In an April 2024 interview with Ahmed Alnaouq for the Palestinian Deep Dive media platform, pharmacist Hala Abulebdeh articulates a problem that has long been a source of dispute in the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies—particularly for those who approach trauma from post-colonial, anti-colonial, or decolonial perspectives. The point of contention can be encapsulated in a question: what value does the term “post-traumatic stress disorder” have in the context of long-term, large-scale, unending forms of violence, such as colonial occupation?

The interview, entitled “Gaza’s Shattered Souls: the Untold Story of Hala Abulebdeh’s Family,” records the first conversation Abulebdeh has had about the disappearance and murder of her parents, four sisters, and brother which began in December of 2023 as a result of the heightened genocidal activities of the Israeli settler state. Throughout the interview, Abulebdeh repeatedly describes and displays symptoms that have classically been associated with the clinical diagnosis of PTSD. She mentions flashbacks to her own experiences of earlier Israeli ground invasions of Gaza; she refers to herself as a person who cannot sleep; she mentions having difficulty focusing at times, adding that “I’m easily, like, slipping away”; she depersonalizes; she struggles to know what verb tenses to use when describing her dreams of her deceased family members.

Abulebdeh would have little difficulty receiving a clinical diagnosis for her overwhelming collection of symptoms. For her, however, the condition of PTSD—indeed, the contemporary use of the term “trauma” in general—seems unable to accurately characterize her suffering, or the suffering she believes all Palestinians have experienced. As she begins recounting the story of her life since October 7, she pauses to reflect that “Sometimes I feel like PTSD is not applicable to us. I feel like there is a kind of, if I call it trauma, there is a kind of trauma that’s specifically, yeah, it’s… Palestinian trauma because there’s a kind of chronic, complex, long, if I can say, it’s… not an event that finished and then we talk about, like, the impacts—no, it’s an ongoing thing. It’s accumulating.” In this brief passage, Abulebdeh approaches what anti-colonial trauma professionals have considered to be the primary failures of a mainstream, universalizing study of trauma.

The term “trauma,” as it has been analyzed in Western cultural discourse, has failed to grapple with sites of violence that are ongoing and systemic. To paraphrase trauma theorist Nancy Van Styvendale, dominant Western approaches to trauma have—perhaps even purposefully—focused on trauma as individual, accidental, and event-based. In this dominant reading, trauma is caused by a shocking, unpredictable occurrence that has a definable beginning and ending, a before and after, and involves discrete individuals. It follows from this limited definition of trauma that treatment should target the individual, removing her, in many cases, from the greater context of her suffering. These categorizations are fundamentally incongruent with traumas caused by ongoing colonial occupation, for example. In the same article, Van Styvendale asks, “Is it possible to locate the traumatic event of a (post)colonial history that is… centuries old and… nations wide?” In the same way that settler colonial studies have negotiated the inability of the term “post-colonial” to accurately represent the conditions of settler occupation, the term “post-traumatic” is equally incongruent with the social, psychological, and spiritual effects of a trauma that seems to have no clear beginning, and has never ended. As scholar of Australian colonialism Patrick Wolfe writes, “When [settler colonial] invasion is recognized as a structure rather than an event, its history does not stop.” There is no “post” colonial for the successful settler colony.

As is clear in Hala’s interview, an understanding of trauma as created by shocking, accidental, and unforeseen events experienced by an isolated individual provides little valuable reflection on the material consequences of settler colonialism. However, anti-colonial and decolonial approaches to the analysis of ongoing systemic violence and its traumatic effects can and do address the many failures of the term PTSD. Among these are the term’s inability to describe and, even more importantly, to provide methods of redress for the social and psychic wounds created by settler states and their transhistorical mechanisms. Moving beyond the discussion of trauma as an indisputable cultural fact, the field of decolonial trauma studies examines the experiences of trauma in the context of their causes, seeking not only to attend to the needs of the individuals within an occupied community, but to rupture the system of occupation that reproduces violence indefinitely.

