Holocaust survivor and trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté spoke to Muneef Khan on Gaza, genocide, intergenerational trauma, and the silence of world leaders.

The following is the full text of the powerful call to witness, resist, and stand in solidarity, transcribed by Maryam Seraj, an editorial intern at The Wire. It has been edited lightly for clarity.

Muneef Khan (MK): Hello and thank you for joining us. I am Muneef Khan and today we are honoured to speak with Dr. Gabor Maté, physician, author, Holocaust survivor and one of the most outspoken voices calling the assault on Gaza by its true name, genocide. Drawing on his expertise in trauma and his own history as a survivor, Dr. Maté has challenged the silence surrounding us and reminded us that never again must mean never again for anyone. Dr. Maté, we're grateful for your courage and for being here to share your perspective on this urgent and enforced humanitarian crisis. Thank you for joining us.

My first question – and it comes more on the subject of the language of genocide – you've been one of the few Jewish voices who's publicly calling what's happening in Gaza a genocide. But what I want to get back on this and what I want to understand is what led you to use that word and why do you believe it's so important to name it?

Gabor Maté (GM): Well, first of all, to tell you the truth, when people start started to use the word genocide in relation to Gaza, I didn't like it because I thought of genocide in terms of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe that swept away so many people's lives, including almost my own, and those are my grandparents. And I thought of it as a deliberate attempt to kill people, to exterminate them. And I didn't think Gaza was a deliberate attempt to exterminate people.

But then it turns out it's not up to me to decide what genocide is. There's an internationally agreed-upon legally-defined understanding of what genocide is. And according to many scholars of genocide, in fact most scholars of genocide, including very prominent Jewish, Israeli scholars of the Holocaust, what has happened in Gaza does meet the criteria for genocide. So it's not a subjective term. It's not a matter of opinion. It's a matter of legal and internationally agreed upon definition.

Look, when I was growing up, I could never understand – once I came to terms with what happened to the Jews in Eastern Europe and once I understood the full horror of it – I couldn't understand how the world could let it happen. I couldn't understand how humanity could stand by. The difference is at that time the Germans went to a lot of trouble to hide what they were doing. This did not happen on television. It did not happen on TikTok. It didn't happen on YouTube, on Instagram. So when we ask the question, how could the world stand by? It's much more compelling to ask it right now because then people couldn't have known the exact details. Some details got out, but the world for the most part did not know and people did not witness it. Now we are witnessing it every day. And we're still letting it happen. And my country is letting it happen. Your country is letting it happen. Much of the west is supporting it economically, militarily, politically. So this question of naming it and bearing witness to it, I think it's the most morally compelling question of the day. Not that there isn't suffering elsewhere. There's suffering in your country. There's racism everywhere. But the degree of cruelty, brutality, and open gleeful imposition of suffering, that's unique right now when it comes to Gaza. 

MK: Coming back to the same question itself, what do you say to people who struggle with this term and in addition to that to those who accuse critics of Israel of being anti-semitic?

GM: Well, as to what I say about the critics of the phrase, I say look up the international definition. Look up all the scholars, the Jewish scholars, Israeli scholars, international scholars of genocide who are calling this genocide. So it's not a subjective term. It's an objective term based on a consensus. And just two days ago, there's a report that over 80% of genocide scholars internationally agree that what's happening right now is genocide. So you can go argue with the experts. Number one.

Number two, as to anti-semitism, we all have three things to say about it. I think let's begin with the fact that first of all, it's a cynical political move. Abba Eban who used to be Israel's foreign minister at some point and was at some point the representative ambassador to the United Nations. He wrote an article in 1973. He wrote this article in 1973 in a Jewish magazine. And he said that the way you deal with critics of Israel is if they are not Jewish, you call them anti-semites and if you are if they are Jewish, you call them self-hating Jews. So it was a cynical political move and Shulamit Aloni who used to be the minister of education in Israel said that yeah, if somebody criticised Israel in Europe we bring up the Holocaust. If they do it in the United States we call them anti-semites.

