Registering despair
British writer Victoria Brittain offers psychological insight into how the phenomenon of suicide bombers affects Palestinian children
Immediately after the incident in mid 2002 in which three boys were killed when they approached a settlement fence in the south of the Gaza Strip -- apparently intending to be suicide bombers though pitifully under equipped to have any impact -- a Gaza Centre for Mental Health Planning (GCMHP) team set out from the Deir Al- Balah clinic to visit schools in the area to discuss the incident with the pupils.
Psychiatrist Dr Sami Owaida described how he asked the children in the first primary school to vote on whether they agreed with what the boys had done, and saw of 22 out of 25 pupils vote in support of the action, while one child abstained and two voted against. The GCMHP team started a long discussion with the children about the incident, about their duties to get a good education and make a contribution in the future, and so on. After some time they took another vote and found that the voting went completely the other way. Later they visited secondary schools too and repeated the exercise with similar results in changing the children's minds from an initial acceptance of the logic of being a suicide bomber.
These experiences show how deeply the phenomenon of suicide bombers has entered the minds of Palestinian children, but also how effective intervention can change their ideas. The GCMHP team's views in discussion with the children were accepted in a way that many parents would envy. Many have reported being rejected by their sons when they tried to speak against children thinking of taking that path or even of joining the groups of young stone throwers trying to bait the settlers or the Israeli army. The young people speak often of their despair and hopelessness against the power of the occupying Israelis. One therapist quoted a child as saying, "I live just for revenge," after seeing his father and uncles killed by the Israelis.
But the motivation is often nothing so personal, but a general feeling of total despair and an overwhelming desire to register that feeling. S, is an 18 year old girl from Jabalya camp. She was so affected by the events in Jenin, in which dozens of people were killed and the camp sealed off and subjected to wholesale destruction during the Israeli army incursion in April 2002, that she set out on a private mission to kill settlers.
The first her family knew about it was when the Israelis phoned her mother and told her the girl was dead and she should come and fetch the body from the hospital. When she arrived at the hospital they laughed and told her that her daughter was on the way to prison in Ramallah after she had been caught with either a knife or a bomb on an apparent suicide mission.
The family were appalled and astonished. Their daughter was not part of any political faction, they told the therapists at GCMHP, where they arrived in great distress, and the story of the knife or the bomb was utterly confusing and inexplicable. "She was just a desperate girl, it's hard to imagine what was going through her head when she set out from Jabalya and headed south," said the therapist who is looking after her mother and sister who come to the clinic deeply depressed and tearful. It took four months for the International Red Cross to get permission for her mother to visit her for one day in Ramallah.
In another incident a Palestinian youth who had applied to one of the factions to be a suicide bomber and been told he was on a list with 87 people before him, simply took a handgun and went off on an unplanned personal mission and shot two Israelis before being killed himself, according to his stunned family who had expected nothing of the sort from him.
Sometimes the families do know or guess what is in a child's mind. Sami has seen mothers come to the clinic asking for help because their child was planning a suicide mission, and reported that in every case the team had made home visits, talked to the child and to the family extensively, and averted the planned action.
GCMHP therapists have witnessed close up the pain caused by the Israeli propaganda, which claims that Palestinian mothers celebrate their children becoming martyrs, and make their death a public celebration. They deplore the media's repetition of this theme and sometimes the political exploitation of grief, which can compound the effects of private grief. "There is no mother in the world who likes to lose a child, even neighbours cannot bear to see a child die. In our society euthanasia is forbidden, unthinkable even for a paralysed dying child, how could anyone imagine wilfully giving up a child to death?" said one therapist who had worked with families in this kind of grief.
The therapists say that it is common for the mothers in the first days of shock to use the religious idea that their child is a martyr in paradise as a defence mechanism. But the grief and depression come inevitably, and GCMHP therapists follow many such cases for as long as they are needed. And, as one therapists said, "we have very good social support here in our communities and without doubt that can reduce the pain."
