The HAMAS Case

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REPORT ON

PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT OF PALESTINIAN DISPOSSESSION &

THE NORMALISATION OF ZIONISM IN WESTERN MENTAL HEALTH

BY

DR TAREK YOUNIS

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1. INSTRUCTIONS

1. I have been instructed by Riverway Law to provide a report on matters within my expertise in support of the application to the British Home Secretary to deproscribe Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah (‘Hamas’).

2. The purpose of this report is to centre the psychological impact of a century-long dispossession and humiliation of the Palestinian people – first by the British Mandate, and then after 1948 by the Zionist state of Israel. It begins with an explanation why experiences of Palestinian dispossession have largely been dismissed within Western mental health fields, rendering the task challenging. It then outlines the psychological harms of Zionist colonial domination, with particular focus on humiliation as a key strategy of psychological violence.

2. QUALIFICATIONS

3. I give this report in my personal capacity.

4. I hold the following qualifications: I have a PhD/PsyD in Clinical Psychology, obtained in February 2017 at the Université du Quebec à Montréal. I am a Registered Practitioner Psychologist with the UK’s Health & Care Professions Council, and a Chartered Member of the British Psychological Society.

5. The following are my current professional roles and positions:

   1. Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Middlesex University:

      1. Researches the intersection of race, politics, and mental health, with a focus on colonisation.

      2. Educates on the importance of State violence and racism in mental health.

      3. Frequently invited as a visiting lecturer and speaker in international settings on State violence, racism and mental health.

   2. Registered private clinical and community practices:

      1. Provides therapy for individuals affected by State violence (including Palestinians), police violence and institutional racism.

      2. Collaborates with human rights organisations to support those impacted by State violence.

      3. Co-founded the Coming Home Project, which provides therapeutic services for Muslims impacted by racist policing, surveillance practices, and State violence, with a focus on desecuritised therapeutic spaces.

   3. Racial Justice Researcher at Healing Justice London:

      1. Conducts research on the marginalisation of Palestinian solidarity in the British mental health settings

      2. Develops grassroots research practices to document and validate the impact of racist State practices.

      3. Spearheads research and development for liberatory health spaces for racialised communities.

6. Selected Publications:

   1. Younis, T. (2024). Growing Islamophobia and Muslims Mental Health: Current Challenges and Future Movements. In Report on Islamophobia: the intensification of racism against Muslim communities in the UK. Runnymede Trust.

   2. Younis, T. (2022). The Muslim, State and Mind: Psychology in Times of Islamophobia. SAGE: London.

   3. Aked, H., Younis, T., & Heath-Kelly, C. (2021). Racism, mental health and pre-crime policing: The ethics of Vulnerability Support Hubs. Medact.

   4. Ghumkhor, S., & Younis, T. (2021). Naming the Injury: War on Terror and the Legibility of Trauma. In The Terror Trap: The Impact of the War on Terror on Muslim Communities. Coalition for Civil Freedoms, The Bridge Initiative at Georgetown University, the ICNA Council for Social Justice, CAGE, Center for Islam and Global Affairs, Muslim Justice League, and United Voices for America.

   5. Younis, T. (2021). Counter-Radicalisation, Public Health and Racism: A Case Analysis of Prevent. Terrorism, Violent Radicalization and Mental Health. Oxford University Press.

PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT OF PALESTINIAN DISPOSSESSION & THE NORMALISATION OF ZIONISM IN WESTERN MENTAL HEALTH

3. INTRODUCTION

7. It is impossible to qualify the full impact of a settler-colonial occupation on a population’s health. As Giacaman (2017) notes, its consequences extend far beyond tolls of death, physical injury and mental illness. Palestinians bear a history of forced displacement, ethnic cleansing and unending exposure to violence, as well as the loss of social, cultural, and economic stability. Psychologists in the Global North not only fail to capture the consequences of Zionist occupation—they actively legitimise it. This legitimisation can be seen in their reduction of the Palestinian experience to that of a “conflict” with Israel, rather than one belonging within a violent relationship of domination and submission (Césaire and Kelley, 2000).