So it's strictly a cynical political move on one level. On another level, the Jewish people have suffered a lot and nobody needs to prove that and we know it. And in the Jewish mind, there's a real fear. And a lot of Jews are brought up with this fear. They're brought up in their schools, in their homes, with the memory of the Holocaust and all the persecutions that took place, throughout history. And what they're never told is the history of Palestine. So that most Jewish people, like most Canadian people, don't know the history of the indigenous people in Canada. Most Americans don't know the history of the indigenous people or what happened to them in the United States. The British Empire which helped to found the Jewish entity in Palestine came to India. We know what it did in India. The starvation it caused, the oppression, the exploitation, the robbery of resources, the killing of tens of thousands of people throughout history. The average British person never hears a word about that. You go to Trafalgar Square and you see all these statues of all these mass murderers who killed people in Africa and Asia and India. In the same way, most Jewish people are never taught about the history of the Palestinians or what actually happened in Palestine or how the same British Empire that oppressed so much of the world also took over Palestine and founded in its interest to support Jewish immigration and the creation of a Jewish entity. So in the absence of knowing the history of Palestine and with this historical sensitivity and hyper sensitivity to any attack in Israel, any criticism of Israel seems like anti-semitism.

It's an honest mistake, but it's a tragic one. And it's unfortunately supported and magnified by the Western media because the western media does not tell the truth about what's happening in Palestine. So people naturally think that if you could have said that, the good news is that fewer and fewer people are buying that anymore. Few and fewer Jewish people are buying it. There's many more young Jewish people who are standing up for Palestine, who are saying, 'No, this is not anti-semitism to stand in favour of Palestinian freedom and we're not accepting the story anymore that we're always the victim and we're only the victim and we have the right to do anything to anybody.' So, it's changing, it's taking time. 

MK: And now I want to come to the trauma oppression aspect of this conversation. And from your perspective, especially as a trauma expert, how do you understand the intergenerational trauma of both Palestinians living under siege and Jewish people shaped by the Holocaust?

GM: Well, let's take the two separately.

The Palestinian trauma has been documented for decades. It's to be suppressed, to be a noncitizen in your own country. I'm talking about the West Bank now. To be always under attack, to have children watch their parents being humiliated. And in Gaza specifically, there was a study done in 2004 that showed that over 90% of children in Gaza then had traumatic symptoms. They were wetting their beds. I wet my bed, by the way, till I was 13 years of age because of what happened to me as an infant, as a Jewish infant. They were wetting their beds. They were aggressive towards their parents. They had anxiety. They had depression.

And more recently, a study last year showed that many children in Gaza, young children, think about death. Imagine a four- or five- year-old having to think about death. That's hugely traumatic. And there's a Palestinian psychiatrist Dr. Samah Jabr wrote a book called Radiance [in Pain and Resilience: The global reverberation of Palestinian historical trauma] for which I wrote the foreward. It's coming out this year. And she talks about what it's like to treat people under occupation. And the example that I always mention an 80-year-old man comes to her for suicidal depression which is caused by the fact that the home that he built with his own hands 20 years ago now he has to destroy with his own hands – forced to do so by the Israeli occupation because they never gave him permission to build on his own land which they don't give to Palestinians. So when Palestinian build homes on their own lands, they're forced to destroy it or the Israeli army comes and bulldozes it. The trauma is endless and is daily. And when I was working there in Palestine three years ago with women who'd been tortured in Israeli jails and tens of thousands of Palestinians have been through Israeli jails, tortured, including young children. Nobody talks about that.

But I was told that there's no post-traumatic stress disorder here because the trauma is never post. It's ongoing.

So, it's unspeakable and the impacts are severe. As far as the Jewish trauma, it is true that trauma is multigenerational. So the trauma that I sustained as an infant I passed some of that onto my kids. I didn't mean to, but I did. So the Jewish trauma has been passed on from generation to generation, but it's been reinforced by a historical narrative that makes us the victims all the time. So that not only do you have the trauma, you also have the reinforcement by a false version of history, a version of history that's been debunked and refuted by Israeli Jewish scholars over and over and over again who've told the truth, who've done their research, who have shown what happened in 1948, the massacre and the expulsion of Palestinians, the rape of Palestinians, the robbery of their homes, the destruction of 500 of their villages. This has been documented by Israeli Jewish scholars. The average Jewish person, I should say, the average person in the West never hears about it. So, in the absence of that knowledge, again, it just seems like more anti-semitism.

