For Life’s Sake
Listen to the cry of “Free Palestine!”
The editors
“There’s nowhere to go.” This is the refrain of the past year, resounding with the cries that first refused the Nakba in 1948. They are heard again, today, against every new bombing, evacuation order, and the genocidal Israeli annexation. Daily, Israel seeks to expand violently into its entire surround, amid the unmistakable and doubly limiting cruelty of Palestinian displacement—as total confinement and mass murder. The cry of this sentence is double-bound. Listen to it! This intimately barbed enclosure, tautly wrapped around the skin: to go is to suffer, and to stay is to suffer still more. From above, demolition and destruction aim to make this imprisonment permanent. From below, resistance aims to make this confining situation obsolete.
In their clinical language—uttered at a cozy remove, though this distance is not obvious and cannot be taken for granted—psychoanalysts may speak here of the maddening effects of “psychological double-binds.” Such a description does little justice to the confinement of a person imprisoned by colonial paralysis—or “ankylosis,” Fanon’s preferred term for the immobilized spine wrapped in colonial barbed wire. In Protean Magazine, poet and philosopher Karen Ng has recently named this twice as the “spine of genocide,” whose stiffened ridges are everywhere held in place by all those who are “wordless on Palestine.” We have strived to refuse this wordlessness—the worldlessness of it—listening, instead, to Palestinian writers, clinicians, and liberation fighters as protagonists of this struggle.
This is its own recoverable historical tradition within emancipatory movements for Palestine—and within the worlds that encompass it. Jean Genet had already said in his 1986 Prisoner of Love,
“To anyone looking at their pictures on television or in the papers, the Palestinians seemed to girdle the earth so fast they were everywhere at once. But they saw themselves swallowed up by all the worlds they traveled through. . . . The Palestinians imagined they were hounded on all sides—by Zionism, imperialism, and Americanism.”
At its highest pitch, the global movement to free Palestine has yet again placed Palestinians on television, in the papers, and on our mobile phones. As the poet Geoffrey G. O’Brien puts it, here in the West, we watch genocide from “as far away as our laps.” Now, in Lebanon, these very same devices have been infiltrated by Israel, delivering a deadly explosion posing as a message, maiming or killing the listener as soon as they respond to the call. Last night was world-history—every night is. Just before an old front in Lebanon reopened for Israel’s current martial expansion, Mary Turfah named, in her contribution to this issue, the reality that Israel “reflects a self-image that relies on total impunity” in order to keep aggressing against its victims.
Palestinians still circulate across the world anyways. Yet, just as swiftly, they and their movement are being swallowed up by the forces of Zionism, imperialism, and Americanism—including a longstanding Christian Zionism, to which Tad Delay points. This is no idle imaginary projection: Palestinians are hounded on all sides, and the reality that has always encircled them is again constricting, more quickly now, on their extermination. Those various circles of force must be broken—martial, material, narrative, psychic—and we demand that you listen to Palestinians in this effort. They lead; we follow. There’s no other way to begin to move: to remove the double-binding, fascist barbarity rapidly wrapping around the world. In her essay, following Ghassan Kanafani, Nihal El Aasar writes that, after their wake-up defeat, the revolutionary Arab masses still face political melancholy and an escalating and tripartite struggle: “imperialism, Zionism, and reactionary Arab regimes—interconnected in a dialectical relationship.”
Adam HajYahia tells us that when a Palestinian man escaped Gaza to return to his occupied lands on October 7, 2023, he shouted ahead to his comrades and fellow escapees, “Go, Mahdi, go!” He also tells us how to hear this, and we are obliged to listen. “Resist your urge to assign messianic meaning to the name Mahdi” in this image of return: This is a reassertion of the political subjectivity of the subjected. The beauty of this image is not due to the suffering of those returning, he tells us, but rather because of the “desire for freedom on which we act.”
Throughout the pages of this collection, you will still hear stories of historical and psychical suffering—how could it be otherwise? In one of his first public addresses, Freud tells us that psychoanalysis attends closely to suffering—even from the blunt traumas of bodily and medical wounds. Because in each instance, a story of suffering extends out of, and with, any wound—even in silence. But to stop here, under the aegis of a physician’s comforting presence, is to prematurely foreclose the collective desires for freedom in our historical and embodied struggles.
We have to do both: not only invite our stories of suffering, but also look carefully for the desire-lines within and through the wilderness of freedom, beyond our lines of sight. Over the summer, a traumatized Palestinian man, Badr Dahlan, was seized in Khan Younis by Israeli forces, who tortured him for a month. He has since become unable to recall the scene of torture—protecting himself from the horrid memory—an abyssal testament to the impossible psychic costs of sustaining Palestinian life, of a violence that cleaves memory from experience. This lost memory is the loudest indictment.
