Given our recent work on the mental health crisis in Syria, combined with the distress we can all feel in and around Gaza, I wanted to share some very practical observations on the psychological effects of conflict, through the lens of "trauma". 🧵 It’s important, in this context, to understand the difference between two types of trauma. A single traumatic event can break the continuum of one’s life journey: Because we can’t process it, we stay stuck in a loop.

That’s what is treated, effectively, as PTSD.

If you don't follow closely events on Israel's northern border, it's easy to believe a regional war is unlikely, that things have already played out.

Seen from Lebanon, things look different: months of slow escalation, calculated but unrelenting and plausibly unstoppable 🧵 Spectacular attacks aside, this escalation is mostly based on "subtle" changes, across multiple variables: choice of targets, weapons employed, number of strikes, expected casualties, and so on.

Both sides are not just attacking each other but negotiating as they do.

Behind the destruction of the cities of Gaza lies another form of violence, ever so intimate and ominous: the destruction of home.

This is important to unpack, as a key to understanding the emotional shockwaves this war is causing across the region. 🧵 Gaza's fabric, even more so than other cities in the region, was largely built by its inhabitants, in ad hoc fashion. That makes for a punishing urban space: cramped, chaotic, weak on public infrastructure.

Thus the crucial importance of private fallbacks. Especially, the home.

In Gaza, this man-made tragedy not only never ends, but gets ever worse, which makes it hard to analyse the war underway. That in itself makes the war all the more dangerous.

I'll therefore try to distance myself from the suffering to formulate four broad analytic hypotheses. 🧵 The real battlefield.

The West Bank, arguably, is where it is happening. Israel is pushing consistently to dramatically change the rules of the game: no PA, more settlements supported by troops fighting a chaotic insurgency. In other words, Israel is set to absorb the West Bank.

I've been trying to think about this deepening, dangerous split we are witnessing between Europe and the Arab world. In over 25 years living and working in the latter, I've never seen anything like it.

Why is it deeper and more dangerous than our other, age-old disputes? 🧵 What worries me most in that respect is the complete breakdown in communication. In the past, our narratives would often conflict, but within a framework that was mostly shared.

Today, Gaza creates a situation where differences are not only profound, but incommunicable.

Genocide is a useful, frightening, and tricky word. Israelis have used it to define 7 October. Many others have described subsequent retaliations as such. Some experts concur, others disagree. It all depends on what one means by genocide. 🧵 As a legal term, its current usage is restrictive. Prosecuting a genocide requires, for instance, solid proof that orders were given specifically to eradicate a well-delineated group. That is why the massacre of some 8000 people in Srebrenica qualified.

A defining feature of the Gaza war is the volume of videos in which fighters film themselves committing war crimes.

This has important implications for the future. 🧵 Hamas equipped fighters with go-pros, although part of the atrocities they recorded could only fall into the hands of the enemy.

Since, Israeli soldiers have posted numerous videos of themselves looting, maltreating prisoners, and destroying civilian buildings they had secured.

In my career, I have never seen such a gulf between Western countries and the Arab world. The alienation is more structural than our many past breakups, over Palestine, or Iraq, or Iran.

This estrangement has many facets. Counterintuitively, aid & development programs are one 🧵 Historically, Western states have sought to offset the effects of politics and business with humanitarian and social programs, to reduce suffering and conflict, show people to people solidarity, broaden ties beyond officials and corporations, promote shared values, and so on.

Seen from the Middle East, Europe may appear like a continent drifting away: rejecting its Arab neighborhood, abandoning any belief in common human rights, and doing so out of reflexive racism.

That perception deserves nuancing. 🧵 First of all, not all European governments are embracing, aping or run by the far-right. Take Norway, Ireland, and Spain. Europe's supposed leaders, eg France or Germany, traditionally take them for granted.

Today is a good time to pay more attention to them.

Like many people across the Middle East, I've sadly been privy to other horrific conflicts. This one I find particularly difficult and disturbing in ways that go beyond the obvious. (By obvious, I mean the levels of violence, falsehoods, and double standards) 🧵 1. First is the focus on babies and children. They count among those slaughtered or taken hostage by Hamas. Israel turned incubators into propaganda, before leaving premature babies to die. And this war has birthed the haunting acronym WCNSF: wounded child no surviving family.

