When the World Expects You to Move On: Palestinian Grief, Trauma, and Sumud
What happens when the world expects you to move on from something that has never ended?
News coverage of Gaza has shifted, and many people in my communities describe seeing fewer posts about the ongoing suffering of Palestinians. After the ceasefire took effect on October 10, 2025, it may have appeared to some that the violence had ended. Yet the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA, 2026) documents continuing airstrikes, deaths, displacement, and severe humanitarian needs.
Reports of continued Israeli military operations and civilian suffering make clear that a ceasefire announcement did not end the harm. When exposure to witnessing harm ends, it doesn’t mean that harm itself has ended. Just because we don’t see/witness it in the same way doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
And this didn’t begin in October 2023. The Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe”, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 surrounding Israel’s establishment. Approximately 750,000 to one million Palestinians were made to become refugees after their ancestral towns were systematically destroyed and entire families including young children were massacred (Institute for Middle East Understanding, 2023). Palestinians have carried generations upon generations of grief, grief that has been compounded because not only are they carrying the effects of past massacres, they are continuing to experience an ongoing one with no end in sight.
Someone I know personally who spent part of her life in Gaza told me she had witnessed seven wars in her lifetime. Although she was a U.S. citizen, she was trapped in Gaza when the genocide started while pregnant and caring for her one-year-old child. Her experience is a reminder that these are not distant stories: they affect people I know personally and communities I support professionally.
The 3 year anniversary raises questions not only about what the world remembers, but what it acknowledges.
People used to talk about this all the time. Why don't they anymore?
My family is still living through this.
I'm still grieving.
Am I supposed to stop talking about it because everyone else has?
Does anyone still care?
Is it even safe for me to keep talking about this?
Three years ago, Palestine dominated headlines, social media feeds, protests, and public conversations.
Now, people within Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and allied communities may experience something very different: the harm continues while its visibility changes.
When Silence Becomes Another Layer of Harm
Collective gaslighting and historical denial
In one of her psychoeducational videos, Dalia Halabi (@daliahalabi88) explains the phenomenon of collective gaslighting that occurs as dominant narratives systematically silence the reality of atrocities in Palestine (Halabi, 2025). She points out that this form of psychological violence occurs when pain and loss is constantly denied or distorted by those in power, resulting in a form of suspended grief, where mourning and meaning-making can become obstructed. This overlaps with disenfranchised grief: grief that is not socially acknowledged or validated. Suspended grief, as Halabi puts it, is a psychological concept that describes the feeling of mourning that cannot fully move forward while loss, danger, and denial continue.
For Palestinians, this is further complicated by the fact that violence and displacement have continued. People may be grieving relatives, homes, livelihoods, interrupted education, and the loss of safety while navigating public narratives that minimize or deny their pain.
Such denial can leave people feeling that their experiences are being questioned and that even their grief is unwelcome.
This is why Dr. Samah Jabr, a Palestinian psychiatrist, emphasizes that we cannot understand psychological suffering separately from the ongoing conditions that produce it.
From historical denial to contemporary institutional silencing
In the past three years we have seen this institutional silence across many realms. As Palestinians continue to experience profound loss and instability, news cycles have moved on. Imagine watching something that is still devastating your family or community gradually become "old news."
Following major changes to TikTok's U.S. ownership and governance, many people within the communities I serve have described something they can feel in their everyday scrolling: they are seeing far less Palestine-related content than they once did.
On university campuses, students participating in pro-Palestinian encampments faced arrests and disciplinary action, including suspension. At Columbia University, for example, police arrested protesters and the university imposed suspensions (APA News, 2024). What does it do to someone psychologically when speaking about something deeply important to them may also threaten their education, employment, reputation, immigration status, or future?
I’m reminded of Palestinian advocates who have faced immigration detention. Salah Sarsour, a Palestinian American community leader and longtime U.S. permanent resident, spent 80 days in ICE detention in 2026. He told NPR that he believed he had been targeted because of his activism and advocacy for Palestinian rights (NPR, 2026). In the previous year, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian Columbia University activist and permanent resident, spent 104 days in immigration detention, from March 8 to June 20, 2025. He missed the birth of his son, who was born while he was detained. After his release, Khalil said he did not fully feel safe (Democracy Now! interview). Both men connected their experiences to their Palestinian advocacy.
How systemic silencing reaches families and individuals
At a recent community event I attended for Palestine, an audience member who identified as Gazan raised a concern I see far too often in my own practice and within the community. He asked the panel of doctors from the United States who visited Gaza to do medical work during the ongoing genocide how they find the strength to put their lives, livelihood, and future on the line to show up for Palestinians in such a dire time, when his own elders advise him to “keep his head down” and not risk losing the privilege he has of safety in the West by speaking up for Palestine.
