Abstract
Aseel Baidoun, is a Palestinian activist and Senior Manager for Advocacy and Campaigns at a humanitarian charity, based in the occupied West Bank and originally from East Jerusalem. In this piece she is interviewed by Cairsti Russell, a sociologist of media at the University of Glasgow. Cairsti is also co-producer and co-director of Freedom to Run, 1 a documentary film and running exchange project between runners based in Glasgow and Palestine centring on the Palestine/Edinburgh Marathons, exploring the restrictions on freedom of movement in Palestine, in which Aseel featured. This interview took place on 6 November 2024.
How are you?
I’m struggling, struggling with responsibilities, struggling with mental health. I don’t know.
That’s why I really wanted to be part of this when you suggested this article. We should be talking about mental health. I just feel like we have changed so much to a point that I think it’s a struggle to make sense of the world now.
A key thing that struck me in the webinar you spoke at organized by Sociologists in Solidarity with Palestinians 2 was your description of the mental toll of what’s happening to Palestine and to Palestinians. As a media sociologist who explores issues relating to the media and Israel and Palestine, I think a lot about hidden and untold stories. We’ve collaborated on a few different things but I hadn’t heard you describe the situation in those terms before. So, it got me thinking about the untold personal stories in Palestine that we aren’t hearing about, and how many of those stories there are.
First, I should be really clear that I’m not speaking on behalf of the people in Gaza who are actually under bombardment. So let me say, I’m talking about the Palestinians who are affected, but not as affected as people in Gaza. So relatively, my house is not bombarded, not my neighbourhood, not my city. So let me start from that. I’m only talking about Palestinians who did not lose it all, yet. When I mentioned in the webinar that I did not feel happy since the start of the war, the emotion: happy, is not part of how I feel anymore. It’s a lot of confusing and overwhelming emotions.
First of all, we feel guilty that we’re not suffering as much as the people in Gaza. We have this guilt whenever we eat food, that we have food. But our Palestinian people in Gaza are starving, so we feel guilty by eating. We feel guilty by going to work. I feel guilty that my child is alive because all my friends that I know have lost children and family. So, the war in Gaza made us Palestinians who are not in Gaza feel guilty for surviving, just the basics, for having the basics. We now carry this baggage of guilt, because we’re not suffering as much, even though we suffer a lot, being in the West Bank under the Israeli apartheid regime. But because we still have a roof, food, and we didn’t lose family members, we feel guilty. So, starting with the feeling of guilt, that has really ruined our days. We no longer complain. We feel like anything that happens to us in life is trivial compared to what people are suffering in Gaza. For example, when my friend lost her dad, she even felt ashamed to feel sad or express how sad she is because we feel like ‘Oh, it’s only one dad. Others lost the whole family.’ So, guilt, is one thing.
Second, the measuring of suffering now has a different scale. Nothing is considered suffering. You’re not allowed to express that you’re suffering unless you can compare it to what people in Gaza are suffering. For example, if you complain, like normal people vent, but now even this space of venting is no longer there because anything you say: ‘Come on, you’re fine.’ Because anything you say will seem selfish and trivial. So now, we feel guilty for just breathing and going to work and eating. We also don’t have the space to talk about our personal issues, because we keep thinking of what others are suffering and the amount of collective punishment and the amount of suffering now, the level of suffering is immense to a point like nothing you can compare it with. Nothing natural can be compared to the amount of suffering people in Gaza are enduring, and that means it fucked up our whole life. We are no longer complaining, we are no longer feeling, we are no longer enjoying.
In addition, seeing the worst nightmare of any human being become a reality in Gaza for 14 months and knowing that the Western world that used to teach us about human rights and morality and values is complicit in what has been done and still going on in Gaza made us feel not only abandoned, but we no longer relate to human rights. I feel confused. I no longer relate to values. I don’t know what my values are anymore, because I know that I can be killed and my daughter can be killed, and that would be okay, because we’re Palestinians. So, I feel angry. My mental health, not only am I guilty, and I no longer relate to my own problems, but I’m angry, really angry. I have no clear values, even my own discipline that I work in – human rights – I can no longer relate to because it has been violated in every word openly, with the countries who voted, complicit in regulating human rights. I feel completely lost. I have lost touch with reality, my value system and I have lost the sense of security. Imagine living in a world knowing that the worst thing can happen to you, to your neighbourhood, to your own city – is okay. And no one would even say, why?
I’m just walking around like a person who lost the sense of safety and security, happiness, I am always guilty and angry, I can no longer relate to my own problems, and I don’t feel safe.
