Palestinian Children in War Zone: Coping strategies and their long term effects

By: Roney Srour

Clinical Psychologist
Palestinian Counseling Center

(November 18, 2003)

Prepared for:

BORN INTO CONFLICT
Children’s Human Rights in Israel and Palestine
An International Symposium in Vienna, November 17 -19th, 2003
BRUNO KREISKY FORUM FOR INTERNATIONAL DIALOGUE  

I would like to start my presentation in this symposium with a short personal story. Once when I was coming back to my rented apartment in the French Hill district of Jerusalem, an Arab child of 7 or 8 years stopped me. At first glance, he thought that I was an Israeli Jew. This is how our very short conversation went:

Boy: Shalom. (Peace in Hebrew)
Me: Ahlan. (which means hello in Arabic - I knew he was Palestinian)
Boy: Oh, you are Arab.
Me: Yes I am.
Boy: Do you love Jews?
Me: (After a short hesitation) Fifty-fifty. What about you?
Boy: I hate them so much

I am not telling this story to say “Palestinian children hate Jews," or to apologize for what the boy said. I am telling this story because I want to concentrate a little bit on this random child, a child who has sentiments that other Palestinian children have.

Since then I have been asking myself, “Why is this little child declaring his hatred?” This child is not saying: "I am nice," "I am smart" or "I’m a good football player." He is saying I hate. Such a child who lives in a continuous feeling of hating and experiencing himself being hated will develop the hatred into a personality character.

In the rest of this presentation, while keeping this child in mind, I will mention a few of the coping strategies for such a situation that are mentioned in literature and to try to show you the long-term effects of these strategies. These effects have not been studied sufficiently by researchers so my notes are taken from my impressions and interpretations of clinical sessions with Palestinian children.

The coping strategies can be divided into 3 categories: personal, social (or Social with a capital S), and familial.

Personal

Fight-Back Strategy:

It was empirically proved that children who were participating in active resistance against Israeli solders during the first Intifada were having less PTSD symptoms than those children who were not engaged in active resistance (Active resistance means demonstrations, throwing of stones, burning tires, etc.). However, both categories of children were exposed to similar violent events from the Israeli solders. One of the interpretations of this finding can be that children who felt that they can do something (take action) had better coping abilities than those who felt helpless and stayed at home.

The two problems that I see in the “fight-back” coping strategy are:

A) Children used it for a long time because the stressing environment remained for a long time.

B) The adults forgot to teach these children that this kind of violence is specific, mainly because it is legitimate. In other wards, the adults during the first Intifada did not emphasize the difference between violence against soldiers, which is legitimate, and other kinds of illegitimate forms of violence.

The result of the "fight-back" strategy is sadness. Today we have youngsters and young adults (who were children during the fist Intifada) who are violent towards others in their environment with no one distinguishing between who is soldier and who is not.

In the present Intifada we have a new kind of violence, which is much more difficult for a child to simply "fight-back" against. This Intifada is not as public as the first Intifada was, more political and involves use of greater military technology from Israeli forces. Children are taking part in street fights against soldiers to a much lesser extent because they cannot fight back tanks and airplanes.

Other types of psychological violence that the Palestinian children face today are the loss of control and sense of discontinuity in their lives. This violence cannot be fought against by the child him/herself.

Here is an example of Palestinian child's morning with all the surprises that this child has to take in consideration:

If a Palestinian child slept all the night long without the soldiers coming to his/her house after midnight looking for one of his/her relatives, and if he/she did not have horrifying nightmares, he/she expects his/her mother to wake him/her up at 7 in the morning so he/she can go to school. The first surprise can be that the mother was informed of a curfew and did not wake her child up. If she did wake the child and the child went to the bus stop to ride the bus to school, a solder can meet him/her in the way and insult him/her or send him/her back home. Alternatively, if this child arrived at the bus stop he can find the bus not coming because soldiers are not allowing buses to travel. Therefore, the child can still be good child and go to school by walking. When he/she arrives there he/she can find 40% of his/her friends not there because they could not make it to school. Most probably, his/her teachers also are neither there.