It was a legitimate concern. If speaking feels consequential, people may begin asking:
Should I post this?
Who might see it?
Could this affect my job?
Could this affect school?
Could this affect my immigration status?
Would staying quiet protect my family?
The consequences of institutional silencing do not remain in newsrooms, detention centers, or universities. They can shape whether people feel safe speaking up, mourning publicly, or expressing solidarity. Silence may also be a protective response shaped by experiences of war, displacement, surveillance, and discrimination. As I explored in my article on Islamophobia and Muslim mental health, for many folks with South Asian, SWANA/MENA, or Muslim identities, self-censorship and hypervigilance may be a response to an accurate assessment of real danger.
To understand these psychological responses, however, we first have to understand what people are responding to.
Palestinian Mental Health Cannot Be Separated From Context
Imagine a fish struggling to breathe in polluted water. We might focus entirely on treating the fish while overlooking the conditions of the tank. Dr. Samah Jabr raises the concern in her course Decolonial Mental Health Practice: Clinical and Ethical Insights from Palestine, that mental-health care can focus so narrowly on individual symptoms that it fails to account for the political and social conditions producing distress. Jabr asks clinicians to consider individual, relational, and structural dimensions of suffering, including occupation, poverty, and state violence. She describes liberation psychology as an orientation that connects personal distress with its social and political roots.
According to the DSM-5-TR, a PTSD diagnosis requires exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence through one or more specified routes: directly experiencing the event; witnessing it in person as it occurs to others; learning that it happened to a close family member or close friend (with actual or threatened death being violent or accidental); or repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of traumatic events, generally in a professional context. If a client sits in our office and exhibits severe hypervigilance, the DSM tells us to treat that as a disorder, a symptom to be fixed. But if our client’s community is under constant surveillance or facing actual physical threat, a reality all too familiar to many South Asians, SWANA folks, and Muslims living in the West, their hypervigilance isn't disordered at all
Jabr highlights that the current model of mental health assumes that trauma is a singular event with a clear past and future, rather than ongoing colonial oppression. She challenges the reflex to diagnose before understanding historical and political conditions. She also questions how well conventional trauma frameworks capture life under continuing danger, when safety and an identifiable “after” cannot be assumed. And when institutions minimize or deny the circumstances through collective gaslighting, a person's emotional response may be misunderstood as an individual problem rather than a response shaped by their environment. Her teachings highlight an important reality: clinical assessment should not erase the context in which symptoms arise.
For clinicians, this means taking symptoms seriously while also naming the conditions that shape them, and supporting agency rather than treating adaptation to injustice as the goal.
Sumud: Beyond Resilience, Toward Dignity and Agency
Jabr distinguishes conventional descriptions of resilience, often framed as an individual's capacity to bounce back or adjust, from the Palestinian concept of Sumud. She emphasizes that people under oppression are not simply trying to return to the conditions that harmed them. They also seek dignity, agency, solidarity, and changes to those conditions.
Instead, she highlights Palestinian Sumud, commonly translated as “steadfastness” or “steadfast perseverance”, a Palestinian concept of maintaining dignity, identity, and everyday resistance amid dispossession and occupation. Sumud is not about adapting to our environment so we can better adjust to the pre-existing state of normalcy. It acknowledges that the normal state is fundamentally oppressive, while maintaining agency, dignity and collective identity in a system that is actively trying to erase you. She identifies the following interrelated expressions and conditions that sustain Sumud:
Affirming culture and identity; preserving the Palestinian national narrative, historical memory, and intergenerational continuity.
Creative expression and agency; community care, connectedness, compassion, and maintaining the fabric of society.
Action against oppression and resistance; steadfast perseverance and connection to the land; protecting dignity and communal values. Jabr also names spirituality, optimism, empathy, social support, education, health care, supportive organizations, justice, accountability, solidarity, and material necessities such as food as conditions that sustain these expressions (Jabr, 2026).
Preserving memory and documenting lived experiences can challenge denial and historical erasure. At a recent Muslim Association for Psychological Services gathering, I heard a Palestinian therapist describe a visit to the Old City of Jerusalem, near the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound. She recalled seeing elderly Palestinian women laying out produce from family farms despite being prohibited from doing so, in view of IDF soldiers. We discussed this being an example of Palestinian Sumud: maintaining a connection to land and livelihood in the face of adversity.
In Part 4 of my interview with Dr. Samah Jabr, I asked about the guilt experienced by people living outside Palestine who witness suffering but feel unable to help. Her response helped put words to not only what many folks in diaspora or with shared identities experience, but also what we can do:
Guilt may conceal helplessness. Jabr suggested that people sometimes experience helplessness because acknowledging their limited ability to change circumstances feels difficult.
