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Many questions even after Mecca meeting remain … what has
become of us? Our people have suffered for 59 years from
displacement, homelessness, discrimination, impoverishment and
expatriation, but they withstood that suffering and never killed
each other; so what happened to us? The late Arafat rejected a
plan to kill Abu Nidal, who had already killed a number of
Palestinian leaders, and said, “If we start this series of
killings, we will never stop.” So what happened? I have heard
stories about new forms of cold-blooded and callous murder, and
about Palestinians denigrating and holding as infidel other
Palestinians or accusing them of heresy and bigotry as a prelude
to ostracizing or murdering them. I have also heard numerous
stories about children who have been horrified and traumatized
and have fallen victims to nightmares, loss of appetite,
insomnia and fear of street-walking. What is happening to us?
How could things amount to assaulting homes, mosques and
universities?
Politics and political difference alone do not provide the
answer. There are several additional social and psychological
factors for what is befalling this society. A safe and stable
environment is one that produces normal children, while the
environment we have been living in since the occupation is one
in which violence proliferates and becomes rampant.
I- Torture
After the 1967 Israeli occupation, a legitimate national
armed resistance movement emerged involving multitudes of
freedom fighters. I can recall that, while I was working at
Al-Shifa hospital in the early seventies, we received several
murdered and injured freedom fighters every day. Reacting to
that resistance and in order to contain and destroy it, Israeli
forces arrested tens of thousands of Palestinians and subjected
them to systematic and various forms of torture as documented by
research teams of both Palestinian and Israeli institutions
acting in the area of defending human rights.
The effects of torture extend from the individual to his
community. Research has found that a high percentage of torture
victims become prey of mental illness which transform victims
into problems for their own selves as well as for their own
families. The commonest problem arising from torture is the
violence which the victim directs to women and children, which
in its turn makes the home a battlefield. The reason for such
phenomenon is that the torture a young man is subjected to makes
him harbor a desire for revenge by violent means and
subsequently he unconsciously resorts to identify with the
Israeli torturer. This conclusion is supported by the fact that
the methods of torture used in Palestinian prisons are the same
as those used in Israeli prisons; they have at times even been
more atrocious and resulted in deaths among several prisoners in
the early years of the PNA takeover. Indeed, in many instances,
the Palestinian investigator was an ex-victim of Israeli
torture. This phenomenon has created a cycle of internal
violence. We note here that many Hams members were tortured in
Palestinian prisons. Feelings of immense hatred and desire for
revenge started to build up and heighten culminating in
accusations of infidelity leveled at leaders of security organs.
All of these factors led to a state of polarization and division
which has aggravated by Hamas coming to power. Now it seemed
that some were willing to retaliate and take revenge from those
who tortured them, a desire which was intensified by the fact
that Hamas government was besieged and there spread a feeling
that it was targeted and conspired against and that some Fatah
leaders were accomplices in such conspiracy.
II- The First
Intifada
Despite the glorification we attribute to the “children of
the stone” whom we hold as examples of heroism, we cannot ignore
the fact that they are flesh and blood and that they have been
victims of various forms of violence. In our work at the Gaza
Community Mental Health Program we conducted a research on three
thousand Gaza children. The study has found that those children
were subjected to several traumatic and violent experiences
including beating, bone-breaking, injury, tear gas and acts of
killing and injury, all of which experiences have left indelible
effects on their psych. Yet, to many, the most excruciating
experience was seeing their fathers beaten helpless by Israeli
soldiers without resistance. Such an experience will ultimately
transform a whole generation into something different as the
second intifada showed; for the children of the first intifada
are themselves the men of the second intifada. Those young men
who are pursuing revenge and killing and are at times seeking
even their own death are the selfsame children who cherished so
many dreams of a better life but saw them fade away and fall
apart the moment they saw their fathers fall helpless and
defenseless victims of arrogant force incarnated in the Israeli
soldier. No wonder then that the Palestinian child will see his
model in that Israeli soldier and that his language will be the
language of force and his toys and games will be the toys and
games of death.
