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.
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.
Many factors contributed to children's involvement in the Intifada.
In the Gaza refugee camps, an average child of 12 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 out 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 daily at 3:00 a.m. to go to work as a laborer in
Israel, assuming 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 in Gaza stand
at more than 50 percent. After such a stressful day, Father will
come home that evening so edgy that anything 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 is below the age of 15. School
offers no respite for the children. Indeed, due to economic and
demographic pressure, most schools are forced to have two shifts.
The first shift starts at 7:00 a.m., with an average classroom size
numbering 70 children. In order to cope, teachers tend to be strict
disciplinarians who will deliver corporal punishment during lessons
if a child so much as gets an answer wrong.
The majority of the Gaza population is Muslim. Islam for them is a
mixture of divine rules and cultural traditions, demanding absolute
compliance, even a fatalistic approach to everyday 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.
Seven Years of Curfew
These are the conditions that led to the involvement of
refugee-camp children in the Intifada. They were being defiant,
defending their playground, 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. They were magnetized by armed soldiers, and by
mysterious masked and daring activists. If children elsewhere were
playing at war, 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.
During the course of the Intifada, over 100,000 Palestinians were
detained in prison and the vast majority of them tortured. More
than 2,000 people were killed, a third of them children. Ninety
percent of children were exposed to tear gas. Fifty-five percent of
children witnessed the beatings of their fathers or elder brothers.
Forty percent of children were beaten. Nineteen percent of children
suffered a host of wide-ranging injuries.
For seven long years, people were forced indoors by a military
curfew, lasting from 7:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. Roadblocks were erected
everywhere and many streets became cul-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 Gaza Community Mental
Health Program (GCMHP) survey, we found that 12 percent of the
adult population were suffering from a severe state of anxiety and
8 percent from clinical depression.
Children, too, exhibited symptoms of anxiety, depression,
post-traumatic stress disorder, stuttering, bed-wetting, insomnia,
aggression, diminished concentration, regressive clinging behavior
and more. Those worst affected were the children whose homes were
demolished by the Israeli army. Second were the children who had
witnessed the beating and humiliation of their fathers.
Concern over Long-Term Effects
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 fared better
than other children. We were ultimately proven wrong. Whilst, at
the time, those active children enjoyed a higher sense of
self-esteem 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 many of the roadblocks 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 violent
clashes with the local population during the seven long years of
the Intifada. In our most recent studies, we discovere
that among those Palestinian children who had actively participated
in local celebrations to mark the Israeli army's 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 neurosis. Some of 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.
This article was presented as a paper at the conference "The
Impact of Armed Conflicts on Children," Belfast, 2-5 February,
1996, organized by Save the Children, Belfast.
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