Reconsidering Trauma: Towards a Palestinian Community Psychology

This article explores two contesting discourses about Palestinian political captives who experienced interrogation and torture by the Israeli security service ( shabak ). The first concerns the intersecting discourses of trauma and human rights as constituted by humanitarian psychiatry and the second is the discourse of sumud , a Palestinian construct engaged in anticolonial struggle. The discourses of trauma and human rights represent the Palestinian captive as an agentless, individualized, depoliticized victim to be treated by psychiatrists and defended by human rights activists. These discourses, which became hegemonic in the post‐Oslo Agreement era, conceal the subjectivity of sumud and the form of anticolonial politics it generates. Based on the conceptions and praxis of sumud , the article offers preliminary reflections about a resistant community psychology in the Palestinian colonial condition.