8. In the Global North, mental distress is raised as one benchmark in the process of affirming experiences of violence. In a settler-colonial occupation however, this process must be inverted. All points of departure must begin with the theft of land; this theft is supported by a military occupation that fractures the community and prevents self-determination; and this fracturing has an immense, inevitable toll on psychological health. As such, as a point of introduction, it is important to assert that mental health can never be disassociated from discussions of land.

9. As the relationship between coloniser and colonised is one of domination, feelings of humiliation, deprivation, and suffocation are inevitable. It follows then the mental health impact on Palestinians requires more than psychological support. Rather, it demands the restoration of social structures, community support, and a focus on justice, which are essential for the comprehensive recovery and well-being of Palestinian communities (Giacaman, 2018).

10. The task therefore of outlining the impact of Zionist occupation on Palestinians is complicated. The simplest reason is that mental health is an artifact of Western history, with a framework of distress and healing that centres the Global North. Palestinians have not framed nor related their distress historically within psychological frameworks before the advent of global Western relief agencies. Indeed, Samah Jabr explains how Palestinians are often burdened to translate their experience in the language of trauma to make themselves legible to the West (Goldhill, 2019). Israeli psychology, on the other hand, is invariably associated with Western psychology, not least because of the numbers emigrating from the Western world. In fact Israeli psychology is so intimately associated with the West, as the eminent Israeli psychologist Dan Bar-On explains, “one might suggest that the apolitical tendency of Israeli psychology is also connected to the individualism of American psychology, with which Israeli academic psychology was affiliated from its beginning” (2001: 334). This issue of Eurocentrism however is pervasive to the Global South, not just Palestine. Indeed, there is something unique about Palestinian erasure. While many scholars —Samah Jabr, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Rita Giacaman, Lara Sheehi, and others—have conducted tremendous work translating the Palestinian psychology experience to the West, the task of relating to the psychological dimensions of Palestinian dispossession is complicated by epistemic erasure.

11. The purpose of this report is to summarise why Western mental health disciplines have failed to validate the experiences of Palestinian dispossession. Then, it will surface the work of scholars who shed light on the psychological consequences of Zionist domination, with a particular focus on humiliation.

4. THE CHALLENGES IN RELATING TO PALESTINIAN DISPOSSESSION WITHIN PSYCHOLOGY

12. “So, you are sent to treat them with texts written in Hebrew. You present the case (of your patient) in Hebrew to your Israeli supervisor. She lives in a colony on the land of your grandfather. She finds it hard to understand you although she assures you she cares about “the Arabs.” She can’t see any need for (therapeutic) intervention because the patient is low-functioning, a simpleton, in her words.” (case of Ali, a trainee Sheehi and Sheehi, 2022, pg.165)

13. In affirming the Palestinian experience of dispossession, we must first address the systematic erasure of this experience in the mental health fields. There are many challenges in affirming the Palestinian experience through psychological frameworks. I will briefly address five: erasure of the Nakba; normalisation of colonial occupation in psychological research; active dismissal of Palestinian mental health within Israel and occupied territories; the false equivalence set out by trauma frameworks; and the problem with setting mental illness as the benchmark of oppression.

14. First, the history and significance of the Nakba has largely been dismissed in the West and therefore omitted within mental health fields (Sayigh, 2013). There was never any clear resistance to colonial projects within the fields of psychiatry and psychology (Linstrum, 2016). Zionism is no exception. On the contrary, as Frantz Fanon notes in the colonisation of Algeria, mental health institutions were introduced to manage and control colonial subjects, not help them (Fanon, 1990). The neglect of Zionist colonisation is thus particularly stark in the histories of psychology and, more contemporarily, trauma studies. As Sayigh (2013) summarises, the growth of trauma literature from the 1990s onwards explicitly centred on the Holocaust. Sayigh concludes, “the absence of the Nakba from the trauma genre both reflects and reinforces the marginalization of Palestinian claims to justice and the recognition of the Nakba in world politics, and thereby, it contributes to the continuing failure to reach an equitable settlement” (2013, pg.58). In other words, the erasure of the Nakba denies the foundational dimension of the Palestinian experience.

