Comedian Theo Von broke down in tears as Dr. Gabor Maté detailed the extreme psychological distress and suffering experienced by Palestinian children in Gaza from before Oct. 7 and during the current war. Von, after getting emotional, told his guest that “it feels like a genocide is going on over there.”
Von hosted Maté, a physician and expert on childhood development and trauma, for an episode of his This Past Weekend podcast on Tuesday for ranging conversation.
Halfway through the interview, Maté explained how trauma causes shame in developing children and how a child will deeply project that feeling inward, believing they are to blame for hurt or alienation they are suffering.
He said this begins a cycle of seeking to “fix” what is wrong. He began by detailing certain scenarios when this can occur, including cases where parents themselves are traumatized.
Children are narcissists, young children. When I say narcissists, I don’t mean in a pathological sense. I mean in the sense they think it’s all about them. Right, and they don’t have any other choice. They’re all they know. That’s all they know. So if the parents are happy and connected and there’s an atmosphere of loving acceptance and so on, then the child thinks, ‘Hey, I must be pretty good. I must be okay.’ But if the parents are stressed, depressed, traumatized, racially challenged, economically challenged, or such terrible things as the children in Gaza are experiencing right now with the daily bombings and all this kind of stuff, what can they think? That there’s something wrong with me.
Struck by the analysis, Von replied: “Oh, imagine some kid over there in Gaza looking up and there’s a bomb. And ‘man, I’m so horrible. I deserve to be bombed.’”
Maté continued then to detail a 2003 study conducted in Gaza that found 95 percent of children “showed traumatic symptoms.” He noted a “high percentage wet their beds”, “expressed aggression towards their parents” and suffered “panic attacks.”
This was “long before the aftermath of October the 7th” he said, adding: “Can you imagine what’s gonna happen to that generation years from now? I mean, it just breaks my heart every day when I think about it. And I know a lot of my fellow Jews don’t agree with me, but as a Jewish person, I’m not the only one who feels that way. It especially breaks my heart.”
With tears in his eyes, Von responded:
Yeah. When you put it in that sense, imagine a kid like, you know, because what are they gonna think? They don’t know. They just think, ‘man, something’s so wrong with me, I deserve to be killed.’ You know, or something. I don’t know.
Maté added that the hopelessness of the situation was amplified when children lose not only their parents, but their “extended families have been wiped out.” He noted that “19,000 kids have been orphaned.”
Von replied: “It’s heartbreaking. I mean, it feels like a genocide is going on over there and you don’t know what to do, you know, from, it’s like… I mean, you can pray, you can speak up about it. And I know that there are more political aspects of it. And we’ve had different people come on to talk about Israel and Palestine here. And it was very knowledgeable for a lot of our listeners because you hear about it a lot, but you don’t know the history and everything.”
The comedian continued: “I mean, it’s heartbreaking anytime something’s happening to a child, you know? That should be the one thing that we can all figure out. This shouldn’t happen.”
Maté agreed and added that “it’s also the truth that it’s also happening to kids in Israel.”
He said: “There’s bombs and rockets and so on. I don’t know if this is the time to go into the politics of it. It’s not a question of valuing or sort of esteeming one’s suffering over another. We don’t compare traumas, but the degree and the scale of suffering in Gaza is unprecedented.”
Watch above on YouTube.
