Is Unresolved Group Trauma an Obstacle for Peace? An Inclusive Israel-Palestine workshop
Introduction: A convoluted road to an uncertain workshop on Israel-Palestine
On 7 October 2023, we were shocked, deeply saddened and enraged by the horrific terror-attack perpetrated by Hamas on southern Israel, in which 1,139 people, including 38 children, were murdered and 250 other people were taken hostages.
In the next few hours, we condemned this crime against humanity and sent no less than 100 WhatsApp messages and emails of condolences and support to our Jewish colleagues and friends, in Israel, the UK and other countries. We were not aware at the time that, in the nine months immediately prior to 7 October, Israel had killed 238 Palestinians, including 44 children (Stern-Weiner, 2024; Jones, 2025).
We were cognizant that the terrorist attack, in the foreground, occurred against a background of many decades of oppression, political violence and deprivation of human rights of the Palestinian people. However, being honest, we must confess that we had pushed this longstanding, ongoing injustice out of everyday consciousness, to place it in a comfortable-enough position somewhere in the back of our minds. It was dormant in our personal and social unconscious (Hopper and Weinberg, 2016).
Also, within a few moments of the Hamas assault, some major institutions of Holocaust and genocide studies determined that their mission required them to speak out. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), which includes a group of scholars running a research centre on genocide prevention, published a statement expressing:
“… solidarity with the many Holocaust survivors who helped build the State of Israel, where they could finally live in the freedom and security they deserved after centuries of persecution, and ultimately genocide” (USHMM, in Cohen, 2024).
This declaration and similar simultaneous statements from other Jewish organizations indicated that, in various ways, the murderous attack of 7 October became mixed or resonated with the Holocaust perpetrated 80 years previously. We were very sympathetic with the statements and, at the same time, felt anxious about what might happen next.
On 9 October 2023, the (then) Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant dictated the continuous bombing and the siege of the whole of Gaza. Literally, he proclaimed:
“I ordered a full siege on the Gaza Strip. No power, food or fuel. Everything is closed” (Gallant, quoted in Fabian, 2023).
To what extent did unresolved group trauma play a part in this disproportionate, state-terror revenge? It became obvious that the huge collective punishment of civilian Palestinians was in breach of the Geneva Conventions, which unequivocally speak of an obligation to protect goods and objects that are:
“… indispensable to the survival of the civilian population” (Geneva Conventions, in Shaw, 2024).
The recurrent and persistent blockade of humanitarian relief, the destruction of civilian infrastructure and the deprivation of basic necessities, such as food and fuel, are prima facie war crimes.
Having said that, many of the scholars and institutions that had issued or signed statements condemning Hamas stayed silent, or tried to justify the slaughter of Palestinians in the name of the right of self-defence and genocide prevention (Cohen, 2024).
This argument of a large number of Zionist scholars, as well as politicians in the US, Israel and Europe, in favour of a strategy that promotes a likely genocide of the other, in order to “prevent” one’s own genocide, comes across as dangerously inconsistent, and denotes double standards.
Soon after the Israeli army started the destruction of Gaza, and in contrast to the silence of many of his colleagues, the Jewish independent scholar Raz Segal (director of the program of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University, in New Jersey) decided to speak out. In his view, the massive indiscriminate assault on this besieged Palestinian territory can be seen as:
“a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes” (Segal, 2023).
The 1948 United Nation’s Genocide Convention, drawn up in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, defines genocide as:
Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group (UN, 1948).
Raz Segal (2023) had the courage to talk about the discrepancy between condemning Hamas terror and being silent about the terror of the State of Israel. He considered that Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza was explicit, open, and unashamed.
Like Segal, in December 2024, Nimer Sultany (a Palestinian citizen lining in Israel, as well as an international law scholar at SOAS University of London) also pointed to this double standard: many Jewish scholars rushed to condemn the genocidal act perpetrated by Hamas, whilst they were unable
“… or unwilling to make the same charge against Israel, when Israel has committed much worse atrocities against the Palestinians since then” (Sultany, in Cohen, 2024).
Furthermore, as the occupying power, Israel is legally bound to allow relief into Gaza under the Geneva Conventions. Denying it is not only inhumane but also a war crime. Indeed, both Israeli and Hamas leaders now have to face an International Criminal Court arrest warrant, for starvation as a method of warfare and for other crimes against humanity.
