Israeli 'Security' Barriers and their Psychological Impact on the Individual and the Collective

By: Mr. Rony Srour, Clinical Psychologist

Palestinian Counseling Center

(December 2002)

For quite some time now, Palestinian cities and towns have been under a very tight siege imposed by the Israeli army as a measure to maintain their geographic and demographic isolation from one another, and especially from East Jerusalem. This siege has had a direct impact on the Palestinian people, particularly those who live in those areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority. Much has already been written about the severe political and economic impact of this siege, as it represents the major source of concern for the Palestinians. But the psychological and social impact of this siege on the Palestinians, both as individuals and as households, although invisible and whose dangers are not as easily discernable, is not any less serious than the political and economic one.

The West Bank and the Gaza Strip today look very much like a huge over-crowded prison, whose inmates are kept in check by heavily armed guards at the gates who are under orders, from their commanders, to maintain a tight grip on the prisoners. If this prison were to be called anything, it would be a “ghetto.” It is ironic that it is the Jewish people, as it is well known, are the most prolific in writing about and describing life in the “ghetto,” and its impact on a person’s mental health.

In addition to the military, psychological, and economic siege imposed on the Palestinian people, as well as the resulting conditions of hunger and poverty, there is another tactic that is intentionally used by Israeli soldiers against the Palestinians – humiliation, under various forms. A person whose overwhelming concern is to gain his/her daily bread, protecting himself and his family against hunger, or for securing his and his family’s basic needs, when subjected to humiliation tactics loses his drive for improving his situation and status not only in his own eyes, but in the eyes of others also, and becomes a person whose sole purpose in life is literally staying alive. This means that such a person’s reasoning loses its thoughtfulness and logic, becoming more reactionary and unbalanced.

When the Palestinians are made a people with limited capabilities, it then becomes easier for both the Israeli military establishment and the western world to see them as inferior beings, easily led, beaten and kicked. This image is considered legitimate and prescriptive, and both Israel and the West justify their oppression of the Palestinians by convincing themselves that the Palestinians “are not advanced human beings like us, they have limited capabilities, they live outside the civilized world, and therefore oppressing them is legitimate.”

The most dangerous aspect of this humiliation tactic is a form of “self-imposed humiliation” whereby a Palestinian begins to see his fellow Palestinian as backward and underdeveloped, and thus begins criticizing his own people’s “backwardness.”

The signs of psychological and physical fatigue recently became clearer on the Palestinian people’s faces, because most of their efforts are expended on their struggle for survival. Universities and schools are retreating, and their closure is no longer a source of outrage. The public’s interest in the arts has declined, and the search for work, any type of work to guarantee one’s very basic needs, like food, has now become the preoccupation of the majority of Palestinians.

Turning the Palestinian people’s attention away from what is necessary for their intellectual and psychological well being, and focusing it on how to guarantee their daily bread and their survival, only makes them ignorant, restricts their economic and social development, and pushes them back at least two decades on the development scale, making it easier for the occupying power to tighten its psychological control over the occupied Palestinian people, and for a longer period of time. This will lead to a situation in which, once the dust has settled and the security situation in the occupied territories has improved, the Palestinians will find themselves worse off than their Israeli counterparts, with a gap of several years of progress separating them, in the areas of standard of living, and intellectual and technological advancements. Such a disparity will probably make the Palestinians feel that the Israelis are more advanced than them. A Palestinian would therefore take the Israeli example as a better model to follow, and would consider the western way of life, which the Israelis ascribe to, as the way for which the Palestinians should strive. The Israelis can thus guarantee long-term psychological hegemony over the Palestinian people, and even over all the Arab people, and this hegemony may continue long after the end of the conflict between the sides.

Even after the war, our disengagement from psychological warfare will be very weak. With its effect, most of our people will see in the Israeli citizen an example of near-by development, even geographically, and will see in the Israeli soldier the image of the soldier who is fighting for the security he has always wanted to have. We see our children in the elementary classes today dreaming of becoming soldiers or policemen. This dream does not necessarily reflect a loss of identity, but rather expresses an objective need for security. The child who wants to carry weapons is not looking for power or strength only, and considers security as his/her ultimate goal. In other words, not all the children who dream of becoming soldiers want to become Israeli warriors to kill Palestinians, and a majority of them want to enjoy the strength they miss, and which the soldier in the khaki uniform symbolizes.