In Europe and the US, many well-meaning officials simply don't get why Gaza is an outrage. For them, Hamas' attack was abominable; Israel is its usual self; Western support isn't new; and many wars and regimes do worse, yet don't stir such emotions.

So why the anger? 🧵 What they miss is that never before did the West abandon all pretence of supporting human rights and international humanitarian law. Indeed, Palestinians are de facto denied any rights whatsoever... when even the more obvious violations aren't called out.

In Gaza, as on many urgent questions, we are watching a cohort of Western leaders do things that don’t seem to serve any purpose, besides voicing their own shallow instincts.

They are not cynical or unconscionable as much as they are grotesque, which is harder to explain. 🧵 The US, for example, has adopted a radical line that could cost Biden many votes, while doing little to help Israel, absent achievable goals.

Meanwhile, Germany, the UK, or France, are bizarrely tearing at their social cohesion in ways that can only profit the far-right.

Don't get this wrong: The fact that the West, in Gaza, is dismissing human rights and international humanitarian law is not a parenthesis, an anomaly, an instinctive reaction. It is the culmination of a shift I have witnessed, in stages, throughout my career. 🧵 In Iraq in the late 1990s, the US "containment policy" essentially entailed keeping both the regime and society besieged. Flawed intelligence was regularly served up to sustain a state of constant belligerence, mostly at the expense of civilians.

Gaza is a hybrid war, which makes it difficult to read. On one hand, it is high-tech, led by a modern, professional army in a "war on terror" style. On the other, it belongs to a completely different era, as if time had stopped in the 1940s. 🧵 Israel's allies only want to hear about the former: intel-driven, targeted attacks against militants blending within the local population. But this is only part of the story, and it is not the biggest part, which is stuck in the mid-20th century.

Why is this conflict in Gaza so horrifying, for so many of us?

Israeli-Palestinian fighting has always polarized; war kills, maims, and displaces civilians; Western double-standards are anything but new.

So what is so gut-wrenching? 🧵 The most obvious answer is not the most satisfying one.

The levels of physical violence are mind-boggling, but not necessarily different in nature or worse in scale than many other conflicts we somehow manage to detach ourselves from.

Over 25 years, I've watched Western embassies in the Arab world disappear behind rising walls. Although they are staffed with typically smart, well-meaning, well-paid experts, it's increasingly unclear how they inform and influence policy. There are several reasons why 🧵 The policy-making process, at least when it comes to the Middle East, is ever more centralized and reactive. It circumvents ministries of foreign affairs, not to mention diplomats in the field, but that is only part of the story. Embassies have their own problems too

If you look at our Western officials' statements and visits to Israel in relation to the Gaza war, a few themes clearly stand out ⤵️ The media cycle circus.
For years, foreign policy has shrunk, in the sense that it is decided by fewer people in shorter timeframes, in response to events as they unfold in the media, rather than a seasoned reading of what can be achieved on the ground, in the national interest.

I'd like to share some thoughts on what I will call "mass hysteria", and not because I believe that I am immune to it.

In fact, I've been caught up in so many rounds of this phenomenon that I believe it concerns us all, as a defining part of our age⤵️ By mass hysteria, I mean:

a dynamic that makes any nuance or criticism truly and durably unbearable to people, who come to define themselves through extreme forms of groupthink, regardless of consequences even to themselves.

The best time and place to speak about solar power is during a stretch of bad weather, in a country where you usually have both a lively sun and a moribund electric grid. Solar should be a no-brainer, although it's anything but ⤵️ Here, you can see in purple the moments where we received electricity from the public grid, over the past month, as well as their random distribution within a 24h hour timeframe. In yellow, our reliance on self-produced electricity. So far so good

We’ve been asked to publish not just our findings, but our data, as part of the application process for a research grant.

This should be mandatory for all NGO projects. We learned sobering lessons as we reviewed the more established open science repositories ⤵️ Open science, which aims to make research results accessible, replicable, and enduring, enforces standards, notably for file naming and metadata. EUDAT provides great tools for organizations to harmonize data among them, but most NGOs would lack capacity eudat.eu

Very practical things I've learnt from collapsing basic services in Lebanon, and my ensuing reliance on what I call "survivalism for dummies". Emojis serve to outline topics 📡Mobile internet is far more susceptible to disruptions than cabled internet, so copper or fiber optic wires are key. Besides, redundant systems are crucial in the office context