Since October 2023, we have written no less than 20 articles that have been published (open-access) in professional journals, forums and newsletters (including Contexts), as well as newspapers, in the UK, Spain and the US. We condemned both Hamas and the government of Israel, and advocated for permanent peace and justice, for which it is necessary to end the human rights violations and the oppression of the Palestinian people.
Witnessing, day after day, the massacres perpetrated against the population of Gaza made us sick. We were not alone in experiencing this. In January 2025, Doctors Against Genocide (DAG) described some of the psychological impact of having witnessed the unfolding of genocide in the previous 15 months. They described this as genocide sickness (DAG, 2025a):
being sick from witnessing a televised and live-streamed genocide, sick from the complicity of the western world, sick from the silence of those in power.
In the circumstances, it gradually became clearer to us that, as mental health professionals and citizens, we have a duty to go beyond the comfort zone of our homes and consulting rooms, to speak out in the social and political arena. And we started this workshop journey, standing up for humanity. We employed a psychoanalytic, group-analytic and attachment lens with the aim of encouraging people, particularly those in positions of power, to work harder for peace and justice.
In September 2024, we proposed a one-day workshop to the Institute of Group Analysis (IGA), based on our article “Israel-Palestine: Unresolved group trauma is an obstacle for peace” (Ezquerro and Cañete, 2025b). No event of this nature on the Israeli-Palestine asymmetrical conflict had ever taken place at the IGA, since the institution was created in 1971. The workshop was given green light in December 2024.
We aimed to put together an inclusive programme, in which different knowledge, facts, views and experiences could be shared with a view to promoting “dialogue” (one of the cornerstones of group analysis), in the service of sociopolitical justice and peace-making. But it was not a straightforward venture.
On the one hand, some colleagues strongly criticised the event as “ill-conceived” and were adamant that the IGA needed to focus on clinical issues, not on politics. On the other hand, we were told that the workshop reinforced “colonial narratives” and, on the face of it, was another “normalising event” that would contribute to perpetuate oppression and injustice. Some colleagues even stated that they would not attend an event to which people belonging to the other “camp” had been invited.
We nearly gave up on the workshop. Yet, for our own sanity, we were determined to go ahead, despite the uncertainty and tremendous pressure we were under, to cancel the event. One month prior to the scheduled date, only eight people had registered. We decided that proceeds would be donated to a Palestinian medical charity, and personally contacted colleagues and members of the public in the UK, Spain, the US and several Latin American countries, in a fundraising campaign.
Against all the odds, and with the help of an intense final push, the workshop came to be a success. We had a full house at the IGA. There were 120 registrants (about half in person and half online), many of them from Spain and Latin America (even one colleague from the US).
Not without apprehension, the five speakers and the participants managed to work together, and jointly created a reflective space for dialogue. It was possible to talk about unresolved collective trauma and its role in the unfolding of the crimes against humanity of the previous 18 months, first in Israel and, then, in terms of child casualties and the destruction of fertility clinics to prevent births, in Occupied Palestine, to an unprecedented new dimension in human history.
The challenge of communicating overwhelming facts about a highly asymmetrical conflict
During the setting up of the workshop, we were advised not to use the term “asymmetrical”, because “it is divisive and reinforces polarisation”. To mitigate our anxiety, we called on members of our peer group. Handling a challenging situation would have to be, necessarily, a group enterprise.
Sue Einhorn, Gabrielle Rifkind and both of us belong to the same year group, as we had trained together at the IGA, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Then and there, Dick Blackwell was one of our teachers. Having said that, his democratic and decolonising teaching approach made him be considered an integral member of our student peer group.
We aimed at a creative and potentially healing dialogue. We knew this would be difficult to achieve and were prepared to settle for a minimum goal of breaking the silence and keeping the communication going. Communication is a keystone of the group-analytic ethos.
At the age of 18, Foulkes (the father of group analysis) was enlisted in the telephone and telegraph section of the German Army, during the First World War. He served in France in the rear, where he became fully mindful of the power of communication for maximising survival. This idea would come to be one of the fundamentals of his conception of group psychotherapy (Foulkes, 1964).
Communication as a form of communing, of sharing one’s intimate thoughts and feelings, is no doubt a powerful therapeutic tool. From the outset, Foulkes emphasised that the most important factor in group therapy is the process of communication itself. Perhaps influenced by his work as a communicator during the First World War, he suggested that, for effective survival, it is essential to keep the communication going; in his mind, psychotherapy and communication come to be the same thing (Ezquerro and Cañete, 2023).
