Palestinians have relied on mutual solidarity and support to overcome a long history of injustices and grief.
By Rana Nashashibi | Truthout | May 10, 2020
With the spread of COVID-19, collective solidarity is on display across the occupied Palestinian territory.
As a Palestinian woman from Jerusalem and a mental health professional, I am both treating and experiencing the extensive impact and far-reaching ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Across the world, communities are dealing with the unbearable pain of death and serious illness, compounded by not being able to comfort or even mourn the victims. On a global scale, people are facing what for many are unprecedented restrictions on freedoms, insecurity and anxiety about the future.
In these testing times, I feel compelled to share our special, decades-long Palestinian caregivers’ experience with dispossession, displacement, denial of basic rights, uncertainty and visceral grief while still maintaining a sense of joy, beauty and finding collective responses that give us realistic hope.
While COVID-19 is forcing millions around the world to make impossible, unfair choices between maintaining their own safety and providing essential needs for their loved ones, this has also been a time of extraordinary courage, resilience and solidarity. Severely overstretched health care workers caring for increasing numbers of COVID-19 patients use ingenuity to overcome shortages of medical supplies, risking their own lives.
What has helped me and my colleagues most in facing multiple crises was mutual solidarity and support.
HolyLandJustice.org 