination, attempting to place themselves within the lived experiences of Palestinians. This aligns with research on perspective-taking, which suggests that individuals are more likely to take action when they can vividly imagine another’s suffering (Batson et al., 1997). Neuroscientific studies also point to the role of mirror neuron systems in fostering empathy, allowing individuals to emotionally resonate with others’ pain (Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004). In this sense, the flotilla becomes an embodied form of empathy—transforming abstract knowledge into felt experience. Rather than merely observing from a distance, activists attempt to bridge the psychological gap between observer and sufferer. This may intensify emotional engagement and motivate risk-taking behaviour. Consequently, the flotilla can be seen as a powerful example of empathy translated into action.

A second important dimension is collective solidarity and social identity, which highlights how group belonging shapes behaviour. Participants in the flotilla often adopt a shared identity, such as “standing with Gaza,” which fosters unity and purpose. According to Social Identity Theory, individuals derive meaning and motivation from their membership in groups they perceive as morally significant (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). This shared identity can increase willingness to endure hardship for a collective cause. In the case of the flotilla, activism becomes a symbolic extension of Palestinian struggle, creating what might be described as a transnational moral community. Psychologically, this blurs the boundary between “us” and “them,” strengthening emotional bonds across geographical distance. Research shows that strong group identification can increase pro-social risk-taking, particularly when moral values are perceived to be at stake (van Zomeren et al., 2008). This helps explain why individuals may willingly place themselves in danger—not solely as individuals, but as representatives of a shared cause. The flotilla thus reflects the power of collective identity in shaping action.

The third psychological aspect is moral witnessing and protest psychology, which offers insight into the symbolic nature of such activism. Many activists see themselves as witnesses to injustice, aiming to draw global attention through visible acts of resistance. This aligns with theories of protest psychology, where actions are motivated not only by the desire to change outcomes, but also to assert moral truth and demand accountability (Simon & Klandermans, 2001). Even when material outcomes are uncertain, the act itself can function as a form of symbolic resistance, challenging dominant narratives and amplifying marginalised voices. In this framework, the flotilla is not only about delivering aid—it is also about making suffering visible and refusing silence. Psychologically, this can create a sense of purpose and moral coherence for participants. It also invites observers to confront uncomfortable realities, potentially reshaping public discourse. The act of witnessing, therefore, becomes both personal and collective, extending beyond those directly involved.

Testimonies emerging from flotilla participants highlight deeply troubling experiences, which can be difficult for both the individuals involved and those who hear them. Psychologists emphasise the importance of engaging with such accounts carefully, as exposure to traumatic narratives can have emotional consequences for audiences. At the same time, these testimonies play a crucial role in understanding why activists choose this path. One of the most challenging questions is why individuals knowingly place themselves at risk of harm. From a psychological standpoint, this may be understood through a combination of empathy, identity, and moral conviction. These factors can converge to create a powerful sense of obligation or purpose. While such decisions may appear extreme, they are consistent with research on high-risk activism and altruistic behaviour. Importantly, this does not mean that all individuals will respond in the same way. Rather, it highlights the diversity of human responses to perceived injustice.

Ultimately, Gaza flotilla activism illustrates the complex interplay between emotion, identity, and moral reasoning. It demonstrates how psychological processes can transform concern into action, and how individuals navigate the tension between safety and principle. The three concepts discussed—empathic identification, collective solidarity, and moral witnessing—offer a useful lens for interpreting these actions. They help move the conversation beyond purely political analysis, providing a deeper understanding of human motivation. At the same time, it is essential to approach this topic with care, acknowledging the emotional weight of the subject matter. For readers, engaging with these ideas may prompt reflection on their own responses to global events. For educators and psychologists, it offers an opportunity to connect theory with real-world behaviour. As such, the flotilla becomes not only a political event, but also a psychological case study. It challenges us to consider what it means to act in solidarity in an interconnected world.

References

Batson, C. D., Early, S., & Salvarani, G. (1997). Perspective taking: Imagining how another feels versus imagining how you would feel. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23(7), 751–758. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167297237008

Figley, C. R. (1995). Compassion fatigue: Coping with secondary traumatic stress disorder in those who treat the traumatized. Brunner/Mazel.

Rizzolatti, G., & Craighero, L. (2004). The mirror-neuron system. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, 169–192. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.neuro.27.070203.144230

Simon, B., & Klandermans, B. (2001). Politicized collective identity: A social psychological analysis. American Psychologist, 56(4), 319–331. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.4.319

Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.

van Zomeren, M., Postmes, T., & Spears, R. (2008). Toward an integrative social identity model of collective action. Psychological Bulletin, 134(4), 504–535. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.134.4.504

The year 2026 has made something painfully clear: the world now knows precisely what genocide and mass killing look like, and Palestinians remain the population upon whom such violence is repeatedly normalised. Independent research shows that the scale of Palestinian deaths is staggering.

Human Rights Watch reports that by the end of 2025, more than 69,000 Palestinians, including over 19,000 children, had been killed in Gaza as part of Israel’s military campaign—a level of destruction described as “unprecedented” in the history of the region. Further demographic research by the Max Planck Institute suggests the true number of Palestinians killed may surpass 100,000, far exceeding earlier official counts. When figures reach this magnitude, any policy resembling a targeted death penalty for Palestinians cannot be dismissed as symbolic; it sits within a wider pattern of systematic killing, displacement, and destruction.

This context raises an essential question: why is it that violence against Palestinians is so frequently regarded as acceptable, justified, or even necessary in public discourse and political rhetoric? Why do the deaths of Palestinians evoke so little institutional movement or moral disturbance from global authorities? The answer, in part, lies in what Hannah Arendt famously referred to as the “banality of evil”—the normalization of cruelty through bureaucratic, political, and administrative systems.

The almost celebratory acceptance of policies that effectively constitute a death sentence for Palestinians reveals not just political failure but a deep psychological process of dehumanisation. Dehumanisation reduces a group to something less than human, something killable, something disposable. And indeed, psychological research consistently shows that when a group is framed as less than human, empathy collapses and support for violence increases.

The data from Gaza between 2023 and 2025 demonstrates exactly this collapse. The Lancet Global Health–based Gaza Mortality Survey estimated more than 75,000 violent deaths in just over a year, further confirming that official counts represent a conservative minimum rather than an exaggeration. Such numbers underscore that Palestinians are not only disproportionately killed—they are killed within a system that leading human rights institutions have now classified as apartheid.

Amnesty International concludes that Israel’s structures of governance constitute a “system of oppression and domination” over Palestinians, reinforced through forced displacement, segregation, land dispossession, and dual legal regimes that privilege Jewish Israelis while subjugating Palestinians. Human Rights Watch similarly identifies the intent to maintain domination and the presence of inhumane acts as evidence of apartheid being carried out in both law and practice.

This is not a new phenomenon. Anthropological and historical research shows that the comparison between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and South African apartheid has existed for decades. Scholars trace its roots back to the 1960s and 1970s, with renewed academic consensus emerging in the 1990s and 2000s as Israeli military rule, expansion of settlements, and legal fragmentation intensified. Palestinian dispossession itself began in 1948, when the newly formed Israeli state engaged in mass displacement aimed at creating a Jewish state —a practice that scholars identify as foundational to today’s apartheid system and its ongoing violence. If there was no one living there then we may see a different future hence the phrase that is often used - “a land without a people’.

What makes the current moment distinct is the visibility and immediacy of this violence in the digital age. Technologies that should have helped preserve Palestinian history instead serve a world eager to erase or ignore it, even as real-time documentation shows communities being destroyed, families erased, and entire neighbourhoods flattened.

Psychologically, the question becomes: are Palestinians treated as an invisible group, one whose suffering does not register in the same way as the suffering of others? The celebrated obedience studies of Stanley Milgram demonstrated how ordinary individuals commit extreme harm when instructed by authority figures. Likewise, the bystander effect research of Darley and Latané shows how individuals remain silent amid collective violence. Both theories help explain some aspects of global inertia—but they also fall short. They fail to account for selective empathy: why silence intensifies specifically when Palestinians are the victims. If psychology claims to be the scientific study of human behaviour, then it must reckon with this selective moral blindness. It cannot ignore how Palestinians are socially conditioned to be seen as less worthy of life, less deserving of protection, and more open to state-sanctioned violence.

The introduction of death‑penalty‑like policies applied exclusively to Palestinians—while no equivalent punishment exists for others involved in the conflict—makes apartheid undeniable (a policy that UK Psychologists for Palestine are against). A dual legal system already exists across the West Bank, where Israeli settlers live under civil law and Palestinians under military law, even while occupying the same geographical spaces. Expanding this system to include exclusive, targeted lethal measures is a logical progression of apartheid, not an aberration. That such action is celebrated by administrators and government officials only reinforces how deeply dehumanisation has been embedded into state policy and public culture.

It is no accident that South Africa, a nation that survived apartheid, has stood firmly with Palestinians. Their history grants them an acute understanding of racial domination, structural violence, and the long arc of dehumanisation. It is also no surprise that many communities who once benefited from solidarity from Palestinians now reciprocate that recognition. Yet the silence—or worse, justification—from others raises troubling psychological questions. How stable or valid are the theories we use to understand human behaviour when they fail to predict, explain, or challenge mass indifference toward Palestinian suffering?

If Palestinians can be killed, displaced, starved, or denied basic rights with minimal international consequence, we must ask whether a new phenomenon has emerged—one in which a population can be effectively deleted through violence, administrative cruelty, and erasure of history, all while the world watches. The celebration of punitive measures directed exclusively at Palestinians illustrates not just state-sponsored dehumanisation but global complicity. This complicity reinforces the idea that Palestinian life is expendable, that Palestinians are something other than human, and that their suffering does not merit moral outrage.

Psychologists, scholars, and human rights advocates cannot ignore this. If psychology is indeed a science of human behaviour, then it must examine not only individual actions but collective and institutional ones. It must study how entire societies come to see a people as killable. It must confront how moral disengagement, obedience, prejudice, and political narratives interact to produce an environment in which a “death penalty for Palestinians” becomes not only possible but celebrated.

The world today faces a defining test: to recognise that the exclusive targeting of Palestinians for disproportionate, state-sanctioned lethal punishment is not merely policy—it is the signature of an apartheid system. And if that is not apartheid, then what is?

Further Reading:

Amnesty International. (2022). Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity. [amnesty.org]

Human Rights Watch. (2021). A threshold crossed: Israeli authorities and the crimes of apartheid and persecution. [hrw.org]

Human Rights Watch. (2026). World Report 2026: Israel and Palestine. [hrw.org]

Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. (2025). Gaza war-related mortality estimates.

Peteet, J. (2016). The work of comparison: Israel/Palestine and apartheid. Anthropological Quarterly, 89(1), 247–282. [jstor.org]

Ayoub, N. (2023). The Israeli apartheid regime against the Palestinians in law and practice.

Ramadan in Gaza has come to embody a profound contradiction: a month rooted in peace, reflection and communal warmth, set against a backdrop of destruction, displacement and survival. Families who once prepared their homes with lanterns, decorations and the familiar scent of Ramadan foods now find themselves observing the holy month from tents pitched beside the rubble of what used to be their homes. The attempt to recreate even a symbolic atmosphere of Ramadan becomes an act of resistance, a way of preserving identity when almost everything else has been stripped away. As psychologists, we are often trained to consider the foundations of human needs—Maslow’s hierarchy being one of the most cited frameworks. It becomes painfully clear that when safety, stability and access to basic resources are removed, the higher levels of self‑actualisation become infinitely harder to reach. Yet Ramadan itself brings an opportunity for spiritual grounding. The question that haunts the mind, however, is this: How does one hold on to that grounding in the midst of genocide?

Traditional Ramadan practices—visiting relatives, decorating the home, preparing special foods—have been deeply disrupted. Many people do not even know if their relatives are alive, where they are displaced to, or if they can be contacted at all. The social fabric that usually strengthens during Ramadan has been torn apart. The thought of preparing a home for Ramadan becomes almost surreal when one no longer has a home to return to. Even the small rituals that provide emotional nourishment—choosing dates, buying Ramadan lanterns, planning the evening iftar meal—are now overshadowed by grief, uncertainty and disconnection. Communities that were once closely knit are now scattered, and the collective pain is compounded by the invisible wounds of not knowing who is missing, who is alive, and who is grieving alone.

