Resiliency as the Capacity to Resist

Despite the depoliticized language of the trauma relief projects cited above, the Palestinian professionals and volunteers who implement such projects often see their work in a much different light.

On one hand, I just want to help the people of my community, my neighbours, our children - because it gives me personal satisfaction to help people. But also, I see this work as pushing our society forward, creating a place for women and youth, with the goal of creating a strong nation that can resist occupation.

Here, the work of healing the physical and psychological scars of war is not about an individual project of self-empowerment, but an individual responsibility to the community, itself part of a wider democratic project of incorporating all members of the community in collective resistance to occupation. Likewise, another volunteer at a neighborhood association and youth space in Balata Camp reflected that he saw his role as “organizing the power of the members of society so that we aren't just surviving, but thriving.” Here again the language of empower­ment is used not as a personal project of self but as a collective mode of resistance to the dehumanizing effects of occupation. Rarely, but occasionally, this language even makes it into donor proposals. For example, in the proposal for a children's blogging program run by a Nablus-based NGO, the organization recognizes that “healing trauma” is “impossible in the current circumstances” because “the condi­tions causing it are ongoing.” Instead, the project aims to “embolden the resiliency” of Palestinian children and strengthen their ability to “imagine alternatives.” Indeed, many Palestinian adults who work with children and youth see their role as providing spaces for young people to imagine and create alternative ways of overcoming occupation (Geographies of Children and Young People).

Just as volunteers at community centers in Balata camp see their work in the context of collective solidarity and resistance to occupation, so too do children enact forms of collective resilience through various activities and projects often organized under the heading of “trauma relief.” For example, in a photo and video narrative project run in partnership between an international NGO and a community center in Balata Camp, many children used the project to produce narratives that subvert their subject position as traumatized victims in need of external support. In one group of girls, the participants, though very young during the Second Intifada, could recall experiencing the violence of occupation first hand. Many had close family members, friends, and neighbors who had been killed, injured, or imprisoned during the fighting, and most had witnessed Israeli incursions and home invasions directly. Likewise, many of the girls came from families struggling with unem­ployment, financial hardship, and health issues. These issues came up during the photo and video narrative writing workshops. However, rather than narrating stories of individual hardship, most stories were told as stories of collective survival and resistance. For example, Dina, age 12, wrote:

I want to talk about my home Balata. I live here and I like this place because my school is here. I live in a good way. But I don't like when the army invades the camp and scares people. When I was in my school, the army came and I was very scared. I wasn't thinking about me, but I was thinking about my mother and my brother and sister. But I should be thinking about my country. My country. I love my country and I love my family. I am so proud to be from Balata. I love the children and my friends so much. I love the people. I must help them and think about them in a good way. I must talk to them in a good way. Finally, I salute the martyrs and the prisoners. We love you and remember you. I love you, oh Balata!

Here, Dina makes direct reference to the violence of occupation in the form of camp invasions.

While Dina's narrative points to the collective strength of the camp in overcom­ing violence, other children took strength in analyzing that violence within a broader political and historical framework. As part of a research project on chil­dren's everyday lives in the camp organized through a local community center, a group of boys and girls aged 10-13 decided to use digital photography and video not to express their own personal fears or experiences with violence, but instead to explore the histories of political violence embedded in the very fabric of the camp. As Omar, one of the boys working on the project, explained: “In this video, we want to show the effects of the occupation and the difficulties it causes, by showing the destroyed houses and the traces of the occupation, like bullet holes and martyr posters.” The video also included an interview with a man whose brother was killed and whose house had been destroyed during the intifada. Omar used the process of photographing and filming the traces of violence of the camp, and interviewing survivors of violence, in order to deepen his own understanding and analysis of the occupation (cf Weizman 2010). Further, he intended the video to be a “gift” to the camp, as part of a process of memorializing past violence and struggle. In this way, rather than being used as a medium for cathartic self-expression to release personal stress and emotion, or to tell a personal survival narrative, photos and videos instead are used to illustrate the political and historical context of violence.

However, not all narratives produced by the children in this research directly addressed the occupation or resistance. Others dealt with more personal matters and ambitions of great concern to Palestinian refugee children, including academic success. For example, Aisha, age 13, wrote that hers was a story of dreams for success in school, traveling, becoming an architect, engineer, or doctor, and pleas­ing her mother (Identities and Subjectivities). Like many Palestinian girls of her age, Aisha is ambitious and confident, in spite of personal and familial hardship. However, her personal ambitions, themselves rooted in religious and familial duty, are also inseparable from the politics of resistance to occupation. When asked how she could achieve her dreams, Aisha did not hesitate to answer: “We need to stop the occupation [...] my dream is to have a free life like other countries, but how can I have that in this camp, with this occupation?” In Aisha's opinion, ending the occupation requires power, specifically “The power of the people, the camp and the country, we can achieve this together if God wills it.” Again we see strong references to community solidarity, resistance to occupation, and deep religious faith, all values cherished by liberation psychology yet noticeably absent in main­stream trauma relief discourse.

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