Our preoccupation with putting food on our table, and the lack of security, put the “Maslow” Pyramid out of our reach, and prevent us from climbing its steps. If there is neither a sense of security, nor sufficient food, then the gap between the current status of a Palestinian and his/her potential will remain large. This ghetto-like life not only restricts our psychological development, but also denies us the chance to reclaim the psychological and social advancements we had once achieved. It is human nature that, in times of war, people and communities come together and draw closer to one another. But the Palestinian situation today however is different, because the war is not a conventional one per se, and as such its psychological effects are different. So instead of coming closer and drawing nearer to one another, the Palestinians are isolating themselves from each other.

Because one of the aspects of our war seems to be psychological, we started to save our psychological energy. Each individual is saving his psychological energy for himself, as a mechanism for dealing with and overcoming the difficulties of the existing security situation. We prefer to save our energy, which would otherwise be expended if we were to maintain contact with others. Quite simply we can say that the frustration in, and the loss of control of one’s life have made us impatient with one another. This sense of frustration is more than normal tension which one can alleviate by forming friendships with others. The sense of frustration, which the Palestinian people are facing, is one that forces people to save their energies in order to better handle crises and emergencies.

The control of the Israeli border police is not limited to our geographic movements, but also includes our concepts and our psychological security. A normal human being, living in a secure environment, develops a logical sequence of psychological security. This ordinary individual for instance, would wake up every day in the morning at a certain time, drive his car or take a taxi to his place of work at a certain hour, return home after work, and spend time with family and friends. This person does what he/she wants without obstacles or difficulties, because he/she lives in a secure environment. A Palestinian however has no security, and he/she cannot always leave the house in the morning. If he/she leaves, and the occupation authorities suddenly impose a curfew, then he/she will be either forced to go back or, worse yet, he/she might not be permitted to return home. The most basic and routine aspects of daily life, such as food shopping, going to the bank, or meeting a friend, these basic human rights, which an individual who is living an ordinary and normal life enjoys, require serious and extensive planning for the Palestinian. And even then, such planning may prove useless and a waste of time because the Palestinians have very limited, if any, control over their own lives. This absurd situation is not just frustrating, but also threatens the concept of security, both individual and societal, including a lack of confidence in others who are also frustrated because they are isolated, except under very special circumstances that dictate otherwise.

In such an atmosphere of non-security and lack of confidence in others, it is not possible for us to identify our feelings, because their source is not clear, and consequently we misdirect our anger. Our anger at the Israeli soldier, our indignation at the frustrating situation, and our lack of confidence in our communities, make us skeptical of others and force us to accuse innocent people of being the cause of our tragedy. We notice that intra-communal and intra-familial violence is escalating: a father beats his son; a husband batters his wife; people in the street deal with each other in a harsh way; taxi drivers fight each other for passengers, and peddlers for customers. We have become fed up with ourselves, sustenance has become scarce and fighting for a morsel has become legitimate, even if our opponent is a neighbor or a colleague.

