Reclaiming Indigenous Palestinian social work in the shadow of genocide through the living praxis of the Cactus Social Work Leadership Model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For over a century, Palestinian life has unfolded under displacement, segregation, and exile by Israel’s settler-colonialism—a systematic erasure culminating in the ongoing genocide in Gaza (Verdeja 2025). Whether exiled, occupied, or remaining in their lands (Said 1992), Palestinians live under a cruel regime that determines who lives and dies, exemplifying Mbembe’s (2003) “necro-politics.” Israel’s “matrix of domination” (Collins 1990) was founded on the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”): the decimation of over 500 villages and expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 (Pappé 2006). This destruction has devastated Palestinian institutions, forcing social workers to prioritize emergency response over professional development. Amid this condition, the Palestinian Social Work Profession (PSWP) struggles to survive and reimagine itself, guided by: sumud, a collective, relational resilience and anti-colonial struggle reclaiming land, memory, and dignity (Meari 2014), and afiya, a vision of well-being, healing, and refusal to be broken. We approach this reflection from positions of embodied witnessing and ethical responsibility. From 2009 to 2016, while working at Al-Quds University (AQU) on campuses divided by Israel’s apartheid wall, T.H., first author, encountered violence, segregation, and bureaucratic precarity. Managing frontline response teams, M.A., second author, saw humanitarian social workers holding space for grieving communities amid collapsed infrastructure. Together, we write as a form of sumud, preserving the legacy of generations who refused erasure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".