When Our Work Breaks Us
The social media blitzkrieg targeted a friend who is the only Black town council member of our small suburb. When she had the temerity to end her Facebook post with the hashtag #FreePalestine, accusations of antisemitism reliably followed, escalating to the allegation that her use of said hashtag constituted psychological torture. As constituents spoke up in her defense, partisans of Israel shot them down with AIPAC talking points, histories that did not reflect the military archives Israel declassified in the 1980s, and, of course, narratives about the monolithic and nefarious nature of Palestinians (who, according to these partisans, don’t exist).
Knowing the consequences for my mental health, I entered the fray, providing eyewitness accounts from my twenty years of work as a human rights advocate in Palestine’s Al-Khalil/Hebron District. I wrote about the daily traumas that my Palestinian neighbors face: Israeli settler and soldier attacks, checkpoint humiliations, the dwindling hope that their children will have a tolerable future.
It was the effect of the Israeli military occupation on Palestinian children that broke me after two decades of work in the region. Specifically, the teargassing of elementary, middle school, and high school children. The soldiers’ smiles, the pleasure they derived from throwing gas grenades at children, would replay like five-second videos as I tried to fall asleep and each morning as we approached a checkpoint for our daily school run monitoring. Our inability to effect change also took its toll. Palestinian and Israeli partners had told us to avoid deportation at all cost, which took civil disobedience off the table. Most draining was the indifference of the international community, the Israeli public — aside from our Israeli activist friends — and even Palestinians in wealthier Hebron neighborhoods to this vindictive exposure of children to noxious chemicals.
No Khalili child has died from the gas yet, although some have required hospitalization. I understand why the bombing of Gaza and killings of civilians, especially minors, claim the headlines. But where else in the world is it okay to blanket schools and the surrounding neighborhoods with tear gas? Only in the poorest communities of Al-Khalil/Hebron must parents choose whether their children’s education is worth the cost of exposing them to a gas that tells their developing brains they can’t breathe. (This neurological response often proves fatal for infants.)
Yes, the gas grenades appear after little boys throw rocks in the direction of the checkpoints. These checkpoints have turned their neighborhoods into economic wastelands and dens for crime organizations because Palestinian civilian police cannot operate there, according to the rules of Israel’s occupation. They separate families. They are the place where teenage soldiers can mock men dressed in pristine suits and burnished shoes on their way to work and where soldiers kill women, men, boys, and girls who look suspicious. But these rocks almost never hit the checkpoints. And, as we often pointed out, if the soldiers weren’t there, the boys would not throw them.
Complex PTSD
People trapped in long-term violent situations may develop what psychologists call c-PTSD or complex PTSD. They can include hostages, survivors of intimate partner violence, prisoners in solitary confinement, bullied children, and, well, my neighbors in the Old City of Hebron. Imagine never knowing when soldiers might burst into your house in the middle of the night, overturn all of your furniture and steal your money. Imagine watching your son leave home every morning and worrying that a soldier might decide he looks too full of himself and beat him, arrest him, or even shoot him. Imagine Israeli settlers stoning your family and home for fun while police and soldiers stand by and watch.
Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) set up an office in al-Khalil/Hebron and soon realized that people in the Old City needed psychologists more than medical care. But, I wondered, weren’t depression and anxiety reasonable reactions for people trapped by their poverty in a place that represents military occupation on steroids?
My trauma is also complex, but for different reasons. First, how could I claim trauma with these girls and boys screaming and scrambling away from the gas, which, as a nerve agent, is forbidden for use in war by the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention?
Other thoughts that slithered around each other and added to the complexity:
- My identity as a white international. The organization I worked for has engaged in a significant, ongoing, and at times sacrificial process to address racism within our administration and field teams. These training experiences and subsequent honest conversations taught me that I had hurt people I worked with. I had not listened to them or partners on the ground the way I should have. And this hard, painful work transformed my organization and me. Today both its administration and field teams are diverse, and when acts of oppressive behavior occur, well-established accountability mechanisms are engaged to deal with this behavior.
- Because of this training, I knew I could not make the savagery I witnessed about myself. I had Palestinian colleagues on my team; they and other Palestinian friends were not the ones to talk to about my grief and rage. As my mental health declined, I increasingly did not want to burden other teammates either, who had their own struggles.
