Rattle fatigue
Relentless violence hurts, haunts children on
embattled West Bank
You may want to read
this on the PC(USA) web site, complete with photos.
by Alexa Smith
BETHLEHEM, WEST BANK - August 20, 2001 - Viveca
Hazboun has dark circles under her eyes.
She isn't getting enough sleep. And she's more than a
little depressed. Her therapy schedule is so overbooked that she talks
with some clients by phone, an unorthodox practice for a psychiatrist.
But her caseload, and her circumstances, are far from
orthodox.
Hazboun, a Palestinian, is the only certified child
psychiatrist on the West Bank. Right now she has her hands full, with
bed-wetters, phobics and suicidal thinkers, and of course with their
concerned parents, who aren't functioning well themselves after a full
year of the worst violence to hit the West Bank in decades. Meanwhile
the Israeli army continues shelling tiny West Bank towns and
assassinating suspected terrorists in crowded downtown areas.
"I don't know why you journalists don't get
it," one man here says. "The Israeli army is shelling the
civilian population."
Yes, he admits, there are shooters among Palestinians,
too, and organized cells of opposition that people are reluctant to
discuss. Yet towns full of non-combatants are being besieged by a modern
army, month after month.
Adding to Hazboun's caseload.
"People are really afraid to move," she
says, noting that she has grounded her own three kids, who live with her
in an apartment in Jerusalem, where Palestinian suicide bombers are
operating again. "I've just said, ''No, you can't go to McDonald's
on Ben Yehuda (a main thoroughfare in Jewish Jerusalem), and you can't
go here, and you can't go there. Yesterday I went out and bought videos
so they can stay home."
That is a typical tactic among Palestinian parents
today. They are trying to keep their children safe in a world that
isn't.
Any elementary school child on the street here -- or
in the nearby shell-shocked towns of Beit Jala and Beit Sahour -- can
tell stories about nights spent in dimly lighted basements while the
tiny stone houses above are blasted to rubble. An Israeli military base
sits adjacent to Beit Sahour -- another highly conflicted spot.
Kids don't loiter on the way home from school. They
know about schoolchildren killed by what the Israelis call random fire.
Many Palestinian children can call the names of the dead. They might
mention Mo'iyad Jawarish, who was found in the street -- shot in the
head -- book bag still slung over his shoulder. Or Mohammed Abdullah, a
youngster who was killed by Israeli snipers as his father tried futilely
to protect him; news cameras captured the tragic death and showed that
neither Palestinian was armed.
The list of innocent victims is long and growing
longer.
Hazboun has personal knowledge of many. She treated a
young mother whose son lost an arm to a sniper shortly after he stepped
outside the family's house to get a better look at a cement mixer.
Another youngster, insensible with fear, was carried to her Child
Guidance and Training Center in Bethlehem after a bullet passed through
a central room of her home, a place her mother had told her would be
"safe."
Three weeks ago, two brothers, ages 8 and 10, were
killed on a Nablus street where they were waiting for their father to
pick them up from summer camp. A helicopter gunship got there first,
shelling a downtown office building that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon said contained offices of the terrorist organization, Hamas.
Sharon, who calls his policy "active self-defense," says
Israel will continue to target people thought to be planning terrorist
attacks, even, apparently, where civilians are threatened.
In the winter months, Beit Jala, Beit Sahour and a
refugee camp on the outskirts of Bethlehem were shelled frequently, on
an irregular schedule that kept grown-ups and children on edge. Charlie
Haddad, the principal of the Dar-Alkalima School (a Lutheran institution
whose name in English is "The House of the Word") in
Bethlehem, says: "It became a daily drill. …… And there is a
lot of resentment, especially if you know what life could be like, if
you know what it feels like to be fine and safe."
"Fine and safe" is not how the Palestinian
kids describe themselves.
For example, 6-year-old Tareq Zoughbi, of Bethlehem,
drew a picture for his dad of a "great, big man with a small
heart" ordering soldiers to kill a child identified as sniper
victim Mohammed Abdullah.
Tareq's father, Zoughbi Zoughbi, is a prominent
mediator who openly talks about politics at home -- but even he was
shocked by the drawing. "I am really worried about the coming days
-- and not just the economics," he says, referring to the
violence-related collapse of the tourism industry. "(I'm concerned
about) the psychology of our children. They're witnessing death,
killing, kidnapping and shooting every day."
Zoughbi's has a 5-year-old who dreams about soldiers
attacking his school and hurting his sister. He says even the youngest
of his brood ask to watch the news before cartoons in the morning:
"They'll wake me up with a kiss on the cheek and
say, 'I'd like to see the news.' It is really a situation we need a
psychiatrist to find a solution for."
But the violence stymies psychiatrists, too.
"It is like being a little child who is drowning
in a swimming pool, and you see and adult and think he will save you.
But instead, he pushes your head under water," says Hazboun, the
child therapist. "This is how I feel, and I'm a psychiatrist. So
imagine how people feel who are living in a refugee camp without any
training in trauma or stress."
And what does Hazboun tell her young clients?
"I tell them they need to feel pride in their
capacity to face this pain. What is happening is scary. It is
troublesome. It is dangerous. And it is OK to be scared," says
Hazboun, adding that she also reminds them to listen to their teachers
and parents. "I say to them that they should be proud they are able
to withstand this anxiety and stress …… (that) they are still
functioning, under duress."
