To witness the destruction and cruelty and sheer violence of the last year means that we simply cannot live or think as we did before.
Whoever we are today is different to the people we were a year ago.
The intensity of violence across the past twelve months is connected to a longer string that stretches back to 1948, and then further back still.
I have been trying to isolate what has changed, and it is difficult to isolate because part of it is personal and then other aspects are shifts in the outer world. Some days I wish for language that is allegorical because I am trying to impose a structure on what is disordered and at other times I want the facts and precise details.
In January, 2024, it was said that around 30,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza. Since February, the number has sat at 40,000 and the reality is that the real number is much higher, that the scale of destruction makes it difficult to document the deaths, the injuries, that healthcare and record-keeping and journalistic witnessing has been under such immense stress that the real number is probably unknown. When The Lancet circulated the number of 186,000 deaths, this is likely a more correct figure than the number that has stalled at 40,000.
The numbers are staggering and the numbers also become nonsensical. The numbers themselves are cold and desensitised, and some days I try to contextualise the numbers. The main stadium in Sydney seats 88,000. Fill that number twice and that is what we’re talking about in terms of the number of the dead. And then there are the injuries and the illness and the disease and the trauma and that Gaza has been made unliveable.
In the second of the Lord of the Rings movies, a character says: what do we do in the face of such reckless hate? And I ask: what do we do with all this violence and death and the killing of so many children and women and the elderly and the men, the number of civilians that have been killed?
What are we to do?
Firstly, we educate ourselves. I don’t believe this is a time for vagueness or wish-washy terms like “cycle of violence” and “fog of war.”
Most of the information a person requires is out there. Any news story should be checked against other news stories, and to not rely just on social media because we all know that the algorithm is also biased.
Secondly, check in with the people around you. It is better to ask someone how they’re feeling, how they’re doing, than not to ask. It is the kindness of strangers and that care that right now counts more than anything.
Thirdly, continue to write, petition your local politicians. They need to know we have not forgotten about this, that we are unlikely to forget about this for a long time.
Fourthly, we need to ask ourselves if it is possible to have peaceful societies over here while beyond our line of sight there is unspeakable violence? Is this possible and would we find it acceptable?
Fifthly, we are big on the narrative of being the captain of our own destiny. What does this narrative mean? Is it useful? Is it healthy? Can the individual be separated from the society they belong to? How helpful is it to be thinking about the individual as opposed to broader society or that each country is an independent entity?
These are questions and each person needs to answer them for their own self. Below I want to include a list of articles that have been helpful to me and I hope that they may be useful to someone else.
- Palestine in Motion: A Palestinian Struggle Against Oppression by Dr. Samah Jabr – Dr. Jabr is a psychiatrist who puts forward her own story and experiences about trauma and treating trauma in a Palestinian context.
- Exploring Decolonial and Indigenous Frameworks of Mental Health to Address the Colonial Trauma Experienced by Palestinian Youth by Vivian Le Duong and Corrin Murphy – The level of trauma and violence requires a different framework in a colonial context. This is a brief overview.
- Decolonise Your Emotions by Australian Palestine Mental Health Network – varying the terminology and approach of how we speak about emotions
- How Israel Has Made Trauma a Weapon of War by Naomi Klein – This article appeared in the last few days and it is comprehensive and considers the implications one year on.
- Lavender: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing of Gaza by Yuval Abraham – This article is from April, 2024, and gives the background for how Israel is carrying out its killing spree in Gaza.
A few books that have been useful to read this year.
- Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
- Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
- Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa
- The Butterfly’s Burden by Mahmoud Darwish
- Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear by Mosab Abu Toha
- Letter from Gaza by Ghassan Kanafani
I have written a few things and they are included below. Hopefully there are words somewhere on this page that are helpful for the reader, what ever their state may be on this day
- The Rooster and the Watermelon essay which appeared in Sydney Review of Books in December last year.
- Guernica which appeared in Meanjin in April this year.
- Lately which is a piece on page 8 of the winter edition of Openbook.
Yumna Kassab 
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