Session
Structural Violence, Settler Colonialism, Health, and Resistance: The Case of Palestine
Cindy Sousa, PhD, MSW, MPH, Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College, 300 Airdale Rd., Bryn Mawr, PA 19010 and Cindy Sousa, PhD, MSW, MPH, Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College, 300 Airdale Rd., Bryn Mawr, PA 19010
APHA's 2020 VIRTUAL Annual Meeting and Expo (Oct. 24 - 28)
Abstract
Introduction to structural violence, settler colonialism, health, and resistance: The case of Palestine
Yara Asi, PhD, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL
APHA's 2020 VIRTUAL Annual Meeting and Expo (Oct. 24 - 28)
Despite the tightly bound relationships between politics and health, imaginations of political violence are often limited to the extreme or theatrical: bombings, shootings, massive and sudden displacement. Yet, within the settler-colonial contexts that typically characterize political violence, these dramatic instances of political violence are only part of a larger picture of violence, control, and dispossession. Within international public health, we must attend to the long-term impacts of the ongoing and insidious nature of structural violence: how structures of society become a ‘social machinery of oppression’ (Galtung 1969).
Focusing on Palestinian health, this panel addresess the particular and lasting dimensions of structural violence deployed within the settler-colonial quest for control of Palestine –displacement, massive land confiscations and home demolitions, as well as the intentional undermining, or de-development (Roy, 2006), of Palestinian systems, sovereignty, and professional expertise related to healthcare, law, education, and governance. Panelists will explore how well-engineered, bureaucratically entrenched structural violence is one of the most powerful tools within political violence - a vehicle for systematic, purposeful subversion of health via social, legal, economic, and political control and oppression. Moreover, speakers will discuss how, since the suffering caused by structural violence does not mimic the overt visibility of direct violence, it is not perceived as a shock to the status quo or even particularly harmful, but, as Galtung (1969) proposed, appears “silent... [and] essentially static.”
Our speakers, who include doctors and public health experts from across multiple sectors of Palestine. Palestinians from within Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, and the diaspora will describe how the purposeful inequalities and miseries inherent to structural violence undermine health care delivery and outcomes – evident within, but certainly not limited to, the problems it poses to healthcare delivery among Palestinians within the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since unjust structures persist under the guise of “normalcy,” structural violence is often not a priority of health and humanitarian intervention. To this end, the panel will detail interventions arising from the Palestinian public health community – illustrating how, just as people make and control the structures of oppression and control, people can also take action and remedy structural violence.
Public health or related organizational policy, standards, or other guidelines
Abstract
Homicide among palestinians in Israel: An unrecognized public health crisis
Osama Tanous, M.D1, Mohammad Khatib, PhD2, Ahmad Sheikh Muhammad, MPH3, Fadi Omar, MA4, Sawsan Rizek-Marjieh, MA5 and Rita Giacaman, Prof6 (1)The Galilee society - the arab national society for research and health services, Shefa - Amr, Israel, (2)The Galilee Society - The Arab national society for research and health services, Shefa-Amr, Israel, (3)The Galilee society - The arab national society for research and health, Shefa-Amr, Israel, (4)The Galilee Society, Shefa-Amr, Israel, (5)The Galilee society - The Arab national society for research and health services, Shefa-Amr, Israel, (6)Birzeit University, Birzeit, Palestine
APHA's 2020 VIRTUAL Annual Meeting and Expo (Oct. 24 - 28)
Background: demographic growth, land confiscating, oppressive practices produced an 11 fold increase in population density among the Palestinians in Israel since 1948. Currently 1.45 million Palestinians live on 2.7% of Israel’s land in small geographical enclaves in a state of ghettoized citizenship where Palestinians have a 5.5 relative risk of dying from homicide compared to Israeli Jews and 70% of cases are closed without charges. This study examines Palestinian Israeli citizens attitudes towards violence, crime, safety and trust in the Israeli police.
Methods Data was collected in 2018 using a stratified multi-stage random sample with 7985 participants interviewed.
Findings: 65.1% estimated the prevalence of violence as high/moderate in their towns. 53.9% believed that they could be a possible target of violence. 52.1% believed that crime is the biggest problem that Palestinian community faces, followed by racist laws (22.1%) and difficult economic situation (14.3%). 74.8% believed that weapon use is normal in everyday disputes. 75.9% believed that the state is interested crime spreading in the Palestinian community. 87.7% agreed that governmental lack of interest in addressing the problem of unauthorized weapons is the cause of their spread, and 82.9 % agreed that police complacency is one of the causes for the spread of unauthorized weapons.
Interpretations: Palestinians in Israeli report high levels of exposure to violence linked to lack of interest of the Israeli government in addressing the problem, and the complacency of the Israeli police. The medical and healthcare community should advocate for addressing these problems.