One of the writers in this issue, the Palestinian psychoanalyst Lama Khouri, has spent her life working in institutions—whether in the United Nations or by leading various networks and organizations devoted to Palestinian care—fighting for the psychical dignity of Palestinian lives. Her piece draws its title from a devastating question, asked by a child who rightfully cannot comprehend the destruction all around them in Gaza: “Is this a dream or for real?” We also start from, and share, this incomprehension—unsure what is dream, what real, while knowing that part of psychoanalytic work turns on parsing the difference. That work also requires addressing the symptomatic inactions and impasses analyzed in Khouri’s essay.
We must listen for however people run together toward the horizon line of collective freedom. In order to join up with those who are already on the run, we must likewise confront a particularly stubborn circle of institutionally enforced repression—inside psychoanalysis, or otherwise—that remains an obstacle to liberation. Palestine is our teacher; in this sense, it is instructive. Accepting the invitation to clear the aisle, we join those who are already ahead of us to provide an unobstructed view of the destination. We release this special issue as one collective voice within the call for abolition, transformation, and exit.
As any analyst knows, wherever we start in psychoanalytic treatment, we are always by degrees too late—as the work routinely arrives after devastation. Writing seventy years ago, Fanon had discovered this belatedness in his own way: “Too late. Everything is anticipated, thought out, demonstrated, made the most of. My trembling hands take hold of nothing; the vein has been mined out. Too late! But once again I want to understand.” We still want to understand, soothe, and comfort the afflicted. We know that we, directly, cannot.
All the proceeds of this issue, therefore, will go to the The Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, where trying to understand and helping the victims of this catastrophe go hand-in-hand.
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As contemporary interlocutors of psychoanalytic traditions, we are inheritors of the field’s early antagonism toward Israel and the politics of Zionism, inaugurated by Freud himself. But, in mainstream psychoanalysis in the West, that early politic has been erased from psychoanalytic history. If it is invoked at all, an anti-Zionist psychoanalysis is assumed to be crushed potential, a future and present to never come.
Psychoanalysis in Palestine has a long and violent history, and in Israel and elsewhere in the world, institutional psychoanalysis has grieved Israeli life while staying silent on genocide. Given the misuses of psychoanalytic history in the service of its conservative forces, it is important to be entirely clear about our own psychoanalytic orientation amid the political demands of the present. Otherwise, Freud need not enter this conversation at all.
Of his own Jewishness, as we see in Evan Goldstein’s essay, Freud disambiguated ethnicity and Zionism from religion and psychoanalytic translation. He wrote that he had no bible, no language, no nation—all that remained of his Jewishness was its very essence. That essence did not contain a state for his people on the grounds of religion.
In Vienna, on February 26, 1930, Freud had the task of responding to Dr. Chaim Koffler, who argued with Freud, trying to get him to pledge his name to the Zionist cause. Freud wrote, politely,
“Dear Sir:
I cannot do as you wish. […]... I do not think that Palestine could ever become a Jewish state, nor that the Christian and Islamic worlds would ever be prepared to have their holy places under Jewish care. It would have seemed more sensible to me to establish a Jewish homeland on a less historically-burdened land. But I know that such a rational viewpoint would never have gained the enthusiasm of the masses and the financial support of the wealthy. I concede with sorrow that the baseless fanaticism of our people is in part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust. I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of a Herodian wall [i.e., the Wailing Wall] into a national relic, thereby offending the feelings of the natives […] Now judge for yourself whether I, with such a critical point of view, am the right person to come forward as the solace of a people deluded by unjustified hope.
Your obedient servant,
Freud”
Psychoanalysis is not, in its origin, Zionist. But it would also be an error to say Freud fully rejected a home for psychoanalysis in what is now called Israel. Just three years after sending off this missive, Max Eitingon, one of Freud’s closest followers, left his Berlin clinic—the first full-service analytic training clinic in the world—to start The Palestine Society (later renamed the Israel Psychoanalytic Society). His 1933 departure from the Berlin Institute condemned it to Nazification when Eitingon refused to appoint another Jewish analyst in his stead. To save psychoanalysis in Europe, he felt, it had to be made palatable enough to the Nazis. In practice, as one might predict, this led to Nazification of the Institute in Germany and, in a double, conjoined motion, to a colonial psychoanalysis in Palestine.
