On Revelations and Revolutions: Drinking Ayahuasca Among Palestinians Under Israeli Occupation

The investigation used qualitative, ethnographic methods. Most data were gathered in 2018–2019 through 31 in-depth semi-structured interviews and participatory observation of five different ayahuasca groups. The interview sample included 13 Palestinians (five women, eight men; nine with Israeli citizenship and four living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank) and 18 Jewish Israelis (eight women, nine men, and one nonbinary person), aged between 28 and 59. Rituals observed typically included about 20 participants and were mostly facilitated by Jewish Israelis; sites sometimes included houses or lands that had been confiscated from Palestinians. Interviews were conducted in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, lasted between one and two-and-a-half hours, were recorded and transcribed, and in some cases used a microphenomenological interview technique to probe fine-grained details of pivotal revelatory events. The first author conducted participatory observation of five rituals and carried out follow-up interviews with the three case-study participants at one and two years after the first interviews. The analysis followed a grounded theory approach: thematic coding and iterative category development were used, organised with the qualitative software Narralizer (no automatic analysis). The extracted text notes that more detailed methods and a supplementary section are available elsewhere; this summary uses only the methodological information present in the provided extraction. From the larger dataset, the team previously identified fifteen conflict-related revelations, of which five were characterised as political according to the Badiou-informed framework; three of those political revelatory events were selected for in-depth presentation in this paper because they had sufficiently rich descriptions of both the event and subsequent developments.

Across interviews and observations the authors report a consistent pattern: Israeli ayahuasca rituals in the sample were often structured around New Age universalist discourse that privileges mystical union, harmony, and a denationalised humanism. Hebrew was the dominant language, Palestinian participants tended to be a small minority and less experienced, and ritual repertoires sometimes included Jewish religious elements and Israeli national songs. These structural features made Palestinian national identity and historical injustice largely excluded from the ritual 'structure.' Nonetheless, ayahuasca sessions occasionally produced intense revelatory events that brought excluded Palestinian realities into the fore. Three case studies illustrate how such revelatory events unfolded and what followed. Khalil, a Palestinian who had internalised an Israeliised identity, experienced a vision while alone on a porch during a Jewish-influenced ritual. He saw the displaced Palestinian owners of the house and was confronted with the Nakba and his own denial of Arabness. Returning to the group he sang an Arabic Andalusian song; the shaman redirected the moment into a celebratory Arab song and dance. Khalil retained fidelity to his revelation: he tattooed a line from Mahmoud Darwish, organised Palestinian-only ayahuasca rituals, and introduced Arab musical instruments, thereby helping to expand ayahuasca practice among Palestinians and create alternative, less mediated ritual structures. Ruqaiya, a Palestinian woman and trauma therapist, had a striking revelatory vision on Yom Kippur in which she saw mothers sacrificing children and felt the 'pain of the land.' She sang al-Fatiha and added Arabic verses to Hebrew songs, delivering an explicitly political message about Israeli responsibility and the insufficiency of mere fasting as atonement. Responses within the ritual were mixed: many participants denied or intellectualised the political content, and some facilitators framed such revelations as personal 'shadow work' rather than a demand for collective reparation. Despite partial containment by ritual authorities, Ruqaiya developed a sense of mission, encouraged Palestinian women to participate, co-facilitated other ceremonies with like-minded people (including two Jewish Israeli musicians who embraced her message), and sought to politicise New Age practice by embedding Palestinian cultural and political expression into ritual. Amos, a Jewish Israeli veteran, underwent a revelatory event triggered when Palestinian participants cried in a ceremony. He relived an incident from his military service first from his own perspective and then from the family's perspective, which produced intense guilt. He intervened by singing a Hebrew song reinterpreted as asserting a shared sacred connection to the land and thereafter began learning Arabic and building friendships with Palestinian participants. Over time, however, his fidelity shifted: in a follow-up interview he reframed the song as a call to personal selfacceptance and movement forward rather than a continuing political responsibility to redress structural injustice. The authors present this as an example of fidelity being reversed or assimilated back into the depoliticised structure when a subject is strongly embedded in that structure. The authors note that these revelatory events typically involved a separation from group harmony, intense negative affect (pain, anger, guilt), an urgent communicative act (often musical), and then varied trajectories of fidelity and action. From the wider dataset they report 15 conflict-related revelations, five defined as political, and rituals averaging roughly 20 participants; some rituals took place on lands with histories of displacement. Follow-up interviews suggest that fidelity can lead to durable changes (as with Khalil and Ruqaiya) but can also be blunted or reinterpreted over time (as with Amos).

Cavazzoni and colleagues interpret their findings through Badiou's theory of events: ayahuasca can facilitate momentary ruptures in a ritual status quo by bringing into awareness excluded truths, and some recipients of such revelations then undertake 'truth procedures'—acts of fidelity that try to restructure the ritual and sometimes wider social arrangements to include what was previously excluded. The authors argue that mystical experiences of unity and prophetic revelatory events exist in dialectical tension: mystical union can preserve harmony and stabilise existing power relations, whereas revelatory events carry a prophetic, particularised ethical-political message that can be revolutionary. The paper highlights how ritual structures in the observed Israeli context often neutralise political content by translating it into individual 'shadow work' or by redirecting emotional ruptures into culturally safe formats (for example, substituting a politically charged Arabic song with an upbeat pan-Arab song). When fidelity is sustained, the result can be diversification and politicisation of practice—Palestinian-led rituals, introduction of Arabic language and instruments, and the formation of new solidarities. When fidelity is reversed or contained, revelatory insight may be reinterpreted in apolitical, therapeutic, or universalist terms that leave structural injustices unchallenged. The authors acknowledge the resilience of the ritual and sociopolitical structure: agents of the structure can and do attempt to absorb or neutralise event truths, producing what the paper terms 'pseudofidelity.' They also point out that subject position matters—those marginal to the structure (for example, Palestinian participants) may be better placed to sustain counterhegemonic fidelity, while those embedded in the structure may find fidelity harder to sustain. The paper notes ethical considerations around how revelations are handled in ritual (the potential for imposition by facilitators) and suggests that persistence and organisational commitment are required for event-derived truths to produce durable political change. Finally, the authors propose that Badiou's categories might be extended to analyse other domains of psychedelic-induced events (art, science, love), but such expansions lie beyond the immediate empirical scope of this study.

Cavazzoni and colleagues conclude that ayahuasca can occasion revelatory events that disclose excluded political truths about Palestinian dispossession and that these events may prompt sustained, politicised action when recipients maintain fidelity. Such truth procedures have the potential to diversify and politicise ritual practice, creating alternative structures that acknowledge Palestinian identity and history. Nonetheless, the dominant ritual structure and wider sociopolitical forces frequently attempt to contain or reverse these truths, producing variable outcomes across individuals. The paper therefore frames psychedelic-induced revelation as part of a sociopsychopharmacology with both counterhegemonic and assimilative possibilities, and it emphasises that sustained commitment and organising are necessary for revelatory insights to translate into lasting structural change.