In addition to all of this, I’ve been traumatized by stories, images and the suffering of my colleagues, of my friends, of distant relatives in Gaza for 14 months. I even began,
[the conversation pauses, Aseel becomes emotional]
. . .and I remember really well, Cairsti. In January I started smelling blood when I was hugging Maya. Maybe because it’s the nature of my work, I collect stories. But all of these images of children Maya’s age, killed, burned, or covered with rubble. They’re not things you recover from and knowing that this is still happening, and just because I’m a Palestinian, it means it will, or it may, or it can happen to me, to my daughter, to people I know, it just took away all these feelings of hope. I no longer think of the future, because I no longer know if there’s a future. I no longer feel that I have the right to think of the future, because all my colleagues have lost their houses, their siblings, their children. So, I feel guilty for even saying the word future.
And also, the uncertainty in politics, we don’t know if the West Bank will follow what happened in Gaza. It took away any hope for a career. I even look at Maya, and everyday thinking, will she continue going to school? I don’t know, all my colleagues’ children are not going to school anymore.
But we are only traumatized, I keep hearing the screams of the people. I get videos from Gaza. Not only are we traumatized by the footage that we’re receiving but the reality that we are living in is also traumatizing: the uncertainty, the fear, the daily Israeli incursions in my city.
I am traumatized to a point that when I hear airplanes, sounds of airplanes, I get an anxiety attack. When I hear fireworks, I have an anxiety attack. It feels like my tolerance to sounds that remind me of the war in Gaza, they trigger me to a point that it’s irrational. And again, I’m saying this as a person who was not directly affected by the war, so I have no idea what someone in Gaza would tell you. Again, I still have a roof, I still have my daughter, I still have my health, and I’m not starving, and all of this is happening to my mental health. I have no idea how that will impact the mental health of people in Gaza who have lost everything.
In addition to all of this, you’re emotionally fatigued, exhausted from feeling empathy. Now, when I talk to my colleagues in Gaza, I feel like I cannot answer the phone anymore. I can’t listen to what’s happening, cannot listen to all these war atrocities committed by the Israeli army. My emotional capacity can no longer relate and feel sympathy or empathy, I feel like we’re exhausted to a point that I just feel I want to close my eyes, close my ears and just do nothing because I have no capacity. Fourteen months of complete horror, and it’s getting worse and worse to a point that I don’t know. I really, I’m trying to visualize the feelings I feel like we’ve just, we became hollow, hollow, like empty inside with just things crashing.
Really, I feel horrible, but I can no longer keep listening to what’s going on. I feel like, ‘Oh, my God, I need a break, I cannot. I cannot.’ When a doctor calls me from a hospital in Gaza, I really think 10 times before responding. I don’t know what to tell him anymore. I don’t know what to do while I’m drinking my coffee in the office, while he is starving and he’s surrounded by Israeli soldiers, and he may be killed at any point. What should I tell him?
I feel I don’t know how, when, I hope, when this war ends and I hope that the West Bank will not meet the same fate as Gaza, and we still have our houses, I don’t know how we will be recovering. I don’t know. How can I ever feel happy again? Knowing what happened to all these people, knowing that literally a genocide was committed, and no one said anything just because we’re Palestinians, you know?
It must be so difficult navigating that emotional and psychological toll, the guilt, anger, loss of hope. I just can’t imagine how difficult it is to navigate all those feelings at the same time as navigating motherhood and parenting, as well as your role as a human rights advocate.
You know, working for the advocacy field in human rights was a roller coaster. In the beginning, I felt so motivated to do something to make sure that all these stories I’m getting are published, to make sure all these voices get heard. I was the one responsible for all the content coming from Gaza to my charity even though it was traumatizing, trying to get all this content and keep getting in contact with people under fire in Gaza. But then I reached the point where I feel it was so useless. So now I keep telling my supervisor, ‘Why would I keep sharing and writing when no one is listening. They’re all complicit in this.’ And I just feel we’re wasting our time. It’s not like the issue is lacking narrative or lacking reality. It’s all there, live. It’s broadcasted live, but no one actually cares.
And so, as a mother, I feel terrified. I even feel guilty bringing Maya into this world. And at the same time as a mother, I feel like I should hide all these feelings and just pretend that everything is okay, specifically as a single mother.
Everyone’s saying that you should buy stocks in case of emergency, in case we have the same fate as in Gaza. I don’t want to stock my house in food, because I know people who did that in Gaza ended up with no house. So, I feel we don’t have an option to prepare for an emergency, because the emergencies are so horrific to a point that you can’t prepare for them. I don’t want to buy food and solar. It’s not Covid. We’re talking about Israeli occupation, bombardment. We’re talking about forced displacement.