Psychoanalysis’ second generation split on the question: some were highly skeptical of a Zionist project in Palestine, and others thought it secured the so-called “Jewish Science” and its future. As Eitingon’s work took hold in Palestine at the Hebrew University, Freud hoped psychoanalysis might find a home there, much like he wished it would “colonize” the world. Freud’s fantasies about the international success of psychoanalysis, imagined along the lines of a colonial triumph, were effectively destabilized by his own critique of mastery and belonging. It is this psychoanalysis—internally divided, even torn, we might say—that we inherit, and it is this division that opens psychoanalysis to radical praxis.
Later, The Palestine Society helped to tie Israel’s state-making project with the European continent whose sins it washed: now, the Israel Psychoanalytic Society is part of the European Federation of Psychoanalysis. Since then, Israeli psychoanalysts have collectively participated in warfare by preparing Israeli soldiers to return to their stations and by engaging in the torture of Palestinian political prisoners, as Kaleem Hawa instructs us in these pages. Israeli psychoanalysts also supervise Palestinian psychoanalysts, directly intervening in their treatments of Palestinian patients.
That psychoanalysis might break out of its historical frame—and become a tool for psychic liberation from within Palestine—is the hope and contention of Dr. Lara Sheehi and Professor Stephen Sheehi’s essential book Psychoanalysis Under Occupation, which shows that, despite complex systems of psychological power (including supervision, medication, accreditation), a radical psychoanalysis lives in Palestine.
In the 21st century, psychoanalysts tend to cling to a revisionist version of their institutional history—to notions of so-called purity, to “analytic neutrality.” Much like any censorious dream, they rework the past to divine a neutralized present, one that rejects the radical tendencies within the practice—as if neutrality, so-called, doesn’t itself have a tilted history, a politics. Rather than evacuating our consulting rooms and classrooms of politics—to comply needlessly with a blanket “Palestine Exception” or demand for “analytic neutrality”—we here seek to put the center of the world at the center of psychoanalysis. As the Sheehis argue, Palestine is always in the analytic encounter—even as it is pushed out, remaindered.
We reject this attachment to a fantasy of neutrality. We seek clarity from psychoanalysts, like Fanon, who are often called on to speak of Palestine from the grave, and rigorously recall the tradition to willfully disinherit its errors. As a theory that has often been co-opted for violence, psychoanalysis can remain on the side of liberation. It must, we must, as Donald Moss argues, listen to the cry.
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Genocide is the end. It is the production of the end: not a passive gravitational spiral in which everything is engulfed, but a sacrificial consumption from which the victor wishes to emerge unscathed and renewed. To contest this imagined future victory of the genocidaire, the martyr Walid Daqqa wrote a letter—smuggled from prison and addressed to his unborn child—in which he saw beyond the prison walls: “I write to an idea or a dream that intentionally or unintentionally frightens the jailer; even before becoming a reality. I write to any child. I write to my child that has not been born yet. I write to the birth (Milad) of the future.”
Appropriating Sabina Spielrein’s original proposition of what would become Freud’s death drive, “images of destruction are very instructive in reference to different forms of self-gratification.” In this light, the fascist self-gratification of genocidal violence is centrifugal—compounding every unreachable wound, dictating the scenes of destruction. Spilling blood every hour now into the various fronts of Israel’s military annexation, the wounds themselves become yet more gratifying weaponry. On its own, this drive is its own circle of force, which must be broken by the collective transference of emancipation—before it breaks the always delicate balance of relations that sustain the world. “Genocide is a symptom of a world in which transference is increasingly difficult,” as Nadia Bou Ali writes in her piece “Social Hell.” One might dream the perpetual nightmares of genocidaires or the dreams of children not yet born, for those are the stakes of the future.
Each day of this genocide has produced new and more horrific scenes of Zionist annihilation: corpse-less burials in which every 70 kg (154lb) bag of human remains constitutes a never-to-be-identified adult martyr; English-language press conferences of children begging for help; more headless and limbless children than one could conceivably imagine; IDF soldiers tauntingly posing in the lingerie of the Palestinian women whose homes they raided as if for sport, evidence of the rampant sexual assault and humiliation of Palestinians of all genders. Jake Romm insists that the gratuitous and pleasurable ultra-violence of the Israeli imaginary “demonstrates the deep psychic wound that feminization has for a hyper-militarized and machismo society.” It is no accident that the victimized European Jew has been transmuted into the muscular Israeli. To paraphrase Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan, the yellow star has, through a perverse washing of the sins of Europe, become the blue and white flag affixed to their lapels and uniforms flying across their country with bombs in tow.
“We release this special issue as one collective voice within the call for abolition, transformation, and exit.”
