“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 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 U.S., 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-U.S. or anti-Israel sentiment, often taking recourse to misleading accusations of antisemitism 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.”

The struggle for Palestinian liberation has become the defining ethical and political matter of our era.

When viewed through the psychiatric and psychoanalytic clinic, it’s clear that, for many, behind their solidarity with Palestinians today lies shared experiences of intergenerational suffering stemming from the legacy of ongoing American and European imperialism abroad and racism within. With social media allowing for an unprecedented level of worldwide proximity to an unfolding genocide after over four centuries of colonial violence has generated a compounding reservoir of trauma passed from generation to generation on every continent across the globe, the images and cries of devastation in Gaza evoke not just sympathy. They are triggering a profound sense of personal resonance. Many Pakistani, Iraqi, Afghan, Yemeni, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Myanma, Irish, Haitian, Somali, Rwandan, Black and Indigenous American, Filipino, Puerto Rican, South African, Colombian, etc. people are now, like my patient, experiencing planes above or cops on the streets as if they’re part of one big murderous machine that they too know very intimately.

From my vantage as both a clinician and political anthropologist, the growing uprising against U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza reflects an emerging revolutionary subjectivity born of massive trauma now coalescing around a singular stage of cruelty. This isn't about individual empathy, an imagined identification with the other as if you are the same as them—a sentimental virtue so often celebrated by white liberalism to validate its sense of its own righteousness while conveniently erasing both history and the otherness of the other and evading any responsibility to act. It is instead about a collectivization of otherness in a rejection of the Euro-American “rules-based international order” that has always depended upon the creation and subordination of supposedly threatening racial, ethnic, and sexual others to justify itself.

The identification at play in this collectivity is not with Palestinians nor Palestinian cultures, per se, but rather with the position of the paradigmatic other that the Palestinian people have for so long been forced by Euro-American hegemony—and the Israeli state it created and whose military it props up—to occupy. Consider, for instance, how the label ‘terrorist’ has so frequently been indiscriminately thrown at........

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