EPA-0648 - Between Jewish Settlers and Palestinian Citizens of Israel: Negotiating Ethno-National Inequality Through the Bio-Medical Category of PTSD

Abstract

In this lecture I examine what happens to PTSD as a biomedical category when local political power relations and ethno-national inequality are brought into the understanding of the disorder and its application. On the basis of four years' fieldwork (2004-2008) at two nongovernmental Israeli organizations — NATAL (‘Israeli Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War’) and the ITC (‘Israel Trauma Coalition’) — I will analyze how Jewish-Israeli experts have negotiated similar clinical questions concerning the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of PTSD, but in relation to two different matrices of political relations and different violent situations: the ‘Disengagement Plan’ (August 2005), which led to the evacuation of National-Orthodox Jews who had settled in the Occupied Territories, and the Second Lebanon War (July 2006), which led to the exposure of Palestinian citizens of Israel to missile attacks.