On a cold, winter morning last January, I sat down and read an article I wrote in 2018 — a clinical account of my own treatment with a Jewish analyst, the child of Holocaust survivors, and someone I understood to be a Zionist. It was written in the analytic third person, a measured account of how politics and history entered the room between us, shaping and ultimately fracturing the work. I described the analytic scene as a “microcosm of world affairs.” It was the most I allowed myself to say.
I was revisiting it in light of the relentless erasure of the Palestinian in so many psychoanalytic circles, especially after the start of the genocide in 2023. As I scrolled through, one paragraph in particular stopped me mid-breath:
I met and befriended many Israelis, some of whom have been more supportive and active in helping the Palestinians than any Arab I know. There are times when I wish I could have a moment with my grandmother to tell her about the Israeli friends who gave me a home, helped me stay in the United States, were there in the most difficult moments of my life, and supported me professionally. I wonder if knowing this might soothe her pain, put a smile on her face, or bring her back to life for a moment.
Those are my words. In print. Indelible. I stood up from my desk. I sat back down. I stood again. I paced the apartment, my hand pressed to my sternum as if I could reach inside and extract something lodged there.
Why did I misrepresent facts so completely that the distortion became its own kind of truth? An Israeli I knew wrote a letter of recommendation for my visa. That is what happened. I transformed that crumb, this single, professional courtesy into proof that Israelis had helped me more than any Arab I had known. How could I write that I wished to tell my grandmother about this? My grandmother, who died of grief after losing her home in Jerusalem twice. I wanted to offer her the descendants of those who dispossessed her as a gift; as comfort — as if this could soothe her pain.
Reading it now, it becomes a diagnostic text — the voice of the “conscripted container,” whom I once misnamed the House Palestinian. The House Palestinian operates within a legible structure of accommodation. She has, at some level, weighed her options. She knows the field exists. The conscripted container was not asked. The conscription happened below the threshold of choice, installed so gradually and so early that there was no moment of decision to look back on, no threshold she can point to and say: Here is where I agreed. She did not sell out. She was drafted. The colonized subject is hollowed of her humanity: her history erased, her rights trampled upon, her belonging stolen. She is rendered an empty vessel into which imperially configured subjects project their monstrosity — their violence, their guilt, their unmetabolized dread of what they have done and continue to do. And yet she does not simply absorb the projection, she goes to extraordinary lengths to refuse it — to offer something different, to insist: I am not the monster you need me to be. She does so often to her own detriment.
She did not arrive fully formed. She was produced — slowly, across three institutions, by formations so gradual she could not feel them happening.
Before I can read these specimens, I must tell you what was there before them. A smell: falafel from Abu Mahjoub’s small shop in Jabal Elweibdeh, which meant I was one minute from my grandmother’s door. Her eyes when she saw me, so present my heart would swell. In her home, I knew what tenderness meant. The air smelled of cinnamon, nutmeg, and often hareeseh at the table, a dessert my mother never made. My grandmother is my Palestine.
One night, when I was five, I woke to my mother — the woman of steel — crying. She was sitting on the sofa leaning forward and holding a tissue, repeating: habibti mama, habibti mama. My father said: Tata matat. I did not quite understand what matat meant. I understood it was terrible. My grandmother died of stomach cancer a year after losing her home for the second time.
A year later, my mother took me to Palestine for the first time. It was the second time I saw her cry. We went first to the Old City, to the school where she had been a student and her mother a teacher. She moved through the narrow streets slowly, stopping to touch the walls — stone worn smooth by hands, by love, by sorrow — and each time she touched them the tears came again. Then we went to West Jerusalem, to the house where she grew up. Someone else lived there now. We stood on the street and looked at it. My mother did not knock on the door. She just stood there, and I held her hand and felt my heart breaking without knowing why. The grief passed from her body into mine through our joined hands. I absorbed it the way children absorb everything: completely, without filter, without the protective distance of understanding.
