The loneliness of grief for Palestinians in the UK
Protesters hold placards and wave Palestinian flags as they walk over Westminster Bridge during a March For Palestine in London on 28 October 2023
Gwyn Daniel writes in Middle East Eye on 15 April 2024:
‘We store our sorrows in jars, lest the soldiers see them and celebrate the siege.” Mahmoud Darwish, ‘The Butterfly’s Burden‘.
Trauma and grief are deeply affected by the way the wider community responds. Denial, dissociation, or victim-blaming exacerbate trauma and intensify feelings of isolation. Helplessness, lack of agency and silencing likewise remain key, as does the question of whether victims attain justice and perpetrators are held to account.
Amid the intense and accelerating suffering endured by Palestinians in Gaza, all these factors remain crucial to prospects for recovery.
They are also relevant for the approximately 20,000 Palestinians living in the UK, many with families in Gaza. They either have suffered – or expect at any minute to suffer – unbearable loss; with as many as 40, 50 or more members of their extended families, including children and babies, killed.
Experiencing these horrors at one remove from a place of safety can bring about feelings of extreme impotence as well as guilt and shame at being safe, warm, sheltered and fed. Helplessness includes being unable to do much beyond phoning and, if lucky, receiving the – never reassuring enough – reply: “We are alive… for now.”
Not having received the worst of news means dreading the moment when the phone’s “ping” heralds catastrophe.
Mourning for dead or missing family members is hardly even possible when in a state of such hyper-alertness about the fate of those still alive. Knowledge of the extreme privations they suffer through homelessness and accelerating levels of starvation and disease creates another level of agony, as does trying to bring family members to the UK, facing indifference and obstruction from the Home Office.
Vast, collective trauma
For those whose family members have been killed, is it even possible to measure a private bereavement against such vast, collective trauma? Palestinians often feel bound to speak on behalf of all those murdered. “What happened to my family is what has happened to over 1,200 other families,” said Palestinian journalist Ahmed Alnaouq of the deaths of 21 members of his family in Gaza in early November.
Living in a safe country, yet being emotionally present in a homeland subjected to genocidal onslaught and catastrophic destruction, is not an experience unique to Palestinians. Ukrainians hosted in the UK also have to witness helplessly as their cities are destroyed by Russian bombardment and their loved ones murdered.
But there are layers of pain for Palestinians which go well beyond these common experiences. They are intensified by dehumanisation, racism and manifestations of what is effectively a hierarchy of suffering.
Alnaouq and others described how, whenever they spoke of their losses, they were asked to condemn the Hamas massacres of 7 October, as if this were “the litmus test of whether Palestinians are worthy of living and grieving”. This question was shockingly asked on the BBC’s Newsnight programme of Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to London, immediately after the deaths of his own family in Gaza.