Facilitators Reflections on Symposium Workshop: Can We Talk About Palestine?

Before going to Belgrade we decided that we would write our reflections of the “Can we talk about Palestine?” workshops for Contexts. We agreed that each of us who wanted, would write our personal impressions of the workshops, and that one of us would co-ordinate these. What follows is our individual voices, but the writing process has enabled a collaborative piece.

The history leading to the Workshops

In May 2021, 67 Palestinian children were killed during an 11-day escalation in violence between Israel and Palestinian armed groups in the Gaza Strip. These hostilities started on a day I was attending an online meeting of the UK-Palestine Mental Health Network. Something in me was galvanised to attempt to speak about these issues more openly within the IGA-UK and GASi. In both IGA-UK and GASi there was no space to have a dialogue about what was happening to Palestinians. It felt threatening for many.

Much of what was happening at that time reminded me of the brutality that police and mental health workers use when dealing with black and Asians in the UK, Europe, and USA. I also recalled what my mother used to call the “bully boy tactics” of the Orange Order in Northern Ireland against the catholics to intimidate and instil fear. The press, and our respective governments, stated often that it is the behaviours of the blacks or the catholics that are the problem and labelled at least militants, if not terrorists when they attempt to defend their right to exist as equals. And that is what the most Palestinians are attempting to do – ordinary humans wanting to go about their daily lives without fear of intimidation and/or death by state condoned violence.

At the time I was a member of the IGA-UK Power, Position and Privilege (PPP) working group. A small group of women from PPP, including myself, joined together to write a statement of Palestinian solidarity for the IGA-UK (following on from Black Lives Matter statement). The members were Claire Bacha, Erica Burman, Reem Shelhi, Farideh and me. There were four other women in the early days but two left the group due to personal issues (Shireen Gaur and Jo Fyne); two remained as “sleeping partners” (Sue Einhorn and Suryia Nayak) due to their commitments elsewhere. The membership of the group formed organically. We developed a solidarity statement to bring back to the main working group for discussion, amendments, and acceptance. The statement is still under discussion.

Claire Bacha (RIP) thought it was important for us to consider workshops at the IGA-UK where dialogue could emerge around the issue of Palestine/Israel. In 2022 I invited some Israeli and Palestinian colleagues (a psychoanalyst, a group analyst, a mental health worker and the psychiatric head of Palestine Mental Health – all women) to join our meetings. Our aim was to think together about workshops within IGA-UK, but the plan stalled. I suggested doing a presentation or a workshop at the GASi Symposium in Belgrade in 2023. Different views emerged in the original PPP solidarity group around my suggestion and eventually Farideh and I decided to meet separately to develop something while also keeping the original group informed.

At our meetings Farideh suggested inviting some of her GA feminist colleagues to help us brainstorm ideas for a workshop proposal. The working group developed in an organic way, like our experience of forming the Palestinian Solidarity group. From these early meetings emerged a group of 8 women committed to the idea of running three workshops on Palestine and our title for the series, “Can We Talk About Palestine?” was agreed. Two members were unable to attend the workshops (Philippa and Marci) but continued to help us think about what we wanted to achieve.

Farideh and I always wanted these workshops to create a space for dialogue. My family history as a daughter of Northern Irish catholic mother and protestant father (who was in the military all his life) often filled me with a sense of anguish: am I the oppressed or the oppressor. Often it felt like the “troubles” happening in Northern Ireland would be happening within our home in England. The pain of all the suffering in my own history caused by colonialism and empire honed my desire to challenge oppression in other areas of the world, including Palestine. Farideh has been interested in the life of Palestinians and the state of Palestine and its history since the 1970’s. For Farideh Palestine symbolised oppression, like apartheid in South Africa.

We both felt it was important to do this work and in doing so honour the memory of Claire Bacha and Sarah Kalai, two of our Jewish colleagues, one British and one Israeli. We think they would have been proud of the success of our workshops at the GASi 2023 symposium in Belgrade. These workshops were the beginnings, in GASi at least, of talking about unspeakable matters.

Farideh and I facilitated the first of the three workshops; Angelika Golz and Sally Skaife did the second and Julia Borossa and Jud Stone the last one. We were fortunate to also have Caroline Rooney speak about the film “Breaking the Generations” that she co-directed.