Against that background, we felt free to communicate the harrowing findings of a comprehensive investigation that had been completed and published, just the week prior to our workshop, by a United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
The UN (2025) report shows that Israel has increasingly used sexual and reproductive violence, as well as other forms of gender violence against the Palestinian population, to terrorise it and perpetuate a system of oppression that undermines its right to self-determination, according to Navi Pillay, Chair of the Inquiry.
The publication of the report was preceded by two days of public hearings, held in Geneva on 11 and 12 March 2025, during which the Commission heard victims and the health personnel who attended them, as well as witnesses, representatives of civil society, academics, lawyers and medical experts.
The report details how Israeli forces have systematically destroyed sexual and reproductive health services throughout Gaza, and have imposed a complete siege of the territory that have greatly restricted humanitarian assistance, including the supply of medicines and equipment necessary to guarantee assistance to pregnancies and births, as well as postpartum care.
These acts violate the reproductive rights and the autonomy of women and girls, as well as their right to life, health, the formation of a family, human dignity, physical and mental integrity, and, also, the right not to be subject to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
Thousands of women and girls have died in Gaza due to complications related to pregnancy and childbirth, as a result of the conditions imposed by Israeli authorities. This amounts to the crime against humanity of extermination, according to the UN Commission.
The report concluded that the Israeli forces have caused deliberate damage to the Palestinian population of Gaza, as a group, through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive health care. This organised violence contains two categories of genocidal acts, according to the Geneva Convention on Genocide:
– First, the deliberate imposition of living conditions that have, as its objective, the physical and mental destruction of the Palestinian population.
– Second, the imposition of measures aimed at preventing births.
Together with the use of starvation as a war method, Israel has launched direct attacks on reproductive health centres, including the destruction of maternity services and the main in-vitro fertility clinic of Gaza, with its 4,000 human embryos. As the Commissioner Pillay further stated:
“These violations have not only caused severe immediate physical and mental harm and suffering to women and girls, but also irreversible long-term effects on the mental health and reproductive and fertility prospects of Palestinians as a group” (Pillay, in UN, 2025).
The massive and constant murder of women and children in Gaza, as a result of the Israeli strategy of intentionally bombarding residential buildings and health resources, in densely populated areas, has been happening on an unprecedented scale in the history of humankind.
In contrast to the 1,139 people murdered by Hamas’ terrorist attack, according to the latest United Nations’ estimate, since 7 October, in a continuous act of state-terror, Israel has murdered 61,709 Palestinians (UN, 2025); there are more than 10,000 dead bodies estimated to be still under the rubble.
This death toll includes 17,492 children murdered in Gaza (DAG, 2005b). And this figure is higher than that of all children who have been killed in the last four years, as a result of all other 32 current wars in our planet, combined. In addition, more than 25,000 children have been injured and 17,000 orphaned. And Gaza has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world. According to the UN (2025) this is a genocidal crime against humanity.
Israeli and Palestinian voices: Further mental health asymmetries
Any human being exposed to any of the unspeakable traumatic experiences described above deserves adequate support from mental health professionals.
Currently, there is a mental health crisis in Israel. After 7 October 2023, about three million Israelis, within a population of ten million, have experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress, according to Israeli health authorities. For some 580,000 people, these symptoms have been severe, as reported by Bletter (2025) in The Times of Israel.
Psychiatric and psychotherapeutic resources have proved insufficient, in the circumstances. This is despite the fact that at the time of the terrorist attack of 7 October, there were 1,420 psychiatrists and 8,864 psychologists available to help with the treatment of this national trauma (Levy, 2023). In addition, some retired mental health professionals in Israel returned to their clinical duties to help with the crisis.
According to Professor Ofrit Shapira-Berman, a scholar of Israeli trauma, the terrorist assault of 7 October is Israel’s biggest trauma yet, not only because of its objective magnitude, but also because it echoes past traumas, particularly the Holocaust. In her view, many Israelis perceive 7 October in terms of the government’s failure to protect them (Adams, 2025), which has partly broken the trust of many citizens in the state, including trust in the state’s capacity to provide effective mental health services, as reported by Minsberg (2024), on the first anniversary of Hamas terrorist attack.
As the event was within sight and we wanted to be as inclusive as possible, we decided to seek first-hand information from mental health professionals living and working in Israel and Occupied Palestine, to be share with workshop delegates.