Other professions or practice related to public health Public health or related public policy Social and behavioral sciences
Abstract
Structural violence, settler colonialism, health, and resistance: The case of the palestinian citizens of Israel
Hatim Kanaaneh, MD, MPH, The Galilee Society - The Arab National Society for Research and Health, Shefa Amr, Israel
APHA's 2020 VIRTUAL Annual Meeting and Expo (Oct. 24 - 28)
In 1948 the Nakba left some 150,000 native Palestinians in what became Israel. Leaderless and disadvantaged, we became second-class citizens. Israel targeted our main resource, land, leaving us, currently 20% of the population, with less than 3% of it. In 1971, as the first physician in my region of Galilee and regional Subdistrict Medical Officer, I faced three inbuilt obstacles to health: The absence of sewage disposal infrastructure in our villages, shortage of indigenous health professionals and the withholding of all onsite government services to small communities, the Unrecognized Villages.
I wrote memos to my superiors to no avail. On March 30, 1976, I woke up to IDF tanks on our streets to prevent a one-day strike protesting land confiscation. I resigned my position and moved to Hawaii. Two years later I returned with a plan: community-based NGO serving my community’s health. With three colleagues the Galilee Society took off. Among its projects were a rotating loan fund to local authorities for sewage network planning, health education and support for health professional training and two mobile clinics for the Unrecognized Villages.
In 1992, during a measles outbreak among Negev Bedouins, the Galilee Society’s mobile clinic team volunteered its outreach services there. Ehud Olmert, the minister of health, fired me for my unwelcome interference. Later he served jailtime for unrelated corruption. Today, sewage networks are in place in most Palestinian villages in Israel, indigenous health manpower supply is booming and many small villages have gained recognition. Through tracing the historical and political trajectory of health among Palestinians in Israel, this presentation will highlight the ways structural violence influence health and well-being of an entire population.
Administer health education strategies, interventions and programs Advocacy for health and health education Public health or related public policy
Abstract
The political domain as the ultimate determinant of population health
Rita Giacaman, Prof, Birzeit University, Birzeit, Palestine
APHA's 2020 VIRTUAL Annual Meeting and Expo (Oct. 24 - 28)
This presentation will trace the research trajectory of the Institute of Community and Public Health (ICPH) at Birzeit University, whose work focuses on life and health outcomes for Palestinians living in chronic warlike conditions under Israeli settler-colonial rule. Over decades of field-based work, ICPH researchers came to the realization that medicalized responses to trauma contributed to concealing the social and political meaning that Palestinians attribute to their collective experience. By adopting an approach that linked the biological/ biomedical sphere to the political sphere through the concept of suffering, and exposing the sociopolitical conditions of life and the collective trauma-inducing nature of Israeli military occupation and repression, ICPH’s research has allowed for the simultaneous personalization of war and politicization of health. In addition to discussing some of the health problems identified by ongoing investigations, the speaker will also touch on the ways in which institution building and knowledge production are linked to the capacity of Palestinians to endure and resist violation in their struggle for justice.
The speaker will speak on the need for reframing of the causes and health consequences of exposure to political violence by placing the concept of suffering at the core of the health paradigm, and by adding a political domain as the ultimate determinant of population health. This reframing is essential for full comprehension of what war does to people. It is also essential to guide relief operations and humanitarian assistance, and to support initiatives intended to mitigate the effects of war on health.
Advocacy for health and health education Public health or related laws, regulations, standards, or guidelines
Abstract
Decolonising settler colonial penologies: Jerusalemite children speaking against home arrest
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, PhD, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom
APHA's 2020 VIRTUAL Annual Meeting and Expo (Oct. 24 - 28)
Through isolation, division and daily slow violence, the settler state increases its capacity of control over the spatial and psychological potentialities of the steadfastness of Palestinian life and Palestinian childhood. This presentation examines the experiences of Palestinian children under home arrest (HA) in Occupied East Jerusalem, and centers the analyses on children’s own voices and sense of isolation when home arrested. HA’s penetration into the most intimate spaces results in an unending bone-deep wounding, dismemberment, and unchilding (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019). It not only awakens personal traumas, but also echoes the history and collective traumas of the community. The plurality of dismemberments constitutes racial markers of social ‘cutting-off,’ harming the unique solidarity that characterises Palestinian society as a whole. Studying structural violence against childhood suggests that children are political capital in the hands of the colonizers, and home arrest is a colonial technology of punishment that governs childhood, targets children’s psyches, and invades their intimate spaces and social bonds with the aim of unchilding. The presentation concludes that HA is a mode of penological governance intending to dismantle the “moral infrastructure” that makes up the Palestinian individual and society; to replace them with notions of defeat, desperation and hopelessness. Children’s narrations revealed how they are not only defined by their vulnerability and traumatic experiences, but also by their agency and decolonising acts, reclaiming their childhood.
Advocacy for health and health education Public health or related laws, regulations, standards, or guidelines