For Palestinians in Seattle, war in Gaza brings lasting mental health toll

SEATTLE — Every day that he wakes up in Seattle, Yaz Kader struggles to stomach what’s happening on the other side of the world.

For him and many other Palestinian Americans in the Seattle area, Israel’s attacks on Gaza over the past year have stirred many feelings: anxiety, grief and a sense of retraumatization.

They’re grappling with the deaths of family members and others they know and love, while trying to navigate tasks at work and school.

The psychological disconnect is overwhelming. Those here in America check their phones constantly for news of loved ones, reading about every new attack with sinking hearts. All the while, they must go about their day as if nothing is happening thousands of miles away.

Kader, a registered nurse born and raised in the Seattle area, hasn’t figured out how to deal with that dissonant reality on a daily basis.

“Some days I’m paralyzed thinking of the suffering,” he said. “One thing I think about is: How is one supposed to act when your people are going through a genocide?

“Going about, doing my job, pretending to have normal conversations,” he said.

“There’s no playbook, no guidebook for how one is supposed to act.”

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas militants killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 240 hostage. Israel has responded with unrelenting attacks on the Gaza Strip, killing , injuring more and displacing more than 2 million people, according to the Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip, which doesn’t distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths. In the past month, Israel has expanded its attacks in Lebanon with the stated goal of targeting the militant group Hezbollah. Lebanese officials said last week that Israel has killed at least 2,500 people, and displaced more than a million others in Lebanon, according to Reuters.

The fear and outrage tied to the war have been felt here by many: It’s prompted extensive protests in Seattle, an encampment at the University of Washington, and increasing reports of both antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Still, the United States government has remained steadfast in its support of Israel, approving a record $17.9 billion in military aid there in the year after Oct. 7, 2023, according to an Associated Press report. Those ties, as well as the business interests that many American companies have in Israel, have made the past year especially fraught for Palestinian Americans. Many have reported being discriminated against or targeted for their heritage.

“There’s a feeling of helplessness,” said Samhar Daoud, a Palestinian American therapist based in the Seattle area. “We see the suffering of our loved ones, and we don’t have the ability to protect them or influence the situation as much as we try.”

“I don’t know if I was lucky”

Daoud said he often encounters people struggling with feelings of guilt.

Those who are in the United States, he said, feel helpless, and conflicted that they are living in a country that is funding weapons for Israel.

While he has seen non-Arab clients who are just now becoming aware of the violence, for Palestinians, much of what’s happening now is compounding pain that already exists.

“It’s been happening for ages, we’ve been saying that for ages,” he said. “We’re just reliving that similar trauma that generations have been forced to experience.”

Grandparents and parents who were alive for the 1948 Nakba — which means catastrophe in Arabic — when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from the land that was settled by Israel, are being retraumatized, Daoud said.

Kader said he also struggles with the injustice of what people in Gaza are facing.

He often wakes up thinking about children who are facing starvation, infectious diseases and their homes being bombed.

“That’s a reality that’s not good for my own mental health. I recognize that,” he said. “But I was once also a 7-year-old Palestinian child. So I am no better than a 7-year-old child in Gaza, yet I’m afforded the opportunities I have here. I can’t make sense of the senseless destruction we are watching.”

For Mayada Davis, those feelings have intensified with Israel’s recent attacks on Lebanon.

Davis, who lives in the Seattle area, is Palestinian and was born and brought up in a refugee camp in Lebanon.

In 1948, her grandmother fled to Lebanon, thinking she would be there just until things improved, Davis said.

“But they never got better,” she said. Her grandfather soon joined, and much of her family has been living in a refugee camp in Lebanon since then. At the time, they weren’t allowed to work in Lebanon, buy a house or become citizens. They didn’t have consistent access to basic necessities like electricity and water.

Davis recalled surviving a massacre in 1982, where at least 2,000 people — Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians — were killed by an Israeli-backed militia at the Shatila refugee camp and the nearby Sabra neighborhood. Davis, who was volunteering with the Red Crescent as a nurse at the time, was told to leave the camp to take a break.

A few hours after she left, militants came in and killed thousands.

“I don’t know if I was lucky or to live with that pain,” Davis said, her voice breaking. “I still feel guilty.”

Now, she said, seeing the places she grew up destroyed has brought up more feelings of dismay. Several of her siblings still live in the camp in Lebanon, and have had to flee. A brother-in-law who lives in Lebanon is in a psychiatric facility, and the family had to take him out of the hospital so they could evacuate. Another brother is in a wheelchair, making evacuation more difficult.