We contacted two Israeli colleagues (Robi Friedman and Marit Joffe Milstein) and two Palestinian colleagues (Samah Jabr and someone else who said she could not really speak, as her WhatsApp and email correspondence was under surveillance by Israeli Intelligence). We then got in touch with another colleague, a Palestinian citizen who resides in Israel (Nimer Said).
The first response came from Samah Jabr, Director of Mental Health in Occupied Palestine. In a swift email, in which she expressed gratitude for our offer of solidarity and for including her voice in the workshop project, she wrote:
“Dear Arturo, the continuous and unresolved trauma of Palestinians is not just an obstacle to peace – it is an ongoing crime. We must resist framing trauma as a type of symmetrical condition while oppression is one-sided and systemic. The social unconscious of trauma cannot be addressed in isolation from justice, accountability and, also, an end to colonial violence. The role of mental health professionals is not only to heal but also to bear witness and stand in solidarity. Our silence (or our equivocation) perpetuates harm” (Jabr, personal communication to Arturo Ezquerro, 19 March 2025).
We are deeply grateful to Samah Jabr for sharing with us crucial, true reflections under extremely difficult circumstances for her and her people. If we really want peace, it is essential to hear her voice and the voices of other Palestinians struggling to survive.
On reflection, we must admit that, during the 40 years we have worked in mental health, we have been biased. On the one hand, we have been privileged to accompany many Holocaust survivors in their therapeutic journey, and to have seen them improve through individual and group psychotherapy (Ezquerro, 2023). On the other hand, sadly, we have not been privileged to treat Nakba survivors. We are so sorry about this.
Looking back, we think we could have been more proactive in liaising with Palestinian colleagues, as we have done with Israeli colleagues on a regular basis. In all honesty, we now feel we have to redress the balance. Via medical charities and voluntary mental health networks, we have offered our availability to the Palestinian people for any support we might be able to offer. They can count on us.
In our personal and professional lives, we had not come across an ongoing and continuous traumatogenic situation, as desperate and dehumanising as the inferno we have been witnessing in Gaza.
Before 7 October 2023, four out of five children in Gaza lived with depression, grief and fear, and three in five self-harmed (Save the Children, 2022). This charity has also found that, since 7 October 2023, there has been a dramatic deterioration in Gazan children’s mental health (McKernan, 2024).
On 13 December 2024, Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) published another highly distressing study on the children of Gaza: 96% of children surveyed felt their death was imminent, 79% suffered from nightmares, 73% displayed symptoms of aggression and 49% wanted to die. Gaza’s children are bearing the burden of a war they had no role in starting (AOAV, 2024).
According to Samah Jabr, trauma in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is collective and ongoing. The threat is constant.
It is not accurate to talk about post-traumatic stress, because the Palestinians are dealing with chronic and continuous trauma (Helbich and Jabr, 2022). There is a real, ongoing and persistent traumatogenic context that must be changed. Help is desperately needed at the international level.
Samah Jabr further reported that, in contrast to Israel, in Occupied Palestine, there are just 34 psychiatrists to look after the mental wellbeing of more than five million people.
In Gaza, there were only six public community mental health centres and one inpatient psychiatric hospital before 7 October 2023. None are functional now (McKernan, 2024). Having said that, Palestinians are determined to survive and developed Sumud, an Arabic term that is comparable to resilience. Sumud has become an important shared political and cultural value for them.
Three days after Samah Jabr’s email, we had a response from Robi Friedman, a colleague and friend with whom we have collaborated over 30 years. He is a founding member of the Israeli Institute of Group Analysis and former President of the Group Analytic Society International. He wrote about his own clinical work:
“Dear Arturo, due to the current war circumstances, I returned to conduct groups with post-traumatic stress patients, in a specialized hospital. They feel threatened and damaged by overwhelming emotions; they haven’t overcome the terror and anxiety about the eruption of internal and external violence; they still feel attacked by these terrible emotions and memories. They consider themselves victims of their attackers, as well as of their own nightmares and depression. At the moment, they cannot stop fighting against real and imagined enemies. Accompanied by an empathetic group, they may progressively feel more secure. But how can you make groups therapeutic with a whole terrorized population, including Arabs, Jews and Druze? And how can the people of Gaza treat their trauma? Trauma is an obstacle for peace!” (Friedman, personal communication to Arturo Ezquerro, 22 March 2025).
We very much appreciate Robi Friedman’s clinical contribution, which helps us understand the psychic suffering of his patients at this critical time.
