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.