15. Second, part of the challenge in relating to the distress when erasing the significance of occupation is its normalisation as “background noise.” This occurs in large part because of the depoliticising impulse in psychology; the focus on mental health tends to reduce social and political issues as matters of personal experience (Younis, 2023). This reinforces the status quo—including occupation—as “normal.” This deflection of politics is particularly relevant to marginalised populations. When speaking of Palestinian women’s midlife health for example, Hammoudeh and colleagues (2017) relate that few women specifically named the occupation as a factor affecting their health. As the authors explain, “it is exactly that pervasiveness – the normalcy of the political context on peoples’ everyday lives – that means that women sometimes felt [the occupation] too obvious to mention “normalising the abnormal” (Hammoudeh et al., 2017 citing Nguyen-Gillham et al., 2008 p.291).

16. Third, there is a history of dismissing Palestinian distress, both in Israel and in occupied territories. In the first instance, this erasure reflects a historical and cultural practice endemic to Israel’s colonial project. This marginalisation of Palestinian dignity is well-documented and affirmed by human rights organisations like Amnesty International (2022). However, it is important to underline how the Palestinian experience of dispossession is particularly erased by mainstream health structures as well as Israeli mental health practitioners. To this, Lara and Stephen Sheehi (2022) provide vivid case examples of Palestinian trainee psychologists who navigate this erasure with their Israeli supervisors. In one case, the authors relate the trilateral story of a Palestinian trainee, Yoa’d, a Palestinian patient and Yoa’d’s Israeli supervisor: “[The Israeli supervisor] sees the [patient] primarily as a resistant patient who refuses to speak, to articulate thoughts, or to open up and be honest. […] To the Israeli supervisor, his silence can only be a defense, a deflection from confronting the unconscious. Without attending to the structural and material realities of his world as a Palestinian, she reads his symptoms as just “nerves” that can be medicated” (Sheehi and Sheehi, 2022: 51).

17. The erasure of colonial occupation is not an aberration; it is symptomatic of a wider political narrative. For example, when mental health NGOs began attending to trauma in the 2000s, following the second intifada, they intentionally dismissed the experiences of Palestinians who may have been exposed to or injured by Palestinian attackers. The reason for this, as Friedman-Peleg (2017) explains, was because mental health NGOs intended to augment the distress of Israelis while erasing the experience of Palestinians. This phenomenon can also be seen in psychological literature, where realities of occupation and ethnic cleaning are routinely dismissed (Hakim et al., 2023).

18. Fourth, a common refrain in mental health relates to the shared experience of Israelis and Palestinians. On one side is an illegal—but, for Zionists, necessary—occupation that causes immense harm. On the other side, there is the ever-present and sometimes realised threat of Palestinian resistance. In other words, Israelis and Palestinians are both anguished by the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” (violent and non-violent), not a colonial relationship marked by domination. Attempts to flatten the experiences of Palestinians and Israelis is nonsensical, and the experience of settlers is revealing in this regard. In the mid-2000s, settlers were forced to evacuate their post-1967 colonial settlements within Gaza. Friedman-Peleg (2017) relates how Miriam Fogel, head of the Israeli mental health NGO MaHUT, framed this experience: “[Miriam] depicted the settlers as passive victims of trauma, like prisoners of war and Holocaust survivors, and identifies their mental vulnerability as being a result of two external threats: the ongoing Palestinian terror and the present Israeli government plan (“a very cruel act”)” Friedman-Peleg (2017: 44). The ascription of trauma, as a means of identifying victims, is a political act. Later, for the purpose of this report, the focus will be on humiliation instead.

19. Fifth, and significantly, mental health is not the measure of injustice. People may find a renewed sense of togetherness, strength and resilience in oppression. This has been noted for example among support workers in Gaza, exposed to the same violence the people they support are experiencing. While trauma remains relevant, there is strength and determination to be found as well through the traumatic experiences (Veronese et al., 2017). As such, one must be careful not to assume a Eurocentric framework which centres “distress” as a measure of oppression. The Palestinian concept of “sumood” is significant in disrupting this assumption. Sumood relates to the steadfastness in faith, continuity and community despite settler-colonial oppression. As Samah Jabr relates, this is a significant framework in the Palestinian experience. But it also underlines how the search for mental health issues—as a means of anchoring the violence of occupation—dismisses the many ways oppressions develop new possibilities of strength, patience and faith.