A few days later, we received a response from Marit Joffe Milstein, another group-analytic colleague working in Israel,whom we know well, as she has been Co-Chair of the Group Analytic Society International until recently. She was brave to let us know that she was feeling close to burnout. Over the last 18 months, she has experienced various stresses contributing to a state of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. She decided to go to a retreat in India to recover. From her retreat, she wrote:
“It is so hard to face the intolerable, to open our eyes, to know, to mourn. Words for me are not enough anymore to face the disaster, and not to fall into deep depression and hopelessness. Step by step, against our deep fears, we should find ways to co-operate and join the mourning of our Palestinian brothers and sisters. We have to face the consequences of decisions that will affect future generations, showing our own inability to challenge the cruelty that was done in our name” (Joffe Milstein, personal communication to Arturo Ezquerro, 26 March 2025).
We specially appreciate Marit Joffe Milstein’s courage to share her own personal experience, to express sympathy towards the Palestinian community and to show concern for the wellbeing of future generations.
Finally, on 27 March, we had an email exchange with Nimer Said, who gave us permission to share with workshop delegates his recent work on silencing mechanisms and, more specifically, his conceptualization of what he has described as the Gaza Numbness Syndrome (Said, 2025). According to him, the scale of suffering in Gaza has become almost unspeakable, because language has been torn away, rendered or completely silenced.
In his view, the Gaza Numbness Syndrome refers to a psychic state of collective dissociation, moral paralysis, and emotional shutdown in the face of unrelenting horror. And it spreads to institutions and entire societies, consciously or unconsciously, turning away from what must be known. This is the result of systematic silencing (Pappe, 2025). In this way, numbness becomes a political project that manifests through the criminalization of Palestinian voices, the reframing of facts as opinions and of historical grievances as controversial:
“Language itself becomes suspect. Words like occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, or even Palestine are stripped of legitimacy, turned into red flags in institutional policy, or eliminated altogether … An entire architecture is erected to prevent the global public from knowing and, more dangerously, from feeling. Emotional overload is weaponized. The endless flood of graphic images, dismembered children, collapsing buildings … slowly produces the opposite of empathy. It produces apathy. And then, into this vacuum, the machinery of denial sets in … The killing of journalists, the destruction of hospitals, the starving of children … all this becomes alleged, unverified, regrettable, but never named for what it really is: deliberate, unforgivable, criminal” (Said, 2025).
He concludes that the Gaza Numbness Syndrome is a consequence of epistemic violence: the intentional destruction of context, history, and moral clarity. And those who try to resist this silencing are swiftly discredited and attacked: their humanity is put on trial; their emotions become suspect. In many corners of the world, to be moved by Gaza is to risk personal, professional, academic and, sometimes, legal consequences.
We are most grateful to Nimer Said for his insights to help undo the numbness and declare that silence will not have the final word. This is one of the reasons why we convened the Israel-Palestine workshop. We were nearly silenced. But we survived.
We were inspired by the work of Hannah Segal (1987), Silence is the real crime, and reassured by Peter Beinart’s (2025) reflections in his recently published book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. At the workshop, we felt free enough to formulate a naïve question:
What would happen if the billions of viewers (who have witnessed the daily massacre of Palestinians in Gaza) had the courage to speak out?
Group-analytic echoes
The workshop would not have come to life without the contribution of our group-analytic partners Sue Einhorn, Gabrielle Rifkind and Dick Blackwell, who ran the extra mile to help us overcome some of the hurdles that were getting in the way. The five of us have shared more than three decades of group-analytic journey. Being together in the workshop, as a group, felt safe: a creative experience of intimate group attachment (Bowlby, 1969; Ezquerro and Cañete, 2025a).
Sue Einhorn provided a daring and engaging personal account of her own experience as a trauma expert and as an independent member of the Jewish Diaspora.
She disclosed that she has been labelled as a “non-Jewish Jew”. This expression was coined by the Jewish philosopher Isaac Deutscher to describe a person, born Jewish, who is not religiously observant, is not a Zionist and not an Israeli. So, non-Jewish Jews are defined by what they are not.
Having said that, she emphasised that a non-Jewish Jew is still Jewish, and she quoted the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who had said that, when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, is when the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously and complicatedly matters most.
Sue Einhorn, in line with Beinart (2025) added that it is the Jewish Diaspora who could help end this war, by speaking out as Jews who oppose genocide and who can envisage other, much better ways for Jewish Israelis to live safely, and avoid their complicity in annihilation and the mass murder of Palestinians.