These were the first two facts I learned about the world: The people you love can be taken away from you and what is stolen from you will never be returned. But in Jordan, Palestine was speakable only as this private sorrow. There were things we could say and things we could not. The grief was permitted. The political claim was dangerous. I learned that early and firsthand. In middle school, I had an Arabic and history teacher whom I loved and admired. She taught us about resistance — drew lines between our dispossession and that of the Indigenous peoples of North America, told us that we had the right to return, to the olive groves, the orchards, and the sea. The next academic year, she did not come to class. When she reappeared, she had been moved to the library. She was quiet for the rest of my time at school.
The lesson was not subtle: To love Palestine and talk about resistance would land you in jail. To know that was unbearable. These were experiences that could not be thought all the way through — not because I lacked the capacity, but because the environment made completing the thought synonymous with disappearance. The knowledge was not destroyed. In the secret spaces of my mind and heart, Palestine was fiercely alive. I would spend hours chanting with Marcel Khalifeh and reciting the poems of Mahmoud Darwish. I would fantasize myself as part of the resistance. But these remained sealed in the private chamber. In public, grief. In private, Darwish. The split became the solution because it let me live, let me belong. And the conscription was slow and certain: Over years, the public self forgot that the secret was there, or visited it less, or visited it only in music and poetry, until the container had been shaped without anyone having to force it.
I was taught early that my mother’s dispossession did not count because it traveled through the maternal line, that since my father is Jordanian, I am not Palestinian. I internalized this as fact rather than recognizing it as the first act of conscription: the severing of my belonging from its name.
If Jordan shaped the container, the United Nations sealed it. I worked at the United Nations between 1990 and 2004, most of which I spent at the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, as a Political Affairs Officer. I entered with the Charter — we the peoples — believing my role was to carry the voices of the oppressed and marginalized. Over fourteen years, I learned to metabolize what the institution required: to convert moral obligation into procedural correctness, so that abandonment felt not like betrayal but like professionalism. I did not resist this. I called it maturity.
The UN’s institutional framework performed what the theorist James Ferguson calls the anti-politics machine: It whisked political realities out of sight while performing its own preeminently political operation under the guise of neutrality. Occupation became the “situation.” Colonialism became “the question.” Dispossession became one narrative among many. I did not notice the substitution because it arrived as professional development. I was learning to be more sophisticated, more realistic, less emotional. What I was actually learning was to metabolize my own erasure and call it growth.
The bureaucratic structure rewarded formal compliance and penalized substantive moral judgment. Max Weber’s iron cage closes not through force but through systematization: The institution does not crush your values, it renders them irrelevant. My passionate commitments became, over years, mere subjective preferences with no place in the rationalized order. By the time I left the United Nations, the conscription was complete. I published my first article a few years later — a sixteen-page essay about Arab immigrant boys in Brooklyn and I did not once use the word Palestine. Not because I lacked courage — it was because the institution had replaced my epistemology so thoroughly that the absence did not register. I absorbed the premise that my testimony was admissible only as emotion, never as evidence, never as theory, never as a claim that might reorganize what the reader thought she knew.
The engine that produces her is what I theorize elsewhere as mawjūd lā yūjad (موجود لا يوجد): “existing unfindable.” In Arabic, the root w-j-d carries both to exist and to find. These are not two meanings that happen to share a root; they have one meaning. To exist is to be findable. English has no such unity, and in that gap a specific violence becomes possible: Someone can be present, can stand forth, and yet remain unfound. The Palestinian does not exist and then, by some separate mechanism, becomes unfindable. Her existence as evidence of what Empire has done produces her unfindability. She must be unfindable precisely because she exists.
Lā-ʿalāʼiqiyya (relationality foreclosure) names what sustains this condition: the dismantling of the apparatus by which another’s presence can cling to you, weigh on you, and demand response. The Arabic root ʿ-l-q from which ʿalāqa (relationship) derives means to stick, to adhere, to bear weight. When lā-ʿalāʼiqiyya operates, the circuits through which suffering would adhere to conscience are severed. The conscripted container is what the Palestinian becomes when she lives inside this structure and learns to manage her own unfindability so that those around her need not confront what her presence means.
