How Occupied People’s Health Suffers in a Settler-colonial State

Apoorva Sarmal, University of Georgia
Abriana Gresham, Virginia Commonwealth University
Mejdy Jabr, University of Arkansas

As a collective of health and social psychologists, we are invested in understanding the societal underpinnings of inequality and injustice.  Through our individual research programs, we critically investigate the consequences of racialized violence and asymmetric power dynamics inherent to settler-colonial occupation to find ways to transform them.  By integrating our respective areas of expertise, we seek to challenge and intervene against our field’s implicit and explicit complicity in Israeli apartheid and colonial occupation (i.e., Zionism), including the ongoing genocide in Gaza (est. 186,000 killed).  This short article provides a summary of a presentation from a broader symposium on critical Palestine-centering psychological perspectives on the ongoing colonial violence at SPSSI 2024, wherein we expose the ways that Zionism pervasively impacts the lives of Palestinian people in Gaza, the ‘48 territories, the West Bank, and the global diaspora.

Health is considered a basic, universal human right.  Yet, the health of the Palestinian people suffers due to Zionist colonial violence.  The racialized violence inherent to the eliminative logic of settler-colonialism (e.g., ethnic cleansing and apartheid) has long resulted in inhumane living conditions for the indigenous Palestinian people.  For example, even prior to the current year-long genocide and increased repression across Palestine, approximately 50% of West Bank residents and over 80% of Gaza Strip residents faced food insecurity.  The Zionist entity (i.e., Israel) also controls the water supply in Palestine, resulting in restricted water supply in many areas of the West Bank and over 90% of the water supply in Gaza being deemed unfit for human consumption. These issues are compounded by the increased concentration of people due to forced displacement.

The psychological health of the Palestinian people also suffers under Zionist occupation.  Western accounts of psychological health simply fall short in capturing the extent of the trauma experienced by Palestinian people.  Beyond the trauma experienced from extraordinarily harsh, if not genocidal, living conditions and frequent bombings, the Zionist entity psychologically terrorizes the Palestinian population by deliberately targeting culturally, educationally, spiritually, and ancestrally meaningful locations.  Furthermore, Palestinian people experience extreme political repression in the forms of speech suppression, illegal detainment of adults and children, and systematized torture.  Notably, 40% of Palestinian men spend time in Zionist prisons, often facing torture.  Additionally, the trauma of land dispossession opens the door to inherited trauma for generations to come, even in the diaspora.

Despite these well-documented, atrocious outcomes in the specific case of Zionism, individual and system-level inaction persists in the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Many of the horrific outcomes that result from Zionism are often referred to as “humanitarian issues.” However, framing them as such implies passivity and relieves the Zionist entity of its responsibility in creating catastrophic living conditions for Palestinian people.  We call on our community of social and psychological scientists to learn more about the history and current infrastructure of Zionism, engage in meaningful action against it (e.g., BDS), and uphold solidarity with Palestinians and their brave resistance efforts until total liberation and return.