For both Farideh and me, it was a truly wonderful experience to have our voices, and those of others who have often felt silenced, be heard. We hope that these workshops and their outcome will be an invitation for more dialogue and understanding.

Farideh Dizadji and Viv Harte

In our pre-meetings we talked about how this workshop might turn out – first – would our proposal ever be accepted when the voice of Palestinians and those who support Palestine liberation, have repeatedly been silenced in GASi, and even as some of us remembered, shouted down at the Barcelona online symposium. Once our workshops were accepted by the scientific committee, we wondered who would come and would there be an attempt at sabotage. Alternatively, we feared that no-one would come or only like-minded people. In the event, the workshops were well attended by a diverse group of individuals and did enable Palestine to be spoken about and important things came out of the discussion.

On each of the three days there was conflict, but it was ‘held’ in the group as something to be thought about, if not then, for the future. In the first session we watched the powerful film ‘Breaking the Generations’ which was introduced by one of the two directors, Caroline Rooney, (the other being William Parry) who we were privileged to have with us. The film was about the impact on Palestinian children and their families of incarceration. After the film, an Israeli in the workshop spoke very movingly about his experience and frustration at knowing exactly what took place in the occupied territories but feeling unable to do anything about it and feeling isolated in his community. A reply, as I recall, came from a Palestinian, but you still joined the army and you let your children join the army. This was a very powerful moment for me which seemed to exemplify something. How far are Israelis who sympathise with Palestinians willing to go in their support? Will they risk prison and ostracization? Who of us would? How can Palestinians remain hopeful when they see Israelis making the reluctant choice to obey orders to threaten them and their children, and to kill them?

At the second workshop the conflict intensified. We began by watching the film ‘The Present’ directed by Farah Nabulsi. This was a story about a father and daughter who must cross a check point to buy a present, a fridge, they are held up for a long time there and the father is put into a cage as he has forgotten his identity card. Eventually, they are allowed to pass. As they move off, the little girl lags behind, she is ashamed as whilst waiting, she wet herself. The father consoles her and when they get to the shop, he buys her another pair of leggings, and she is happy again. They buy the fridge and push it to the check point. But the fridge is too big to fit through the gap that the Palestinians are allowed to use. The road is just there but is only for Israelis. The father remonstrates to no avail getting angrier and angrier until it looks like he might just be shot. It is a frightening moment. Meanwhile the girl seems to take a gamble that they won’t shoot a little girl and wheels the fridge along the road. The film ends here.

This story mirrors a story told by a Palestinian therapist to researchers Lara and Stephen Sheehi who have recently written a book called ‘Psychoanalysis under Occupation, Practicing Resistance in Palestine’. The authors’ analysis of the therapy in which this story is told, and the story itself, enable a deeper understanding of the significance of checkpoints, how they are intentionally used by the Israelis to humiliate, to destroy dignity, to break up families, to smother childhood and most importantly, to disconnect events and create meaninglessness. The Sheehis’ book shows how psychoanalytically based therapy can unblock paths and connections that have been sealed for survival, bringing to visibility the impact of violent oppression. In doing so, psychotherapy becomes a tool for resistance.

The relating of this story to that of the film was interrupted by a Jewish American woman who wanted to talk about culpability. She confronted a Jewish Israeli woman who was in the room with something she had said in a previous group about being ‘one of the good ones’. The latter woman tried to defend herself by talking about how her husband had refused orders whilst a soldier. A row ensued which seemed to hold something important – yes, we are all culpable for suffering, but can we bear to think about it, and how can we get to feel good enough about ourselves to make ourselves useful to resistance?

The energy in the room was all between these two women with one clearly distressed. In moving it back into the group another row broke out, this time between two Palestinians that also referred to an earlier session. One of them accused the other of calling himself Israeli, when he was an Israeli Palestinian. She said he ‘should’ be calling himself Palestinian. There were cries then from others who said we shouldn’t be saying that people should or shouldn’t call themselves what they want, we don’t know enough about their circumstances, and that people resist in different ways. Here the tension was between individual freedom and solidarity.

In the third workshop we listened to some powerful poetry – a performance poet, Rafeef Ziahdah, verses of Mahmood Darwish and a rap from Lowkey. We had loosely based our three workshops around an idea of 1) the situation now, 2) the implications for clinical work, 3) what next?  In this last workshop we talked of resistance movements around the world – Life, Women, Freedom, Black Lives Matter, Me too, the Arab Spring. It was not long though before another row broke out. This time could the voice of a Palestinian woman be heard or was a European male voice to have dominance? The reality of who was speaking over who was unclear, but again the argument itself seemed to be the important thing. The European man walked out.

