Dr. Samah Jabr is a leading Palestinian psychiatrist, psychotherapist, writer, and public intellectual. She is former chair of the Mental Health Unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health, and for over two decades, she has explored the psychological dimensions of life under occupation — not as an academic exercise, but as a lived reality.

Her new book, Radiance in Pain and Resilience: The Global Reverberation of Palestinian Historical Trauma, brings these ideas into global relief.

“One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”

This was a tweet posted by award-winning Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad on X in October 2023. It is also the title of his recently published New York Times Bestseller which has also been shortlisted for the 2025 Palestine Book Awards. A memoir, and a reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values.

Omar spent the past two decades reporting on major world events, the so-called War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change and more. And for almost 2 years now, watching the carnage, the genocide in Gaza, enabled by the West.

A writer, editor, filmmaker, organiser, and longtime advocate for justice in Palestine, Frank Barat has spent years holding space for difficult and necessary conversations. He has worked with iconic voices like Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, and Ilan Pappé, curating powerful collections like Gaza in Crisis and Freedom is a Constant Struggle.

He was a coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. And his work with the Ciné-Palestine film festival in Paris is an extension of his activism through storytelling and visual culture.

In this episode of Falastin, we talk not only about Palestine as a cause, but also as a cultural and political lens — a way of seeing and understanding global struggles for liberation, how storytelling and film can shift the global conversation and what solidarity means and looks like in this moment of genocide.Music: Al-Quds Arabiya | Edward Said National Conservatory of Music