Food, water and electricity shortages turn fasting into something entirely different from the spiritual practice observed elsewhere. Many are not fasting from dawn to sunset out of devotion alone but because there is simply nothing available to break their fast with. High prices and limited access to even the most basic items make Ramadan staples—like dates, lentils, flour or cooking oil—luxuries rather than norms. While the iftar meal is meant to be a moment of relief, gratitude and family connection, many families in Gaza approach sunset with anxiety rather than comfort. For some, there is no plate to fill; for others, a charity kitchen becomes the sole place where they can hope to receive a meal. Long queues form hours in advance, and people wait after an entire day of fasting simply for the chance of receiving something modest enough to share. It is essential to recognise that while food matters, the emotional strain of not being able to provide for one’s family is a psychological burden of its own.

Conditions inside shelters worsen the emotional toll. Thousands of families are living in overcrowded spaces with very limited goods and services. With no steady access to energy sources, people rely on open fires for cooking, which has led to an increase in fire‑related accidents and injuries. The shelters themselves offer minimal safety. Fabric partitions, overcrowding, poor sanitation and a lack of privacy combine to create environments that amplify distress. Many attempt to maintain dignity by keeping their temporary spaces arranged as best as possible for Ramadan, but the fragility of these living conditions weighs heavily. Charity kitchens become lifelines—both materially and emotionally. They are spaces where people gather, not only to receive food but also to hold onto a sense of community that the war tries to erode.

Despite these hardships, the emotional and spiritual resilience of Palestinians in Gaza remains extraordinary. Even amid rubble, lanterns still appear in marketplaces. Families gather for prayer, and communities hold onto worship as an anchor. When human systems fail them, many turn more deeply toward faith. For some, this is not simply devotion but necessity—faith becomes the last remaining structure when everything else has collapsed. Palestinians have long modelled what resilience looks like, and during Ramadan, this resilience becomes even more visible. The essence of the month—patience, reflection, charity, community, hope—remains alive, even when surrounded by devastation.

Ramadan also arrives with profound grief. Many families face the month having lost relatives, neighbours and entire neighbourhoods. The emotional weight of fasting while grieving, while living under trauma, while feeling abandoned by the world, is immense. Islam encourages contemplation, and Ramadan deepens that contemplative lens, but the spiritual reflection this year is intertwined with a painful understanding of what has been taken from people. We still do not know enough—psychologically or clinically—about how communities cope with prolonged trauma under siege, about how children internalise these experiences, or about how families maintain emotional bonds when survival consumes almost all energy. Research, although vital, feels painfully insufficient when communities are experiencing trauma in real time.

For psychologists and humanitarian professionals, this situation raises urgent ethical and reflective questions. What does Ramadan mean for families whose fasting is shaped by scarcity rather than choice? How do people maintain hope, faith and identity when the physical spaces that hold their memories have been destroyed? What are the psychological effects of observing Ramadan while enduring ongoing trauma, especially for children who associate the month with joy, family, warmth and connection? How does displacement reshape spiritual practices and family rituals? On a global scale, what responsibilities do humanitarian organisations and the international community hold in protecting civilians during sacred periods? Restricted humanitarian access not only threatens immediate survival but also undermines long‑term recovery and emotional healing. And crucially, for those of us outside Gaza, how might Ramadan reshape our own awareness, empathy and willingness to provide meaningful support—materially, politically and spiritually?

Ramadan in Gaza is not the Ramadan known elsewhere in the world. It is a month marked by courage and sorrow, by faith and deprivation, by resilience and unbearable loss. For many Palestinians in Gaza, the most basic right—the right to eat food without risking death—has been taken away. The spiritual beauty of Ramadan remains, but it is carried through immense suffering, held up by people who refuse to let their dignity or their faith be destroyed.

In the end, Ramadan in Gaza becomes a testament to survival, identity and unshakable faith. And as psychologists, allies and human beings, it calls us to reflect not only on their resilience but on our responsibility to bear witness, to advocate and to refuse silence.

As we reflect at the end of 2025—both as editors and as people working in psychology—we have to sometimes ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions, such as during the Christmas period why are Palestinians, particularly Christian Palestinians not recognised or spoken about? Universally around the world Christmas is celebrated by many. Friends and families unite. Communities pause and reconnect.

So why does this “universal” not extend to the Christian and Muslim in Palestine? Why do so many look the other way when the universal rolls around? Is this the portal to dehumanisation—the quiet slip from “they exist” to “they don’t,” from “we see them” to “we can’t,” from “their lives matter” to “we’re not sure what you’re talking about”? That slide has a history. It is how peoples get erased. It undermines self‑determination. And it forces us to ask a basic question psychologists know well: whose story are we telling, and whose reality gets left out?

From a psychological standpoint, the basics are simple: everyone exists; everyone functions; everyone breathes, eats, sleeps, and feels. As psychologists and as human beings, we know this. So why do we struggle—societally, globally—to see Palestinian’s in the same universal frame, especially at a time built around the message of “people coming together”? If a global event is truly global, it should hold space for everyone. It should acknowledge, include, and connect. Yet for Palestinian Christians, too often the message is: there’s no such thing.

Let’s ground this in reality.

Bethlehem is not a myth; it’s a Palestinian city

The heart of the Christmas story—unfolded in Bethlehem, a city in the West Bank where Palestinians live and work today. The Church of the Nativity stands over the traditional site of the manger. Christian Pilgrims visit. Midnight mass is held. Local families decorate trees, prepare meals, and set out nativity scenes. None of this is abstract. It’s everyday life.

Palestinian Christians—a small but historic community—have carried these traditions for centuries.

The celebration and the constraints

Here’s the straight truth: celebrating Christmas in Bethlehem can be hard. Checkpoints, permits, and movement restrictions make travel complex. The local economy relies heavily on religious tourism; instability disrupts it. Families feel the impact in real time.

That contrast—between the global message of “peace on earth” and the concrete realities of life under restriction—is sharp. It’s not a theoretical problem; it’s a lived one.

Interfaith solidarity exists

There’s another truth that gets ignored: in Palestine, Muslim neighbours are often encouraged to protect and safeguard other religious sites. A Muslim family holds the keys to Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Christianity's holiest site, which has been passed in the family for over 800 years. This is a shared culture, not a media trope. It’s a reminder that coexistence happens in daily acts, not just a political statement.

Modern adaptations are real

Palestinian Christians have adapted. Livestreams connect those who can’t travel. Diaspora communities organize gatherings across the world. Artisans carve olive wood nativity scenes that reach global markets, supporting local livelihoods. Again: not myth, not slogan—reality.

So why do we “not see” them?

This is where psychology matters. Several processes can make a community invisible:

• Dehumanisation: stripping away mental life and moral worth, often through language that frames people as less than human.

• Moral exclusion: placing a group outside the circle of care where norms of fairness and empathy “don’t apply.”

• Narrative erasure: telling the story without them—editing out their presence until absence feels normal.

• Outgroup invisibility: defaulting to a mental model of “us” that silently excludes “them.”

When globally Palestinian Christians are treated as if Christmas “isn’t for them,” or as if “their celebrations don’t count”, we’re not just being inattentive. We’re reinforcing these psychological processes. We’re rehearsing a shared delusion that says: “They don’t have Christmas. They don’t have presents.” That’s false. And it’s harmful.

The universal has to be universal

Global moments mean very little if they only reflect the dominant gaze. According to Christians Christmas is a universal moment because it is suppose to widen the circle—if that circle narrows when Palestinians come into view, then the moment is no longer universal; it is conditional.

This matters beyond symbolism. When world leaders talk about peace and goodwill, but practice policies or rhetoric that exclude Palestinians from the very moments that symbolise inclusion, people notice. The message rings hollow. The gap between values and practice widens. And the psychological toll grows—on Palestinians, and on anyone watching the contradictions pile up.

What do Palestinians think and feel?

We should be cautious and humble here. Palestinians think and feel many things; they are not a monolith. But the core is clear: they exist in the same reality as everyone else. They celebrate, mourn, hope, and plan. They process the season like any other community—through the lens of their lived experience. They are not a separate human species living on a different planet. They are people. Full stop.

Back to the question

So let’s return to the key question you set for this piece and for our readers: Do Palestinians “exist” in Christmas? The answer is yes. They exist in the story’s birthplace. They exist in the pews, homes, and markets of Bethlehem and beyond. They exist in diaspora churches, mosques and living rooms around the world. They celebrate, adapt, and endure. To “not see” that is a choice—and one with consequences.

What should we do—practically and psychologically?

1. Name the erasure: Call out dehumanising language and moral exclusion when we see it. Don’t normalise invisibility.

2. Widen the lens: Include Palestinian voices of all faith in coverage, curricula, and platforms—especially around universal events.

3. Support livelihoods: Consider buying from Palestinian artisans, support cultural institutions, and amplify local initiatives.

4. Practice empathetic consistency: Apply values equally—peace, dignity, justice—without exceptions.

5. Teach the full story: In psychology and social sciences, make the processes of dehumanisation, narrative erasure, and moral exclusion explicit. Show how they operate—and how to resist them.

A closing invitation to reflect

We ask readers to sit with the sadness that emerges from this conversation and to confront the disconnect between the ideal of “universal moments” and their lived application. Reflect on the immediate question: Do Palestinians exist in Christmas? And then expand it: Whose histories are we writing? Whose realities are we normalising?

At the end of 2025, let us commit to universals that are truly universal—to moments that honour the full human circle. Let us remember Bethlehem is not an abstraction. Palestinians are not an absence.

Jolel Miah and Sadia Lira interviewed Dr Reem, a clinical psychologist from Jerusalem, Palestine, for the UK Psychologist for Palestine News podcast, discussing the mental health situation in Palestine, shifting from psychoanalysis to liberation, decolonial, and Islamic psychology for enduring hardship. Dr Reem emphasized the critical need for global empathy, starting with “believe us” when Palestinians describe atrocities, and highlighted the systemic dehumanization of Palestinians, explaining that they are experiencing “profound existential exhaustion” and “insistence on life” rather than resilience. The conversation also cantered on challenging biases through self-questioning, the necessity of actively imagining and planning for a free Palestine, and the importance of decolonial, religiously informed psychological services for post-genocide recovery that focus on internal restoration and justice before forgiveness.

Details of the podcast….

Introduction of Guest and Context Jolel welcomed Dr Reem, a clinical psychologist and practicing psychotherapist from Jerusalem, Palestine, to the UK Psychologist for Palestine News podcast, noting that listeners and readers were eager to hear from someone actually in Palestine about the mental health situation there. Dr Reem introduced themself as a published author on the psychological effects of colonization on the Palestinian psyche, an academic, and a consultant with NGOs. They mentioned their shift in focus from psychoanalysis toward liberation psychology, decolonial psychology, and Islamic psychology for enduring hardship, especially after the genocide witnessed over the past couple of years.

Learning and Resource Sharing Jolel and Sadia expressed excitement about Dr Reem presence and the opportunity to learn from their professional and lived experiences. Sadia Lira requested to collect references for Dr Reem’s publications to share with the audience and asked about the best way for listeners to reach out. Both hosts appreciated Dr Reem sharing their time and acknowledged the sensitivity of the topics to be discussed.

Empathy and Believability for Palestinians The discussion moved to empathy, which Dr Reem described as a crucial starting point for any conversation, especially given the global burnout from witnessing violence. Dr Reem stated that practicing empathy with Palestinians should begin with “believe us” when they convey the atrocities committed against them. They recounted reflections from their time in graduate school about people doubting or having difficulty believing the narrative of what was happening in Palestine over the 76 years of ongoing conflict.

Systemic Dehumanization and Empathy as a Universal Construct Dr Jolel questioned why Palestinians often do not receive empathy, asking if empathy is a universal construct. Dr Reem asserted that there has been a systemic effort to “eject” Muslims, Arabs, brown, and black people from the “circle of believability” and humanization through means like Hollywood, social media, and textbooks. Dr Reem confirmed that all humans are capable of empathy, but it is often reserved for those designated as “in-group” members, with Palestinians frequently categorized as an out-group, especially under a white western supremacist ideology.