The consulting room did not create the conscripted container. It inherited her. When I entered treatment with the analyst I will call Dr. S in 2014, I had already been shaped by decades of prior formation. I learned in Jordan that Palestine could burn in you but not pass through you into speech that reorganized the world. At the UN, I learned that my own reality required translation into terms that would not disturb. I arrived in that room pre-adapted for what he would require. For Dr. S, lā-ʿalāʼiqiyya was already in place before we even began our sessions: The circuits through which my particulars might have adhered to his conscience, allowed him to relate to me or have empathy that would have made me findable as a specific woman rather than a category had been severed before the treatment began. A few months into our sessions, Dr. S asked me, before I even sat down, whether I had written graffiti on the air-conditioning unit outside his window. I sat in shock, my eyes welling up. I thought: Who am I to this man? How does he see me? I spent days researching the graffiti to prove my innocence. It did not occur to me to ask why he accused me instead of wondering whether the researcher who had visited him the week prior was responsible.
Here is the moment of mawjūda lā tūjad: He looked at graffiti and found the Arab. He looked at me, his patient of months, a woman with a name, a history, a clinical relationship, and could not find her. In that instant, I was hypervisible as suspect and unfindable as subject. The particular woman who walked into his office every week was replaced by the category that Empire had prepared for her: vandal, delinquent, the one who defaces. This is mawjūda lā tūjad operating inside the clinical frame itself, the very space that is supposed to be organized around the labor of finding.
And then the conscription: I did not write the word racism in the article I wrote about our work together. I did not write that my analyst saw graffiti and assumed the Arab did it. Instead, I analyzed the incident as a disruption of the frame, a “non-process event,” a phrase coined by José Bleger to describe something that bypasses the psyche’s capacity to metabolize — it occurs, but cannot be symbolized, linked to other experience, or made into knowledge that reorganizes anything. I reached for that term in 2018 as if it were precision. But it was protection of my analyst. The clinical language did what lā-ʿalāʾiqiyya does: It severed the circuits by which that incident might have adhered to the others, accumulated weight, and completed the thought I could not afford to finish — he is racist, the profession is complicit, I must leave.
In another one of our sessions, I came into Dr. S’s office. I had just settled into my chair. I had not yet begun to speak. Before I could, he asked: I heard there is genital mutilation in your part of the world. Were you mutilated?
What came over me first was shame — not the shame of having done something wrong, but the shame of being forced to undress in a room where I had gone to be held. I felt it in my body: A sharp pain that radiated from my lower abdomen into my arms. I did not have a word for what had just happened. I have one now: I felt mutilated by him. The question did what it named.
Genital mutilation had nothing to do with me, my mother, my grandmother, my community, my country, my family’s faith, my people. The distance between that image and my life was absolute. And yet that was what he brought into the room and placed against my body.
I am a Palestinian Christian woman raised in Amman, Jordan. Female genital cutting is not practiced among Palestinians, not among Jordanians, not among Arab Christians, not in the Levant, not in any community or culture connected to my life. If he had seen me for even a second as a particular person — the granddaughter of a Jerusalem teacher, a Christian from the Levant, a woman raised in Amman — the question would have been unthinkable. But he did not see me as particular. He saw a category: Arab woman from over there. I had been in that room for months. I had spoken about my childhood, my mother, my grandmother, my faith, my city. None of it had adhered. What remained was the imperial template, onto which any projection could be deposited because no particular fact about me had been allowed to accumulate.
If the conscripted container had not already been built inside me, I would have said: Are you out of your mind? Instead I sat with it. I absorbed it and called the absorbing composure.
This is what it feels like to be on the receiving end of lā-ʿalāʾiqiyya — not as theory but as a question asked of your body. He did not say: There is no world in which I will know you. He asked a question instead. But the question said everything.
I did not include this incident in the 2018 article. Now I understand why. That article was a defense of my innocence, a proof of my goodness, written from inside the longing that had brought me to psychoanalysis: The longing for the particular quality of knowing this profession promises — that someone will sit with you and find you, fully, without flinching. To include what he asked me would have been to admit that the room had been organized, from the beginning, around my unfindability. I was still, when I wrote it, performing my legibility for the institution that had failed me. Still hoping that if I told the story carefully enough, gently enough, without too much accusation, I might be received.