III- The
Effects of Ongoing Violence
Israel
systematically assaulted the Palestinian people in all aspects
of their lives and it even escalated its aggressions during the
second intifada as it resorted to a policy of house demolition;
infrastructure, farm and facilities destruction; extrajudicial
killing and mass detention of activists and systematic torture.
Psychological research worldwide has shown that ongoing armed
conflicts result in what is known as chronic social toxication
which makes people and children less sensitive and more
ruthless, less rational and more impulsive, less conversant and
more violent. More significantly, new groups are formed of
individuals who are alien to the family system and to the social
fabric and who are powerful and violent enough to be capable of
heinous killing. Ultimately, those individuals are viewed as
untouchable masters and examples to be followed by the
disadvantaged and vulnerable. The outcome of this is that brute
force, not morality, emerge is the example to be followed.
Another effect
of such social toxication is the phenomenon of social
disintegration and disunity which is manifest in the decline of
the father’s authority with all the moral values it embodies;
and in the young men’s tendency to search for a new identity
which they seek to be assertive and different from that of their
vulnerable and downtrodden parents. There emerged the new form
of identity provided by Islamic organizations and armed militias
which in many cases supplanted national and filial belonging and
rendered many persons alienated from their community.
IV- The PNA
Performance
The PNA performance has had a tremendous psychological impact
on the Palestinians. Throughout its term of office, the PNA
regime has been characterized by absence of law and justice,
violation of human and individual rights, contravention against
public lands, disrespect for reason, disregard of accountability
and penalty amounting to rewarding of offenders, spread of
favoritism and nepotism which created heightened feelings of
bitterness, exasperation and hatred among the disadvantaged and
destitute. All of these factors made the Palestinian citizen
feel that only force in its different forms is the only resort.
The PNA added insult to injury as its security organs
penetrated families. This reciprocally allowed families to
penetrate security organs which became controlled by Fatah
leaders as well as by heads of a large Gaza family. This
resulted in gross security violations and social disorder, and
culminated in numerous instances of law-breaking and aggressions
against public and individual rights and property. In all
circumstances, aggressors were backed either by their faction,
family or a security organ and sometimes by all of them, which
made power concentrated in the hands of influential individuals
in the large authority apparatus. This eventually resulted in
more disunity and division among those same families, and new
armed and rival groups emerged by virtue of the official
authority support; only to turn against that authority one day
and dauntlessly assault some of its major symbols.
In this regard, it is noticeable that the Palestinian
people’s performance in the first intifada was characterized by
an overwhelming sense of solidarity, resilience and commitment
to moral values, all of which seemed to be nonexistent in the
second intifada which has been dominated by chaos,
disintegration and division. Some observers attribute such
change to the presence of the PNA and to its inability to assume
a leading role, as well as to its acting as a barrier between
the resistance and occupation. Its corruption and weakness made
it easy for both parties to beat it.
V- Absence of a
common enemy and uncontrolled arms
The actual non-presence of a common enemy in Gaza diverted
the furious and enraged feelings of revenge from their natural
path and redirected them into the Palestinian community among
individuals, families and the factions contending for power and
their militias. Under deteriorating social, economic, political
and psychological conditions, it is only natural, as we have
already warned that violence will prevail in the Palestinian
society and among its individuals and groups. This situation
further worsened with the proliferation of arms and plentitude
of funds in the hands of contending parties and militias. Those
factors on their own, however, cannot account for those bizarre
acts of revenge, torture and killing committed in the recent
clashes between Fatah and Hamas and which reflect inveterate
grudge and hatred. Therefore, there is need to consider the
other reasons.
Conclusion
The systematized repression and torture that the Palestinian
people was subjected to under the Israeli occupation, the poor
performance of the PNA as embodied in the absence of law and
justice and maladministration all led the youth to seek and
cling to a new identity which is different from that of their
helpless parents and which holds that naked force is the only
means to avenge themselves over the suppression they have long
been subjected to.
The formation of those political, partisan and religious
identities and the view that ultimate force is the model of
heroism are the major cause of the status quo of Palestinian
armed conflict which finds its fuel in many causes such as
division, hatred, and vindictiveness of a generation that rebels
against the declining family system and the chaotic PNA.
* Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj is the director general of the
Gaza Community Mental Health Programme and a human rights
activist. |