- So the despair kept metastasizing in my privileged white self. Palestinian and Israeli friends who believed that change would come in the 1990s had given up hope. I knew the Israeli military occupation would have to end eventually, if only for demographic reasons. But the Israeli political establishment and its allies seemed content to let dead, mutilated, and traumatized victims pile up indefinitely.
I presented this snarl to friends at home to explain my predicament, and most of them couldn’t see it. Of course, I was allowed to have trauma, they said. A therapist telling me, “Be gentle with yourself,” wasn’t going to unravel it.
So, after 27 years, I retired. I found a therapist who understood systemic racism, stopped watching films and documentaries about the Israeli military occupation, and blocked people on social media who justified treating Palestinians as subhumans. Gathering courage, I reconnected with friends I had ignored because I didn’t know how to interact with human beings when I was consumed by grief, anger, and self-loathing. I became involved with the Black Lives Matter movement in the Rochester area, primarily led by young women who often met in our home. The joy, anger, and creativity they brought to challenging the racism of the Rochester Police Department and their unrestrained laughter in each other’s company turned my heart from mourning.
However, this Facebook conversation about my friend using #FreePalestine in her post yanked me all the way back to Al Khalil/Hebron. As had happened over the years, one accuser told me I simply hadn’t seen Israeli soldiers teargassing children. Another wanted documentation of every time I had witnessed the gassing, when I had witnessed more than a hundred such incidents.
I left the conversation. Just as advocacy for Palestinian human rights always brings charges of antisemitism, I knew the next stage of this discussion would become what the children had done to deserve the teargas. And I could not bear that.
Resilience
An internet search of the words “Human Rights Work Resilience” brings up pages of resources designed to help human rights fieldworkers avoid burnout. During my exit interview, I told my personnel coordinator that given the emotional damage I brought with me into the work, perhaps I hadn’t had the requisite resilience needed. She scoffed a little and said she thought sometimes we talked too much in the organization about resilience. I had served longer than any other member — 27 years. Most people would sustain some damage after that amount of time. However, she asked, could I really characterize most of my time in the field as traumatic?
She was right. Misery isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when I think about the Haitians, Palestinians, Colombians, Kurds, and Indigenous people I’ve lived and worked among. I think about the meals shared, playing with their children, the insider political jokes, the type of community that happens only among women, the pride that peasant farmers take in their crops. I think about the veteran activists and organizers in each location who want to know how people battling systemic oppression in other regions have achieved their goals. And I think of watching new activists experience that heady sense of power when their boldness and presence in sufficient numbers causes authorities to back down. I maintain close friendships with team members I served with for only a couple months. Times I spent with North American Indigenous communities in South Dakota and Chiapas, Mexico cut me to my spiritual core and grounded me to look at the world and my homeland with clear eyes. Also, for some reason, a large percentage of human rights workers — of whatever nationality — are hilarious.
I am not sorry I chose this work instead of going on for a Ph.D. I am not sorry I was on the other side of the checkpoint to hand alcohol wipes and tissues to children as they rushed to us from the teargas. I am not sorry I became friends with people who also became the subjects of our human rights abuse documentation, even though that added to the pain of the work. I am not sorry I spoke up on Facebook for my friend in local government, even though I knew the responses would anchor me temporarily to a new depression.
So, where does that leave me? Do I want more people documenting human rights abuses and standing with people who resist systems of domination? Yes. Do I wish brokenness on them? No. Should they perhaps stay in the work for less time than I did? Maybe, although my sense of history was helpful in an organization with high turnover. In the field, we see Colombians, Kurds, Palestinians, migrants, and Indigenous people becoming their own best human rights documentarians. As video cameras and smartphones become cheaper, we believe that trend will continue. But are they any more resilient, given that many do not have the option of leaving their current locations?
We could, of course, shift the focus from the mental health of resistance workers to the sources of what they are resisting. We could sue weapons manufacturers and fossil fuel corporations out of existence. We could put sugar in the oil tanks of all the construction vehicles building oil pipelines and luxury housing developments. We could make predatory capitalism a crime. And by the hundreds of thousands, we could push through all of the checkpoints to overwhelm the infrastructure of every fucking military occupation everywhere.