5. THE MENTAL HEALTH IMPACT OF THE ZIONIST COLONISATION ON PALESTINIANS: A FOCUS ON HUMILIATION

20. After my mother-in-law, one of the soldiers ordered me to follow him to the same room. He let me in and then left. There were two masked [female] soldiers in the room, and they were holding a huge dog. I was so scared I stayed glued to the door. I tried to leave, and they yelled at me and ordered me to stop. I told them that I was afraid of the dog, but they ordered me to take off all of my clothes. I refused to do it, and then one of the soldiers threatened to release the dog if I didn’t obey. I had no choice and took off all of my clothes, including my undergarments. She ordered me to turn around in front of them, and I did. It was humiliating and degrading. I started to cry, and then they ordered me to get dressed, and some of the [male] soldiers took me back to the room with all of the women. (B’Tselem, 2023)

21. This vignette captures the strategy of dehumanisation enacted by the Zionist occupation today. It only reflects one instance in a daily experience of humiliation. Indeed, the psychological violence of colonial occupation is well known. The history of this has been documented by scholars like Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan (1985). Wars, ethnic conflicts, and political violence have significant public health implications, extending beyond the visible toll of death and physical injury. It impacts their very selfhood.

22. For Palestinians impacted by prolonged conflict, the effects are not limited to immediate survival but include severe psychological distress. Forced displacement, continuous exposure to violence, and the loss of social, cultural, and economic stability contribute to widespread trauma and chronic insecurity, which public health efforts often overlook. The advancement of settlers in the colonial project involves a process of ethnic cleansing which violently disassociates a people from their land; a dehumanising strategy hindering basic needs of community and belonging. This has widespread health implications, which are significant for a wider understanding of mental health impacts. These health impacts are briefly summarised below. Following this, the report will focus specifically on the Zionist application of humiliation—a particular form of colonial psychological warfare—on Palestinians.

The Significance of Humiliation as a Colonial Strategy Against Palestinians and its Impact on Mental Health

23. There are discernible psychological features in colonial violence beyond wider health considerations, such as humiliation. Humiliation is a deeply personal and social experience involving feelings of being unjustly debased, linked to a loss of dignity, honour, and justice (Giacaman et al., 2007). Frantz Fanon has written extensively on colonial projects’ use of humiliation as a violent means of instilling a sense of inferiority and subduing resistance among indigenous populations (Fanon, 2002). Unsurprisingly, humiliation is hallmark of Israeli occupation as well (Giacaman et al., 2007).

24. As such, while all forms of adverse mental health outcomes are relevant in Palestine, this report will focus on humiliation as a particular tool of colonial occupation. This focus on humiliation is not only to validate the Palestinian experience in light of colonial occupation; it affirms, unequivocally, the colonial nature of the Zionist project. This section will first compile the various ways Israel has used humiliation that seeks to psychologically harm entire communities. Then, it will outline the psychological studies unveiling their impact on Palestinians.

25. The Zionist application of humiliation is fundamental to its colonial nature—not an excess of military activities. This is important because Israelis have argued their actions are dynamically related to those of Palestinians. Their logic offers that incessant military detention, degrading checkpoint searches, bombardments and house demolitions are all unfortunate but legitimate actions needed to secure Israel’s post-1967 security. But drawing on early Palestinian testimony paints an undeniable picture: dehumanisation has been the mainstay of the Zionist project since its establishment. Salih Baransi’s village, al-Tayyiba, was taken by Zionist forces on May 7^th, 1949. Baransi (1981: 7) relates what occurred soon thereafter, in his own words:

After our village had been handed over, I was at home when someone knocked at the door. When I opened it to see who was knocking, I found a policeman standing at the door and asking me if I was Salih Baransi. When I said "Yes", I was told to accompany him to the police station, and when I asked why, he said, "You can find out when you get there."