Challenging Biases and Dehumanization Sadia and Jolel reinforced the ethical and empathetic nature of psychology and encouraged listeners to question their struggles to feel empathy for Palestinians, Muslims, and other marginalized groups, recognizing the influence of historical biases and media portrayals. Dr Reem suggested a process of self-questioning for noticing blind spots, recommending people internally ask what they know about a group, where they learned it, and if it is true, which can serve as a starting point if they are afraid to speak up or approach someone from that group.

The Current State of Palestinians When asked how Palestinians are doing, Dr Reem stated plainly that they are doing “quite badly,” despite an “insistence on life” that frustrates the colonizers. They detailed that internally, there is a crisis of meaning and connection, and the massive scale of savagery has warped Palestinians’ perception of their own value and redefined humanity for them. Dr Reem observed high levels of psychological defences in private practice, including compartmentalization, denial, and somatization, which manifests in high rates of cardiovascular illnesses, diabetes, and cancer.

Existential Exhaustion and Insistence over Resilience Dr Reem summarized the overall experience as “profound existential exhaustion” and a “constant struggle against nihilism,” noting the pervasive fear and the slow pace of change relative to the urgency of the situation. Sadia Lira addressed the use of the term “resilience,” which Dr Reem critiqued, saying they designated ten pages in their doctoral thesis to criticize its overuse and potential weaponization to excuse external inaction. Dr Reem proposed using “insistence” instead of resilience, defining it as an active and continuous choice by Palestinians to stay, driven by the collective continuity of the group, and influenced by religious, spiritual, national, and even tribal motivations.

Decolonisation and Language The conversation touched on the language of decolonization, including the term “Middle East,” which Sadia Lira pointed out is a colonial-era term related to Britain. Dr Reem agreed that they would actively choose terminology like the “MINA region” or “East Asia” (later corrected to a geographical region other than East Asia) and acknowledged that language is a primary weapon and a precursor to genocide and eradication. Jolel suggested a future podcast focused on the geographic naming of Palestine.

Motivation Behind Colonizer Violence and Dehumanization Dr Reem shared their childhood curiosity, growing up during the Second Intifada, about what motivated young, armed soldiers to torment and torture civilians at checkpoints. They recounted a distressing story from the Kalantia checkpoint, where an elder collapsed and a soldier allegedly urinated in a bottle requested for water, resulting in the assassination of the elder’s son after he reacted. Dr Reem noted that this curiosity steered them toward psychology, focusing on the psychological makeup of the colonizer, referencing literature from Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and others.

The Colonizer’s Narrative and Cognitive Dissonance Dr Reem explained that the colonizer constructs a mythical portrait of the colonized as savages or primitive (similar to Manifest Destiny in the US) to give themselves the moral license to eradicate a population. The colonizer also constructs a narrative of their own superiority, such as being “God’s chosen people,” creating a hierarchy where Palestinians are viewed as the unchosen obstacle.

Critique of Psychological Studies and Accountability Sadia expressed concern that past studies on dehumanization have gone “undetected” and asked if the academic community is truly learning from them. Dr Reem reflected on the failure of research into Holocaust survivors and Nazi soldiers, suggesting that research needs to be more than archival; it needs to be a method of restorative intervention. Dr Reem noted that the Milgram and Stanford prison experiments were sometimes used in US clinical psychology training to excuse atrocities, suggesting that the “uniform is the one who’s doing it” or “we would have all done this,” which Dr Reem called a frightening way to teach the material that warps accountability.

The Path to Hope and Liberation Jolel Miah shifted the conversation to what hope and liberation look like, acknowledging the reality of despair. Dr Reem introduced the concept of “liberation madness,” stressing the need to envision a future free Palestine, free MINA, and a rehabilitated West to arrive at liberation. They emphasised the importance of psychological interventions for survivors of genocide that restore their sense of self and reconcile them with a humanity that failed them, rather than simply neglecting them or creating a sense of massive entitlement that leads to cyclical violence, citing the disturbing cyclicality of grandchildren of Holocaust survivors committing genocide themselves.

The Necessity of Imagining a Free Palestine Dr Reem discussed the importance of actively imagining and planning for a free Palestine, emphasizing that this is a collective effort and essential for liberation. They introduced their article, “Besiege You of Siege with Madness,” which stemmed from the observation that some Palestinians feel stuck in a fatalistic viewpoint, leading to a “real threat in the way that these conversations go” by limiting the act of imagining freedom. Dr Reem stressed that liberation needs to involve imagining tangible realities, such as walking by the beach and returning to homes, moving beyond despair and planning for enjoyable, caring worlds.

Decolonial Planning for Post-Genocide Psychological Services Dr Reem detailed that actively imagining liberation includes planning for post-genocide psychological services, which must be decolonial, working from the ground up, and based on people’s religious values, attachment to the land, and meaning-making, rather than biomedical models. They noted that the liberation movement is a “deloized effort,” involving everyone globally, and asked the other speakers what hope looks like for them. Jolel affirmed that liberation is possible by citing the historical example of the British Bay of Bengal transforming, and agreed that it needs to be ground up, asking the people with attachment to the land.

Hope in Simple Freedoms and Professional Responsibility Jolel and Sadia discussed hope in relation to basic human rights, such as being able to walk by the beach without fear, a simple human aspiration that should not be complex to achieve. Sadia focused on hope within the field of psychology, which they see as increasing when more people feel confident to speak out, challenge uncomfortable topics, and recognize that their role extends beyond sessions or teaching. Dr Reem added that the genocide had been a tragic test, revealing that many professionals with large followings failed to show care for other humans, questioning their motivations for entering the field.

Reparative Process and Internal Restoration Dr Reem emphasized that the genocide is far from over, and upon its eventual conclusion, a reparative process must unfold for both Palestinians and Jews who may wish to stay as Palestinians. They noted that psychologists need to focus on restoring the “darker parts” of the human psychic makeup without shaming or disavowing them. The need for repair also extends to relationships with the world, citing the situation in Sudan as another place requiring world reparation.

Infrastructure for Healing and the Role of the Community Dr Reem discussed the infrastructural challenges for healing, highlighting that the genocide included a “medicide,” with hospitals and the only psychiatric hospital in Gaza being destroyed, and healthcare providers targeted. They proposed that healing will require very limited resources, focusing on participatory research as an intervention, and stressed that no one will parachute in with solutions. Instead, care will primarily be provided by Palestinians (and potentially other Arabs) on the ground, likely in group formats, centered on meaning-making, narrative construction, and cultivating a sense of purpose.

Critique of Forgiveness Interventions and Decolonization of Psychology Dr Reem cautioned against interventions focused on forgiveness without prior justice or reparation, citing American psychologists’ work with Rwandan genocide survivors as an example of the “white saviour” complex. They argued that the immediate focus should be on “forgiveness of the self” for survivor guilt and reconnecting people to the human project. Sadia Lira questioned whether survivors of genocide need different forms of therapy and accountability before forgiveness, bringing up the necessity of decolonising psychology, which means including diverse perspectives rather than solely applying a Western view.

The Shift Towards Islamic Psychology and Fitrah Informed Psychotherapy Dr Reem shared that they have gravitated towards Islamic psychology, specifically “fitrah informed psychotherapy,” finding that pre-existing models do not speak to the magnitude of loss and suffering from genocide. This model assumes individuals are born with inherent goodness, and the therapist’s task is to help them return to themselves, reconnecting them with the divine, which is seen as a more holistic approach that can include somatic interventions and is not limited to talk therapy. Jolel agreed that forgiveness is a massive leap, emphasising that there must be a path to reconciliation, truth, and justice, which involves tangible actions before reaching forgiveness.

The Current State of Non-Recognition and the Path Forward Dr Reem asserted that they are “so far from forgiveness” because the current reality requires a focus on recognition of harm, pointing out the refusal of many Israelis to watch or believe videos of the atrocities. They stated that after recognition, there must be reparations—real material ways to attempt self-redemption—before forgiveness can be considered. Jolel concluded that liberation is not just for Palestinians but for everyone, and denying reality is a form of self-oppression, making liberation an individual and collective responsibility.

Final Reflections and Call to Action Dr Reem ended on a note of hope, acknowledging the shifting consciousness demonstrated by achievements like the election of a Muslim mayor in New York, and the re-education of an entire generation. Sadia Lira called for self-reflection and for the audience to recognize their positions in mental health and not shy away from difficult topics. They emphasized that understanding one’s role as a psychologist, therapist, or academic is crucial, as the occurrence of genocide suggests there is no guarantee against it happening again. Dr Reem agreed that the current moment requires honesty, confronting one’s limitations, and focusing efforts on changing one’s immediate community, trusting that the echo will carry over.

A huge thank you to the 24 amazing people who have already taken part in our opinion poll! Your insights are incredibly valuable and have given us some fascinating perspectives so far.

But we’re not done yet – our goal is to reach 100 responses, and we need your help to get there. Every single response matters and helps us build a clearer picture of what our community thinks.

If you haven’t completed the poll yet, please take a few minutes to share your thoughts. It’s quick, easy, and your opinion truly makes a difference.

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Let’s make this a conversation that represents all of us. Thank you for being part of it!

with valuable contributions from Diyala Medhat, Dr Mohammed Darabeh, Mohammed Nasser, Dr Yahia M.G. Mezied, Professor Izat El Amoor, Professor Ramsey Hanhan, Dalia Lina and others.

The last two years, I witnessed Palestinian universities being destroyed, Palestinian university professors being killed, psychologists being killed, university students being killed, schools being destroyed, school children and teachers being killed, PhD students working on their laptops among the rubble, all in Palestine. I’ve asked myself and others many times: how can I help? I don’t even know where to start. I have joined so many voluntary organisations in order to volunteer to help Palestinian university students and colleagues, but things have been very slow. I have felt like a useless bystander.

Being silent bystanders is surely not what academics, intellectuals and educators should be. According to Noam Chomsky, we are meant to speak truth to power and speak up when we spot a genocide, educide, scholasticide. Otherwise, what’s the point of academics and educators? How can we look our students in the eye and ask them to adhere to UN’s sustainability goals, while we are silent about the violations of these goals in Palestine? What kind of role models do we provide for them? I don’t perform life-saving operations, I don’t repair boilers, or fix trains. I teach university students, and I use what I learn from scholarly work to reflect on myself and society; I have studied social anthropology, social policy, psychology among other things, and I have learned to hold a mirror to the structure of my thoughts, others’ thoughts and society at large, and identify inconsistencies. Among other things, I teach about using meta-cognitive reflection to examine cognitive biases. Am I meant to switch all that off when it comes to Palestine? How will our students trust us if we don’t hold the mirror to atrocities against Palestinians? How will our oppressed colleagues from Palestine and elsewhere trust us? How will anyone at all anywhere trust us?

Some time ago, I saw yet another video of a very young child carrying his baby sibling on their back as they were fleeing from Israeli bombardment. It was brought to my attention by Dr Jolel Miah, who noted about it:

‘The life of a carer. We must see these people as humans instead of animals.’

The whole thing made me remember a story I heard, where a young child carried their dead brother on their back, in the aftermath of bombing in Japan in 1945. There is dispute regarding whether/when this event occurred and how. The story/myth goes like this: when the boy was advised to stop carrying his dead brother, so that he doesn’t get too tired, he said:

‘He’s not heavy, he’s my brother’.

The powerful photo and the story really moved me, as did the video of the Palestinian children.

I thought: I will follow your hallowed steps and your examples and carry my Palestinian colleagues on my back. I will take them with me wherever I go. I will bring them into academic and non-academic spaces I inhabit, in my writing, academic or not, prose or poems.

I will also carry dead Palestinian Colleagues too, such as Professor Refaat Alareer, who was targeted and killed in cold blood by fascism and greed. I will carry his books everywhere, write about him, talk about him, give his books as presents to my favourite people.

There is all this talk about decolonization of the curriculum in academia. But it often sounds passive, superficial, theoretical and ineffective to me, especially while the Palestinian genocide has been going on for so long. My brain sometimes falls asleep with the web of vague terminology. And no, it’s not enough to just notice that there are no Palestinian authors and academics to cite in our articles and chapters. We need to ask what we can do to help with the development of such scholars. How can we include more Palestinian academics’ work in our writing when they haven’t written anything because they are being killed in every possible horrible way, at all different stages of life? That Palestinian teenager you saw being killed on their bike could have been a health psychologist, practitioner and/or academic, in a few years.

