“I live out by O’Hare. Every time a plane flies overhead at night, my hands shake. I’m looking for a place to hide. And then the sirens too – the police and ambulance sirens. I know they’re not there, but it feels like soldiers are just outside the windows. We used to watch them walk up and down the road by my grandparents’ house, and we weren’t to say anything. They’d harass everyone, beat people up, including my grandpa. We were supposed to stay inside. My cousin was killed,” my patient told me last November during a psychotherapy session in Chicago, home to the largest population of Palestinian people in the United States. “I haven’t felt like this, had nightmares like this, since I was a kid.”Since the Israeli bombing and invasion of Gaza began last October, a long-simmering global movement has emerged, particularly from the Global South, in solidarity with the Palestinian people. At least tens of millions of people have marched through the cities of the world in protest of Israeli-perpetrated genocide. In the US, the ruling class and closely linked media have typically portrayed such expressions of solidarity, if acknowledged at all, as simply a matter of vague ideological kinship or abstract anti-US or anti-Israel sentiment, often taking recourse to misleading accusations of anti-Semitism to explain it all away. By doing so, they ignore its historical roots and the ongoing truth to which this movement testifies: There is a deep psychic and visceral connection that binds countless people from diverse backgrounds to the gruesome oppression of Palestinians and to the enabling indifference to it shown by so many North American and European observers.“I’m trying not to watch it, to look at the videos and the pictures of little kids trying to wake up their dead siblings, but it’s impossible to avoid – and I don’t want to avoid it. It’s the truth. It’s their truth, but it’s also mine and my family’s. But I just can’t deal with it,” another patient said. Yet another explained, “You leave, thinking it’ll be better. But it doesn’t stop. It just changes. Now you get to watch and pay for it rather than be stuck underneath it. I don’t know which feels worse.”
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