The police station consisted of three rooms side by side, with a cement bench in front, beneath which was a place for chickens and rabbits, and in front of it a large courtyard, a high wall and a gate. No sooner had I passed through the gate than they started raining blows on me until I fainted.

When I came to myself I tried to get up, but could not. Looking around me I found that I was in the place for chickens and rabbits, and because the roof was so low I could neither stand nor sit up: all I could do was to lie on my side. Of course, I could not stay lying on one side - I had to turn over.

But every time I tried to turn on to my other side, I was wounded by the roof which, as I said, was very low and made of rough cement, which cut like a knife, and when I turned back the first wounds got cut again. I stayed there for three weeks; it was summer. They put my food, which was a plate of lentils, through the narrow entrance and I had to eat lying on my face or my back. I had to answer the calls of nature in my clothes, in the same place. I contracted a severe fever; my temperature rose and I asked for a doctor, but they refused my request. When I reached the stage where I could no longer move or speak, they were obliged to let me out. They took me to another place, which consisted of a small wooden shed - a sort of hutch made of mud and roofed with wood and straw, and I stayed there for a time until the fever abated. They used to send a boy to me to tell me to clean the lavatories. The idea being that I would refuse, so that they might beat me. After a month and a half they let me go, and to this day I do not know why they arrested me and did what they did to me.

26. Baransi’s testimony surfaces the incredible psychological violence wrought by Zionists and curbs any legitimacy to Israel’s alleged justifications for violence. Colonial tactics of humiliation are not arbitrary; they are executed with great intent to mark a relationship of domination. Salih’s case is not isolated; it is revealing of a history of practices in colonial domination. The wider impact of humiliation is discussed below.

Research studies on Humiliation

27. Recent studies have explored the psychological harms associated with the Zionist use of humiliation as a systemic strategy of domination. In 2011, a study on mental suffering surveyed a sample of 1,778 Palestinians across the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem (Barber et al., 2016). They found significant exposure to political violence between 1987 and 2011. During this time, 78% of Palestinians had their homes raided by Israeli military forces, while 74% witnessed acts of humiliation carried out by either Israeli or Palestinian military or police. Sixty-two percent experienced verbal abuse firsthand. More than half (56%) reported being fired upon, 43% had been physically attacked (hit or kicked) by soldiers or police, and 26% of men had been detained as political prisoners. Additionally, 44% suffered material losses, such as the destruction or confiscation of their homes or land by the Israeli government. Movement restrictions were also a significant issue, with 68% of respondents in the West Bank stating they were unable to access medical care at some point due to obstacles such as checkpoints, barrier walls, or curfews. The authors affirms that feeling "broken or destroyed" was distinct from traditional mental health measures, consistently reliable, and experienced more commonly than depression or trauma-related stress across genders and regions.

28. In another study, researchers analysed data from the 2014 Socio-Economic & Food Security Survey, which covered 7,827 households in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Hammoudeh et al., 2022). The study focused on several types of deprivation—subjective, material, food, and political—alongside acute political, health, and economic stressors. Results highlight that feeling deprived is a major determinant of mental health. These circumstances lead to profound mental health challenges, including feelings of humiliation. The internalized wounds caused by ongoing conflict hinder survivors' ability to recover. Addressing these mental health impacts requires more than physical aid; it demands the restoration of social structures, community support, and a focus on justice, which are essential for the comprehensive recovery and well-being of Palestinian communities.

29. Feelings of humiliation have a strong impact on their experience of physical and emotional complaints (Giacaman et al., 2007). Importantly, the study showed that the more types of humiliation someone experienced, the more likely they were to report many health issues. For example, people who went through humiliating experiences were 2.5 times more likely to report frequent health complaints than those who hadn’t faced any. This risk kept increasing with each additional humiliating experience. The authors argue that humiliation should be recognized as a significant cause of health problems for people in occupation, affecting health independently of other types of violence.