Teachers say that, while the kids may be functioning,
they are also angrier. More dirty words get scrawled on schoolyard
walls. There is more pushing and fighting in the halls. Homework doesn't
get done, sometimes because the electricity is out, sometimes because it
is hard to concentrate when shells are exploding outside. Grades are
dropping.
And because kids get tired of being cooped up at home,
the solution becomes a problem.
"They don't go anyplace," schoolteacher
Mervat Abu-Kula says of her three children. Her house in Beit Jala is in
the line of fire of tanks deployed to Gilo, a Jewish settlement that
became a target of Palestinian gunmen last winter. "They go from
school to the house, and from the house to the school. They study at
home …… because I am afraid something will happen if they are out in
the streets.
"It is like they are in a prison. They're
fighting with one another, fighting with me. Because they have no place
to go and nothing to do."
Abu-Kula says the army is indiscriminate -- unable to
directly target gunmen. "When you see the bullets …… I don't
know how to say this," she says, searching for the English words,
"enter the house near you, or breaking the windows, you have a bad
feeling.
"You are very upset, nervous. …… You feel
like you are inside a war, but it is a war that is not equal between
forces; just from one side. And the Jewish side is shooting and shooting
and shooting."
Bethlehem merchant Sameer Mitri, 39, says his business
has collapsed since tourists stopped coming almost a year ago. "If
you don't work here, you don't eat," he says. "There is no
disability. People are nervous."
Mitri says he can't afford to buy the 10 pounds of
meat his kids normally consume in a week, so he buys a half-pound only.
Last Christmas, he says, there were no gifts: "The bigger kids,
they understood. We are buying them clothes, buying them food."
It has become impossible to protect the children from
the violence all around them.
Hazboun says surviving is a matter of embodying the
Arabic term samedoon, which in her translation means "those who
withstood" or "those who hung in there."
"I think that is what these people are ……
samedoon, she says. "We have to let these kids who are terrified be
proud of their fear, be proud that they have handled it. We go around
every day doing our business. We know it is not normal. People should
take pride that they are surviving, maintaining something. There's
nothing phony about this."
But it takes a toll.
Even for Palestinians who've survived the seemingly
relentless conflict since Israel was established in 1948, this violence
is extreme, more intense even than the Intifada that erupted in 1987 and
galvanized Palestinian opposition to the Israeli occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza.
"It is not like 1987. The context is
changing," says the Rev. Mitri Raheb, no stranger to turmoil, whose
mother took him as a child to the Church of the Nativity when the
Israelis shelled Bethlehem in 1948.
In the 1987 Intifada, Raheb points out, Israeli
soldiers occupied Palestinian towns -- and were forced to look into the
eyes of young stone-throwers who wanted them to leave. Today, he says,
there is no eye contact, no human encounter.
"Israelis now don't feel the pain like
Palestinians," he says. "Before, soldiers had to walk through
the narrow streets in Gaza, and they were able to feel what it was like:
what it means (to know) that you can be hurt. Nowadays they use Apache
helicopters. This war, for them, is becoming like a computer game. And
they cannot be directly hurt like us."
Asked about the Palestinians, he says, "I've
never seen so many depressed people."
In all there are eight psychiatrists on the West Bank,
but there is only one psychiatric hospital, in Bethlehem. It does not
admit children. Before the outbreak of this Intifada, Palestinian kids
were treated in a children's hospital in Jerusalem, but that isn't often
possible now. And very few Palestinians on the economically beleaguered
West Bank have enough money to foot a hospital bill.
So deeply traumatized kids are kept at home, something
Hazboun calls "ridiculous." That's why she's trying to raise
money to build a children's facility on the West Bank.
"They need intensive treatment. They need safe
treatment. And we don't have that in Palestine."
Hazboun, the only Christian psychiatrist and the only
female psychiatrist on the West Bank, has a hard time getting to her
patients. It isn't always easy to travel from Jerusalem to her clinic in
Bethlehem. When the road was closed one day last fall, she had to run
for the border -- frantic that the Israelis might open fire (although
they did not), and dodging rocks thrown by Palestinians. She held her
briefcase over her head in defense.
"I'd like to be able to deliver psychiatric care
to patients at this point," she says. "I'd like to be able to
reach people who cannot move to get it. And I'd like to feel safe doing
it."
But no one gets to feel safe.
Abu-Kula, sitting in her Beit Jala house, laments:
"We want peace. I discuss violence with the
children, tell them not to use violence. There are too many people dead
in this Intifada. We don't want any more dead, Palestinian or Jewish.
…… I'm very, very tired. We're working under pressure at the school
to take care of the children. I don't let my own children out of the
house; outside there may be shooting.
"What can I do? My health is affected this time.
I have headaches. My stomach hurts when I hear the shooting. It is
nerves."
No one, it seems, is immune to "nerves."
Twenty-something Ely Nastas of Beit Jala was hired
recently as a social worker at the Dar-Alkalima School. It is her job to
listen to kids who are upset by the past year's violence.
"Lots of the kids are afraid when there is no
electricity. They don't like the dark," she says, referring to
power outages caused by the shelling. She says she doesn't like it much
either.
"In our house, we go to the basement and sleep on
the floor, all in the same room, when the shooting comes close,"
says Nastas. "This is hard for us, the big people. So what about
the children?"