Hearing these stories of her family suffering is emotionally complicated, said Sarah Davis, Mayada’s daughter. As much as it hurts to watch the destruction from afar, she said, the psychological impact will be much greater for those experiencing the violence.

“There’s a feeling of guilt in all of this,” Sarah Davis said. “You can’t have full happiness.”

Healing together

As Palestinian Americans grieve, some are seeking out mental health treatment.

Haneen Ahmad, a Palestinian American therapist based in the Seattle area, said her practice has seen a growing number of people seeking counseling directly related to the trauma of the war in Gaza.

“There’s a lot of anxiety and depression, folks reporting that they’re feeling numb or can’t concentrate on work,” Ahmad said. “Across the board, several different types of challenges are showing up with folks’ mental health.”

While some are seeking out individual therapy, more are turning toward healing in group settings.

Daoud said he’s often been asked to facilitate healing circles where people are given space to share their feelings about what’s going on. Some can connect over similar experiences, he said, and realize they’re not alone.

“Most of the people I’ve seen are looking for community-based events,” Daoud said. “People are honoring each other’s spaces and stories. That does create resilience — seeing the despair and also the whole point of that comes back to, we’re still here.”

Ahmad has led healing circles at the University of Washington and the Muslim Association of Puget Sound.

Those group settings, she said, can be crucial to dealing with traumatic events.

Even impromptu get-togethers can provide a vital outlet for processing grief, she said. Ahmad recalled a group of local men who meet after going to mosque to have tea and process what’s going on in the political climate.

“We don’t heal in isolation,” Ahmad said. “Especially for folks coming from a background where in their culture, they heal as a community — they lean a lot on those cultural norms to process what’s going on.”

On top of the violence, several Palestinian Americans said they’ve struggled with how to grieve something many people don’t want to discuss.

The Davises said they tread carefully when bringing up the war with people they know. Some don’t acknowledge the violence, even though they know the family has been impacted.

“You may lose your friends,” Mayada Davis said. “You love people, you get to know this nice person. But if you let them know what’s going on, you may lose them.”

“Or they might say something that hurts,” Sarah Davis said.

For Sarah Davis, seeing her people portrayed as inherently violent, or her family’s home a place where extreme violence is commonplace, doesn’t align with the loving community she experienced when she visited the refugee camp during childhood summers.

“It doesn’t match up with the humanized experience that I had,” she said. “They’re people at the end of the day, just like us.”

Seeking community

Ahmad said she recommends people who are struggling with the violence happening in Gaza make a point to reach out to others in their community when they’re feeling down — but not necessarily on social media.

“Maintain connections that you feel have a positive impact to you,” she said. “I’d love for people to pick up the phone, meet for coffee, go for a walk around Green Lake.

“I tell people to give yourself permission to disconnect from social media and news,” she said. “That can be heavy and daunting, and a catalyst for those feelings that linger. We want to make sure we’re taking breaks from the heaviness and all the news of the genocide.”

She also urged people not to neglect their own basic needs — sleep, nutrition, hydration and body movement.

Daoud said simply finding ways to connect to Palestinian culture can be a form of self-care.

“Cooking, dancing, writing something in Arabic,” he said. “Whatever we can do to showcase our identity is a form of resistance.”

Others, like the Davises, have found support through protesting and organizing.

The person who encouraged her family, said Sarah Davis, was Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, the UW graduate who was shot and killed by the Israeli military in September while she was in the West Bank to protest Israeli violence and settler expansion. “When she found out we had lost family, she brought my mom a bouquet of white roses. The week after, she held an art fundraiser. I think that was one of the first things that got us out of the house to participate.”

Seeing people from all walks of life empathizing with them made them feel supported in a way they hadn’t before, Davis said.

Kader was one of two “uncommitted” delegates Washington sent to the Democratic National Convention this year, electing not to support Kamala Harris over her stance on Israel. He said the lack of action against the violence from most large institutions — universities, politicians and news organizations — has made him even more aware of the importance of the Palestinian community locally.

“We have some wonderful coalition partners,” he said, citing support from Black, Jewish and Native American activists. “But as Palestinians we have really had to band together so we can talk about the genocide. That network of Palestinians I know has grown in this area and that’s just because we’re all talking to each other a little bit more through the grief.”