30. Children are particularly affected by the Zionist strategy of humiliation. As the Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad el Sarraj (2002) explains, research has revealed that 55% of children witnessed their fathers being humiliated or physically abused by Israeli soldiers during the first Intifada. This experience has a profound and far-reaching psychological impact on those children. A study in 2008 sought to understand the long-term effects of occupation on Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip (Altawil et al., 2008). The researchers randomly selected 1,137 children aged 10 to 18 from various areas of Gaza to participate in the study. Participants completed surveys measuring their traumatic experiences, PTSD symptoms, and personality traits. The findings were alarming: every child had faced at least three traumatic events. Common experiences included humiliation (99%), hearing explosions (97%), attending funerals for martyrs (85%), and witnessing shelling by tanks or military planes (84%). The study revealed that 41% of these children suffer from PTSD.

31. There is a gendered component to the violence of humiliation. In interviews with 35 Palestinian women in Occupied Palestinian territories, Hammoudeh and colleagues (2017) found that prolonged political violence profoundly shapes Palestinian women’s perceptions of their health, both directly and indirectly. Women frequently linked their health challenges to mobility restrictions imposed by Israeli checkpoints and blockades, which fuelled feelings of fear, anxiety, stress, and humiliation.

32. While there is no need to incorporate Israel’s “version of events”—Palestinian testimony is sufficient—the strategy of humiliation was corroborated directly by IDF soldiers. “Break The Silence”, an organisation which contains testimonies of Israeli soldiers following the Second Intifada, relates many instances of humiliation as standard procedure (Break the Silence has been critiqued, not least in its framing of the violence but also its proximity to the Israeli miliary, see Jude, 2020). These testimonies relate the mundane activities of humiliation:

I’m thinking about that poor family whose rooftop was turned into a public bathroom by the entire company, what an awful thing. […] I know there was one platoon where everyone – from the commander all the way down – took dumps in pots, out of some kind of operational principle. Whatever.

(https://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/database/606607 )

33. Humiliation figures centrally in colonial projects, and Palestinians have long been subjected to its dehumanising, psychological harms under Zionist rule. To affirm, humiliation is significant in several respects. It specifically outlines an experience that is not “equitable” between Israelis and Palestinians, for it is the tactic of a coloniser. Humiliation speaks to the profound experience of being degraded, stripped of rights and relationship to land and community. Mental health is not needed to visible the violence in this process. However, as outlined above, the anguish associated with humiliation cannot be understated either.

6. CONCLUSION: SUMOOD AFTER A CENTURY OF PSYCHOLOGICAL HARM

34. “Over the last 54 years of occupation Israel has been trying to control, exhaust and terrify the Palestinians in the name of 'security'.” (Samah Jabr, 2002)

35. The experience of Palestinian dispossession, under a system of humiliation and control, has continued for at least three generations, from before the Nakba until today. As we have heard from Palestinians directly, life under a system of humiliation and colonial domination paints a grim picture for everyday life. The process of dehumanisation is deeply impactful on mental health; this has been the central message from luminaries like Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived the holocaust and shared his experiences in vivid detail. The experiences of Frankl are known; however this same recognition has not been afforded to Palestinians. If circumstances for Palestinians are to change, a recognition of their psychological experience of colonial domination is needed, followed swiftly by full justice and accountability.

36. It is important to end on a tension raised earlier: mental health is not the measure of violence. As we have seen with Palestine for over a century, as much as a colonial project seeks to break the spirit of its people, the spirit has remained. This speaks to the astounding sumood. Sumood is often translated as steadfastness, but its significance among Palestinians extends beyond that. It’s community in times of forced atomisation. It’s continuity in times of violent erasure. It’s resistance in times of colonial oppression. The idea of sumood then speaks to a tension that an emphasis on mental health fails to grasp: despite a century of erasure and systemic violence on the psyche of Palestinians, the colonial project has failed.

7. EXPERT OBLIGATIONS

37. I confirm that I have made clear which facts and matters referred to in this report are within my own knowledge and which are not. Those that are within my own knowledge I confirm to be true. The opinions I have expressed represent my true and complete professional opinions on the matters to which they refer.

38. I understand that proceedings for contempt of court may be brought by anyone who makes, or causes to be made, a false statement in a document verified by a statement of truth without an honest belief in its truth.

39. I confirm that I have not received any remuneration for preparing this report.

Dr Tarek Younis

London

United Kingdom

13 December 2024

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