Emotions reveal values. Rather than suppressing guilt, helplessness, or anger, she encouraged people to listen to what these emotions communicate about their values.
Agency can take different forms. Solidarity and meaningful action can reflect each person's resources, expertise, relationships, and capacity.
“Everyone can decide what to do according to their capacities.” — Dr. Samah Jabr Watch our full conversation available via inclusive therapists.
For diaspora communities, preserving family histories, maintaining cultural identity, building community, and bearing witness may carry particular meaning. If you are in diaspora some places to practice Sumud include:
Tell family stories across generations; preserve oral histories, photographs, family names, village histories, and memories of home, with relatives’ consent.
Keep Palestinian cultural practices alive through cooking family recipes, sharing traditional foods, speaking Arabic or family dialects, practicing dabke, making art, and observing cultural or religious traditions.
Attend Palestinian community gatherings, cultural events, commemorations, and intergenerational spaces that preserve memory, identity, and belonging.
Participate in mutual aid and community care. For example, supporting newly arrived families, sharing practical resources, and helping relatives or neighbors affected by displacement or loss.
Sumud does not mean being unaffected by oppression. It acknowledges that grief, fear, exhaustion, and helplessness can coexist with agency. It demonstrates that meaningful action can look different for people in different contexts. What is possible for someone living in the diaspora may differ profoundly from what is possible for someone under occupation. Agency must be understood within each person’s circumstances. As Jabr cautions, Sumud should not be romanticized or used to judge people whose capacity for steadfastness changes over time. It is also not a substitute for safety, rights, or institutional responsibility.
Recognition, Context, and Agency
And so, three years from the start of the genocide, we continue to bear witness that Palestinian suffering did not begin on October 7, 2023, and has not ended. As conversations about Palestine become less frequent in dominant spaces, we affirm the importance of preserving Palestinian histories and testimony across generations. Jabr discusses the saying “the old will die and the young will forget” as a colonial expectation that oral histories and collective memory resist.
We hold on to the context that Palestinians live in, both in Palestine and in diaspora, which holds space for history and the ongoing realities of occupation, displacement, and oppression. Because psychological responses must be understood within the contexts they exist in.
When therapists create space for clients to bring their full self into the therapy room, including their ancestry, their religious practices, their cultural foods, and their political realities, it helps leverage the profound source of strength grounded in Sumud.
This shifts the massive burden of pathology off the individual's shoulders and places it firmly where it belongs, on the structures of oppression. It reminds us that grief and anger can be deeply human responses to injustice.
Seeking Culturally Responsive Therapy in Texas?
If you’re navigating grief, anxiety, trauma, or the emotional weight of ongoing violence affecting your family or community, your experiences deserve to be understood within their full context.
I provide culturally responsive therapy informed by my experience supporting Palestinian clients and individuals affected by war, discrimination, collective trauma, and ongoing violence across SWANA/MENA communities.
Therapy cannot resolve political oppression or structural injustice, but it can offer space to process difficult experiences without separating them from your cultural, historical, political, familial, or spiritual realities. Together, we can explore ways to support your well-being, relationships, values, and sense of agency.
I offer individual and family therapy via telehealth to Texas residents, with a free 15-minute consultation available. Learn more on my Work With Me page.
References:
Associated Press. (2024, April 18). Police arrest dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia, including congresswoman’s daughter. https://apnews.com/article/cd80372939c7c08a40346e8b7d546da1
Democracy Now! (2025, July 3). Exclusive: Mahmoud Khalil, Palestinian activist jailed by ICE for 104 days, in first live interview [Video]. https://www.democracynow.org/2025/7/3/mahmoud_khalil
Halabi, D. (2025). [Video discussing collective gaslighting and suspended grief] [Video]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/DPjajcUET5P/
Institute for Middle East Understanding. (n.d.). Quick facts: The Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe). https://imeu.org/resources/the-nakba/quick-facts-the-palestinian-nakba-catastrophe/142
International Court of Justice. (2024, January 26). Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel): Order. https://www.icj-cij.org/node/203447
Jabr, S. (2026). Decolonial mental health practice: Clinical and ethical insights from Palestine [Online course]. Science and Nonduality.
Khan, M. (n.d.). Colonization and Palestinian mental health: Interview of Dr. Samah Jabr by Maliha Khan, LPC [Video interview]. Inclusive Therapists. https://www.inclusivetherapists.com/videos/colonization-and-palestinian-mental-health-interview-of-dr-samah-jabr-by-maliha-khan-lpc
United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner. (2025, September). Israel has committed genocide in Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds [Press release]. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-find
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. (2026, October 5). Humanitarian situation report: 2 October 2026. https://www.ochaopt.org/content/humanitarian-situation-report-2-october-2026