We need to help Palestinian academics and future academic psychologists and psychological practitioners to develop their skills, their careers, produce publications…and even acknowledge that there are no Palestinian academics cited in a paper we publish, because there are no papers by them, as many were killed before they could even go to school, let alone to university. Palestinians are some of the most educated people in the world, they would have had a much higher representation in academia if there had not been the illegal occupation, genocide, holocaust.

[I am aware that Palestinians are not the only oppressed people, so where you see the word ‘Palestinian’, please add any oppressed people that come to mind, e.g. people of Sudan, Congo. When I say ‘academics’, please insert the words ‘doctors, psychologists, social workers’ and so on].

But that’s me stating what I think Palestinians need.

What do they actually need? What can, for example, UK Psychologists do for Palestinians? I asked some Palestinians I know. For the purposes of coherence of the article, they should all have been academic psychologists and practitioner psychologists from Palestine. But because of how horrific the situation is at the moment, I could not find many academic psychologists and practitioners from Palestine to answer my question. So here is a beautiful patchwork of Palestinian Professionals.

Here are the words of Dr Mohammed Darabeh, a writer and psychiatrist and writer from Gaza:

‘As UK psychologists, your role can be powerful: raising awareness of the profound mental health impact of this genocide, advocating within professional bodies to recognize the severity of what is happening, and ensuring that the narrative of Palestinian suffering is not erased. Equally important is creating academic and professional platforms where Palestinian voices and experiences are centered, rather than spoken for.’

Dr Mohammed Darabeh, Psychiatrist-Gaza Community Mental Health Programme

Dr Darabeh wrote a wonderful book about the children of Gaza: Frail Whispers : the Plight of the Children of Gaza | Universal Book Links Help You Find Books at Your Favorite Store! (and more information about Mohammed’s work and how to support him here: Dr.Mohammed_Darabeh | Instagram, Facebook | Linktree)

As an answer to your book and an offer of hope, Mohammed, here is a conversation between UK Psychologists: The answer to the question What if they were ours? | BPS was They are ours | BPS. They are talking about Palestinian children, Mohammed. Palestinian children are ours according to this conversation between UK Psychologists. There is hope!

Here are the words of Mohammed Nasser (who was recently featured in UK Psychologists for Palestine) , a digital marketing specialist from Gaza who studied with Professor Refaat Alareer:

‘What UK psychologists can do is raise awareness of the deep psychological wounds that children and families here are carrying. To speak about the trauma we live every day, and to remind the world that healing is not possible without peace, safety, and justice. Even just acknowledging our pain is already a huge support.’

Mohammed Nasser, Digital Marketing Specialist | Media Buyer | Google Ads | Field Marketing | SEO | Marketing strategy planner and Content writing, Gaza, Palestine.

Thank you for being so incredibly kind and saying that just acknowledging your pain is huge support, while you are going through such a difficult time. Just acknowledging what you are going through still feels very little, but I appreciate your acknowledgment, as it gives me hope and it makes me feel that I am helping a little bit, and it gives me strength to keep going… I will keep telling of Gaza, I promise.

Professor Ramsey Hanhan, a Palestinian American writer and former professor in Physics reflects on his experiences of silence, including in relation to mental health professionals:

‘I am a Palestinian American living near Baltimore, Maryland. On Oct. 7, 2023, I happened to be visiting Palestine on a book tour. My first shock came a few days later, while still there, when my inbox filled with letters from my daughter’s school district, the university where I worked, my former employer, the governor, etc. All expressed solidarity and compassion with Israelis and not a word of solidarity with Palestinians. I felt unheard and unseen, and utterly dehumanized.

The mental health profession relies on trust. In that environment, with the media and politicians constantly gaslighting us, I did not feel safe to seek mental health support from providers, establishments, and institutions that do not acknowledge our pain.

Over the past two years, Palestinians all over the world have been living under tremendous psychological stress. Some have lost family members in Gaza, and often more than one. Many worry about their loved ones every day. All are horrified by the images and stories coming out of Gaza, as are most decent human beings on Earth, Palestinian or not.

Why would anyone trust a therapist who’s silent on genocide? Who would be comfortable revealing their intimate feelings to someone who does not see them? The mental health community discredits itself with its continued silence on the biggest mental health crisis of the century.’

Ramsey Hanhan, Ph.D., Author and Public Speaker

You can find Professor’s Hanhan’s wonderful writing here: ramseyhanhan.org and ramsey-hanhan.medium.com

Professor Hanhan is making some very valid points: how can we be trusted as psychology professionals if we don’t talk about the genocide against Palestinians? I invite mental health professionals and psychologists to discuss this matter. Dr Hanhan’s experience sounds excruciating. It provides a glimpse on how anti-Palestinian racism is experienced by Palestinians, whether they are residing in Palestine or not, and illustrates that language and silences matter. We need to make sure we support Palestinians. How can they trust us to educate their children, support them with their mental health, when we are silent about the genocide against them?

Professor Hanhan, I am pleased to report that there are UK practitioner psychologists that publicly support social justice, Palestine and Palestinians: for example Dr Mehdi Alemohammad: ‘It’s time for psychologists to become activists’ | BPS . So there is hope!

A Palestinian scholar from Gaza with a visual disability emphasized that academic support should never overlook academics and students with disabilities, stating:

“Values and morals stem from empathy for others. For students with disabilities, knowledge is our only weapon; it is what empowers us and shapes our future. That is the true moral value. Speaking from my own experience, if I were not educated, I would not have been able to defend my rights, reach where I am today, or have the willpower and direction that guide me. Our commitment to education comes from a deep, inner awareness of its importance for people with disabilities; it is a moral conviction that drives us forward. That is why we feel such empathy for our students, and I firmly believe in the principle: ‘Nothing about us without us.’”

These precious words were translated from Arabic to English by another Palestinian scholar. Just to make it clear, this is a disabled scholar, under genocide and oppression, taking the time to write for this article. What an honour to be allowed to contain these words in this blog post.

I agree, it is so important to always remember how important it is to link knowledge to moral values, rather than think of knowledge in a vacuum, outside of any framework of social justice and values. And you are making a very important point that Dr Darabeh made earlier, that we should be carefully listening to you and asking you what you need, rather than imposing things on you.

These words remind me to be more empathetic with our students with disabilities too, and of course it reminds me that this genocide created so many people with disabilities, both students and professionals.

Here is what UK Psychologists can do for Dr Mezied, a Medical Doctor in Gaza:

“What we need from psychologists, especially in the UK, is more than just academic support. We need acknowledgment of our psychological suffering under continuous war, displacement, and trauma. We need professionals who can amplify our voices, advocate for mental health support for Palestinian children and families, and pressure their institutions to take a stand for justice. We need solidarity not only in words but in actions in research, advocacy, and healing partnerships.”

Dr Yahia M.G. Mezied, Medical Doctor in Gaza

Thank you for taking the time to write these precious words for this blog post, while doing your life-saving work in Gaza!

I have no idea how to pressure institutions, but I hope I am amplifying your voice with our co-writing!

That said, I feel so honoured being in the presence of someone so brave, someone that stayed in a genocide to volunteer medical support for his fellow Palestinians, that I feel that the least I can do is to try, so here it goes:

Beloved British Psychological Society, Beloved Universities UK and all learned societies, if you read this, please pressure Israel to stop the genocide against Palestinians, to stop killing psychologists, academics, students. I plead with you, please join the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement so that no more Palestinian psychologists, students, academics, practitioners are murdered. I have promised to the Palestinians I am carrying that I would at least try, so here I am, trying. Please.

Dr Mezied, I also wanted to paste here a public letter of HCPC professionals, to show you an example of how healthcare professionals in the UK are trying to support Palestine and Palestinians:

‘To all HCPC registered Professions

We stand in solidarity with healthcare professionals facing disciplinary action for advocating for Palestine and upholding human rights.
This open letter calls on the HCPC to protect the right to ethical advocacy, defend freedom of expression, and ensure that systemic bias does not silence professionals—particularly those from marginalised communities. We invite all registered professionals and trainees to read, sign and share.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScx89tqXGcI4wRAYC2G2UYFTHj5GYH9e0gjE9UA4sJ0ZJb-nw/viewform?pli=1 ‘

I hope this gives you some hope!

Healing partnerships and research are so important, and I’m hoping by writing this piece is a small step towards that. Thankfully there are a lot of individuals and organisations advocating for Palestine, but I think more research and healing partnerships are needed, and they demand very careful, patient and pain-staking work. The group ‘Standing Together’ appears to me to be a great example of a healing partnership.

How can these healing practices happen effectively? Three brilliant Palestinian Psychological Practitioners provide a very thoughtful framework for that:

‘The war on Gaza has exposed many hidden truths about the global Zionist narrative, despite the heavy losses suffered by our people. This deep sense of mistrust toward Western professionals is not new; rather, it stems from years of experience and the realization that some supervisors who appeared to us under a neutral Western facade were in fact carrying Zionist agendas.

For this reason, it was difficult for many colleagues to respond to this question.

UK Psychologists can help us, first of all, by adopting anti-Zionist action, accepting that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and putting Palestinian stories and Palestinian voices front and centre of their advocacy and practice.

They could also implement the following suggestions through the lens of liberation psychology and Trauma inform practices, which could include:

- preparing a list of mental health professionals working in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem.
- conducting a comprehensive needs assessment.
- providing supervision and support through individual or group sessions, whether in person or online.
- providing specialized training in trauma, including psychological first aid, using the lens of liberation psychology and trauma-informed practices.
- providing manuals and practical guides on how to deal with trauma.
- providing psychological care to professionals themselves when they are personally affected by trauma.
- providing tools, practices, and training to promote well-being and resilience in the mental health field.
- ensuring legal protection for professionals and their work under wartime conditions.
- creating opportunities to connect with international mental health institutions, so that local professionals have opportunities to become part of global networks.

These suggestions also highlight the importance of developing professional supervision groups and platforms, with clear ethical principles that ensure recognition of Palestinian rights and solidarity with our cause. Furthermore, there was a strong call for a collective approach—such as group analysis and community-based interventions—because the scale of harm in Palestine is too vast to be addressed through individual therapy.’

Diyala Medhat (community and educational psychologist in Jerusalem) and two fellow Palestinian Practitioner Psychologists

Thank you so much Diyala and colleagues for putting together this very thoughtful and set of suggestions! We have been supporting your oppressors for years, and it took a genocide to wake us up. Even though we woke up, we haven’t been able to save you or even marginally improve your lives. No wonder you distrust us. I am guilty to tears, and I’m trying to use my guilt to focus and help. I am certainly putting Palestinian stories and Palestinian voices front and centre of my advocacy and practice. I hope writing projects like this one will help heal wounds to an extent, and create healing partnerships, to use the wonderful phrase that Dr Yahia Mezied used. I promise I will do my best to help with such healing partnerships! And I know that many UK Psychologists will join us.

Here is a course by one of my colleagues on helping health professionals dealing with stress as a very small first offering: Rise x Future Me at Manchester Met

Pro-genocide lobbies often pinkwash the genocide against Palestinians. That is why this incredible voice from this Palestinian sociologist in the USA is so important:

‘Queer Palestinian liberation cannot – and must not – be achieved through a colonial or genocidal plan of action aimed at full annihilation of Palestinians. For most queer Palestinians I know, such liberation is outright unwelcome if it comes at the cost of perpetuating violence. Let me express just how deeply I believe in this: if I had to choose between two scenarios, one in which I would receive a perfect, full-scale Palestinian queer liberation matching the utopia I have envisioned my whole life – but only in the aftermath of a genocide and a violent colonial project – or endure being disowned, threatened, beaten, or even killed by my own family and community due to homophobia, I would choose the latter. This is how strongly I would rather face personal hardship than support the Western violence pretending it is there to save me and my queerness from my people as it ethnically cleanses us all.

(Excerpt from https://culturico.com/2025/04/15/dear-western-world-it-is-time-you-relearn-queer-palestine/)

This is how you can help queer Palestinians:

· Fund their activism: local queer Palestinian organizers have been active for decades with limited resources, small staffs, and mostly volunteer labor.

· Recognize that the queer Palestinian struggle is inseparable from the broader Palestinian struggle.

· Listen and amplify without centering yourself: believe and share their stories/perspectives, on their own terms.

