A Psycho-Political Reflection on Collective Trauma, Mourning, and the Denial of Truth

By Nimer Said

There are moments in history when the scale of suffering becomes almost unspeakable — not because language fails us, but because language is torn away, silenced, or rendered. In such times, the violence is not limited to broken bodies and shattered homes; it extends into the realm of thought, feeling, and meaning. In the case of Gaza, we are not merely witnessing devastation — we are witnessing a systemic assault on the very possibility of knowing.

The term Gaza Numbness Syndrome does not refer to a clinical diagnosis. Rather, it names a psychic state, a condition of collective dissociation, moral paralysis, and emotional shutdown in the face of unrelenting horror. It is not confined to the people of Gaza alone — though they endure its deepest layers — but extends outward, encompassing distant witnesses, institutions, and entire societies who, consciously or unconsciously, turn away from what must be known.

In psychoanalytic terms, numbness is a defence — a psychic shield raised against annihilation. When the mind is faced with what it cannot process or metabolize, it splinters. It dissociates. It numbs. These are not signs of indifference; they are survival strategies. But when such responses are replicated not only in individuals but across collectives, and when they are not spontaneous but carefully manufactured, they reveal something deeper: numbness as a political project.

Gaza Numbness Syndrome is not simply the byproduct of trauma — it is the result of systematic silencing. It is produced through layers of structural violence: censorship of journalists, the deplatforming and criminalization of Palestinian voices, the rebranding of facts as opinion and of historical grievances as “controversial.” Language itself becomes suspect. Words like “occupation,” “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” or even “Palestine” are stripped of legitimacy, turned into red flags in institutional policy, or erased altogether.

This is not an accidental consequence of war. It is an epistemic strategy — a war on truth. An entire architecture is erected to prevent the global public from knowing, and more dangerously, from feeling. Emotional overload is weaponized. The endless flood of graphic images, dismembered children, collapsing buildings — without context, without continuity, without space to hold them — slowly produces the opposite of empathy. It produces apathy. It freezes the witness in a state of helpless witnessing.

And then, into this vacuum, steps the machinery of denial.
It whispers that it’s too complicated. That neutrality is the only ethical position. That one must “see both sides,” even as one side is being relentlessly obliterated. Through legal rhetoric, academic policies, sanitized news frames, and institutional cowardice, the truth is made slippery. The killing of journalists, the destruction of hospitals, the starving of children — all this becomes “alleged,” “unverified,” “regrettable,” but never named for what it is: criminal. Unforgivable. Deliberate.

Thus, Gaza Numbness Syndrome is not a purely psychological condition. It is the logical consequence of epistemic violence — the deliberate erasure of context, history, and moral clarity. And those who try to resist this silencing — those who name, remember, grieve, rage — are swiftly discredited. Their credibility is attacked. Their humanity is put on trial. Their emotions become suspect. To be moved by Gaza is to risk professional, academic, even legal consequences in many corners of the world.

And yet, to feel is to know and to know is to work through in order to repair.

To truly know — not just intellectually, but somatically, emotionally, ethically — is to become dangerous to the systems that require ignorance and numbness in order to survive. That is why the act of knowing must be made intolerable. That is why empathy must be punished. Because to know Gaza — to really know what is being done to its people — would demand a reckoning too great for the current world order to bear.

There is a psychic war taking place alongside the physical one.
A war on memory.
A war on witnessing.
A war on feeling.
And the battleground is not just Gaza itself — it is our internal psychic lives. Our capacity to be moved. Our capacity to act.

Yet no understanding of this syndrome would be complete without recognizing the unbearable paradox of the cruelty that surfaced on October 7th, 2023 — the day when Hamas carried out a brutal and shocking attack on Israeli civilians. From a psychoanalytic lens, such cruelty is deeply related to a history of dispossession and unmourned loss. For generations, the Palestinian people have been subjected to violent erasure — of land, of identity, of voice — while simultaneously being denied the cultural and political space to grieve.

When mourning is interrupted, disfigured, or forbidden, the psyche may respond not with surrender but with explosive retaliation. Aggression becomes a distorted language of protest, a desperate expression of vitality in the face of chronic despair. The brutal attack — while morally indefensible in its targeting of innocent Israeli civilians — can also be read as a symptom of psychic rupture: the return of the repressed in its most violent form. When repair is made impossible, and mourning is denied its place, what remains is rage — blind, primal, disorganized — fuelled not only by political reality but by centuries of blocked grief. The inability to mourn — individually and collectively — can lead to a haunting repetition of trauma through destruction, rather than through repair.

In this sense, Gaza Numbness Syndrome reveals not only a silenced people but a broken cycle of grief. A people unable to weep are eventually unable to feel. And a world that refuses to bear witness becomes complicit not only in the violence it ignores, but in the madness it later condemns without understanding.

To begin healing from this syndrome, we must feel again. Not in order to be overwhelmed, but in order to reclaim the fullness of our humanity. To allow grief to do its transformative work. To let rage animate action rather than rot into cynicism. We must gather around truth, not because it is comfortable, but because it is the only thing that can still save us.

Knowing is not merely intellectual.
It is ethical.
It is spiritual.
And in times like these, it is revolutionary.

Because in Gaza, what is being killed is not only life — but the right to remember it. The right to speak it. The right to know it happened. To reclaim that knowing is to begin to undo the numbness. It is to declare that silence will not have the final word. And it is to insist — against the erasure, against the noise, against the forgetting — that we remember.