And October 7th – they keep saying this phrase that it's the largest number of Jews killed in one day since the Holocaust. That's a completely outrageously false statement. It's false not because factually it's not true. It's false because of its implication. Those people were not killed because they were Jews. They were killed because the Palestinians saw them as occupiers of their own lands. And had those occupiers been French or Indian or Chinese, that would have been the people killed on October 7th. I'm not justifying October 7th. I'm saying that it has nothing to do with anti-semitism. It has to do with the real desperation of a people breaking out of a blockade and a concentration camp. People have been bombed and killed and massacred for decades, filled with hatred and filled with despair. And actually, what's surprising is when I visit Palestine, when I've been to Gaza, to the West Bank, including recently, I don't meet any hatred as a Jew. I meet welcome, I meet people who just want their stories to be understood. 

MK: If I may interrupt also, that was going to be my next question about when you first visited Gaza. You know, you described that you were crying for weeks?

GM: Yeah. When I first visited the occupied territories in during the first intifada and I went with the medical delegation to look at the medical care under the occupation under the conditions of the intifada and I went from refugee camp to refugee camp and and I was in Jabalya refugee camp which Israel just destroyed recently killing a lot of people seeing these cement hovels in which these people who have been expelled from their homeland had to live so that I have the right to go there and move there as a Jew. I have the right to become a citizen. I have to get land because I'm a Jew from Europe. And the Palestinians who were born there whose parents and grandparents and great grandparents have been there for generations and generations, they don't have the right to go back to their homes. They're living in these hovels in the sounds of Gaza. Of course, I cried. I couldn't help it. It's just it was and that was over 30 years ago now. It's much worse now. And when I was there three years ago, I wasn't in Gaza. I was in the West Bank. It was much worse three years ago than it had been when I was there. 

MK: Could you describe something that you saw for our audience to understand. 

GM: Well, again, I did a workshop seminar for women who had been tortured in Israeli jails. And when you listen to how they were tortured, the clever cruel, psychologically astute. One woman was being interrogated and she began her menstruation period during the interrogation. She starts bleeding. They laugh at her. They don't give her any clothing. They don't give her any help. They just let her sit there and bleed and they laugh at her. Now, what's that about? It's about denying people their dignity. It's about making them feel completely dominated. People are tortured and screaming and the screams are channeled into the cells of the other people. And then the checkpoints where Palestinians, as a Jew, I could go through the checkpoints like that and I could go to different checkpoints where they just wave at you because we had the right license plate. But if you're Palestinian going to hospital trying to give birth, they make you wait for hours at the checkpoints or they question you or they'd make you turn back. People can't visit their relatives if they're Palestinians. If you're Jewish, hey, whatever you want. This is what goes on every day. It goes on. 

MK:  if I may ask, why do you think so much of the mainstream media avoids framing – I mean, first of all, avoids covering this in depth and also avoids framing – what's happening as genocide. I mean we've seen the complicity of so-called media organisations which are quite unquote “renowned organisations” but I think in a personal capacity all of us now feel must be disagreeing with that now. 

GM: Well, when you look at the media historically, it's not so surprising. During the Vietnam War, which some of your listeners might remember, the Americans said that the North Vietnamese had attacked an American battleship in the Gulf of Tonkin, which then gave them the reason to bomb Vietnam and kill hundreds of thousands of people. That incident never happened. The media could have known that it never happened had they done a little bit of investigation. All the lies that the Americans told about Vietnam, the media repeated and magnified. They were a megaphone for the American government. Later on, it turns out it was all a pack of lies. But that was after 3 million Vietnamese had been killed and the country had been devastated and the bombing of Cambodia and Laos.

So if you remember the war in Iraq any five-year-old child with half a brain knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein possessed. They didn't exist. The United States stands in the United Nations and shows evidence of the weapons of mass destruction. And the British press and the American press all repeat – weapons of mass destruction. What's the result? Half a million Iraqi civilians killed. Years later the truth comes out. Oh, we made a mistake. Well, the same thing is happening right now because the press is not independent. We talk about independent media and free press. Free from what? Not from the control of the people that own it and the billionaires that own the media are completely aligned with the American government.

