In Memoriam: Adib Jarrar

Our colleague Adib Jarrar, clinical psychologist, organisational consultant and activist based in Ramallah, Palestine, passed away on Sunday 2^nd July 2017, four days after undergoing open heart surgery for a condition that had left him increasingly debilitated and frail. He was buried in Acca (Acre), the city of his birth and home to his mother and extended family, on Friday 7^th July. He was 60 years old.

It is an honour for the two of us to remember our colleague and friend Adib Jarrar. Adib was from a well-known and distinguished Palestinian family, which brought depth to his sense of connectedness with the lost Palestinian homeland (watan). Blessed with profound insight into the catastrophic effects this loss had on Palestinian identity, he dedicated himself to work in whatever way he could to confront this situation head on. His efforts to do so grew from a secure and deeply embedded identity as Palestinian, which allowed him to establish a ready and authentic emotional connection with his compatriots. It was also from this base that he was able to reach out to others - in the West and in Israel - concerned about the continuing dispossession and dehumanisation of Palestinians, which he often referred to as the on-going Nakbi.

We worked with Adib in the second of a series of seminars on psychoanalysis for Palestinian psychologists, where he led a session on the Group Relations method and its relevance for Palestine. His sheer pleasure in being able to convey the psychoanalytic underpinnings of the Group Relations approach and its relevance to Palestinian situation, in his mother tongue, was a pleasure to behold - most of the participants had been educated in Hebrew. He placed great faith in the younger generation to carry forward the task of engaging emotionally with the assaults on Palestinians' human rights and dignity that continue to be a feature of their daily life. He was in touch with the scars such attacks left internally, yet had found a way to process the