The specificity of Palestinian trauma discussed by Abulebdeh should not, of course, be flattened through comparison to other analogous contexts. That said, the systems of imperialism, capitalism, and ethnonationalism that underpin Israel’s settler project are deeply implicated in the process of settlement more broadly. It should not be surprising that the most virulent denunciations of the current stage of Israeli genocide in Gaza since October 7 have come from communities whose own subjugation echoes the experiences of Palestinians, such as South Africa and Ireland. In the context of Canadian colonialism, Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) activist Clifton Ariwakehte Nicholas, who visited Palestine in 2016, noted that “If you remember the Oka Crisis, what we went through in 1990, that’s every day for Palestinians. The theft of lands and the erasure of history was glaring.” Similarly, Kanien’kehá:ka activist Ellen Gabriel remarks, “I see a propaganda playbook being played out against Palestinians by not just Israel but by the United States, Canada, and the European Union. They’re making blanket statements that everybody is a terrorist, which they did to us too.”

These statements convey an important understanding of Israeli occupation as inextricably linked to structures of violence that have and continue to impact South Africa, Ireland, and the Americas. While we investigate the parallel forms of colonial violence that link these countries, it is essential to foreground the traumatic repercussions of settler occupation on colonized peoples, especially as described in their own terms. Studying these repercussions provides clear indication not only of the obvious detrimental impacts of living under a settler state, but it may offer steps toward dismantling ongoing settlement through highlighting the ideologies and mechanisms of colonialism. There are countless examples of anti-colonial writers, care workers, and survivors who have described the trauma of living under settler colonialism as inextricable from the project of settlement itself. Important parallels emerge when Abdulebdeh’s own testimony is compared with any number of responses to colonial violence.

My own training as a scholar and teacher in the field of trauma studies primarily focuses on Canada and the anti-colonial work of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis authors. When I first heard a clip of Abulebdeh’s interview, it resonated with many responses to North American settler colonialism that I have encountered through my own work. Abulebdeh’s testimony, particularly her discussion of the inadequacy of the term “PTSD” in relation to the nature of Palestinian trauma mirrors what the late Métis professor and health practitioner Jo-Ann Episkenew described as the “post-colonial traumatic stress response in Indigenous people” in her book, Taking Back Our Spirits. Episkenew asserted that one of the major ideological factors contributing to post-colonial trauma for Indigenous people is “our exclusion from the authorized story of the creation of the [settler] nation-state.” She coined the term “national collective myth” to describe “the story that justifies the settlers’ existence as a new nation and inspires pride in the settlers as citizens of that nation. In other words, the national collective myth is, in effect, the creation myth of the settler’s nation-state.” In Episkenew’s understanding, “The stories of Indigenous people who have not vanished must necessarily be excluded from the national collective myth. Indeed, our continued existence is problematic since we are a constant reminder of those historical and contemporary events that call into question settlers’ pride in their nation… This exclusion has health consequences and has caused Indigenous people to suffer grievous emotional wounds.”

Episkenew makes clear that the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from the collective myths of their occupiers has serious material impacts on occupied populations. Writing from her own position as a Métis woman, she argues that the Canadian “national collective myth culminates in the formation of the modern-day settler nation of Canada, a country that the United Nations judged the best in the world in which to live for seven consecutive years [from 1994 to 2000]… using scientific indicators: life expectancy, education, and income…” Applying those same indicators to registered or Status Indians, however, revealed a different picture–one in which Canada ranked forty-eighth on the same list of countries.

In order for Canada to maintain its global reputation as “one of the best places in the world to live,” the portrait of life inside its borders must exclude any of the experiences that call this designation into question. In other words, the settler state necessarily constructs and reconstructs its own mythology by expressly annihilating any contrary opinion. Episkenew observed that “Implicit in our exclusion is the understanding that we are not noteworthy enough to remember, not significant enough to perceive, and not desirable enough to have a place in the future of the Canadian collective.” Erasing the history of a colonized people is insufficient for settler colonialism—to continue, it must erase their present and also their future.