Dick Blackwell, a trauma expert who took a lead on the development of sociopolitical group analysis, provided a powerful scrutiny of historical events in modern and contemporary Europe, from which he proposed a more than plausible hypothesis that a true understanding of this cataclysmic conflict would be seriously handicapped without taking into account the history of colonialism in the Arab world and antisemitism in Europe, where the problem started well before it was exported to the Middle-East.
He convincingly argued that, at its core, colonialism is a terrorist activity, as it often involves terrorising the native population in order to maintain a particular system of domination, which is itself implicitly defined as not terroristic despite the real terror it perpetrates. And, when the colonised population reacts with violence, this resistance is inevitably labelled as terrorism.
Dick Blackwell also pointed out that there is a tendency to overlook the more complex dimensions of history and contemporary international politics, interwoven with the internal conflicts and divisions within the groups that are regarded as the principal protagonists; for example, the overlooking of the many Jews who have, for a century and a half, vigorously opposed Zionism.
Gabrielle Rifkind, a member of the Jewish Diaspora and distinguished international conflict mediator working in the Middle-East for 20 years, vividly described the absolute horror of what happened in Israel and what has been happening in Gaza since then, which can make us lose faith in humanity. She added that a terrible insanity has emerged, in which each act of violence is another nail in the coffin for peace. She stated: it is only by creating a better future for the Palestinians that we can make this madness subside and achieve peace.
Drawing on her work as mediator, she knows that Palestinians still dream of returning to their grandparents’ homes. They walk around with the key to their forebears’ house hanging on a loop around their necks, and remember intimate details about their lost family homes, whilst yearning to return to lands in Israel and Occupied Palestine. But most live in cramped, squalid conditions, with no freedom of movement.
The Nakba is not a just a memory. It is a living nightmare. In this context, Hamas draws its identity from the marginalised and dispossessed of society, and has access to many disaffected young men. Each Palestinian civilian or fighter killed creates new recruits and militant supporters.
According to Gabrielle Rifkind, people are not born violent; they become violent through pain, powerlessness and humiliation.
And, when there is no legitimate means of being heard and people are excluded from access to essential living resources, they are more likely to seek ways to express themselves through the politics of resistance, the politics of revolt and the politics of violence. She concluded that real peace cannot be accomplished while Palestinians are denied their human and political rights.
Survival and attachment to homeland
The workshop was delivered safely. It was a painfully powerful day, with difficult emotions and deep reflections that contained a tiny ray of hope.
At the end of the day, we shared a disturbing question that had been formulated by Jewish Independent Voices (IJV), a group of prominent British Jews who oppose all forms of racism, on 27 January 2025 (International Holocaust Remembrance Day):
“… what does it mean to remember one genocide as we watch in horror while another one unfolds?” (IJV, 2025).
Both Israeli and Palestine lives matter. We must all live up to the mandate of Never Again, in the knowledge that it has to be, necessarily:
Never Again for Anyone!
And before saying goodbye, as a tribute to humanity, survival and attachment to homeland, we read out to the delegates a fragment of one of the poems of Canto General, by the Chilian poet Pablo Neruda, which we translated from the original Spanish version:
I don’t feel alone in the night,
in the darkness of the land.
I am people, innumerable people.
I have pure strength in my voice to penetrate the silence
and to germinate into the darkness.
Death, martyrdom, shadows, cold breeze,
suddenly cover the seed.
And the people seem buried.
But live returns to the homeland.
Conclusion
For the Israeli community, recovery from a cumulative trauma that developed over many centuries of antisemitism in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, is complex and difficult enough. For people in Occupied Palestine, effective recovery is overwhelmingly challenging, under a cruel and persistent traumatogenic Nakba context of ethnic cleansing and continuous political and military oppression, let alone 18 months of daily bombing.
Unresolved group trauma is an obstacle for peace. Political violence and crimes against humanity in Occupied Palestine must stop at once.
Declaration of conflicting interests
None, apart from the authors’ commitment to humanity and peace-making.
ORCID iD: Arturo Ezquerro https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9910-4576
ORCID iD: Maria Canete https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7967-1103
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Arturo Ezquerro. British-Spanish consultant psychiatrist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and group analyst; former Head NHS Medical Psychotherapy Services for Brent, London; over 200 publications in six languages, including six books.
email: arturo.ezquerro@ntlworld.com
Maria Cañete. Consultant psychotherapist, psychiatrist and group analyst; senior trainer, Institute of Group Analysis; former director group therapy programme, University College, St Charles, and Mile End Hospitals, London.