The Palestinian Genocide and the Decimation of our Mental Health - an explanatory post

Decimation or reclamation?

Photo by Houssem Bouaza on Unsplash

Over the past few months I have met so many people suffering from such intense trauma at watching what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank. The trauma is real, their faces are pictures of exhaustion, their bodies sag as if in physical pain. I never knew that empathy could run so deeply.

Mental torture is mental torture because it is mental. We are - those of us who care - all being thoroughly traumatised and it is by design. We are taunted with dead babies and laughing soldiers, with governments who give free passes to serial murderers and intimidate us should we speak up. It is by design.

I don't share the words of description of trauma of those witnessing the horrors of Gaza, except to see the depth and breadth of it. I have walked the streets of Britain and there is not much of it. The indifference and the desensitisation is far more apparent. People do not care, or they do not care enough. They can switch off at whim, like when the football is on. Turn their minds away from the infanticide still happening and never paused, as grown men kick a ball and cry when it doesn't hit a net.

But there are some pockets of the West where there are people who still care about others. Whose empathy consumes them. Who are going through trauma at the horror of it all; who are experiencing intense psychological pain.

I will not sugarcoat this. We are living in a time where the whole world stood back and allowed a genocide to happen because they did not care enough. Aside from a few brave souls like the Houthis, the rest of the world did nothing. Sure, South Africa took to the ICJ, but when it became apparent that would stop nothing, what then? What did they do? Sure, Spain’s PM has made some digs, but so what? His country still remains in the EU, who fully support the genocide in every way.

Words are cheap. They mean nothing without action. These countries will not take any real and purposeful action to stop the murderers they see aiming their guns at children’s heads. That is the truth of it. That is the absolute truth. The whole world is a cowardly place, and not one of these ‘superpowers’ stood up in defence of the weak.

So I write and I share the trauma of these citizens of these cowardly states, because I desperately want our kids’ generations and those to come to know that not all of us in this pathetic time sat back with indifference. That some of us resisted so strongly to the depravity that our own minds tried to dissociate from the evil of the times we were in.

Because trust me, we will be examined for centuries by psychologists and experts, totally confused as how a whole planet watched and let this happen. When no-one had any excuse that they ‘did not know’, where there wasn't a single person who was ignorant to it. How did humanity get here? To this abnormal state of non-humanism? The decimation of their empathy: everything psychological that made them human.

I want them to know, that it wasn't all of us who watched without emotion. That the decimation of our mental health was actually a reclamation of our humanity under the relentless and exhausting flood of imperialistic violence and narrative and force.

I want them to write down in their records that not all of us watched love island while Palestine burned.

Not all of us lost our souls.