This temporal exclusion is not a metaphor—it describes the aim of settler colonialism writ large. To return to Palestine, Wolfe explains this colonial logic through the example of the founding of Israel: “As Theodor Herzl, founding father of Zionism, observed in his allegorical manifesto/novel, ‘If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct.” In the Israeli creation myth, the present destruction of the past is essential to the settler colonial future. Essentially, settler colonialism harnesses revision of time as a primary mechanism of its settlement. The heightened violence inflicted on Palestinians since October 7 can only be seen as “reasonable” retaliation for attacks by Hamas if Israel can successfully erase the history of its continued assault on Palestine—from the original Nakba up until 2024. To draw on Episkenew’s analysis, the trauma of Palestinians must be vehemently rejected and actively erased in order for the “national collective myth” of Israel to stand up to scrutiny.

Investigations of the temporal nature of trauma caused by ongoing colonial occupation is common currency in both clinical and political discussions of trauma. PTSD in its most general form is a condition of living that alters a sufferer’s experience of time. It involves the persistent re-experiencing of the trauma in the form of intrusive memories, flashbacks and nightmares. The past asserts and re-asserts itself chronically into the present, sometimes making a distinction between the two impossible. As well, the warping effect of trauma on time is not exclusive to the past’s imposition on the present. One of the criteria associated with the “avoidance” category of symptoms in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders describes a “sense of a foreshortened future,” for example, the patient “does not expect to have a career, marriage, children, or a normal lifespan.”

When expanding our focus from the individual to the communal, it is abundantly clear that the future circumscribed by traumatic occupation is the future of a people. In Abulebdeh’s testimony, this threat to the future is hyper-present. In her reflection, she recalls a state of fear that seems to eradicate temporal distinctions altogether: “I had the expectation that something horrible will happen.” The future in this statement is determined by the expected violence learned from the past—and in the grammar of this sentence, that future is certain.

It is by recognizing the unique historical dimension of settler colonial trauma that comparative anticolonial-trauma studies is able to tackle the social, psychological, and spiritual effects of settler colonial violence. Anti-colonial writers and practitioners differentiate their approaches from what has come before, because if trauma is event-based, then there must be a clear before and a clear after. If trauma is accidental, then we as a society can have done nothing to stop it. If trauma is individual, then we are excused from examining the scale of the violence as it functions systemically and historically. By criticizing the dominant understanding of trauma, anti-colonial trauma professionals have also clearly ascertained what is necessary not only to diagnose or analyze the traumatic impacts of colonialism, but to address its past, halt its present, and prevent its continuation into the future. A goal of systemic revision is at the core of anti-colonialist approaches to trauma that see trauma not as an unfortunate side effect of an accidental event, but as a central intention of colonial violence. Large-scale trauma of an occupied people is inextricable from the process of settlement, because the struggle to imagine a future beyond the present condition is an embodiment of the colonial intention to debilitate and to eradicate a future for a colonized people and their territory.

The anti-genocide movement of 2023-2024 seeks not only to end the present heightened violence that has taken place since October 7, but to interrogate and dismantle the machinery that sustains the Israeli settler state in order to secure the future for Palestine and for Palestinians. The BDS and ceasefire encampments that have been staked out on university campuses across the world are an important embodiment of the material challenges to trauma proposed by practitioners like Episkenew. In its many forms, the global protest against the continued genocide of Palestinians—the refusal to be silenced, even against threats of arrest, deportation, and physical violence—not only challenges the national collective myth of the Israeli settler state, but also enacts a refusal to be complicit in violence carried out in its name.

Sarah Stunden is a writer, researcher, and instructor living in Tiohtìa:ke (Montréal). She earned a PhD in English literature from McGill University (2019), studying non-verbal methods of storytelling in contemporary North American trauma fiction.