So that's why you never see the truth about anything that the American government wants to fool the people about.

The media will line up, especially when it comes to imperial policy, especially when it comes to foreign policy. It's like I said, the British people still have not been told what happened in India. The Belgian people are now beginning to be told that their country killed 12 million Congolese in the late 19th-early 20th century. But when these things are happening, the media will never tell the truth. We're lucky if they tell the truth decades later. 

MK: And now I want to come down to the aspect of healing and hope. You know, as someone who has dedicated your life to understanding trauma, what message of solidarity or compassion would you want to share with the people watching in Gaza? 

GM: If you look at the history of any country that has been under oppression or foreign domination or internal injustice, this struggle has been going on for thousands of years. But what is it that inspires us? What is it that still keeps us demanding and insisting upon freedom and justice? Because as human beings, that's our nature. There's something in us that demands freedom, that demands justice. In face of all the lies, in face of all the distortions, in face of all the propaganda, look at these people who are going on this flotilla right now. They're never going to get there. The Israeli army will stop them on their seas as they always do, like the pirates that they are. But they're doing it, aren't they? Because the truth and justice matters more to them than this victory or that victory. So, what I'm saying to people is this is a long-term struggle. And if your heart is breaking, good. That means you're an alive human being. If your heart is not breaking, then you're either blind or your heart is closed. So what I'm saying is justice and freedom are human imperatives. They're human impulses. They're human drives. And that'll keep us going in the face of injustice. In the face of setbacks, in the face of horrible suffering that will never be extinguished.  

MK: There is also another side to this question which I wanted to ask in a personal capacity. People who feel helpless as they witness it from afar. I've been covering this for the past two years. I'm in touch with people in Gaza day in and day out and it's a question I wanted to ask is that you know what would you say to those who witness this from afar but still want to remain present to the truth of what's happening because these are beyond horrific what we see on a daily basis. 

GM: It's beyond belief what we're seeing and what the world is allowing it to happen. Well, look, first of all, they want you to feel helpless. They want you to feel isolated. They want you to feel everything you do is futile. And, um, it's true. I've been speaking about this subject for decades. Certainly, I have been for the last two years. Millions of people have seen my talks. Millions of people have seen the talks by the wonderful Francesca Albanese, the UN rapporteur. They've seen talks by Norman Finklestein, the American scholar Ilan Pappe, the Israeli historian. They've seen the Palestinian speak, they've seen Muhammed el Kurd speak, they've seen all the wonderful articulate people from Gaza, the journalists who put their lives on the line. And none of that has saved a single life. But has it been useless? No. Because when you talk to the people in Gaza, it makes all the difference in the world to them that some people notice them, that some people support them, that some people feel with them, that some people – many people, millions, hundreds of millions of people – understand their experience. That makes a big difference. And if you feel totally helpless, do something. Speak out. I don't know Rs 5 whatever you can afford to go to whatever organisation and talk to other people so you don't feel isolated because it's terrible to be alone with this burden. That's what I would say to people.

MK: This brings me to my final question and this is more targeted towards the global leaders. What would you say to global leaders who choose silence when Gaza is being devastated? 

GM: You might as well ask me what I would say to Adolf Hitler. What would I say to Adolf Hitler? I have nothing to say to Adolf Hitler. These people are blind. They're opportunistic. They're venal. They're hypocritical. They're liars. They're cowardly. I'm speaking objectively because they know what's going on. So, what can I say to them? I would say to them, there is history. You will not be remembered well. There is humanity and those people who are in touch with their humanity, they see what you're doing. They see it. You live with that. That's your choice. I would not want to be sharing your split, suppressed, hypocritical, selfish state of mind. I would not want to be sharing that state of mind. And some of you, because historically this is always the case, even some of the Nazi criminals later on had conscience struggles and they felt terrible about what they had done. A few of them, some of you will wake up. I just hope it happens sooner rather than later. That's all I would say to them. 

MK: I really appreciate you joining us Dr. Maté and it's been an honour talking to you and please continue to do what you're doing and I hope to reconnect with you again in the future. Thank you so much.

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