This is mawjūda lā tūjad in its clinical specificity. Every particular detail I had offered, details that constituted me as a findable subject, a specific woman with a specific history, had failed to register. The finding apparatus had been foreclosed by lā-ʿalāʼiqiyya before the treatment began. Had he asked a French Jewish woman whether she had experienced genital mutilation, the question would have ended his career. He would have known not to ask because he would have known her. He did not know me, and the reason he did not know was not ignorance. It was foreclosure. It was lā-ʿalāʼiqiyya, the severing of the apparatus by which knowing becomes possible.
But what the consulting room gave me, despite everything, was language. Psychoanalysis named what had been happening all along. Through projective identification, he expelled into me what he could not bear in himself — his violence, his guilt, his dread of what his people have done to mine — and I became, in Bion’s formulation, a bizarre object: saturated with his projected material, experienced as persecutory, encountered as threat before I had spoken. This is why the incidents escalated rather than resolved. He was not reacting to me. He was reacting to what he had placed in me. The graffiti. The genital mutilation question — placing the image against my body and interrogating me for it. The bizarre object managed, finally, by expulsion.
Attacks on linking: I could know each incident in isolation but could not let them accumulate into the thought they pointed toward — he is racist, the profession is complicit, I must leave — because that thought terminated in an action I could not take. So I applied minus-K to my own experience: stripped the incidents of their meaning and returned only the worthless residue. The clinical language did to what I could see exactly what his lā-ʿalāʾiqiyya had done to me. It received the evidence. It returned it stripped of obligation.
In one of our last sessions, I told him I had imagined he would be pro-Palestine. He said: “Of course I would be supportive of Israel! If things get tough for me here, I could always move there and be accepted.” I responded with a heavy heart: “Will you be living in my grandmother’s house?” He paused. Then he said: “Sometimes we hurt each other.”
I accepted it. I took the crumb and, in the 2018 article, called it an ending. The stolen house, a specific house on a specific street taken from a specific woman, dissolved into mutuality. His discomfort equated with my family’s dispossession. And the conscripted container received it as closure, because decades of formation had taught her that crumbs were meals.
Dr. S was not an aberration within the psychoanalytic world. He was its expression. The frame we revere — organized around the premise that the relationship itself is the instrument of healing, that the patient’s particulars matter and weigh — is often suspended for the Palestinian.
On October 14, 2023, seven days into a livestreamed genocide, an email arrived from someone I will call Dr. M. — a famous Israeli psychoanalyst. She was writing about a social media post on my account, which she said denied the atrocities of October 7. Her evidence: “They opened a dumpster to find 24 beheaded babies.” The very lies fueling the bombs. I was in my kitchen and my body remembered before I did: shoulders curved inward, spine slightly bent, chin lowered. The posture of the colonized who has learned to make herself smaller, softer, less. Decades of performing the reasonable Palestinian had wired my nervous system to accommodate before thought could form.
I thought she was a friend; she was the same woman to whose office I brought three young Palestinians from a peace-building initiative about ten years earlier, hoping she would see them. She listened to Samer’s testimony about his father’s factory, the solar panels the apartheid would not allow. Dr. M. leaned forward. She looked like she was listening. When Samer finished, she asked, in a voice eager to share: “Do you know about the Second World War? About what happened?”
My head spun. I thought to myself: Do you really think they don’t know? They are here, their dispossession laid bare, and you reach for the Second World War. We are all paying for a crime we did not commit. Samer had testified to the present tense of ongoing dispossession. In the space of a breath, his present tense became her past tense. His father’s factory became the Holocaust. His occupation was absorbed into her history. I watched Samer’s face. Something closed behind his eyes. Nadia looked at the floor.
I said nothing.