In light of such circumstances – no physical or psychological security – many Palestinians have sought alternate means. Some moved to the Jerusalem area, and others begged for work permits. In this way, the occupation has put us at conflict with ourselves, for on the one hand we want to earn income for our families, and on the other hand we want to preserve our sense of dignity. The ensuing clash between the two has been obvious. There are people among us whose life has become so difficult that they were forced to humiliate themselves for the sake of their children. Others however (who carry the Jerusalem identity cards) moved back to live in the Jerusalem area, in order to enjoy some privileges they are entitled to, and to which others in the rest of the West Bank are not. In this way, the occupation has effectively divided us into a people who are at conflict with each other, and into social groups who are jealous and resentful of one another, as the majority of the West Bank residents carry a “Green West Bank” identity card, which carries no privileges, while residents of the Jerusalem area were given the “Blue Jerusalem” identity card, which does carry certain privileges. The occupation authorities have exploited this matter, and have used the threat of revocation of the Jerusalem identity card as a weapon against the holders who, in one way or another, try to help their brethren in the West Bank. An example of this is the privilege of Israeli yellow-plated private cars (mostly transit cars for hire, locally known as “fords”) whose drivers no longer transport Palestinians with West Bank identity cards for fear, and under threat of losing that and other privileges in Jerusalem. These drivers, who are Palestinian Jerusalemites, can drive Israeli yellow-plated cars and move freely through military barriers, and have been, for years now, transporting people from the West Bank to Jerusalem and back, either through by-pass roads, or round-about detours through mountains and olive groves to avoid the military barriers, which prevent the Palestinians’ entry into Jerusalem. But eventually however, and under threat of severe punishment, the drivers stopped transporting West Bank Palestinians. Under these circumstances, the Palestinians inside Israel are considered by their brethren in the occupied territories as the “aristocrats” of the Palestinian people not in any real sense of the word, but rather simply by virtue of their mere enjoyment of certain privileges.

Poverty, the feeling of insecurity, and the lack of safety, have divided Palestinian society into classes not on the economic or social level, but in the different degrees of physical, psychological and economic security each of these classes might enjoy.

As long as the struggle for sustenance and for security, both of which are necessary for survival, continues, then all our intellectual, psychological, and spiritual interests are routinely concentrated on our efforts to ease our tension and alleviate our worries. It has been noticed recently that death, which is a spiritual concern, preoccupies us less, that the culture of martyrdom has lost its glorification, and that our sorrow and tears have become nothing more than mere civility towards the victims’ families on that sad occasion. This somewhat callous feeling may be linked to the fact that there have been so many martyrs already, and so many more injured, that the news of yet another death or another injury have become part of our “normal” daily lives. Suppressing our feelings towards such disasters is a self-defense mechanism, and in so doing we avoid added pain within ourselves. To ignore death, treat it indifferently, and not allow ourselves to be affected by it, all are not only linked to an overwhelming sense of grief and frustration, but are also the result of our surrender, and of our acceptance of the notion that a Palestinian’s life is not as valuable as any other’s. If life, in our eyes, is considered so deformed then preserving it is no longer a holy task. It is strange however that we are fighting for survival, even though we seem to hate life. Our matter-of-fact notion of death lacks serious feelings of sadness. There is also another reason for ignoring death, namely our refusal to admit that it is so close to us, and that it will claim the lives of many. To admit this is to accept the notion that death can defeat us, and that it can interfere in our struggle for survival and for protecting our lives.

There is an odd outlook on death in our society, which is suffering the oppression of occupation. The fida’iyeen suicide bombers, unable to express their feelings against the oppression they are subjected to, in either words or deeds, and also unsuccessful in revolting against their oppressors, opted to let their bodies speak for them. The rationale is that if continuing life aims to reduce the value of man, then ending life, one way or another, may then give man a value that life was not able to give him.

The person who chooses martyrdom does not do so in pursuit of eternal life, or for the sake of his homeland alone, but also to rescue himself as well. His struggle for survival is to die for an objective he seeks to achieve. The surreal Palestinian reality made life and death synonymous. It is known that depression, as a purely psychological disorder, pushes some people to suicide, so that they can rid themselves of despondency. But when it is linked to a sense of frustration resulting from humiliation by an external factor, then the thought of suicide becomes the final step one takes in an attempt to rescue one’s self from death.

Based on the above, we can say that this bloody war, waged by the occupation authorities against the Palestinian people, is psychological in as much as it is also a physical, political and economic war. The psychological effects of this war may be a random outcome of the political situation. They may also be an objective by themselves, which the Israelis calculatingly planned for, particularly if we bear in mind that psychology has been the Jewish state’s strongest weapon, and its most preferred field of battle.

It is deplorable that rank and file Palestinians are ignoring or trying to ignore these psychological effects, and are not trying to take them into consideration in their planning for resistance. If we Palestinians ignored our psychological needs, then it will be easy for the Israelis to increasingly ignore us as well. Indeed, if we ignore our feelings, we will be then ceding our humanity.

Translated from Arabic version on December 10, 2002