Palestinian children and violence.

Presented at the conference: “The Impact of Armed Conflic on Children” Belfast, 2-5 February 1996, organized by Save the Children - Belfast.

During the violent days of the Intifada , I was told by a PLO official, on one of my visits to Tunis, that he was concerned about the damage being done to the national spirit of the struggle by the portrayal of our heroic Palestinian children as victims. At the same time, back in Gaza, I still had to deal with the Israeli occupation authorities who were accusing me of using children and their alleged trauma for political propaganda.

There is no doubt in my mind that life as we lived it was a political issue. Living under occupation makes any one politically involved. Not only the politics of the deadly confrontation between Israel and the PLO, but also inter partisan politics were exerting their pressure on my work. It was difficult to form a board of directors with the agreement of all political streams. It was difficult enough to get the representatives of the spectrum to meet, let alone to agree on anything. Each party was mainly concerned about its slice of power, and sought to monopolise power, sometimes through intimidation or even brute force. One example was when my drug- addict patients were threatened by Hamas, to either stop taking drugs at once or be killed. Some were killed, despite my attempt to save them.

And since everyone loves children, it was argued that these patients were killed for the sake of protecting children from their bad example.

How did children become involved in the Intifada? The world watched in amazement, seeing youngsters not only confront, but even draw Israeli soldiers into battle. More than anybody else, the Israelis themselves were desperate to know the answer; their self perception was suffering, and their image in the eyes of the world was being damaged.

In our culture, children are fortunate in not being stigmatised or ostracised when they require psychiatric help. For to consult a psychiatrist in Gaza can be a risky business. Many people still believe that mental illness is a form of bewitchment or evil possession. One curious phenomenon that emerged during the Intifada was the marked increase of spiritual healers and fortune tellers, also of those who dealt in black magic. People who had become extremely stressed as a result of life under occupation went to them, feeling they could provide them with magical remedies. After all, people reasoned, what could a mere doctor do to help a man possessed by the devil, or a woman under the spell of a genie?

Fortunately, children were spared such reasoning, and were brought in for psychiatric treatment.

Many factors contributed to children involvement in the Intifada. In Gaza refugee camps, an average child of twelve will belong to a large family, and have at least seven siblings. Living in cramped two roomed dwellings, he will spend most of his time outside on the street. There he will congregate with his friends. They will do everything together - play, eat, fight, sing and weep. Home is an overcrowded space, where mother is struggling to make ends meet. Father rises at 3:00 am every dawn, to go to work as a laborer in Israel, if, that is he is lucky enough to be allowed in across the border that day, and to find work once there. This is no small achievement, as unemployment levels for Palestinians from Gaza stand at more than 50%. After such a stressful day a father will come home that evening so edgy that any thing will make him angry. He will often express his frustration by shouting at the equally exhausted mother.

One of the first impressions on arriving in Gaza is that it is full of children. Half of its one million population are below the age of 15. School offers no respite for the children. The majority of schools are forced, by economic and demographic pressure, to have two shifts. The first shift starts at 7:00 am, its average classroom size numbering 70 children. In order to cope, teachers tend to be strict disciplinarians, who will deliver corporeal punishment during lessons if a child so much as gets an answer wrong.

The majority of Gaza population are Muslim. Islam for them is a mixture of divine rules and cultural traditions, demanding absolute compliance, even a fatalistic approach to every day life. Men gain power through money and political position. They tend to consider their women and the family as a whole to be their exclusive property.

The children of the refugee camps became involved in the Intifada due to these conditions. They were being defiant, defending their play ground, their territory against the invading Israeli army. They were also rebelling against all forms of imposed authority, including that of family and teacher. And they were reacting to the sight of the humiliation of their fathers, who were helpless when abused or beaten by Israeli soldiers. The children were identifying with new symbols of power that they saw raging in the streets with new heroes. They were magnetised by armed soldiers, and by mysterious masked activists who were so daring. If children elsewhere were playing at fiction of wars, in Palestine the game was for real. Shootings were with bullets. Bones were broken with batons. Tear gas penetrated into every room. Homes were dynamited. And blood - real blood - poured off the injured and the dead.

* over 100,000 Palestinians were detained in prison, the vast majority of them were tortured.

For seven long years, people were forced indoors by a military curfew, lasting from 7:00 pm to 4:00 am. Road blocks were erected everywhere and many streets became cull de sacs - Israeli strategic traps to catch escaping stone throwers. Mounting tension and violence on the streets invaded every home making people increasingly stressed and vulnerable. In one of Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP) survey we found that 12% of the adult population were suffering from severe state of anxiety, and 8% with clinical depression.

Children too exhibited symptoms of anxiety, depression, post traumatic stress disorder, hysterical conversion, stuttering, bed wetting, insomnia, aggression, diminished concentration, regressive clinging behavior and more. Worst affected were the children whose homes were demolished by the Israeli army. Second to them were the children who had witnessed the beating and humiliation of their fathers.

For more than two years during the Intifada we were captives to the national mood of defiance participating as willing players in the illusion that children actively expressing defiance were fared better than other children. We ultimately were proved wrong. Whilst those active children enjoyed a higher sense of self-esteem at the time than the rest, this factor did little to protect them from the serious and long term effects of trauma.

Today, with the cessation of daily, armed confrontations - with the virtual disappearance of road blocks, and the lifting of curfews - Palestinian children are settling back into a normal school routine, a routine that had been continuously disrupted by the presence of an entrenched occupying army, and by its recent violent clashes with the local population during the seven long years of the Intifada. In our newest studies, we discovered that among those Palestinian children who had actively participated in local celebrations to mark the Israeli army withdrawal from the majority of Gaza - celebrations which included the raising of the Palestinian flag and the singing of national songs - there was a marked reduction in the level of neuroticism.

Sof our Palestinian youth, who had been stone-throwing children during the Intifada, and had been empowered by such activities, were reluctant to see lost that sense of national participation that their Intifada role had brought them, and so made the transition to an active role in the local electoral process. They became keen voters, throwing their ballots in the ballot box with the same determination they had used when throwing stones against occupying Israeli soldiers.

Despite these positive changes in the circumstances of these child victims, I continue to be concerned about their mental health, and the long term effects of the trauma, violence and abuse they have witnessed.