· Engage with care: when meeting queer Palestinians, talk to them as potential life friends, not as temporary projects. Avoid saviorism—don’t try to “fix” their fate but build genuine, reciprocal relationships. See them beyond their queerness, they are people first. Ask about their well-being and mental health.

· Understand the systems they navigate: for many queer Palestinians, local homophobia may be safer and less complex than navigating immigration law, asylum processes, NGOs, militarism, and capitalism—all systems that often exploit queer Palestinians in service of powerful states seeking to keep them victimized.

· Challenge oppression at home: resist policies/rhetoric in your own country that sustain these global systems. Reject anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discourse, since Western narratives about queer Palestinians are often entangled with Islamophobia.

· Recognize diversity in our community: queer Palestinians are not a monolith. Internal disagreements about strategies towards queer liberation are normal and valuable. Do not weaponize these disagreements against us.

· Understand mobility decisions: some queer Palestinians wish to leave, often due to militarization, displacement, or survival needs—not only because of homophobia. This desire to leave is common amongst Palestinians collectively, it is not unique to queer Palestinians. Many have known no other reality than occupation and apartheid. It also does not mean they lack love for their land. Do not judge the decision to leave (many cannot anyway).

· Support whether they leave or stay: if they seek relocation, help with legal fees, housing, jobs, or connections. If they remain, ask what forms of support they need from abroad, financially or otherwise.

· Challenge those around you: bring these conversations to your friends, family, and employers online and offline— even if you risk backlash. Change requires persistence. Keep the cause visible.

· Resist sensationalist portrayals: mainstream media often focuses on extreme cases of violence, but these do not represent the entirety of queer Palestinian life. We are far more complex and diverse.

· Learn queer history: recognize that concepts like coming out, visibility politics, and pride were developed in Western contexts and can harm non-Western queer communities when imposed without cultural sensitivity.

· Understand colonial homophobia: Western colonialism played a role in producing much of the homophobia seen in the non-Western world today.

· Challenge misinformed statements. Such as “they kill the gays”, “they throw them off rooftops”.’

Professor Izat El Amoor, Professor of Sociology | Queer Palestine Public Speaker | SWANA Region | Qualitative & Mixed Methods Researcher

So many wonderful suggestions here! I’ve got to be honest: if I was in danger of being murdered by my own family and friends because I was gay, I would run away from them and from my country of origin. I’ve run away for much less than that in fact. Professor El Amoor’s statement that he would prefer that than Palestine not existing blows my mind, it tells me how much he loves Palestine and highlights the sacrifices he would make for Palestine. I don’t think I ever felt this love for Greece, that feeling was somehow trampled on fairly early on. But I have felt it for the UK, which is why I am so heartbroken by its involvement in the genocide against Palestinians. Thank you Professor El Amoor for these insightful and moving insights and recommendations, it feels like a really difficult space to navigate, and you do it brilliantly.

I am very moved that all these Palestinian professionals took the time away from their busy and fraught by the illegal occupation and genocide lives to write these precious words. Their words to guide my practice and I always keep them in mind when trying to help Palestine and Palestinians.

They all spoke about trauma. They all spoke about the importance of being asked what they need.

I invite more Palestinians, especially psychologists and academics, to contribute to this dialogue, to create more co-authored posts. I think co-writing and publishing such pieces can create spaces where some healing (however small) can take place. There is a lot on social media, but sometimes it can be piece meal, and lost in the noise.

I would like to include the silence of those Palestinians I asked that could not contribute due to the disruption generated by the genocide and holocaust. Their enforced silence is represented here with some empty lines:

Include this silence in your papers and articles if you can.

I will carry on my back as many Palestinian colleagues as I can. But I’m only small, the Palestinian colleagues in need are so many. Can you please help too?

If you cannot speak out about the injustice, can you do background work, and help in any way you can? Can you please not carry on as normal? Everybody can offer something and we don’t all need to do the same thing. You could highlight their articles, their practice, include their work in your work, invite them to speak, invite them to collaborate and participate in learned societies. Let’s put Palestinians back in the curriculum, discussions, events, institutions. Let’s support Palestinian students, academics, practitioners. Let’s make sure UN’s sustainable development goals include Palestinians too, some of the most oppressed people in the world.

************

Why do we remain silent when we witness injustice? There are many reasons for that, and others have written on this topic in inspiring blog posts and articles in UK Psychology for Palestine and elsewhere. I think part of the answer could be implicit biases, shaped by the influences at different points in our lives. I think it is really important to examine and reflect on our implicit biases and internal conflicts – I’ll start:

My implicit biases don’t know what hit them

Are you feeling conflicted, because your family and friends support the genocide against Palestinians? I think I know a little bit how you might feel. I grew up in Greece. I feel I have more in common with Israeli than Palestinian culture. Until two years ago, I was under the false impression this was a conflict of equals, and I felt closer to Israel. I always like to emphasize that I have inherited Islamophobia for historical reasons (see ottoman empire), hoping that it absolves me a bit. I’m not religious, I don’t understand, and I’m not particularly interested in Islam, and I am not very familiar with Palestinian culture – I certainly don’t particularly like Palestinian music. I used to love Israeli music, especially when it enriched Western ‘classical music’ pieces, although now it just brings to my mind horrific images of mutilated Palestinian children, and I avoid it. I must have listened and danced in my parents’ house to the ‘Fiddler on the roof’ CD more than 100 times until my mid/late twenties.

For most of my life, the genocide and holocaust against Jewish people was at the front and centre of my thoughts. It is the reason why I am speaking up about the Palestinian genocide, and I like to see it as proof that I would have spoken up against the Jewish genocide during WWII as well. For me the Jewish and the Palestinian genocides are linked completely. Refaat Alareer said it all in his amazing poem, I am you.

I feel very conflicted and saddened. I wish I could still admire and support unequivocally every aspect and expression of Jewish culture, including Israel. But I cannot ignore what is in front of me. I am horrified that Palestinians are reliving what the Jewish people experiences in the 1940s. I feel incredibly guilty that I didn’t realize the injustice until 2 years ago.

Talking about WWII, my Mum mentioned the following: During the German Nazi Occupation in Greece, the Nazi German soldiers would execute 20 random Greeks for every German Nazi soldier that was killed. How many Palestinian need to be killed for every Israeli that was killed? 500? 2000? 4000? It is 50 apparently. Shame on you, shame on me, shame on us for all our deadly biases and racist calculations.

It is so frightening to me, the amount of anti-Palestinian racism I see around me, on social media, on TV, in real life. Constantly. In people’s silences, in mainstream media twisting the truth, accusing displaced/dehumanised/genocided/famined people of terrorism, when it is finally abundantly clear that the most abhorrent terrorism and lawlessness is inflicted on Palestinians, and has been for years. I constantly see evidence around me that Palestinian lives don’t count for much, certainly not compared to Jewish lives, especially in mainstream media. Grimm et al. (2025) suggest that Palestinian victims are dehumanized while Israeli victims are given much more personalized coverage, and that agrees with my experience of listening to the radio, for example.

I know there are many Jewish people who oppose the genocide against Palestinians. I am very moved by the Jewish people that speak up (such as the brave ‘wrong Jew’, as they cheekily call themselves as well as holocaust survivors, the group ‘standing together’, a Jewish-Arab movement). Their voices are so important, much more important than mine, because they are able to counteract the weaponisation of antisemitism, which is dangerous for both Palestinian and Jewish people. I can imagine that they must have had to cut ties with friends and relatives because of that, and I appreciate their sacrifice.

I am a feminist but…

I consider myself a feminist. I don’t like it when women are told what to do, including being forced or coerced to cover their hair and face so that they don’t tempt men. I was very moved by all those Iranian women fighting recently against being forced to cover their hair, and I am devastated by what is happening to women in Afghanistan. I also like to offend everyone’s sense of decorum with my awful haircuts and unruly hair, fully aware that every single day is a bad hair day for me. It feels like a feminist act of defiance – who am I kidding, I am lazy, and I am happy I can get away with it because it thankfully agrees with my scruffy academic persona.

I’m also not that keen on religion, including Christianity and Islam. I’m not saying it’s the right thing to do to ignore religion, I just grew up being told that religion is not worth thinking about and is in fact oppressive and must be avoided. I was a very confused 13-year-old when my Dad, who grew in a dictatorship that shoved religion down his throat, asked me to not do my homework and not pay attention to my religious studies at school, although I was not officially exempt from it. I have often worn my religious agnosticism as a badge of honour, I think I still do a bit, although I am fully aware that it is mainly because of the way I grew up rather than from any deep knowledge, search or reflection on the topic.

But since the Palestinian genocide started happening, so many of my heroes are women wearing head scarfs. Recently we had a meeting with a group of volunteers trying to help Palestinian students. One of the volunteers had her hair and face covered. All I could think, as I was trying to hold back my tears because I was so moved by what she was saying was ‘thank you for all your help, time, humanity and compassion, you wonderful human’. That’s not what I would be thinking some years ago. This wonderful volunteer reminded me of a Palestinian Professor of Physics that was killed at the beginning of the Palestinian Genocide, she also had her face and hair covered in the photo that accompanied the social media post about her death and the death of two of her children. I can’t even find her name anywhere anymore. At the time I had felt so conflicted, despairing at the multitude of oppressions this Palestinian professor faced. Now I just mourn for a female Palestinian physics professor, I don’t seem to care about anything else. My implicit biases don’t know what hit them, and feminism seems to have moved down my list of priorities somewhat.

That does not mean I have forgotten feminism. But I am re-thinking it in light of the Palestinian genocide. I remember reading about Palestinian women saying something along the lines of ‘our men need our help; we cannot think of them as separate to us, look how they are treated by the illegal occupation’. That has stayed with me, and I am letting this idea percolate in my mind. I think they have a good point. Professor Izat’s reflections are very useful and relevant here too.

But listen, misogynists of the world, misogynists of all shapes, religions, and colours, including my internal misogynist (‘why are you washing Mum’s dishes, Dad?’), don’t feel you are off the hook; I’m just taking a pause for thought and focusing on Palestine for now, but I’ll be on to you as soon as I can for more confusing/conflicting reflections on and conversations about each other’s biases, so that we can all behave better towards each other and promote more gender equality!

Can we trust silent or pro-genocide Psychologists?

Professor Hanhan and Diyala Medhat and her colleagues talked about trust. Trust is such an important concept here.

I recently learned that many psychologists support the genocide against Palestinians. That was a shock I will never recover from. I am stunned, and not in a good way. Psychologists have so many important skills, such as reflexivity, that should have prevented them from supporting the worst type of oppression. It is meant to be a caring profession. If you are one of these psychologists and you can find it in your heart to honestly look at the horror and injustice done to Palestinians and appreciate their pain and their loss without lying to yourself and others about the genocide being a ‘conflict of equals’, I would like to plead with you to carry Palestinian colleagues too in every way you can, even if in silence.

I reflected on how much I have always blindly trusted practitioner psychologists (and related professions) all my life. I have always really enjoyed sessions with psychologists. They have helped me so much over the years. I have trusted them with my troubles, and I have trusted the advice they give me.

But can I still trust this professional’s judgement if they cannot denounce the Palestinian genocide, or even worse, if they support it? I agree with Professor Hanhan, I don’t think I can. Despite all their reflexive and critical thinking training, their knowledge of human cognition, emotion and brain function, they have not spotted a terrible injustice, or even worse, they agree with it. I suppose I was too naïve to think that I can trust all psychologists; psychologists are as flawed humans as everyone else, and from that perspective, perhaps I should not be too surprised that some of them are supporters of a genocide. But I will always miss the time when I assumed no psychologists would ever support a genocide, and that time is now in the past. I still believe psychologists can change the world for the better, just not all psychologists.

I think it is important that psychological practitioners take a stand on ethical issues. I would feel safer with psychological practitioners that speak publicly against the Palestinian genocide, and I will probably only seek their services from now on. And obviously, I wouldn’t trust a psychological practitioner who denies that the WWII genocide/holocaust against Jewish people happened either, although up to now I had assumed that no psychological practitioners would be capable of such blatant denial of reality. I am not so sure any more. Palestine opened my eyes to politics and there is no going back now.