As we were leaving, Dr. M stood beside them, small in stature, tears in her eyes. “I want you to have a good future,” she said. I felt the sincerity of it. I was moved. But sincerity comes with limits. Now, after the genocide in Gaza, I can see what her tears were also doing: She saw the young adults and the violence against them, but for her, like many liberal Zionists, the issue was, and still is, the occupation — not apartheid, not settler colonialism, not the foundational violence underneath. Her sincerity stopped where her state’s violence began. Her tears were real. And the boundary of her tears was the structure.
Walking back, Nadia said quietly: “My father was right.” Again, I said nothing.
But once I received that email seven days into the livestreamed genocide, something broke. Not because I received new information. Because the genocide made the conscription crystal clear. The links I had spent decades severing reconnected all at once — every incident, every room, every clinical language that had received the evidence and returned it stripped of obligation. He was racist. The profession was complicit. I had been metabolizing my own destruction and calling it analysis. The thought completed itself. And every room that had required my unfindability became uninhabitable.
Last spring, in a room on Capitol Hill, a staffer for a Democratic representative recited the beheaded babies narrative, then pivoted seamlessly to “Israel has the right to defend itself.” I felt the old posture begin — the shoulders curving, the spine softening. And for the first time, I caught it mid-motion. I did not straighten performatively. I did not make myself smaller, softer, or less. Something else happened. I spoke with such passion and force that my body was shaking and my lips were trembling.
I said: My family has lived in Palestine from the beginning of time. We have massacres enough to count for many October 7ths. Why is our right to defend ourselves never on the table? I said: The beheaded babies story was walked back by the White House itself — why are we resurrecting it now, if not to keep us unfindable beneath the lie? I told her about the children. Our children are the only children in the world prosecuted in military courts. Tens of thousands of Palestinian children taken in the middle of the night, interrogated without a lawyer, without their parents. I asked her: What will it take for you to see us as human beings worthy of a life?
The room went quiet. I did not fill the silence. I did not translate myself into a language that would make the truth bearable for the person who could not bear it.
After a genocide, mawjūd lā yūjad and the conscripted container are no longer conditions I manage. They are a diagnosis I name. There is no question where I stand, and there is no question why I was unfindable for so long. It is beyond my grandmother now, beyond her house, beyond the personal grief I once offered as my only admissible testimony — the one register in which I was permitted to exist without disturbing. Gaza liberated us. The ultimate breakdown actually happened. What we always suspected is unquestionably true: We, the Palestinians, have always been mawjūdūn lā yūjadūn — existing, present, visible in our dying, yet systematically unfindable in every register where finding us would produce obligation. Many world leaders did not fail to see us. They could not afford to find us. And in that truth there is a terrible freedom: The freedom of the one who no longer performs her own unfindability.
I refuse to be in rooms that require my lā yūjad as the price of entry — Zionist circles, spaces where the Palestinians’ right to exist, to justice, and to dignity must be argued rather than assumed. These are not negotiable positions. They are not postures I adopt and release depending on the room. They are what remains after the conscripted self has been incinerated by the unbearable and you discover that you can, in fact, bear it. They are the first acts of mawjūda tūjad: existing findable. Existing in a way that clings, that weighs, that refuses to release the conscience it has adhered to.
The conscripted container is not a metaphor. She is a woman produced by a specific trajectory: unmetabolizable knowledge sealed in secret in Jordan, epistemological replacement at the United Nations, clinical exploitation in the consulting room.
But now, she is a woman who stopped curving. The undoing is not finished. The container was built over decades and she does not dismantle in a single essay or a single act of spine. But she is no longer sealed. The return address has been restored. And what Empire deposited in her, she is learning, slowly, imperfectly, with her body still remembering its old shapes, to send back.
My very dear friend, Yo’ad Ghanadry, who now lives in Jericho, once told me what she does after crossing a checkpoint — the searches, the humiliation, the waiting. She said: “When I arrive home, I would brush the dust off my clothes, clean the mud off my shoes, smile, play music, and go on with pride and determination. This is how I keep going.”
I walk through the psychoanalytic checkpoint the same way. And I know that on both sides of it there is a growing line of analysts — flags raised, voices high — colleagues who have broken silence, resigned memberships, signed letters, written openly about what complicity has cost. We are not alone. We are here.