So, I feel as a mother I’m traumatized. I’m so scared of losing Maya. I feel the good thing is now, I try to enjoy even looking at her, I stare at her. I stare at her hands, knowing that I don’t know if she will make it to the next day, if I will make it to the next day. I literally stare at her, and I feel like maybe people in Gaza didn’t have the chance to stare. I should always make sure that she feels safe so I’m not allowed to show her how scared I am, like when we heard the Iranians retaliate with all these rockets I got an anxiety attack. I was putting Maya to sleep on the sound of bombardment, and I was so scared to a point I could feel an anxiety attack happening, but I could not show it to Maya. She was scared with the bombing and the building shaking. But I was telling her it’s okay, Maya, it’s just fireworks nearby. It took her 45 minutes to go to sleep, and once she went to sleep, I could no longer feel my legs because I was so scared. But I think I’m just drowning with fear that I can no longer receive the reality as it is. I felt like, I wish I was dead before hearing or seeing the building shaking, because I can no longer even imagine if I’m so scared because of everything that we have witnessed in Gaza, we will witness here, because I don’t know how people in Gaza have made it so far.
And as a human rights advocate working I feel like I should keep doing the job that I do, because we cannot give up. But inside me there’s a part of me that gave up. I don’t even care what I’m saying anymore, because I know no one is listening. But I just do it because I have to, as a Palestinian and because of my work ethic, I have to keep doing my job. But fucking hell, no one is actually caring, and people who do care can’t do much because they’re also helpless like us, because it’s all about politics and decision makers.
As a media sociologist who works on Palestine, the failure of mainstream media to accurately report what is happening makes me feel so angry, how the reality is being ignored. And hearing you outline it all, it makes sense why you have previously described Palestine as facing an existential threat.
Actually, it’s exactly how we feel. We are facing an existentialist threat. We’ve been facing this threat for so long, but now it’s so real. You know, when we used to imagine the worst-case scenarios, what’s happening now was a scenario that we even did not write down because it was too ugly to happen, too bloody to happen. But now it’s actually happening. We are facing an existentialist threat: the way that we’re always targeted, the way we are subjected to killing, to mass murder, to forced displacement. What’s happening in Gaza? Come on, we’re talking about more than 45,000 Palestinians killed and millions displaced. And what can be more than this to be counted as existentialist threat just by being a Palestinian?
They’re trying to make sure that wherever you’re living is uninhabitable, they’re attacking UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency, supporting Palestine Refugees], attacking schools, hospitals, so anything that can make your life feels somehow normal, making sure that it’s not. Not only are they making cities uninhabitable, movements so restrictive, but really just by being a Palestinian means you will be facing the worst. And I feel I don’t want to exist anymore. And I keep thinking like ‘Why was I born here?’ I feel so sad because in my life, I just wanted to enjoy the mountains, hikes, the rivers, to smell nature. And now I feel like ‘Oh, my God! That’s it! This is my life now, just fear and tragedy.’ I just have to enjoy that I’m still alive, I’m just being thankful that I have food. This is not the life I wanted. I just wanted to be someone who enjoys nature, who enjoys being a human, not someone who’s stripped of all feelings. The Israeli occupation is not one year old, it’s decades and decades of oppression, but the past 13 months have been to a completely different level. Every time I pass a checkpoint now, I have an anxiety attack, because I know anything can happen at the checkpoint. Literally, an anxiety attack when I see a soldier, because I know that a soldier can just shoot me in the head, and no one would ask him why, because I’m a Palestinian.
It has become so isolating, because it’s a collective feeling. Not only me. I bet you, the vast majority of Palestinians have very similar feelings that we don’t talk about it because no one wants to talk about it because we just want to escape it. It has become isolating. We don’t talk to each other anymore, because it’s so dominating. At the same time, it’s so isolating, we don’t want to share it. I feel I don’t want to keep talking about the situation. I just want to talk about normal things, but I cannot talk about normal things, and I don’t want to talk about the situation, so I don’t talk to anyone. And also knowing that I cannot share my burden with someone else, because that person has the same burden. I don’t want to burden them with it. It has become too much.
We first met through Freedom to Run, the film I made with Stephen Sheriff [fellow co-producer and co-director of Freedom to Run] about the restrictions on freedom of movement in Palestine and people have been really shocked by the reality of what’s shown in the film, of the occupation and the checkpoints, the reality of life in Palestine – even people who thought they knew a lot about the Israeli occupation. But we filmed that in 2018, and both the situation in Gaza and in the West Bank has dramatically changed since then.
You know, it’s so funny that now we call any time before 2020 as the ‘Golden Times’. So, imagine you’re saying that people are shocked. Now we refer to these times as Golden Times when we were just talking about checkpoints and military occupation. Now it’s completely different. Now, we live in a reality where the settlers and the Israeli army are raiding our cities and towns, vandalizing cars, streets, shooting anyone they see. We’re talking about restriction of movements not like the one we talked about in 2018. Now, literally, we cannot move between cities, let alone run. I will never run in a city or in between cities now because I will be shot 100%.