Much of the discourse around Palestine involves the practice of asking fundamentally disingenuous questions: bad faith questions that trap one in historical justifications that create hierarchies of human life, that assign innocence and infallibility to historical victimhoods, that refuse a confrontation of suffering and international law alike in favor of an ascended future of impunity. One such nuclear question is that of the right to exist—equally a philosophical, legal, and psychoanalytic question. It’s repeatedly said that Jewish people qua Israel have a right to exist—an illogic that presupposes that the state is the only legible vehicle of political sovereignty and self-determination. Nations—peoples—have a legal claim to existence, but states do not. Peoples, too, have a right to self-defense that occupying powers also do not.
Zionism—a fundamentally European endeavor—succeeds in collapsing the totality of Jewish life and futurity into the State of Israel, further annihilating the entangled Jewish and Muslim and Christian lives that had existed in Palestine in the preceding centuries.
Responding to the ongoing Nakba, Rana Issa implores us to divest from the memory-capturing mythcraft of the Holocaust in which every Arab neighbor of Israel is reconstituted as the same existential threat to Jews/Israel as the Nazi German brutality, from which many of the colony’s original Eastern European inhabitants had fled. Proceeding from the liberatory potential of the Nakba and the global geography of Palestinians, produced in the handful of generations since 1948, Issa describes a matrix of struggles against apartheid—as with Rhodesia and South Africa, whose own freedom fighters were also staring down the barrels of Israeli weaponry—and coloniality more generally.
“What does it really mean when Palestinians are asked to recognize Israel's right to exist while they themselves are murdered and brutalized on live television?” Issa asks. “Who and what has the right to exist in historical Palestine today and in the future?” Depending on whom you ask, the answer is certainly Palestinian children who bear an overwhelming burden of suffering. They have long been weaponized in Israel’s political psychology. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir not only altogether negated the existence and possibility of Palestine, but solemnly lamented that there can only be peace when Palestinians love their children more than they hate Israelis. The voice of a troubled Israeli conscience, she felt Palestinians could never be forgiven for forcing Israel to kill them. Yasmin El-Rifae describes the staggering child mortality of this dispensation of the Nakba as “central, fundamental, axiomatic” rather than accidental: Palestinian children represent a Palestinian future, but Israel’s genocidal grammar demands Palestine “only exist in the present, the tense and temporality of domination.”
Zionism is a calculus of abnegation: whether a qualified destruction of Jewish life through the linguistic, cultural, ethnic Frankenstein of a Westphalian nation-state identity, or the annihilation of regional Arab Muslim existences through the actualization of Eretz Israel. Through conversations with his father, a survivor of the Holocaust, David Markus describes an epochal formation of memory: leaving the unresolved trauma of Europe behind, a Jewish refortification in Israel engendered a “crystallization of identitarian fantasies, and the soldering into place of a closed circuit of persecution and retribution over the festering wound of childhood fears and humiliation.” Refusing Israeli genocide’s annihilatory maneuvers means refusing the segregating constraints placed upon memory, especially through the West’s imposed moral and universal understanding of Nazism as the exclusively singular culmination of necropolitical ideology and practice. Instead, we endeavor in this issue to excavate a continuous psychopolitics of coloniality through a politic of international solidarity. A bridging of individualized encounter and the collective consciousness, psychoanalysis offers us and our readers the opportunity to clarify and fortify our political commitments to Palestine’s liberation.
The inaugural piece in this online series, Nadia Bou Ali’s “Ugly Enjoyment,” invites us to answer the question of what it means to really be alive. In the face of this unspeakable production of mass death, we must endeavor to understand and speak into existence that “living is only thinkable when it seizes to be an object to be apprehended: life is only an object if we recognize that it is conditioned by the ability of the subject to recognize the restraints on living.” Against the colonial and material monopolization of Palestine as feed for Zionist expansionism, we insist—alongside Nadia and the chorus of voices within this issue—that “the people of Palestine fighting against extermination are the very negation of life’s ugly enjoyment of itself, in its self-affirmation and disavowal of all negative value.” Palestine teaches life again and again, as poet Rafeef Ziadah reminds us. But we must not learn life simply from Palestinian abjection, but from the revolutionary insistence on life, the militant struggle of existence for life’s sake, and the anti-imperial humanisms that refuse fortifications of the political theologies that enclose Palestinians. We are resolute in this resistance, and intend for this issue to embody sumud, the spirit of resistance, an active and dynamic striving toward the construction of institutions that make the Israeli occupation increasingly impossible to sustain.
This series shares a name with the Palestinian chorus calling for freedom: “From the River to the Sea.” Palestine will be free.