Health journal article: Antisemitism is a necessary therapy for Palestinians' mental health

The Health and Human Rights Journal has a special section this month: "Settler Colonialism, Structural Racism, and the Palestinian Right to Health." It was organized and curated by the Community and Public Health at Birzeit University and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.

Its seven articles are predicated on malicious, antisemitic lies about Israel. The lies - that Israel is a racist, apartheid, settler-colonialist state bent on eradicating Palestinian Arabs and their culture - are accepted as unvarnished truth, without any debate. 

The introduction of an article purported to be about amputations begins with this antisemitic framework:

Since 1948 and with the establishment of the state of Israel, Israel has been deploying physical and structural violence against Palestinians in multiple well-documented ways, all aimed at the erasure, subjugation, and oppression of the Palestinians, in line with what Patrick Wolfe has called the “logic of elimination” in settler-colonial states.[1]

Israel’s colonial ideology is manifested in the “daily assault on Palestinian life as a result of settler-colonial ideology that renders them killable as a part of and a furthering of their removal from their land.”[2] 

Another article's abstract begins with antisemitic lies as irrefutable facts:

In this paper, we examine the social construction of race as a determinant of health inequities in Palestine. Race myths about Palestinians conform to the “logic of elimination” integral to settler colonialism, predicated on the dispossession and removal of the Indigenous people from the land.

These are all absurd and hateful lies. Somehow, the Palestinian population nearly quadrupled under this genocidal regime since 1967. 

Another article based wholly on a lie claims that systemic Israeli racism is behind Israel's "refusal" to provide Covid-19 vaccines into the Palestinian controlled areas. In fact it was the Palestinian Authority that refused to partner with Israel on obtaining vaccines.  And if Israel is racist, then why did it provide vaccines for its Arab citizens - and for Palestinian students at Israeli universities?

Again, the article is predicated on lies, but those lies are not even up for debate. Naturally, their conclusions are based on these lies. The articles are anti-Israel propaganda, pretending to be science, with lots of footnotes as if linking to previously written antisemitic articles in the social sciences or by NGOs is the same as linking to a real scientific paper that has gone through rigorous proof.

One of the articles in the journal outshines the others, though. 

Titled "A Call for Social Justice and for a Human Rights Approach with Regard to Mental Health in the Occupied Palestinian Territories," it says that the only effective method to treat Palestinians' mental health issues is to teach them to blame Israel (i.e., Jews) for their issues.

It seems necessary and urgent to look at the effects of political and systematic violence on Palestinian mental health in order to strengthen the resilience of communities, instead of individualizing their suffering. This can be achieved by moving away from a mental health framework that regards them as individual victims affected by political violence and toward a human rights framework that sees them as rights holders and survivors of a collective experience of violence within a social and political context...

[T]he solution to breaking the cycle of internalization is to be found in resistance and in directing feelings outward, to those who oppress, instead of inward.

Hating Jews - and "resistance," which is understood by Palestinians as physical attacks on Jews - becomes the preferred path to solving Palestinian mental health issues. 

Come to think of it, there are numerous papers about the trauma of Palestinians suffering under Israeli oppression, but I don't recall a single [Palestinian] academic paper about mental illness that might prompt Palestinians to want to kill random Jews. Apparently, the mental health professionals in the territories don't regard terrorists as mentally ill to begin with, but rather as role models who are breaking the paradigm of victimhood, as suggested by these authors.

Beyond that, the authors urge mental health professionals in the territories to become anti-Israel activists themselves, and they rail against the "depoliticization" of their roles - the exact opposite of decades of psychological practice:

A stronger understanding of the political and social implications of trauma and a more active role in relation to social injustices and human rights violations are essential against the background of the ethical standards of our profession. As mental health professionals, our commitment to advancing human rights can be shown by highlighting the pathogenic context in which trauma develops and by demanding social justice on a political level.

All of the articles in this journal have the usual disclaimer that the authors have no competing interests. But one of the co-authors of this article has a supremely competing interest: Samah Jabr is the head of the Mental Health Unit within the Palestinian Ministry of Health. She has every incentive to demonize Israel and declare it the source of all Palestinian problems. 

And, in fact, she does. On her Facebook page, she frames the Israeli celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Resolution as "celebrating the historical trauma of Palestinians." Her entire mindset is based on nearly all Jews as evil people whose entire goal is to cause pain to Arabs.

A competent mental health professional would note the amount of psychological projection that she shows in this paper. Because the only ones who have physically tried to rid the region of an entire people are her fellow Arabs, not the Jews. 

(h/t MtTB)

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