[wvns] Causes for Palestinian War
The Psychosocial causes for the Palestinian Factional War
By: Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj
Gaza Community Mental Health Programme
http://www.gcmhp.net
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.
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