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TITLE: Trouble In Store For War-Scarred Sons of Gaza |
AUTHOR: Victoria Brittain |
PUB: The Guardian |
DATE: April 13, 2001 |
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A generation of children are growing up in Gaza scarred by severe trauma and addicted to violence, according to a leading Palestinian psychiatrist, who fears that they threaten the fabric of future Palestinian society. "You see children with no hope for the future, not skilled because their schooling has been so disrupted, quite desperate," says Dr Eyad el-Sarraj. "Their parents transmit a continuous message of helplessness, fear, anxiety, deep despair in their eyes. The children feel totally unprotected and see that their parents are powerless. "Every day they receive confusing messages from Palestinian television. In the morning the message is fight the Israelis, in the evening the message is look at the dead bodies and terrible wounds of those who fought today, and these are pictures nobody can tolerate." Traumatised Dr Sarraj, who was trained in hospitals in London and Alexandria and has a distinguished record of publications, is the chairman of Gaza's community mental health programme. "Every single person who lives in Gaza is traumatised to one degree or another," he says. His programme, with 220 employees, including 12 doctors and 15 psychologists, has treated 11% of the estimated 1m Palestinians living in Gaza. About 30% of the people in the occupied territory have heard about its work, especially with children. Gaza is a society of children: half the population is below the age of 14. "These children very often have to cope with a father who has been subjected to Israeli violence, especially difficult if he has been tortured by the Israelis. Or they have fathers humiliated by long-term unemployment," Dr Sarraj says. "In our culture the father always comes home with something to eat; even if he visits his sister or his cousin he must take something; but now men have nothing, literally. "The story of the man who drove his bus into that group of soldiers in Tel Aviv recently was just this anger and despair. Such a man comes home and projects his anger against the family, particularly against the children. The child has lost the security framework which was his father." Dr Sarraj explains the terrifying psychology behind Palestinian children's games. "To get rid of fear you engage it, to get rid of the fear of dying you engage death. These children are playing an exciting and addictive game with death, and addictive is just what it is." He has recorded how, after the first intifada, which ended in 1993, children played in the streets, pretending to be Arabs and Jews trying to kill each other. "The children have switched their identification from their father to the Israelis. They prefer to play the Jew in the game because he is the powerful one. They have seen how their own fathers have lost the symbol of power." In a survey of 3,000 children in the first intifada, 45% said they had seen their fathers being beaten by the Israelis. It is not only children who dice with death. "There is communal fear and people deal with it by denial - they go up on the rooftops to watch the bombardments, saying, we don't care what happens to us," Dr Sarraj says. "The bombardments are completely terrifying, massive explosions. I've thought Gaza would be flattened as I listened to it - just try to imagine the impact on children." Humiliation The Israelis systematically transmit the devastating message that Palestinians are not human, he says. "'You are not a human being,' they say with their eyes full of contempt, and their daily humiliations, such as making the only entry and exit from Gaza for Palestinians in their daily routine to be over a river of sewage, which not one Jew or one Israeli would accept to cross even once, never mind twice a day." Tens of thousands of Palestinians receive this dehumanising message every day, he says. "This is what you are worth, no more than a piece of stone." His vision of the future is extremely bleak. "A new seed of hatred is sown every single day by the Israelis." He describes his own society as one now unprepared for peace, culturally or educationally. "If peace comes and the common enemy is removed, I fear the creation of a new enemy, chaos and violence, drug addiction - everything we have seen only in American movies." Nevertheless, he says, Palestinians still have some resources which have not been eroded. "Our mothers have a very strong role, they are very, very important symbols of security and the basis of the family, and our tribal tradition gives us the honour and obligation of solidarity. Gaza is very, very poor, but people survive by sharing - we have to at all levels." END |