Decolonising Minds in Relation to Israel and Palestine

Shaul Magid (Harvard Divinity School) and

Zahi Zalloua (Whitman College, Washington State)

The Decolonising Psychoanalysis seminar series has now completed thirteen events, with a wide range of academic and clinical contributors based variously in the USA, UK and South Africa. Our next seminar seeks to engage with thinkers who are theorising the subjective experience of Israeli and Palestinian life, using the lens of Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, Post Colonial Theory and Afro-pessimism, amongst other systems of critical thought.

Any enquiry into ‘decolonising’ the Israel/Palestine context, and its psychological aspect, has to be approached with humility and care, given how much blood has been and continues to be spilt, and how to various degrees we are injured by, implicated in, or insulated from that violence. To help us in this regard, we have invited two highly experienced and sensitive scholars to offer their thoughts in this extended instalment of the seminar series, Shaul Magid and Zahi Zalloua.

A recording of the seminar will be available to ticket-holders for a full year after the event.

About this seminar

Decolonising the Israeli Mind
Shaul Magid (Harvard School of Divinity)

It is no secret that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict seems to be stuck in an endless cycle of violence accelerated by incompatible narratives and irreconcilable differences. In the wake of the massacre of October 7 and the sociocide of Gaza, this has only deepened the division between two peoples who claim the same land as their own. Political and policy debates continue apace but what is less examined is the psychic dynamics of trauma and victimization that plagues both peoples, the Jews embodying a Judeo-pessimism of being “the most victimized victims” and the Palestinians a Palestino-pessimism, being, as Edward Said coined it, “the victims of victims.” In short, can pessimism produce a healthy future?

In this talk I will explore the notions of “colonization’ and “decolonization” not as political tropes but as ways Jewish Israelis and their supporters conceptualize the complex relationship between nationalism, colonization, religion, liberation, and freedom. What does it mean to “decolonize” one’s own story, to create/perform a “counter-identity” that does not erase but transforms a story into one that enables a piece of it to fade into history/memory, replaced by a space where one’s future is inextricably intertwined with another future. What does antisemitism mean in the context of a nation-state? How does one navigate the difference (or non-differences) between Israeliness and Jewishness, normalcy and exceptionalism, settlerness and indigeneity? Finally, what are the psychological components at play when identity, fantasy, narrative, and religion are performed on the world stage of global politics?

Decolonising the Palestinian Mind
Zahi Zalloua (Whitman College, Washington State)

After two years of live-streamed Palestinocide, who would fault Palestinians for adopting a pessimistic disposition and orientation? Still, we (Palestinians and their supporters) should resist what we might call Palestino-pessimism so as to avoid the pitfalls of Afropessimism (and Judeopessimism)—namely the impulse to ontologize one’s exclusion and exceptionalize one’s suffering. Decolonizing the Palestinian mind would involve instead at least three elements: (1) a libidinal divestment from the image of the Palestinian as victim (calling into question the liberal politics of recognition, where the Palestinian question becomes reduced to fixing the “empathy gap”); (2) an investment in a contrapuntal reading of Palestinian identity as both Indigenous and exilic (casting Palestine as an anti-identitarian cause); and (3) a reckoning with the racial matrix of the human (anti-Zionism is not only part and parcel of the struggle for Palestinian liberation, it must also speak to the problem of anti-Blackness, scrutinizing its presence in the hegemonic definition of the human).

Respondent: Anshu Srivastava (Guild of Psychotherapists)
Chair: Fiona Yaron-Field (Guild of Psychotherapists)

Please note that this seminar takes place on a Sunday and is longer than the usual events in the Decolonising Psychoanalysis series.

The titles of these talks have been inspired by Professor Haider Eid’s book Decolonising the Palestinian Mind (2023)

Speakers’ Biographies

Shaul Magid is Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School and co-editor of the Harvard Theological Review. He received rabbinical ordination in 1984 and has served as the rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue since 1997. He is the author of 8 books and more than 75 scholarly articles, including Piety and Rebellion: Essays in Hasidism (2019), and Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (2021). Shaul’s recent research explores contemporary American Judaism, Jewish identity, race, critical race theory and what he calls ‘Judeo-pessimism’. His latest book is The Necessity of Exile (2023) and in May 2024, he co-convened, with Terrence Johnson, the academic conference “Jews and Black Theory: Conceptualizing Otherness in the Twenty-First Century“.

Zahi Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and a professor of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College and Editor of The Comparatist. His most recent work includes Fanon, Žižek, and Violence of Resistance (2025), The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment (2024), Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality (2023), Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (2021), Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future (2020), Theory’s Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy (2018), and Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek (2017).

Bursary tickets

A limited number of bursary tickets are available on a pay-what-you-can basis to people who would not be able to attend without financial assistance. To apply for a bursary ticket please email ivan_talks@guildofpsychotherapists.org.uk. Thank you.

A recording will be available for ticket buyers for a full year after the event.

Certificates of Attendance available on request.

Organised by the Race and Culture Committee of the Guild of Psychotherapists.

Image caption
Al-Jammama_1.2 (detail) from the series In Another Place
photographer: Aviv Yaron
website link: https://www.avivyaron.co.uk/portfolio/in-another-place/