Psychological practitioners can really help their clients with emotional regulation. How should a psychological practitioner help their client deal with emotions in relation to the genocide against Palestinians? For example, I have been told not to be too emotional about this issue, to use logic more than emotion. What that means is, don’t be emotional about the genocide. Suppress your feelings about the genocide, about Palestinian children being killed, about Palestinian colleagues being killed. Although I am not a clinical psychologist, my instinct is that we need to keep talking and sharing our emotions, thoughts and humanity amidst all this horror, to create those healing partnerships that Dr Yahia Mezied talked about. We desperately need UK psychological practitioners with an interest in social justice such as Dr Mehdi Alemohammad that can help us in this process, especially given the UK’s involvement in the Palestinian genocide.

Action

Our Palestinians colleagues told us what they need. And we need to come together to stand with them and help them stand on their own feet in whatever way we can. Let’s get to work, listen, help, give everything we can. We owe it to them. Here are some organisations and initiatives to support and volunteer with:

Scholarships For Ghazza (SFG): Overview | LinkedIn

Mothers Of Hind

Virtual fellowships as ‘material solidarity’ against scholasticide | THE Campus Learn, Share, Connect

A lot of relevant information here: Solidarity with HE in Palestine

Please also support Palestinian scholars such as Dr Mohammed Darabeh and Professor Ramsey Hanhan by buying their books, donating to fundraisers, and so on.

Do your bit, silently or loudly, anonymously or with your full name, do whatever you can.

Carry a Palestinian Colleague on your back.

They are not heavy, they’re our colleagues.

On behalf of humanity, I wanted to say to all Palestinians, including Palestinian Psychologists,

I am so sorry.

I hope you can forgive us one day.

I hope this article is part of a wider conversation to bring everyone together in healing partnerships, as Dr Yahia Mezied mentioned, so that we can all, including Palestinians, move on in peace and justice.

I want to finish this article with a Palestinian poet’s words. I saw this poem on LinkedIn. It helps me to forget wallowing tearfully in my guilt and sorrow about Palestine and spring to action:

I must admit reading your poem usually transforms my sorrowful quiet tears into a full-blown sob (a bit like this one), but I’ll do my best, Daliah Lina! You are welcome to take the tiny amount of courage I have. I will fight peacefully in all the ways I outlined in this blog post and healing partnerships that allow us to move forward in peace, justice and strength’.

Dr Aspa Paltoglou is a scholar, educator, occasional poet, and a BPS chartered academic psychologist.

Summary

Dr Jolel Miah, Sadia Lira, and Yahya Delair discussed the erasure and dehumanization of Palestinians in anti-racism discourse, exploring how historical colonial practices and a Western-defined “hierarchy of normality” contribute to the misrepresentation and marginalization of non-Western groups. The panellists critiqued modern anti-racism efforts for being theoretical and comfortable, emphasizing the need for genuine decolonization in psychology and for individuals in positions of privilege to show courage, challenge power, and speak out against systemic injustices affecting Palestinians.

Details

• Introduction and Panelist Introductions Dr Jolel, a health psychologist and senior lecturer, welcomed listeners to a UK Psychologist for Palestine episode, introducing co-host Sadia Lira, a PhD psychology student and trainee health psychologist, and contributor Yahya Delair, a lecturer in mental health. Yahya Delair also shared their work within the criminal justice system, supporting marginalized communities and equity of care. Dr Jolel invited listeners to revisit Yahya Delair’s past articles for UK Psychologist for Palestine, emphasizing the importance of ongoing discussions and learning.

• The Erasure of Palestinian Identity and Anti-Racism Dr Jolel highlighted a specific type of racism that often goes unnoticed, particularly concerning Palestinians, questioning why such treatment occurs. Sadia Lira explained that there is an “erasure” of Palestinians in anti-racism discussions within psychology, stressing that acknowledging and platforming Palestinian stories is crucial for genuine anti-racist work. Sadia Lira expressed excitement for Yahya Delair’s insights, recognizing them as an expert in the field and looking forward to learning from their perspective.

• Dehumanization of Palestinians and Historical Context Dr Jolel brought up the disturbing term “human animals” used to describe Palestinians, noting that they had not heard such language used for any other group in modern times, and asked Yahya Delair to explain its origins. Yahya Delair referenced Edward Said’s 1978 book “Orientalism,” which systematically dismantled Western academic supremacy and explored the perception of the “non-western other,” providing a framework for understanding the dehumanization and devaluation of Palestinian lives. Yahya Delair also described how historical colonial practices, such as Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, involved studying colonized peoples to label them as “savages,” a tactic mirrored in the historical perception of Palestinians as inherently violent.

• The Hierarchy of Normality and Colonial Language Dr Jolel questioned the origins of negative perceptions about other people, specifically asking if it stems from a lack of emotional intelligence or intellect. Yahya Delair responded by explaining that such perceptions arise from a “hierarchy” where one group defines normality and morality, and that the West has historically promoted its standards as the norm, leading to the collapse of these ideas as people gain awareness. Yahya Delair further illustrated how colonial ideas consistently use dehumanizing language, citing examples like “aliens” for asylum seekers, “human shields” for Palestinians, and the misrepresentation of efforts to free women in Afghanistan while simultaneously causing mass casualties.

• Critique of Modern Anti-Racism and the Call for Courage Dr Jolel expressed skepticism towards the “disguise of humane work” used to justify inhumane actions, noting that technology allows people to see through such pretenses. Yahya Delair criticized modern anti-racism efforts for becoming theoretical and palatable, arguing that focusing on issues like microaggressions, rather than dismantling systemic oppression, is akin to “decorating the cage” instead of breaking free from it. Yahya Delair used the examples of George Floyd and Rajab to highlight how some anti-racism discussions are comfortable addressing distant injustices but avoid uncomfortable truths about power imbalances closer to home, showing how colonized anti-racists wear the colonizer’s clothes.

• Decolonizing Psychology and Addressing Systemic Issues Sadia Lira underscored the importance of discussing issues often ignored in psychology, such as the inherent colonization of the field, which primarily focuses on Western understanding while neglecting diverse cultural and religious perspectives on mental health. Yahya Delair elaborated on the concept of decolonizing psychology, noting that it often requires secularizing institutions to acknowledge contributions from non-secular thinkers, and expressed concern that many aspiring psychologists lack historical understanding of the institutions they aim to challenge. Yahya Delair cautioned against the devaluing of anti-racism work when individuals are given titles merely based on their background, stressing that genuine anti-racism requires discomfort and challenging the status quo, rather than simply pandering to the majority.

• Palestinians as a Catalyst for Exposure and Rebalancing Power Dr Jolel questioned if Palestinians are casualties of these systemic issues and whether their experiences expose the ineffectiveness of current anti-racism work. Yahya Delair asserted that Palestinians are exposing the “moral bankruptcy” of the entire world, including institutions that claim to advocate for decolonization or diversity while taking funding from questionable sources or lacking courage and justice. Yahya Delair highlighted that the Palestinian struggle is rebalancing power and decolonizing minds, leading people to question media narratives and understand that appearances can be deceiving.

• Political Language and the Need for Moral Consistency Sadia Lira raised the issue of political language, citing a politician’s comment that attending certain marches would be “unbritish,” which she found bizarre given the context of anti-racism and the diversity of participants, including a large Jewish block. Yahya Delair emphasized that this moment requires courage and moral consistency from leaders, particularly those who benefit from the anti-racism sector. Yahya Delair underscored that true justice requires sacrifice and that fear should not deter individuals from speaking out or signing letters, drawing parallels to the assassinations of Malcolm X and Dr. King, who both made ultimate sacrifices for equality.

• Final Messages on Courage and Challenging Racism Dr Jolel asked the panelists for a final message for listeners regarding racism and Palestinians. Yahya Delair urged psychologists and those in positions of privilege to show courage, be direct, and challenge power without excessive worry about consequences, aiming to dismantle racism rather than merely equipping individuals to handle it. Sadia Lira echoed this sentiment, stating that psychologists have no excuse to avoid uncomfortable topics and should use their privilege and status to speak out, sign letters, and work together to care for others. Dr Jolel concluded by encouraging listeners to question why Palestinians are treated and described in such a way, emphasizing that critical thinking about the “why” of racism will lead to broader understanding.

We were appalled and incredibly saddened to hear that two of our colleagues and Psychologists from Palestine, have been killed by Israeli missiles, two years after the genocide against Palestinians has been raging in Gaza. The illegal occupation and genocide that killed them go against everything we stand for as psychologist and educators, and it against UN’s sustainable development goals, which underlie our practice.

We would like to express our deepest sympathies towards the families of the deceased Psychologists, to their colleagues, and to the people of Palestine. We know how important Psychologists are for every community, even more so for a community under genocide and illegal occupation. The first one was Tasneem Mu’in Issa Shublaq. She was 27 years old, and worked as a psychologist with Juzoor, an organisation that is part of Oxfam and linked to Ireland. According to the post by Oxfam, Tasneem had been helping displaced children that had lost their homes and often their parents since January 2025. Tasneem had lost her son a year ago. She was killed along with her two sons, Sham (5) and Suleiman (3), and her unborn child. Her husband is in a critical condition at the time of writing.

The other psychologist that was killed was Dr. Ismail Abu Rakab. He was Head of the Department of Psychologists at Gaza’s Ministry of Health. He was a Clinical Psychologist, and a pioneer of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in Gaza. He helped many Palestinians in need of mental health care. He was also the Head of the department of psychologists at the Ministry of Health. Along with him, his wife and daughter were also killed.

Both of these psychologists could have both left Gaza, but they chose to remain to help fellow Palestinians. We are deeply moved by their dedication, ethical stance, and empathy.

The grief for the loss of these two psychologists is unbearable. We wanted to create a space where we could all grieve and remember them.

We are also aware that Tasneem and Ismail are not the only psychologists killed in the genocide. We would like to update this space with information about other psychologists that have been killed, in order to honour them, remember them, and grieve for them.

Do you know the names and stories of other psychologists killed in Palestine?

Please get in touch if you think you can help with this project.

Psychologists are not a target.

Aid workers are not a target.

Academics are not a target.

Warm regards,

UK Psychologists for Palestine

Liu and Hilton (2005) point to the overarching importance historical representations have in creating, maintaining (or changing) a people’s identity. A key part of a groups’ representation of its history - what Liu and Hilton refer to as its charter - provides an account of the origin and historical mission of a specific people – and with it a tool for the ongoing project of not only interpreting and constructing both identity and experience but also a plan for action (Wilmer, 2002).

Liu et al. (2005) note, that in the content of historical representations, warfare is privileged over all other categories of events – that is to say national self-image will be strongly influenced by representations of past conflicts. As is well known, faced with the prospect of losing power, Slobodan Milosevic invoked the narrative of a quasi-mythical historical mission for the Serbian people – to save Europe from the Turks, tracing this back to the battle of Kosovo at the Field of Blackbirds in the late 14th century. With the dead now reawakened, this myth elevated Serbian nationalism to an imagined spiritual plane and intoxicated Serbian nationalists to commit an orgy of destruction, killing, rape, ethnic cleansing and genocide - the purpose of which was to build a greater Serbia and obliterate the history of the Bosnian Muslims. More than 800 mosques were destroyed – blown up, burnt down – converted to new buildings or car parks (Glover, 1999), countless atrocities committed, between 100,000 and 150,000 people killed (Nilson, 2004; ICTY Demographic Unit, 2011; Research and Documentation Center (RDC), 2013) and two million refugees. In this collective historical fantasy, the Bosnian Muslims were at once (construed as their historical tormentors) ‘Turks’ but also ‘Serbs’. Hall (1994, p.113) describes how (during 1991) he was surprised to ‘learn’, following a discussion with Serbian acquaintances, that “virtually all Bosnian Muslims come from Serb Families” – something that was, in the eyes of his interlocutors, “a fact”.

In such a context, Hall went on to relate how any rational discussion of the history of the Muslim people “got nowhere” – shipwrecked on the belief of his associates that the Serbian nation was a kind of “superpersonality, with its own memory” (ibid). Presumably, this meant that in the eyes of the Serbs, the Muslims were not part of this nation or this ‘superpersonal structure’. This mythologising/deification of nationhood and supranational identity is found time and again in studies of genocide (c.f. the notion of Angkar in the Cambodian genocide, the ‘Party’ in the Soviet era, the Volksgemeinschaft or the Aryan race during the Nazi period, the ‘chosen people’ in Israel’s endless wars against reality). Closely allied to the mythological destiny of the people is the alleged conspiracy against it…and hence the inevitably of conflict.

