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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. |