During the morning hour, the child has many surprises that he/she has to be ready for. These difficulties are too much for a little child to handle and there is nothing a child can do to against this psychological violence. This continuous instability is very stressing in the child’s life and prevents him/her developing a healthy sense of safety that we all need and, for most in the world, develop without much effort.

Social

Ideology:

It was also empirically proven that children who believed they knew why the first Intifada was taking place had fewer symptoms. The children who took part in the festivals after the PLO came back to Gaza and the West Bank also had fewer symptoms. This tells me that although his/her biological parents in the first Intifada could not physically or psychologically protect the Palestinian child because they were helpless, he/she was protected by ideology.

The 'Ideological Father' was the belief in 'Palestinian Collectivism' or some people may argue that he is Yasser Arafat. During this Intifada, the ideology has begun to weaken. The Israelis have defeated the National Father; he could not protect himself and could not protect his children after they had great expectations of him.

It seems that in a strong patriarchal society if there is no strong father figure, there is no strong family. In other words, the feeling of a Palestinian Collective has decreased for people are more preoccupied with their personal security and basic needs. As Maslow put it, when there is no satisfaction of basic needs and personal security, there is no collectivism and no ideological father to protect these children.

Familial

Some studies showed that children who had warm and supportive experiences with their parents had fewer symptoms during the first Intifada, although they experienced traumatic events by solders. If we want to look at the average Palestinian family versus a 'normal' family situated a zone of no conflict, the average Palestinian family has much greater signs of traumatization:

1) Palestinian families have all been under stress since 1967 and some of those since 1948. This means that we are presently talking about a 3rd generation of national Palestinian trauma. A person born in 1967 is today about 36 years old and in most cases will be a parent. A parent raised in a stressing environment all his life will have fewer chances to be a good parent. In other words, a Palestinian child has fewer chances to have a parent who is not stressed and was not traumatized than the average child in the world.

2) Prisoners: Since the Oslo Accords, many Palestinian prisoners were freed from Israeli prisons. Some of these prisoners are fathers and mothers and came back to live with their children after release. In our clinic and in many studies in other places of the world, we see that prisoners are one of the most traumatized categories of any society in war. Children who live with fathers or mothers, who were traumatized, especially by previous prison experience, have less chance for healthy emotional development.

I should mention here that traumatized prisoners in Palestinian society have no professional psychological help.

3) The absence of a Palestinian legal system and welfare system: Palestinian families, like other families in the world, unfortunately experience unwanted phenomena like domestic violence, physical and sexual child abuse, alcoholism, drug abuse and have little or no government or non-governmental organized interventions.

In developed countries, these phenomena are dealt with by the help of an organized justice system with law enforcement authorities and a welfare system with social interventions. In the Palestinian territories, there are no such systems. These phenomena are seen but not treated. Furthermore, prevalence of negative phenomenon has started to increase. Familial trauma can be seen to be more and more stressing to the Palestinian child. An indirect relation to increase in violence increases factors of familial trauma.

Conclusions

If the Intifada and its effects are having long term and complicated negative emotional repercussions, we should start looking at the psychological situation not as temporal crises but as permanent phenomena that necessitate professional intervention by:

1) Starting to develop a strong and multi-professional mental health system, which has the ability to treat both PTSD children and adults and is ready to handle more cases of severely traumatized people who will be present even after cessation of conflict. This system should be stable, known and friendly to the traditional people of Palestine and not temporal in application, changing every few years.

2) The mental health system and other organizations starting to work with parents on their parenting skills and with teachers to provide relaxing home and school environments bringing psychological relief to children.

3) Preventive programs: Children who have symptoms of trauma should receive professional help. Children who are under stress and are not showing symptoms, as of yet, should have afternoon activities like drawing or sporting events so they can vent their negative emotions and decrease there chances of developing more serious symptoms.

4) Giving special attention to girls and women. Girls usually show their stress in withdrawal and somatization, especially in a traditional society where girls are not allowed to act out there emotions as behavioral problems.

5) Encouraging public dialogue and research about emotional trauma of people in the first and second generation of the “Nakba” (1948). This way the public can start to be sensitive to what children are going through today. In addition, traumatized adults and senior people can start to be aware of what emotional effects they have been living with.