Representations then embody plans of action – they legitimise them – determine what is ‘good’ within the fames of reference they delineate and determine what is evil. They provide a good cover story for the legitimation of other motives – such as waging war to accrue land, material (and human) resources for economic benefit (Ferguson, 2006). The actions that ensue from them, in turn help to objectify the representations themselves; for example, self-defence enacted by others is ‘seen’ as attack – an enduring feature of the mirror world which characterises the semantic universe found in all genocides, and settler-colonial rampages.

The Freudian nature of this is obvious, yet these are not individual acts of repression and projection but typical expressions of a state sponsored rationale for slaughter. How legitimate is it then to move from the language of individual ‘psychopathology’ to talk of a state sponsored ‘mass psychosis’, where the individual disconnect from reality has its origins in a much greater political project – of which the mass individual disconnection from reality forms an essential part? Whatever language we choose, we are ultimately confronting the limits of metaphor in trying to adequately convey what is going on. Education about the Holocaust for Israeli children is a not so ‘fine’ example of the destructive power of representational charters. Naomi Klein (2023, p.297) describes the pedagogy of horror as a process of “re-traumatization, not remembering.” In this incarnation of the weaponisation of anti-Semitism (Finkelstein, 2003), there is the ever-present threat of a ‘Nazi’ lurking around every corner - in the shape of Palestinians, who had nothing at all to do with the extermination of European Jewry. The reconstruction of the Nazi past in the present, intertwined with Netanyahu’s equation of Hamas with the Israelites’ ancient enemy, the Amalekites deepens the malaise. The biblical commandment referenced by the Israeli leader has been seen as a rallying cry to “completely destroy” all of Amalek, to kill each and every one of them (NPR, 2023). And this one might add, includes their journalists. To destroy the evidence, to create an anti-spectacle in negation of the death industry of Israeli society has become a prime goal.

Representations are as important in the explication of ‘sins of omission’ as much as they are in explaining sins committed. The inept Western response to the Bosnian tragedy certainly owed much to the image (in the West) of the country as a land with “no oil or uranium or diamonds” (Todorov, 2003, p.258) and one riddled with “ancient hatred” (Simms, 2004, p.9).[1] Similarly, in Palestine the prevailing economic factors are substantial. In the case of Gaza, the economic riches – of offshore natural gas reserves (Gaza Marine 1 and Gaza Marine 2) estimated to be worth $4.5 billion - are difficult to ignore, though it is evident, that the intention of the US and Israel, contrary to international law, is not for the Palestinians to exploit these. In addition to the theft of resources, which includes water in the West Bank, Francesca Albanese’s (2025) report From economy of occupation to economy of genocide lays bare, and in detail, the corporate profiteering that has supported Israel’s illegal actions and ongoing genocide. She lists numerous sectors; “arms manufacturers, tech firms, building and construction companies, extractive and service industries, banks, pension funds, insurers, universities and charities” (p.2). The Press release for the report summarised the grim picture,

“In the past 21 months, while Israel’s genocide has devastated Palestinian lives and landscapes, the Tel Aviv stock exchange soared by 213 percent (USD), amassing $225.7 billion in market gains—including $67.8 billion in the past month alone. For some, genocide is profitable.” (OHCHR, 2025)

To state what I hope by now is obvious, the genocide in the occupied Palestinian territories cannot prima facie to be explained by psychology.

It should be remembered that the representations we see courtesy of the mass media are not inevitable – they are rooted in power – not nature – ergo they do not represent truth or seek to represent it. They are there to serve power. Images other than those distributed for mass consumption are possible, but the most salient representations generated by a culture reveal a great deal about what it is possible to think (and do) within it.

Collective representations and reconstructions of historical memory coexist alongside the reconstruction of personal memory after genocidal action for both the perpetrator and the victim and perhaps also for the bystander or bureaucrat. Holocaust denial for example is well recognised (Lipstadt, 1994). Similarly in Serb communities, as in others where the ‘nation folk’ have been responsible for genocide and mass killing[2], the reconstruction of memory has turned to denial – and is extensive throughout Serbia and Republika Sprska. It is a denial which is also reinforced in diverse spheres (political, academic, legal and media) of the international community (Parent, 2016). Socially shared representations rarely if ever encompass guilt, witness Tony Blair’s inability to say sorry for British involvement in the slave trade 200 years after its abolition (Churcher & Padley, 2007). Post-war Germany however provides an interesting exception, although the meanings of the acknowledged guilt appear to be undergoing a transformation as the modern German state enacts a ruthless suppression of pro-Palestinian protest as it continues its compulsive commitment to supporting genocidal Israel under its mantra of Staatsräson.

As Serbian forces sought to destroy the history of ‘the other’– as Israeli forces likewise do, their supporters are compelled to reconstruct the past or feel the full human cost of contributing to atrocities – that is what denial is about (Cohen, 2001). The two cognitions ‘we committed genocide’ and ‘genocide is a crime against humanity’ are incompatible with each other. One or the other has to be altered or repressed (Festinger, 1957). McCallester (2007) provides a telling example:

BRATUNAC, Bosnia and Herzegovina -- Something terrible happened in a very public place in the center of this small town in eastern Bosnia on a hot summer evening in 1995. But ask around town and no one seems to have noticed the dozens of buses brought to the town's elementary school.
Nor did they see the 2,000 to 3,000 Muslim prisoners held inside the Vuk Karadzic School and in the packed buses parked on the streets outside.
Nor did they hear the gunshots and screams that rang out all night in and around the school. "I confess I was prone to drinking in those days, and that night I was rather boozed up," a former Bosnian Serb soldier and town resident said in an interview with Newsday last week.

Denial can also take other forms: most familiar to Western audiences is that the parties fighting in Bosnia were morally equivalent, locked into a ‘warring psychoses’ fed by an ancient historical enmity from which there was little option but to ‘let them get on it’ (Power, 2003, Simms, 2002). The idea of genocide as destiny is one with which scholars of the Holocaust may be familiar. Beyond the confines of Western rhetoric however the intellectual community has been unanimous in attributing to the Serbs the major responsibility for the onset of war in Bosnia and commission of war crimes– ample evidence of this was in fact available to the West (Attila Hoare, 2004). A UN commission itself concluded that 90% of crimes were committed by Serbs, 6% by Croats and 4% by Muslims – and of course the Bosnian Serbs were the only party to seek and attempt the “systematic” elimination of “all traces” of non-Serb groups from their territory (Waller, 2007, p.277). The Western response to this, in the words of Peter Galbraith a member of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was that “we did not want to know what was going on, did not want to confront it, and did not want to act” (quoted in Cohen, 1998, pp.220-221). All this was of course supported by the “institutional amnesia” of the press (Simms, 2002, pix). The behavioural science community itself consistently falls prey to the sleep of reason on these matters. The following is an account provided by psychologist, Inger Agger who describes her work in Bosnia after the war had ended.

“I was… to… give a lecture to a group of psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers who were participating in a training program on post-traumatic therapy. I talked about the importance of not using testimonies to increase tensions among ethnic groups, and I said ‘Now at a time when Bosnia has been in a process of peace for more than a year, the main issues are related to confidence building, dialogue, and reconciliation among the three ethnic groups who fought each other’. They shouted angrily at me, and I felt the impact of their aggression as a wave coming toward me to silence me… According to their model of the world, there were not three ethnic groups who had fought each other. There was an aggressor and a victim… There were 35 people in the room, and maybe 10 of them spoke angrily; the others were silent and looked uncomfortable“ (Agger, 2001, p.242).

There can be little wonder why the audience was “angry”, “silent” or “uncomfortable” in the face of an outsider coming to lecture them that ‘in order to recover’ from the trauma of war, they now had to adopt the same (Western) representations of reality that in part had (in the West) been responsible for prolonging it (See Harper, Roberts & Sloboda, 2007). A review of Psychology in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia (Biruski, Jerkovic, Zotovic & Krnetic, 2007)

managed to condense the recent history of the region into a familiar refrain:

“As is well-known, ethnic minorities fled as atrocities were committed by all sides” (p.220).

The naïve reader could of course be forgiven for forming a distorted (and confused) view of who the perpetrators were from this description and what the nature of the conflict actually was. The phrase ‘genocide’ is of course notable by its absence. In Western official narratives – as Power (2003) and Curtis (2003) observed with respect to Bosnia - it usually is. As for Bosnia – so for Gaza – as BBC interviewers demonstrate with unseemly regularity. The unanimity of the scholarly community and indeed the legal weight of the argument supporting the accusation of genocide are nowhere to be seen. The BBC’s habitual refrain is “Israel denies it” to which one may add– and so does the BBC. A similar emphasis given to the perspective of the perpetrator is however absent from its reporting of other crimes, great and small. Great effort is thus expended to keep the denial in place and reality at bay.

One simply cannot contemplate the power of social representations to mould public and indeed professional thought and behaviour without giving a thought to the behaviour of the media and the mass communications industry. This is central to the manufacture of shared cultural standards of history[3] and it played a pivotal role in the genesis of the Bosnian genocide. In an extensive analysis of Serbian and Croatian propaganda during the Balkan wars, Macdonald (2002) articulated how control of the media was central to Milosevic’s strategy, but the diffusion of nationalist representations of Islamic conspiracy into the population took some unusual routes:

“Throughout Serbia, Kosovo fever gripped the population. Serbian bookstores filled their shelves with books on Kosovo, while musical artists dedicated their works to Kosovo. Even a new perfume, ‘Miss 1389’, evoked mages of the battle” (Macdonald, 2003, p.72).

In this climate, the image of Serbia as victim of an historical Islamic genocide was prevalent, even in some Western media (Simms, 2002). Extensive propaganda was employed to instil fear into the Serbian population that they were at risk of ‘another’. And with this image came the belief that the Serbian people were the ‘Jews of the Balkans’…and salvation would come with their own promised land, a Greater Serbia. Macdonald (2002) notes that both Milosevic and Tudjman utilised biblical imagery – portraying their respective national histories as extensive periods of ‘Fall’ – with themselves spearheading redemption for their people in what were to be historical turning points. In Israel the government is wedded to a biblical fantasy that the land is theirs by divine decree, and therefore beyond question. One might just as well say that Israelis are the Serbs of the Middle East. Ingrained with victimhood even as their reign of slaughter continues unabashed. This cannot be underestimated. In the words of former Israeli PM Golda Meir (1975, p.142)

“We cannot forgive them [The Arabs] for forcing us to kill their children.”

This discussion of social representations leads us to think carefully at how the past will be remembered ‘in future’ – how public memory of genocide will be performed – in Bosnia, in the local region (Croatia, Serbia etc.), In Israel, in Palestine, in Europe, and the rest of the world. What images, public sites, monuments and testimonies will populate the social and symbolic order – and become the “organising agents” for subsequent thought and action (see Hughes, 2003 for a discussion of similar questions concerning the genocide in Cambodia). In a glimpse into this future, Omar El Akkad’s (2025) attempt to reckon with the deeply embedded lies of the West, comes with the title “One day, everyone will have always been against this.”

Conclusion

Although a more extensive analysis than space allows is warranted I hope the foregoing has at least demonstrated the viability of an analysis of genocide based on Moscovici’s theory of social representations. In both the Bosnian and Palestinian contexts, it is evident that historical and contemporary representations have played a role in galvanising, organising and directing a significant section of the Serbian and the Israeli people’s intellectual cognitive and behavioural resources toward a project (simultaneously personal, social and political in nature) in which the Bosnian State and the Muslim population on one hand and on the other the Palestinians and any prospect of a state for them, have been facing the threat of extinction.[4] This system of representations is not reducible to psychology. It serves other, more malign and inhuman interests.

Intellectuals, as much as the general public, are susceptible to State-Media orchestrated narrative accounts of the past. The Holocaust had now become a template – a trans-cultural representation of suffering and victimhood – and a powerful one at that. It can be evoked not just by the victims of mass killings and successive genocides but also by perpetrators. Biblical and Holocaust imagery in the wrong hands presents a significant challenge to the international community for which it has, to which it has yet to adequately respond. I would like to conclude by noting, that psychology or its explanations as far as they go, are certainly “not a panacea” (Suedfeld, 2000, p.7) for preventing genocide, the driving forces for which, as has been argued here, lie considerably beyond the remit of the psychological sciences. Mainstream psychology must now relinquish its assumed embryonic role in the causation of genocide and begin a reckoning with its own political nature.

