The Psyche's Reaction to Witnessing A Genocide

What is the mental health impact of witnessing the annihilation of fellow human beings? I’ve wondered about the various emotional responses we’ve had over the last eighteen months—those of us witnessing the genocidal campaign in Gaza intermittently through our iPhones, or the healthcare workers who’ve seen it firsthand, and I wonder too about those who choose to turn a blind eye.

• There is the distancing: “It’s too much, I can’t bear to look” and so the person goes about their day as they always have, largely unaffected, because “what good does my suffering do? How does me feeling bad help the Palestinians?”

• There is the willful ignorance: “I haven’t watched the news in years” or “I don’t know, the geopolitics of that region are so complicated,” as if the specifics of a place make genocide more or less acceptable there.

• There is the guilt: of eating, of existing, of watching our own children play freely, noticing their chubby legs and soft skin unscathed, unscarred, while seeing skeletal babies want desperately for milk.

• There is the disappointment: “Humanity has failed”, the recognition that humanity has so frequently, despite its capacity for greatness, tended to the primitive, that this isn’t the first genocide nor is it likely to be the last.

• There is the helplessness: Attending protests, calling representatives, donating money, resharing on Instagram–wanting desperately to believe that any of it moves the needle and yet seeing only more death and destruction, not less. Knowing that it takes governments, sanctions, embargo–wanting to have more power than we do.

• There is the dissonance: On the one hand, supporting Palestine in words, maybe in action. On the other hand, paying taxes that fund the Israeli army and living thirty minutes from the facility that manufactures the bombs dropped in Gaza.

• There is the despair: “It doesn’t seem it will ever end” or “I have no hope left”. What makes this genocide unique is the access to information: we can bear witness in a way we couldn’t before. If one photo of Emmett Till launched a revolution, we’ve seen thousands from Palestine yielding no change, and the hopelessness is a reaction to inaction.

• There is the awe: “How do they continue to survive, and how do they continue to say alhamdulillah?” which can teeter into romanticizing of their suffering (as the poet Refaat Alareer warned against), as if they aren’t still simply people who want to live a normal and dignified life.

• There is the anxiety: “If this can happen in Palestine, it can happen anywhere”, and knowing that these aftershocks have, they will: that American police train with Israeli ones, that Israeli surveillance has made its way to UAE, that permanent residents and visa holders in America detained simply for protesting, for writing, marks a fundamental shift toward authoritarianism.

• There is the heart-wrenching acceptance: That perhaps this could mean the end of the people in Palestine, the total destruction of Gaza, a second Nakba–the next stage of ethnic cleansing.

• There is the spiritual anchor: For Muslims, it’s conviction that God’s promise is true, and belief in Islamic eschatology and Divine justice.

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We hear from across the world the death toll, the physical injuries, the amputations. But from my lens as a psychiatrist, I find myself asking—what becomes of the people who survive? What is left of them? How do they recover? How do they go on?

I asked a young doctor in Gaza the other day, how do they have the strength to keep going?

“I believe a strong relationship with the Qur’an is the secret,” he said. “Allah talked about these events repeatedly.”

He continued, “the strong fabric of the society here, the extended families and the spirit to support each other knowing that we don’t have anyone except ourselves.”

And he concluded: “This land is sacred land,” he said. “We guarantee our blood is not spilled for nothing.”

In other words, spiritual conviction, collective humanity, and a belief the indigenous have for the sacredness of the land that is theirs.

I think about this, living in America, a land stripped of all three. In the void of a spiritual supremacy–in the distance from belief in a supreme deity–what becomes the center if not the self? America isn’t built on any sense of collectivism, it’s the opposite: it’s built on individual gain. Every man for himself; in the suburbs, every family for itself. We are taught, almost from childhood, to compete for individual gain, not collective betterment.

If the indigenous Americans were custodians of the land, the Europeans arrived to be colonizers of it, with the same primary motivation of modern-day American capitalism: money. They didn’t believe in living in harmony with the land or its rightful owners; they believed in extracting from the land, plundering it, looting its resources and sending the wealth back to Europe. We still celebrate usurping the land as progress.

And that, too, is the Zionist project: to take land. To stop seeing the indigenous as humans, but as filth. There is no spiritual core to such an agenda, only a weaponization of religion not unlike that seen in other violent ideologies.

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What becomes of a soul—a sentient, spiritual being—who witnesses what is happening in Gaza, who unwillingly but not unwittingly is complicit in this?

I can tell you what it is not for me—it is not ennui nor nihilism. It is not forgetting, nor looking away. It is stripping away the veneer of $8 lattes in pretty coffee shops and exotic vacations and the false prestige of institutions like Columbia to reveal only a rot within a place that was never meant to be anything but temporary—a life that will feel like it lasted a day, or part of a day.

And yet. And yet, it’s also a place of beauty, and possibility, and hope—a place that, despite its decay, despite its impermanence, is a place worth planting a seed, even if the Day of Judgment should be upon us.

And so despite my guilt, my disappointment, my helplessness, despite the dissonance and the despair, I joined a protest, and I planted a peach tree.