Community Psychology Under Colonial Occupation

These reflections are the result of a visit to Palestine in May 2013, at the invitation of the community psychology program at Birzeit University, near Ramallah1. We attended the 2-day International Community Psychology Conference: Global Perspectives, Local Practices, and also visited various urban and rural settings in the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem. What is known as Historical Palestine was a British mandate after the defeat of Turkey and break-up of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. During this period there was immigration by Jewish settlers, many of whom lived peaceably with their Palestinian neighbours. The United Nations had proposed partitioning the territory between a Jewish and an Arab state. At the expiry of the mandate in 1948, the movement of political Zionism seized the initiative, declaring independence. This was opposed by the Arab nations, leading to the first of several armed conflicts. Clearances of villages, including a number of massacres, together with the fear this engendered, led to the flight of 80% of Palestinians from what became Israel (50% for Palestine as a whole). The Palestinians know this event as the Nakba, which means the great catastrophe. They settled for the most part in what were initially temporary camps that now have a more permanent character in what were the territories of Egypt (Gaza), Jordan (the West Bank), Syria, and Lebanon. The boundaries of the State of Israel were fixed at the “Green Line” by the eventual armistice, with Jerusalem/Al Quds itself partitioned. Israel passed legislation formally dispossessing these previous Palestinian residents of their homes, farms, and businesses while the Palestinians claim the Right of Return. The 1967 Six Day War was a military victory for Israel and territories in Jordan, Syria, and Egypt were occupied. After the Camp David agreement the Sinai was returned to Egypt. The subsequent peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation led to some limited self-government in the West Bank and Gaza. We then went on to where the road has been closed off, preventing travel between adjacent villages—not the separation wall at this point, just a pile of rubble blocking the road. We saw grey material dumped on agricultural land—industrial waste we were told. We continued to Bil’In. This is one of many places where colonizer settlements have been built, contrary to international law (you don't transfer your population to occupied territory) behind the 12-feet separation wall. First though the land was enclosed by a fence. It is nothing more than theft. The land belongs to the villagers who have farmed it for centuries and the Israeli State simply fences it off and gives it to the colonists. In this case, though, there had been a successful struggle, all the more impressive for being organised by the country people themselves, involving weekly Friday protests (which continue with international and Israeli dissident participation too), and legal processes. As a result, the fence was moved back a few hundred metres and the Palestinians are again cultivating the land—we ate some “liberation lettuce.” But there is constant harassment. These are the conditions affecting the Palestinian people and their daily life. This is a classic “limit situation.” As noted, there is resistance, and although this has in part been armed, it is overwhelmingly nonviolent. Most Palestinians have never handled a gun. The two intifadas (uprisings) used economic boycotts, strikes, and civil disobedience as well as the more widely reported violent tactics. However, in certain areas there is a celebration of martyrs of the struggle that emphasizes military prowess, for example, with photomontages that add heavy calibre weapons to their photographs. At the same time there is a rich use of other imagery, for example, the keys that symbolize return, and the murals depicting villages from which people were expelled or fled. One consequence is the overwhelming definition of Palestinian identity in terms of the collective struggle. Although this has its valuable side, there is also a cost in terms of positive personal narratives, a point that was made to us by some of the more sophisticated local activists. What might community psychology offer in such a situation of extreme power asymmetry? Is community psychology even possible under such conditions? If so, then what form would it take? We got some answers at the conference. A community psychology master's degree program has been running at Birzeit University for 4 years, in part funded by a Norwegian institution. The conference was an opportunity to showcase some of the work done, mostly by students, and also to engage with some international colleagues. This latter is of great importance. Universities in occupied Palestine are isolated. Staff who are Palestinian nationals cannot travel freely as a result of restrictions imposed by the occupation power. Paradoxically, they even suffer isolation from other parts of the Arab world: There was only one non-Palestinian Arab delegate at the conference, a British national. There were no delegates from Gaza either, in this case a result of the Israeli blockade and collective punishment of the population for voting for Hamas. One of the invited international speakers (from Venezuela) was denied a visa by the Israeli authorities. Despite the isolation, community psychological work was of good quality. It perhaps tended to be more descriptive than intervention-orientated, except at a more individual level (for example, with detention survivors). This may be partly a result of the newness of the program and of local difficulties in integrating with initiatives based in the communities, but also because of the need to document the social psychology of Israeli colonial oppression (its mechanisms and its impacts) to understand it. The concepts used were not always the same as in mainstream English-speaking community psychology. A symposium on “psychological sense of community” was more about resistance, identity, and solidarity in the face of aspects of the occupation in East Jerusalem (Jerusalem residents can visit the West Bank but not vice versa). There was also the use of concepts from Palestinian culture, for example, that of Sumud, derived from the strategies of resistance to interrogation, in place of Western psychology's trauma, and Palestinian reflections on the concept of resistance. However, the closing symposium was organized on the theme of a “context-bound, yet globally integrative model of critical community psychology for the Arab-Palestinian context,” explicitly drawing lessons from liberating psychologies in other contexts, most of which bear the marks of colonialism one way or another. We were reminded of the difficulties of language too. Arabic apparently does not have a straightforward way of translating community and a choice therefore has to be made between concepts at either the macro or micro scale. In the last days of our trip, we were lucky enough to briefly visit some inspirational community projects—two in refugee camps in Bethlehem and one in the village of Beit Ummar mentioned above. The projects focused on (a) sports and other cultural activities and (b) theatre, respectively, in the two camps, and on a variety of modalities of nonviolent action, including maintenance of an active presence on the land and documentation, including a video at Beit Ummar. While there was no community psychological input, the people running the projects spoke very much the same language as that of critical community psychologists, in terms of strengthening culture, counterpropaganda, positive identity, and self-respect, as well as the inevitable concern for the more material dimensions of community life. It left me as convinced as ever that there is no real boundary between political and community psychology. The political is ultimately about community and the community is itself political, both internally and in its external relations that are reflected in the social psychological life of its members. Community psychological praxis is different in different contexts, but is always concerned with questions of power, belonging, amelioration, and transformation. In this respect, we might look at Arabic's difficulty in translating community in a different light

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Community psychology · Palestine · Sociology · Community Health and Development · History · Psychology · Social Psychology

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