Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2007, pages 19-20

Jerusalem Journal

The Struggle to Develop Identity While Living Under Occupation

By Samah Jabr

AS JEWISH ISRAELIS celebrated the High Holy Days this past September, authorities tightened checkpoints around my hometown of Jerusalem. This meant that I, along with thousands of other Palestinians, frequently were kept waiting for several hours to cross a checkpoint—causing me to miss more than one Ramadan dinner with my family.

When checkpoints are tightened, Palestinian drivers jostle to reach the front of the line of waiting cars. Israeli soldiers sometimes interfere—to reward those drivers who have cut in line! While watching hour after hour pass by as I wait to move my car a few yards closer to the checkpoint, I feel as if it is my blood that is boiling, not the gasoline in my car.

On one occasion, after waiting for more than two hours at a checkpont without making any progress, drivers began laying on their horns in protest. The Israeli soldiers closed the checkpoint completely and attacked the front cars, until their drivers started urging everyone to stop honking. Thus are we conditioned. We “learned” to wait motionlessly and mutely at the checkpoint and never again dare to protest. The result of our repressed outrage, of course, is deep depression.

It is under such conditions of prolonged oppression and discrimination that Palestinians struggle to develop their individual as well as national identity. Among the options available to us are refusing to assimilate, and confrontation. The choice will vary among individuals as well as generations, according to the political climate or social situation.

Stress and divisiveness are tactics intended to demoralize Palestinians, make them internalize feelings of inferiority, and sabotage their self-confidence and their ability to unite in pursuit of a common purpose.

Israel’s illegal occupation is said to be “civilized,” while our resistance to it is characterized as “savage.” Israelis benefit from a good economy, modern education and advanced medicine, with a specialist in every field. They produce computer chips, while Palestinians are seen as producing nothing but human bombs and street fights in Gaza. We therefore are expected to accept—if not welcome!—our occupation and exploitation, and to voluntarily abandon our subjective sense of identity and existence in favor of the lies of the more powerful occupier.

This deterioration of Palestinian morale is further exacerbated by factional infighting and the international support of one faction over the other. As intended, it is having a major negative impact on social cohesion, especially given the current disempowerment of non-affiliated nationalist leaders and the promotion of some who suffer from an ambiguous national identity and from an occupation-based mentality. At the same time, anti-intellectual attitudes are directed at thinkers, scientists and artists who refuse to surrender their national claims or dismiss their own culture as being inferior to that of the occupier.

Because power under occupation flows away from the occupied and toward the occupiers and their supporters, the latter’s premises and proposals are given more validity. Among the occupied, power is granted to the elite supporting the occupation, which eventually evolves into the ruling class.

Palestinian businessmen, for example, have great confidence in their Israeli counterparts. Important Palestinian national figures seek treatment in Israeli hospitals, while Palestinian NGOs provide better salaries and job opportunities to graduates of Israeli universities.

As the Caribbean-born psychiatrist Franz Fanon pointed out 40 years ago, these actions spring from the identification of the oppresssed with the aggressor—a defensive mechanism which involves increased assimilation of the occupiers’ culture and the simultaneous rejection of one’s own. Seeing themselves through the eyes of the occupier, Palestinians suffering from this syndrome believe what they are told, that we are primitive and terrorists. In fact, their inferiority complex is the result of an economic and military power which renders the occupier’s life more advantageous and more precious than ours. Some of us begin to imitate the occupiers in power, associating that power and success with the occupier’s culture, ideology and way of life, which are viewed as inherently superior.

Because the lies to which Palestinians are subjected have been passed down from generation to generation, they can become embedded in the subconscious of susceptible individuals and extend to all aspects of their lives.

Nevertheless, many ordinary Palestinians remain convinced of the right of our nation to self-determination, and believe that traditional values such as dignity and honor are to be defended at all costs—including one’s own life. They recognize the occupation as a generator of shame, and the need to ferociously reject it.

Palestinian leaders who argue that the occupying power is too strong to be effectively resisted, and that we therefore have no recourse other than to accept its rule as an inescapable fact of life, only serve to reinforce and institutionalize the mentality of occupation. This mentality threatens our people, our sense of common purpose, and our confidence in the future. It is essential that our understanding of occupation be expanded to include this internal occupation of the mind. After all, it is precisely such internalized acceptance and surrender that is the ultimate goal of occupation.

Today it is more important than ever to build a national consciousness and demand for liberation. We must replace the occupier’s colonial assumptions with a defiant cry for truth and an unwavering assertion of the merits of our national culture.

It also is essential to develop the Palestinian economy in the face of massive corruption and infrastructure problems, encourage the political mobilization of the educated middle class in order to counteract the dominance of those who suffer from the mentality of occupation, and maintain Palestinian morale.

Occupation is overwhelming and relentless—we cannot just ignore it as if it does not exist. But it cannot be overcome with mute passivity. Instead it requires a fierce and roaring opposition—a human being’s natural response to oppression. As a people, we must commit ourselves to a conscious, sustained effort to enhance personal dignity and self-esteem in order to overcome the mentality and lack of ethnic pride occupation seeks to impose. Moreover, each individual not only must work on his or her own identity, but interact with  families, friends and peers in such a way that their shared experience and strength can counteract and transcend the attempt to destroy cultural and personal identity.

The last thing we want for our people is resignation. Because we are living our lives, involuntarily, under military occupation, we must fight our oppressors and struggle every day to liberate our minds, our bodies and our land. For it is precisely our fury and determination to fight oppression—even by honking horns at a checkpoint—that proves to us, and the world, that we are alive.

Samah Jabr is a psychiatrist practicing in the West Bank and her native Jerusalem.

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