So, whatever you portrayed in 2018 are now referred to as the Golden Times, which is fucking scary, that we thought we were living the worst times then. But that worst has become a dream for us. We all wish that we could go back to 2018. Imagine! Really, I wish I could go back to a time where I used to feel sad when someone was killed. I don’t have the capacity now to feel sad when Israel killed someone because they literally kill hundreds a day. I want to go back to 2018 when they stopped you at a checkpoint, it felt like ‘Oh, God! This is horrible!’ But now they don’t even stop you. They just close it, and I don’t know how to explain it, but the way it’s deteriorated, we did not expect it. No one did. No one could expect this.
We are talking today for The Sociological Review. I wondered what role you think sociology can play, or what role should it play in what’s happening?
I think in sociology there should be a crucial understanding of something. . . as Palestinians we grew up being a big fan of resistance, resisting the occupation. We used to be a society that fosters people who say no to oppression. It’s worth studying how the Israeli systematic use of collective punishment has actually been targeting and destroying the societies fostering resistance. So now, as Palestinians, we now fear people who say no to oppression. We now fear them, because we know, if my neighbour was open, even on Facebook, just saying like ‘we should fight the Israeli occupation’, my building could be targeted. So as members of the Palestinian society, now we started fearing each other about this, which is creating a big dilemma, because, as a human being, my instinct is to fight oppression and to resist. But my reality is at the point where the Israeli occupation not only targets the person who resists the oppression, but targets the neighbourhood, the family, and the whole city. So now I want to make sure that all my neighbours are silent, like we’re okay with everything going around us. No one is openly resisting on Facebook, no one’s openly resisting in arms, no one is openly resisting in any kind of form, peaceful or not peaceful. Otherwise, we’ll all be targeted.
What’s happening now in Palestinian society is something against all nature. Not only are we being proactively punished by just being Palestinians, for our own ethnicity, and by just existing – because just existing is resisting – because we don’t do anything but just being a Palestinian in the West Bank. It means I’m resisting the settler colonialist project. But it’s also trying to survive. I can no longer be part of a movement talking about self-determination or resisting, I’ll be targeted, and everyone I love or know will be targeted. So it’s like existing in silence and facing all this oppression and making sure that everyone around me is silent or else we’ll be all targeted.
I think somehow, sociology and academia should try and manoeuvre – what does that mean for the society, for the family, where we used to really honour people who fight the occupation? Now fighting the occupation means that my house will be demolished. I’ll be detained even if it was my neighbour, or my dad, or my sibling. So, regardless of all the mental issues I am I telling you about, surviving now, means making sure that we’re all quiet in this oppression, or else I don’t know what will happen to us, either in prison or under the graves or homeless. So, I think the way the Israeli occupation altered our relationship with family members, with neighbours. The way we look at each other now, the way we all are facing the same existential threat. But we’re also becoming existential threats to each other if we decide to break out from silence.
We’ve spoken before about the dilemma of being involved in politics and activism, and about pushing back against the occupation. And what you’ve described adds a whole other dilemma and level of hopelessness and despair to the situation. It ties into what you were saying before about how things are much worse now. What else do people need to know?
We should no longer see the Palestinian struggle as ‘Palestinian struggle’ per se. It’s part of a global struggle. I think people should be relating to the Palestinian struggle, not because they’re pro-Palestinians or against Israelis or pro-Muslims. People should be relating to the Palestinian struggle because it’s a basic struggle to survive. And it’s a basic struggle to oppose oppression.
My message is that you cannot be an activist in human rights, you cannot be an activist in climate change, you cannot be an activist of any type in a rights-based group, and not be part of the Palestinian struggle to survive. You cannot be a human being with values. If you cannot relate to the Palestinian struggle or any other struggle that has the same issue, people just trying to survive and fighting and oppression. It’s not about Israelis or Palestinians, Muslims or Jews at all. It’s about basic human rights.
I really find it hard to survive. That’s it. I just find it hard to survive Israeli threats, I find it hard to move. I find it hard to exist as a human being. As a Palestinian I cannot not relate to any other global struggle. And I expect the same from people who call themselves activists. Some people decide not to act on their values, they decide not to be activists, they decide to be, I don’t know, individualist. But people who decide to do something about anything, they should also do something about the Palestinians, because it’s a global struggle. We can no longer say Palestinian is a complex struggle. No, it’s not, at least not in the past 13 months. It’s Israel committing the worst atrocities against humanity and Palestinians just trying to survive. If they survive. That’s it. It’s time to portray the Palestinian struggle as part of any struggle, of any movement.
I think that’s a powerful place to end this.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.