When Resilience Becomes a Burden

Reflections from Gazan Palestinian Scholars

Bibliographic Data

ID12020541
AuthorsKhalid Dader (0000-0003-2121-2953, corresponding author), Malaka Shwaikh (0000-0001-9504-5620), Hala Shoman (0000-0001-8851-4054), Saga Hamdan
Year2025
Volume54
Issue4
Pages51-59
Publication date2025-10-02
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Palestine Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0377-919X • E-ISSN: 1533-8614
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0377919x.2025.2599554
OpenAlexW7119115611
LanguageEN
Citations received9

In this essay, Palestinian scholars from Gaza reflect on how Gaza is brought into Western academic spaces since the beginning of the genocide. Over the last two years, academic engagement with Gaza has increased, often highlighting Palestinian resilience. While this attention is essential and needed, the authors argue that framing Palestinians as resilient obscures the toll of genocidal, settler-colonial violence. This narrative not only clouds grief, exhaustion, and fragmentation, but also reassures external observers and absolves them of the responsibility to act to stop the genocide. Drawing on their lived experiences, the authors show how resilience discourse romanticizes suffering, aestheticizes sumud, and dismisses Palestinian voices as too emotional for credibility. Instead, they call for an ethical approach in academic settings that situates survival within its violent conditions, resists reductive binaries of heroism or victimhood, and centers Gaza’s lived realities in order to confirm Palestinian humanity beyond the rhetoric of resilience

Framing (construction · Humanity · Narrative · Palestinian refugees · Psychological resilience · Resilience (materials science · Rhetoric · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Peacebuilding and International Security

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