ABSTRACT
This chapter explores psychological expressions of self and collective assertion of sumud (stalwartness), as living practices under occupation and settler-colonial violence. By unpacking and examining a number of painful cases that speak to the politics of psychical and psychological asphyxiation imposed upon the Palestinian people, it highlights how Palestinians clinicians attend to how Palestinians, circumscribed by violence and death, operate internally and communally, within a psychic political-economy of life that defies being objectified as legible victim through human rights discourse. In this way, the chapter takes up how Palestinian clinical practice and Palestinian “livability” function themselves as various forms of sumud and a refusal to be metabolized by an apolitical and non-structural analysis or Zionist ideological negation. Through case examples and discussions with clinicians, the chapter outlines how clinicians provide “breathing room,” to make sense of individual and collective suffering.
