Wasseem El Sarraj
Wasseem El Sarraj is a British/Palestinian writer and psychologist, living in London. He is the son of the late Eyad El Sarraj, the Palestinian pioneering psychiatrist and founder of the Gaza Community Mental Healthcare Programme.
Mental Health and Human Rights in Palestine
Co-publisher:Zand Graphics Ltd
Categories: Biography, Civics & Citizenship, Decolonisation, Health, Mental Health
This is a biography of the life of Dr Eyad El Sarraj, Gaza’s pioneering psychiatrist and founder of the Gaza Community Mental Healthcare Programme, written by his son, Wasseem El Sarraj. It is also a history of Palestine with a focus on Gaza. Eyad’s life was intimately intertwined with Palestine’s struggles so his choices and reactions reflected many of the major historical moments of the last 70 years. The book is an effort to provide a perspective on how the forces around him impacted his life, and how he took control of what he could achieve in an intractable situation. The book is interspersed with Wasseem’s own reflections as a mixed-race Palestinian, and as someone who has lived under occupation in Gaza.
ISBN Print: 9781990263378
Publication Date: March 2022
Page Count: 150
Binding Type: Soft cover
Trim Size: 6in x 9in
Language: English
Colour: Colour
Wasseem El Sarraj ably interweaves the history of Gaza and his own life with that of his remarkable father, the courageous psychiatrist Dr. Eyad El Sarraj, who served as healer for Palestinians struggling with both the Occupation and their own ruinous political divisions and as a beacon of moral hope for Israelis seeking a just peace with Palestinians. — Nancy Murray, activist for peace with justice in the Middle East since 1988. She is co-founder and president of the US-based Gaza Mental Health Foundation.
The book gives a socio-political background necessary for the reader to understand the complicated situations and conditions, especially in the Palestinian and Israeli long and bloody conflict that was the framework for Eyad’s life, thinking, and professional and political activity … One can say that Eyad was born in Palestine, died in Israel but lived in Gaza. As Wasseem writes: Gaza’s pain was Eyad’s pain. — Ruchama Marton, MD, is an Israeli psychotherapist, psychiatrist, feminist, and founder of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel
Gaza Community Mental Healthcare Programme has transformed the way mental health has been talked about, and treated, in Gaza. Eyad’s personal sense of right and wrong, and a keen sense for justice, meant that mental health would become inextricably linked with human rights. … I am glad that Eyad’s work and his life has been documented, and consolidated in this memoir. — Yasser Abu Jamei, director, GCMHP.
This is a biography of the life of Dr Eyad El Sarraj, Gaza’s pioneering psychiatrist and founder of the Gaza Community Mental Healthcare Programme, written by his son, Wasseem El Sarraj. It is also a history of Palestine with a focus on Gaza. Eyad’s life was intimately intertwined with Palestine’s struggles so his choices and reactions reflected many of the major historical moments of the last 70 years. The book is an effort to provide a perspective on how the forces around him impacted his life, and how he took control of what he could achieve in an intractable situation. The book is interspersed with Wasseem’s own reflections as a mixed-race Palestinian, and as someone who has lived under occupation in Gaza.
Foreword by Ruchama Marton MD, Preface, Prologue, 1. Empires and Tribes, 1 The British, The Nakba, 4. Egypt: Collective Joy, 5. Returning to Gaza, 6. London, 7. The Clinician and the Activist, 8. The Gaza Community Mental Healthcare Programme, 9. ‘If you have the gun, you have the rights’, 10. War on Gaza, 11. A talent for hope, 12. The rationality of revolt, Epilogue, Afterword by Yasser Abu Jamei, Director of the GCMHP
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Rinky-dink Revolution involves actions and inactions that are easy, safe, mundane, unglamorous, and feasible within every person’s life.
Howard Waitzkin’s Rinky-Dink Revolution … is small to be sure—light-weight, unimposing in appearance, and with an abbreviated wing-span of just 72 pages total, including 11 pages of fore-and-after-matter. A quick read. But rinky-dink? Quite the opposite. …
Like the best revolutionaries in all times and places Howard Waitzkin is guided by a powerful sense of possibility as well as deep feelings of love. He’s pissed off to be sure, because he pays attention to the crimes of racial capitalism. But he also knows that “even anger at injustice makes the brow grow stern,” and that being pissed off will not take us where we need to go—only love and joy and generosity can do that. He illustrates over and over that the greatest weapon in the cause of liberation is our beating human hearts longing to be free.
This book is bantam-weight, as I said—the perfect mini-manifesto to slip into your back pocket or your backpack, a worthy companion as we mount the next action or tend the community garden. — Bill Ayers. Rinky-Dink billayers.org
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Howard Waitzkin presents a clear, straightforward intervention for revolutionary change in the global capitalist economic system. He covers much ground, with sophistication, while keeping the argument grounded. His focus on ways to facilitate a challenge to capital and to build further revolutionary transformation is crucial at this historical juncture. The discussion of creative constructions and creative destructions is particularly useful. —Brett Clark, Professor of Sociology, University of Utah, and author of The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift
The end of capitalism is possible. Waitzkin takes us a step further in the creative process for transformation. Through specific examples from organized groups within the United States and abroad, this work constitutes a practical guide for everyone. Waitzkin encourages our creativity for organized, safe acts and omissions to transcend capitalism. —Nylca J. Muñoz Sosa, lawyer, public health leader, and activist focusing on health justice and decolonization in Puerto Rico
Waitzkin is among the expanding list of authors who openly reject the imperative of capitalism for infinite economic growth. He clearly understands that the world can provide better lives for all of humanity while reducing the total mass of capitalist production, which is overwhelmingly wasteful…. Rinky-Dink Revolution is a great contribution to probing how we can live our lives in ways that prepare us for the society we hope to bring into being. It is more than worth reading – it is something to think deeply about.
Contents
Moving beyond capitalism now 8
Peculiar ways to struggle without confronting capitalism 12
Rinky-dink revolution and revolutionaries 21
Creative constructions 36
Creative destructions 49
The death of capitalism and the birth of something else 65
About the author 68
Acknowledgments 69
Vision statement: Moving beyond capitalism—now! — Howard Waitzkin and Firoze Manji 70
Audiobook
You can listen to the audiobook here:
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