Lessons from Palestine: Understanding the resistance of educators and students in times of crisis

Many educators and students living through war and displacement carry difficult emotions into classrooms, but they can also transform them into acts of care and resistance. To understand this, we need to understand their emotional states at a granular level.

Since January 2024, we have been collaborating on a project with the dean and professors at the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Ibn Sina College in Nablus, Palestine, with support from Université de Montréal International.

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Our aim is to learn how professors and students talk about their emotions in a region marked by occupation, violence, forced displacement and chronic uncertainty.

From January 2024 to September 2025, we met every two months with five professors and the dean of nursing and midwifery at Ibn Sina College.

Palestinian university professors told us they need to be present and emotionally available for their students while grappling with the impacts of Israel’s military occupation and what many experts have labelled a genocide in Gaza, and they’re looking for tools to help them do that.

Our exchange with Palestinian educators and students led to the development of an intervention tool, CARE (Connection, Action, Resistance, Empowerment), co-designed to address two central emotional states: resistance fatigue and qahr.

Read more:
For Palestinian children living in Masafer Yatta, going to school is an act of resistance

What is qahr?

Resistance fatigue speaks to a pervasive loss of control over our days, choices and even our inner world. This emotional exhaustion is not only personal, but it is also shaped by political structures of exclusion and dispossession, which includes forced displacement, navigating checkpoints and restricted movement.

However, we witnessed another emotion salient in Arabic-speaking countries that we believe underpins resistance fatigue: qahr.

Qahr is a concept that is necessary to grasp in order to truly understand what Palestinians and others living through colonial violence in southwest Asia and north Africa are feeling.

In Arabic, the word qahr evokes an emotion that blends powerlessness, grief and an acute sense of injustice and being overwhelmed by forces larger than ourselves. More than anger and deeper than grief, qahr speaks to the suffocating weight of injustice, the pain of being silenced, muzzled, diminished, trivialized and made invisible.

Qahr is a complex emotion that also holds the potential for transformation — for naming, sharing and reimagining how to live and care for each other. It is a specific emotion shaped by oppression, perpetuated violence and historical trauma that non-Arabic languages often fail to capture.

What we have learned is that qahr is more than a feeling. It is also an action born of the Palestinian determination not to disappear. It is carried through stories, graffiti, songs and through everyday acts of resistance that push against military occupation and attempts at erasure.

Qahr might feel like rage and grief mixed into one, but it often looks like actions that serve as counter-narratives. These actions are deep forms of care, for ourselves, our communities and one’s history and ancestry. They are also political tools that reclaim space, time and dignity.

Hope and care

Our previous work with teachers in Lebanon has shown that educators and students alike carry the emotional trauma into the classroom from collective crises such as economic collapse, war and displacement. The Lebanese teachers we spoke to discussed losses, suffering, injustice, death, violence, unstable living conditions, but also feelings of hope and resistance.

Likewise, during the early days of the genocide in Gaza, many teachers expressed their profound sense of oppression and how they managed to transform it into hope and even moments of joy.

Their commitment to developing educational initiatives for their students stands as powerful evidence of this resistance. As Asma, a teacher from Gaza, explained: “People in the Gaza Strip have become experts in creating alternative life plans.”

In this way, spaces of suffering also become sites of hope and care. Our research on exploring emotion work, on valuing the role of emotions and on dialogue allowed us to turn toward specific emotions experienced by many of our project partners.

The CARE intervention

Inspired by our research findings about fathering amid political violence in occupied Palestine, we were interested in analyzing our discussions with colleagues at Ibn Sina College in terms of emotions and resilience.

Through our understanding of qahr, we created CARE (Connection, Action, Resistance, Empowerment), a culturally adapted intervention, with professors and students at Ibn Sina College. During a series of online dialogues, we reflected on the lived experience of teaching under occupation, talking about loss, and staying committed to teaching and training.

CARE builds on this insight, offering an adaptation of acceptance and commitment therapy with situated and culturally grounded strategies for educators and students to collectively hold space for their emotions and their actions.

What began as a project to support the psychosocial needs of health-care professionals in crisis turned into the co-creation of a training module on trauma and mental health. Our discussions revealed a common thread in our Ibn Sina colleagues’ objectives: a desire to share their own complex emotions to better support others, in particular their students.

As our collaborations evolve, we continue to explore how emotional concepts can inform pedagogical, political and relational practices. Qahr offers a lens through which to understand not only suffering and hope, but also the actions of resistance and reparation under conditions of war and displacement.

This is how our colleagues in Palestine began to share their complex, often opposing, feelings that arise in these circumstances, including resistance fatigue and qahr.

Together we identified key goals for the meetings, with a focus on developing psychosocial and mental health interventions and training sessions that recognize and validate these emotions. CARE emphasizes practical strategies for educators and students to individually and collectively hold space for strong emotions.

CARE was integrated into a guidebook and was first delivered to a cohort of nursing instructors and academics, who tested it with students and in professional circles in the fall of 2025. This initiative underscores the transformative strength of collaboration, and the importance of diving deep into learning about context and culturally specific emotion concepts for responsive care.

Qahr is a legitimate feeling. CARE offers a stepping stone to accompany teachers and professors in this experience, helping them to channel it in their own way, according to their resources and context. In this process, it is essential to mention that we also have much to learn from those who feel qahr. Their experiences invite us to question our own understandings and reflections of loss, anger and injustice.