On Tuesday, February 27, the Department of English, the Department of African American Studies, and the Princeton Committee on Palestine (PCP) co-hosted the annual Edward Said ‘57 Memorial Lecture. The lecture was delivered by Samah Jabr, a psychiatrist and head of the mental health unit of the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
In her talk, Jabr argued that the “historical trauma” generated by the Israeli–Palestinian conflict requires a reevaluation of psychiatric practice. She criticized the “Western” method of treating the trauma of individuals as inadequate. Instead, in the Palestinian context specifically, psychiatry must reorient itself toward addressing the problems of collective trauma and struggle. Jabr has previously described this process as “decolonizing psychiatry.”
Later in her talk, Jabr told the audience that “without addressing the machine, we cannot fix the trauma,” arguing that the State of Israel is the sole cause of Palestinian suffering. As a clinical position, she claimed, psychiatrists should urge their patients to participate in liberation movements. The correct attitude for patients to assume is sumud, which Jabr defined as “a mental state as well as being action oriented: it is defiance against oppression.”
Jabr’s work consists of both activism and clinical practice. In 2015, she called upon mental health professionals “to engage in sociopolitical solidarity with the people of Palestine as a therapeutic position.” In her lecture, Jabr emphasized that psychiatry should aim to alleviate the root causes of trauma, and only secondarily on the trauma itself. “Solidarity, resistance is very important for the treatment – and then the last thing that we need is specialized mental health practices.”
Previous statements by Jabr have also downplayed the atrocities committed by Hamas. A week after October 7, Jabr denounced psychiatric associations’ condemnations of the massacres, which she framed as a “legitimate struggle” against Israel by “an occupied people.” In 2018, she lamented the fact that in her view, “when Palestinians fight for their national rights, we are called ‘terrorists.’”
Regarding the current conflict, Jabr asserted that Israel is targeting medical personnel and infrastructure in the ongoing campaign to eradicate Hamas from Gaza. “One hundred doctors have been arrested and exposed to torture,” Jabr stated. “Those who are detained in Gaza, they go to concentration camps… and then some of those who leave these concentration camps tell the stories of what’s going on there.”
This is not the first time that pro-Palestinian activists have evoked the Holocaust in their discussion of the Israel–Hamas war. In many protests following the October 7th attacks, activists held signs saying “Never Again,” invoking one of the most commonly used phrases in Holocaust remembrance. Members of the Princeton community have recently condemned the use of terms like ‘concentration camps’ by activists, which similarly evoke the Nazis’ extermination program during the Holocaust.
In her lecture, Jabr also claimed that Israel has an agenda to deny Palestinian suffering in Gaza while exaggerating Israeli loss. Among her examples of “falsehood,” Jabr listed reports of “decapitated babies and stories of rape” which emerged following Hamas’ October 7 massacre. Reports of Hamas’ infant murder have been widely confirmed, though official reports of decapitations were largely retracted. Evidence continues to mount about the scale and nature of Hamas’ weaponization of rape and sexual violence against Israelis.
The lecture was titled “Radiance in Pain and Resilience: The Global Reverberation of Palestinian Historical Trauma.” The event was moderated by Razia Iqbal, former BBC correspondent and John L. Weinberg Chair at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA).
Jabr’s talk comes a year after the controversial 2023 Said Memorial Lecture given by Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian activist accused of antisemitism. In his work, El-Kurd has asserted that Israelis “harvest organs of the martyred [Palestinians], feed their warriors our own” and more recently described Hamas’ October 7th massacre as resistance, “retaliation,” and “a revolutionary struggle.” During last year’s lecture, El-Kurd defended the act of throwing rocks at Israeli’s heads, claiming that violence is “our natural response to brutalization.”
Upon learning of El-Kurd’s invitation, the Center for Jewish Life (CJL) and dozens of students publicly urged the English Department to withdraw its sponsorship and denounce El-Kurd. In response, Professor Jeff Dolven, then Department Chair, acknowledged that examples of El-Kurd’s antisemitic remarks “brought me up short,” but he rejected the students’ requests, finding value in the “contexts and larger arguments” of El-Kurd’s poetry and journalism. After the event, Dolven told The Tory that he did not find anything objectionable in El-Kurd’s talk and refused to express a view about Hamas.
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