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[1] See Attila Hoare (2007) for a sober reflection on the recent history of genocidal violence in the region prior to the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.

[2] The reworking of historical memory is also a notable facet of British and American history – with respect to their own military activities.

[3] See for example Philo & Berry, 2004 on the effect of media representations of history on understanding of both World-War II and the Palestinian Israeli conflict.

[4] The actions of the Croatian government in manipulating historical representations (e.g. resurrecting symbols of the Ustasha from WWII) similarly warrants a place in any analysis of the attempted destruction of Bosnia.

Summary

Dr Jolel Miah and Dr Ron Roberts discussed the Milgram experiments, focusing on obedience to authority and distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate authority, which causes unjustifiable harm. They connected this to ethical considerations in psychology, the role of mass media in shaping public opinion, and how social support can reduce obedience. Dr Ron Roberts also referenced the Stanford Prison Experiment to illustrate de-individuation and emphasized the need for psychology to address the abuse of power.

Details

• Introduction to Milgram Experiments Dr Jolel Miah and Dr Ron Roberts discussed the Milgram experiments, a familiar topic in psychology, particularly social psychology. Dr Ron Roberts explained that Stanley Milgram conducted these experiments in the early 1960s to study obedience to authority, influenced by questions about the Holocaust and people obeying orders to cause harm. The experiments involved participants believing they were delivering electric shocks of increasing severity to a confederate for incorrect answers, with about two-thirds of participants willing to administer what they believed to be harmful shocks up to 450 volts.

• Legitimate vs. Illegitimate Authority Dr Ron Roberts elaborated on Milgram’s concept of illegitimate authority, distinguishing it from legitimate authority, which he defines as authority whose exercise leads to unjustifiable harm against people. Dr Ron Roberts noted that while institutions like the police can exercise legitimate authority, they can also exercise illegitimate authority through actions such as unjustified violence or arrests. He emphasized that Milgram’s experiments warned about illegitimate authority, with psychologists themselves acting as the authority figures in the study.

• Ethical Considerations and Institutional Hypocrisy Dr Ron Roberts connected the Milgram experiments to ethical considerations in psychology, noting that current ethics codes are partly derived from the Nuremberg Code, established after World War II to address crimes against humanity committed by doctors. Dr Ron Roberts highlighted what they perceived as hypocrisy from organisations which condemned Russia’s actions in Ukraine and supported the expulsion of Russian psychologists, but remained silent on the genocide in Gaza, which they believe is due to UK complicity.

• Societal and Psychological Factors in Obedience Dr Ron Roberts discussed how mass media plays a significant role in disseminating views that can mobilize a country’s resources towards genocide by making people believe they are under threat. They explained that the Milgram studies show no simple dividing line between leaders and followers, as they feed on one another and historical representations, emphasizing the collective and situational nature of such phenomena rather than solely individual actions. Dr Jolel Miah questioned why a large part of the population would agree to such actions, leading to a discussion on how mass media shapes public opinion and the susceptibility of individuals to manipulation.

• Psychology’s Historical Context and Current Challenges Dr Ron Roberts observed that psychology has become increasingly individualistic, especially with the rise of neoliberal capitalism, moving away from critical figures like Erich Fromm and R.D. Laing, and focusing more on neuroscience and social cognition. Dr Ron Roberts pointed out that psychologists have often tried to excuse the behaviour of participants who obeyed in the Milgram experiments by arguing they believed they were doing good, an argument that is problematic given the Nuremberg Code’s origins. They highlighted that historical figures like Hitler and Pol Pot also claimed to be doing good while committing atrocities, suggesting that the belief in doing good is not an excuse for harmful actions.

• Relevance of Disobedience and Social Support Dr Ron Roberts noted that while two-thirds of participants obeyed in Milgram’s experiments, one-third disobeyed, a significant proportion that psychology has largely overlooked. They found it interesting that a similar proportion (about a third) of Russian military leaders disobeyed Hitler’s orders to invade Russia. Dr Ron Roberts emphasized that Milgram’s variations of the experiment showed that obedience rates dropped significantly when participants had social support from an ally in the room, indicating that social solidarity and organization are crucial in combating illegitimate authority.

• The Stanford Prison Experiment and De-individuation Dr Ron Roberts also referenced the Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo), where individuals assigned arbitrary roles as guards abused prisoners, leading to the experiment’s early termination. Dr Ron Roberts suggested that putting on a uniform, like in the military, can lead to de-individuation, reducing individual responsibility and increasing conformity to group pressure and authority, as seen in instances like Abu Ghraib. Dr Jolel Miah concluded that this phenomenon suggests that individuals in uniform may feel a diminished sense of personal accountability for their actions.

• Future of Psychology and Power Dr Ron Roberts raised a fundamental question about the kind of psychology appropriate for societies where power is widely abused, arguing that Western psychology often assumes a democratic context where bigger societal issues do not need deep consideration. Dr Ron Roberts asserted that psychology needs to build upon the foundational work of researchers like Asch, Milgram, and Zimbardo to develop a contemporary approach to understanding and addressing the abuse of power. Dr Jolel Miah concluded the discussion by reiterating the UK Psychologist for Palestine’s commitment to educating the public about the experiences of Palestinians .

By Mohammed Nasser and Aspa Paltoglou

Mohammed Nasser, a Marketing Executive from Gaza and former student of Professor Refaat Alareer, tells us about his life, family, work, and career aspirations.

My name is Mohammed Nasser. I am from Gaza, currently living with my family in a small department in Az-Zawayda City after we evacuated from the North to the South of Gaza.

Before 7 October 2023 and before the war in Gaza, we had a normal life.

Before the war on Gaza, Gaza City was a beautiful city. It had lovely beaches, good restaurants and many people from outside Gaza visited Gaza City.
Before the war on Gaza, there were many organizations such as Doctor Without Borders, UN, UNICEF and all these organizations worked towards helping Palestinian people here in Gaza.

I remember, when I was a student, I would wake up, drink coffee and then go to my university. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the Islamic University of Gaza, a degree that was taught and assessed in English. Coming back from university, I would meet my friends and family. Just a normal and simple life, but we are so happy. Because we felt safe, and safety is so important.

When I graduated from university, I started doing a job I loved. I worked as a digital marketer with many companies outside Gaza such as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. I had a good income. We had a beautiful house filled with love and with my family, with my sisters and brothers. I usually worked from home. I worked with many companies outside Gaza, with great results.

We had a good life.

But everything changed after 7th of October 2023, everything changed in our life.

When the war started, I remember telling each other: ‘now we are in war! We’ll be very lucky if we manage to stay alive…’ We just didn’t know what to do. We purchased a lot of food. After a week, the Israeli army told us that we should evacuate from north to the South in the beginning of the war, after one week of the war in Gaza. So, we evacuated because we were scared for our safety. In the beginning of the war, they destroyed Al Shifa Hospital, and they destroyed many hospitals in Gaza, and they targeted and killed many people.

I tried many times to return to my work after the war started. But there very big problems, such as problems with the internet, electricity and everything else. And two weeks ago, we evacuated from north to the South of Gaza. This journey was very difficult, and we spent more than $1000 to evacuate from the North of Gaza to the South. The distance was just 12 Kilometres. Imagine, we paid $1000 to evacuate from North and the South, for such a short distance.

So, things are very difficult, and it is very hard to leave everything behind, leave your memories, your home, leaving your dreams and everything. My home is a symbol of love. It’s a symbol of my dreams. It’s a symbol of our joyful moments with my family.

Before the war on Gaza, I had an opportunity to get a visa to work at the United Arab Emirates. But I chose to stay in Gaza. I thought I should try and build my future here in Gaza. I had a good income; I worked as a freelancer. And I earned a good salary from my work. But after that, I lost everything. I lost all my contracts; I lost all my income. If I could turn back time, I would have left Gaza. This is a difficult thing for me to say, because I love my city. We spent all our lives here in Gaza. We grew up here in Gaza…

But life has become so difficult. Our children here in Gaza, including my nephews and nieces, lost many years of education and opportunities. I have two sisters. They are married. And they have children. My sisters tried many times to teach their children mathematics, English, Arabic and everything else. Homeschooling is a big challenge under the circumstances, but they are doing their best. Many bombs have been dropped near my area. So, the situation here in Gaza very complicated and difficult.

UK Psychologists could help a Palestinian people here in Gaza by providing materials of education, scholarship or aid.

It’s a great opportunity to write for UK Psychologists for Palestine! I hope my words will touch people around the world. I want people to know about me, about my family here in Gaza. I hope somebody would like to hire me! I am also looking for a scholarship or any opportunity to work or get a visa to work outside Gaza.

I love Gaza so much. I grew up here. But we’ve lost everything. We lost our home, incomes, job. I spend all my time during the war trying to help my family, as you might have seen in my posts on LinkedIn. I am just looking for an opportunity to leave Gaza and build my life again.

I write and create videos because I hope that everyone will know about my story in the future. We are not just numbers. I remember my professor in Gaza, Refaat Alareer…He was a wonderful professor! I worked with him in my business and technology incubator at Islamic University. I am so lucky to have met him! He told me about his life and education. He inspired me to write. So, I just try to write about me and my family. To get people’s attention to our story. We are not just numbers. We are human beings. We belong to humanity. We deserve to live. We deserve to live in a beautiful city and to have a country.

Thoughts from Aspa:

I have been very impressed with Mohammed’s creativity in his LinkedIn posts, and I was even more impressed by his character when I met him. He has such a friendly and sunny disposition, despite everything that he is going through. Not that expressing sorrow would have been wrong, of course it wouldn’t. But it just dawned on me how grumpy I become with the slightest hurdle, and that I would not have been able to be as positive if I was in Mohammed’s position.

Furthermore, his love and compassion for his country, his city, his family, his work shines through. He had an opportunity to leave but instead chose to stay in Gaza, a city that, as far as I know, has never been easy to live in, to put in mildly. It took a genocide to make him, very hesitantly, decide to leave Gaza, to leave Palestine. In comparison, it’s striking to me how easily I left Greece, without thinking of how to help Greece or my family, despite the fact that the problems in Greece were not as big as the problems Mohammed had been facing in Palestine, even before the genocide started. Palestine and Palestinians never stop to inspire me and make me a more compassionate, thoughtful, and generally a better version of myself.

One of his university professors, Professor Refaat Alareer is not with us anymore, but I know that he would have been so proud of his student. Professor Refaat Alareer would have turned 46 some days ago. I love Professor Refaat Alareer’s writing and I love the fact that he encouraged his students to write, be creative, and publish their work. So, I can see why Mohammed writes and creates videos so prolifically. Professor Alareer really inspired him. I feel very moved to meet one of his students, and I think Mohammed is a credit to Professor Alareer.

For me, Professor Alareer is a great example of how important university education is for individuals and societies, and what a difference an inspiring educator can make for students. I can see in Mohammed Professor Refaat Alareer’s gentle, cheeky, creative, kind and sunny disposition. Alareer helped Mohammed find his voice, he gave him the confidence to share his story with the world. To show that Palestinians keep their humanity, love, and kindness even among the most horrific circumstances. If one day I manage to be half as good an educator as Professor Alareer and inspire the students I care for to be half as resilient, creative, caring for their community and family, generous and honest as Mohammed, I will be very happy. I am very fond of encouraging our students to write in a reflexive as well as academic way about psychology and their career aspirations, and I would love to explore whether writing fiction and poetry would help their professional and academic development. I would have loved to collaborate with Professor Alareer on this…

Since Professor Refaat Alareer is not with us, and he cannot provide a reference, I take his place, although I hardly deserve it, and I vouch for this former business student and current marketing professional.

This is something I say to my students as I often as I can, and I say that to you to, my adopted student: Mohammed, I am so proud of you and all your achievements!

If you can offer work or any opportunity for Mohammed Nasser to work or study, please contact him here: Mohammed Nasser | LinkedIn

Note from Aspa: No AI was used for this piece

Dr Aspa Paltoglou is a scholar, educator, poet, and a UK chartered academic psychologist.