I am left wondering about the significance of these conflicts in the groups. They all involved a pairing, they each seemed to hold a tension in which, though I knew each time which voice I felt sympathy with, the fight was important and meaningful for all. The tendency of the rest of the group was to act like a chorus swaying towards the liberal norm in each argument, to support the person who was being confronted. The workshops seemed to be performing or enacting something that we can learn from. I described a little of the Sheehi’s book above that actually was not said in the workshop. On reflection, I thought that there were several attempts, unconscious I think, to prevent this book being spoken about, and that this mirrored the treatment that Lara Sheehi has had in her academic work where there has been an attempt by a Zionist group, StandWithUs, to silence her with accusations of antisemitism. There has been a strong reaction to her in the American Psychoanalytic community. It occurred to me that the violence of silencing gets continually repeated, with it not really being significant who is playing which role; the playing out of the drama is the key thing. I think that the repetitions must be allowed so that each time they can be further understood.

The workshops seemed to me a step on the way – at last the occupation of Palestine could be heard and we could begin to talk.

Sally Skaife

I would like to add some thoughts to Sally’s summary of our workshops: The title we came to choose, “Can we talk about Palestine?” felt like a call from an experience of being silenced. I think that we live in a time where opposing views of accepted mainstream realities are silenced and demonised. So I could extend this call, to “Can we talk about vaccines, climate change, gender identity,  Syria, Ukraine and so on.”

It seems that rather than engaging with their voices and ways of thinking, those with opposing voices are put into camps like ‘anti vaxxers’, ‘climate change deniers’, ‘supporters of….’ .and so on, and in the case of the critical voice about Israel’s state politics, we become ‘antisemitics’. So these three workshops felt like a relief, and the fights we witnessed were important. I felt especially grateful for having participants from Palestine, Israel, Palestinian Israeli, Jewish American , Muslim Indian and more…But what touched me most was the exchange between our Palestinian and Israeli colleague, stating that they were here alone, with no backing from their community, and unless this backing would develop, this communication could not be continued through their communities. I think that this should motivate us to continue this project.

Another important statement was made by one of the participants, that no matter how good we feel as a person, we are implicated by the history and actions of our countries. There is no escape from the realities and the projections we need to carry.
To me, the fight against propaganda through the hands of powerful people who don’t hesitate to follow criminal agendas, has to continue.

Angelika Golz

As I reflect back on these workshops, I am left with necessarily contradictory feelings. A surprised relief that they even took place and that they were consistently well attended in the crowded symposium programme of an organisation where until very recently the very name Palestine felt to me quasi-unmentionable and /or subject to repetitive arguments between members. But did this signify a shift? If so, what if anything, did it mean for those among us who are consistently silenced?

A profound despair at the intractability of the situation on the ground in Palestine that seems to be getting worse even as it is becoming more visible in the way it is being reported and publicly discussed. ‘Breaking the Generations’, the film that centred the first workshop, showed the incarceration of so many Palestinians including children both within a system of walls and checkpoints as well as actual prisons, to be a deliberate attack on connection; this, referenced by the film’s very title. Made eight years ago, it captured a situation that is ongoing, the specificity of a Palestinian childhood lived under conditions of threat, but perhaps with a broader implication as well. How can we turn away from the reality of our children as fodder of war?

Yet, even as specific injustices and even horrors become undeniable, a fragile hope arises in me. We did come together after all, over three days, and while there were certainly moments of conflict, and moments of open despair, I think that the very expression of both conflict and despair would not have been possible without at least a baseline of trust. A hard to delineate sense of connection was palpable to me within the group, between participants, with the material. Whilst it may well seem too utopian to speak of co-existence in the context of Israel and Palestine, group analysis has taught me that connection can occur when you least expect it.

Julia Borossa

From left to right: Viv Harte, Jud Stone, Farideh Dizadji, Sally Skaife, Angelika Golz, Julia Borossa, Caroline Rooney

jborossa@gmail.com; farideh.dizadji@gmail.com; angelika@golz.org.uk; vivharte@btinternet.com; sally.skaife@btopenworld.com; judstone25@gmail.com