The Settlers' Town is a Strongly Built Town: Fanon in Palestine

This article emerges from one collaboration with Palestinian clinicians while presenting the work of Frantz Fanon to a group of training clinicians in the Maana Center of EMMS Nazareth Hospital in Nazareth (al-Nasirah). Reading and discussing Fanon in Palestine with Palestinian clinicians and trainees elicited deepseated feelings of affirmation and validation, while also disclosing anxieties arising from colonial alienation, as Fanon would say. At the same time, Fanon conjures in Palestine an affirming and empowering spirit that, inevitably, results in a consideration of how Palestinian indigeneity, no matter how mediated by regimes of domination and control, recenters itself as a repost to the extractive psychological and material violence that constitutes settler colonialism; in this case, Zionism. Adopting a decolonial methodology, we came to understand how psychological theory and practice provides Palestinian clinicians a means to work for selfawareness within a regime of oppression. Centering indigenous lives, their relationships to their own collectives and communities, and their relationship the psychopathy of settler colonial structures, produced critical psychological and social knowledge.