Introduction
In July 2014, at the time of writing this chapter, the Israeli military launched “Operation Defensive Edge” in Gaza. The attack came as Palestinians were welcoming the much-anticipated arrival of a transitional unity government meant to repair the rift between rival Hamas and Fateh factions and to administer the politically and geographically fractured Palestinian polity.
Israel’s stated causus belli was rogue rocket fire from Gaza. The rocket fire itself was retaliation for Israeli raids in the West Bank following the murder of three teenaged settlers near the city of Hebron in June and tensions over the killing of two Palestinian youths by Israeli soldiers in May. However, this intensification of violence must be seen within the context of the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967, and the original displacement of Palestinians from their land in 1948 (the majority of residents in Gaza are registered as refugees). Although Israeli settlers and troops redeployed from Gaza to the West Bank in 2005, the Palestinian enclave has been under strict Israeli military blockade since Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006. Since that time, Gaza has experienced regular bombardment and has endured three full-scale assaults.This most recent attack surpassed operations Pillar of Defense (14-21 November
2012) and Cast Lead (27 December 2008-18 January 2009) in both duration and loss of life. Sixty-six Israeli soldiers were killed in combat, and rockets killed six civilians inside Israel. Meanwhile, over 2,000 Palestinians were killed (an estimated 70% of whom were civilians, including over 400 children), and more than a quarter-million Palestinians (mainly refugees) were once again displaced. Over 40,000 Palestinian homes were completely or partially destroyed by the Israeli attacks, rendering thousands of families homeless.
Indeed, entire families and neighborhoods - not just individual lives and buildings - were destroyed. As many as 59 Palestinian families suffered multiple losses, with victims ranging in age from 10 days to 95 years. In one incident, 26 members of the Abu Jame family were killed in a single bombing. In addition 138 schools, 134 factories, 80 places of worship, 15 hospitals, 18 health clinics, and 29 ambulances were damaged or destroyed, along with vital civilian infrastructure including a water treatment facility and Gaza's only power plant. The deleterious effects of these attacks were compounded by the shortages of fuel, medicine, and other vital goods due to the longstanding Israeli blockade. Taken together, the totality of violence directed against a captive population represents an assault against the people in their entirety. While individuals become direct victims of attacks, the violence they endure is a part of the overarching violence of settler colonialism directed at the Palestinian people as a whole, often targeting the home and family directly, thus seeking to undermine their means of physical and cultural survival.Beyond the physical loss and destruction, survivors in Gaza were also left with the psychological effects of war. Upon cessation of hostilities, the UNICEF mission in Gaza estimated that some 373,000 children had suffered traumatic experiences requiring psychological support (Cumming-Bruce 2014). This new tsunami of trauma only added to what Akihiro Seita, the health program director for UNRWA, described as a “psychological trauma and PTSD epidemic,” in the wake of the 2012 Israeli assault (UNRWA 2013). Commenting on the 2014 figures, the head of UNICEF in Gaza, Pernille Ironside, observed that “there isn't a single family in Gaza which hasn't been touched by direct loss” (Cumming-Bruce 2014). Even children not directly exposed to physical violence are vulnerable to traumatic stress. Studies in Palestine have shown that traumatic stress among family members impacts children's mental health (Palosaari et al.
2013; Qouta et al. 2007) Likewise, parental and familial support is vital to children's ability to cope, meaning that parental stress will negatively impact children's resilience (Altawil et al. 2008).The 2014 attack on Gaza, and the high level of violence directed at Palestinian homes and families, underscores the collective nature of these traumas and the challenges of treating them. The collective and chronic nature of violence in Palestine requires a reassessment of the prevailing biomedical model of individual trauma that guides conventional psychiatric responses to such events. As Nguyen- Gillham et al. (2008, p. 292) contend, “suffering and endurance have to be interpreted at both an individual and collective level,” rather than privileging predominantly Western understandings of psychological trauma which treat the individual as the locus of pathology and the terminus of treatment. In their study, Nguyen-Gillham et al. (2008) demonstrate that the response of the international donor community has largely relied upon Western models of psychological trauma relief while overlooking “the collective resiliency of Palestinian youth and the practices of communal support and care,” thereby distorting “the social suffering of war into individual illness” (ibid.). International humanitarian efforts have only just begun to understand what Palestinian psychiatrists and psychologists have known for decades - that the collective and political nature of violence and trauma under occupation requires collective, community-based responses that acknowledge the political context of occupation (Khamis 2000; Tawil 2013).
Though empirical psychology operates under the positivist pretension of “universal validity” (Burton and Kagan 2005), trauma is not a politically neutral, “value-free” category. Underlying political commitments buttress various understandings of trauma as well as the various treatments mobilized in response. For example, in seeking to maintain a sense of political neutrality, the mode of trauma relief deployed by international humanitarian aid agencies in Palestine during the Aqsa Intifada (2000-2005) largely ignored the specific political nature of violence under occupation (Veronese et al.
2011), thus stripping children from their social and cultural contexts and their historical and political narratives (Marshall 2014; Sousa and Marshall 2015). Mass violence damages a sense of meaning and coherence in the world (Janoff-Bulman 1992), and yet psychiatric responses to children’s trauma largely discourage children from interpreting violence within a broader political or historical frame. Likewise, despite what is known about the importance of the family for well-being within political violence (Eggerman and Panter-Brick 2010; Garbarino and Kostelny 1996; Johnson and Abu Nahleh 2004; Kuttab 2004;), practice with children facing political violence tends to regard the child as the primary target of the intervention, with little focus on the family context (Peltonen and Punamaki 2010). Literature focused on children in Palestine is no different. Palestinian family life is rarely portrayed as anything but a potentially negative factor in children’s mental and physical well-being, as opposed to a source of strength and resilience (Marshall 2014). In this way, trauma relief itself becomes a kind of double violence, a trauma in itself that potentially reinforces the isolating effects of violence against the Palestinian family and the national narrative.The purpose of this chapter is not to offer definitive solutions to the chronic psychological traumas experienced by Palestinian young people and adults alike, nor to denigrate the vital efforts of psychologists, counselors, humanitarian aid workers, and other committed professionals and volunteers in Palestine. Instead, this chapter seeks, firstly, to highlight emerging interdisciplinary literature about the collective and political nature of trauma and violence, which require political, not just clinical, solutions. Secondly, following the liberation psychology approach developed by Ignacio Martin-Baro, this chapter serves as the opening of a discussion about what the study of childhood trauma looks like, not just from the perspective of children, but “from the perspective of the oppressed” (Lindorfer 2009).
In so doing, this chapter follows a postcolonial impulse in giving attention to the other ways of understanding trauma and doing trauma relief that are offered by Palestinian psychologists, community workers, teachers, parents, and young people themselves. As such, this approach urges children’s geographers and other researchers working with children in situations of political violence not to overlook but to “look beyond” children, as Klocker (2013) puts it. This means appreciating children’s embeddedness within families, communities, and historical and political narratives, as well as questioning the assumption that children are the only victims worthy of care and attention. In exploring these connections between liberation psychology and childhood trauma in Palestine, this chapter reviews and extends a critique of trauma relief developed by the authors elsewhere (Sousa and Marshall 2015). Crucially, this chapter aims at further developing this critique by bringing together the extensive literature on childhood trauma in conflict settings with a postcolonial approach to children’s geography, which remains underdeveloped at this time.2