Trauma Doesn't Turn You Into A Zionist. Resistance Is Not a Trauma Response.

Misusing trauma discourse to flatten power, pacify movements, and excuse empire.

The emergence of trauma into liberation discourse, perhaps for the first time is a profound step forward. I don’t believe decolonization divorced from trauma and relational repair can ever reproduce new or liberatory outcomes. Bold statement, I know. But I hold that liberation begins in the body. Because the state, and the systems adjacent to it, have found their way into our very somatic experience.

After two years (and 77 years) of unrelenting brutality met with impunity and complicity from governments near and far, it’s become clear that what we need is not merely policy reform. We need a revival of individual and collective sovereignty. A reclaiming of responsibility to usher in the freedom we long for. And that work doesn’t start “out there.” It begins inside. It requires unlearning the ways we’ve internalized our oppression. Recognizing how we mirror power-over dynamics in our own bodies and relationships. How we hand over our authority, again and again, to external forces.

This lens brings a necessary depth to our movements. But as with any discourse newly introduced into mainstream political conversations, like that of trauma, it risks dilution. We risk landing on simplistic conclusions that flatten its power.

In our case, we land on something like this: That the trauma of the Holocaust reincarnated itself into the trauma of Gaza. That the genocide of one people is now birthing the genocide of another. And so, we are told, we must “break the cycle.”

But worse than that, we double down: To fight back, they say, is to become the very thing you’re fighting. To resist is to be stuck in a trauma loop. Violence begets violence and so on.

And that, my friends, is where we lose the plot. Where trauma—a field of humanity and nuance—becomes stripped of its context and turned into moral relativism. Where colonization is no longer a structure, but a psychology. Where genocide becomes an unfortunate consequence to trauma, and resistance becomes a mental health issue.

Trauma Doesn’t Make You a Zionist

We must ask: When we attempt to understand the Zionist project through the lens of trauma, who does that serve?