To live in Palestinian
Majd El-Amad
My work has been with women who have been beaten or shot during demonstration, ex prisoners who have been tortured and sexually abused, women who have lost husbands or children by death or deportation, women whose homes have been blown up by authorities, women recovering from stress-related miscarriages, and women broken only by dashed hopes that their children will lead a better life than they did.
Since the beginning of the Intifada, women have made an effort to be full participants in the struggle for independence. They have participed in committees, initiated boycot of Israeli goods, done volunteer work in hospitals, risked their life to save children during demonstrations and get food during curfews. Sometimes their activity has put them in situations of conflict with men of their own society.
In this paper, I shall attempt to describe my work by giving clinical examples of experiences of the women with whom I work. I shall discuss the theoretical context of the problem and describe the solution I tried to impliment. Of course clinical examples are more extreme than problems in the general society, and therefore this paper is not a balanced analysis of the effect of the Occupation on Palestinian women. I will also make recommendations for future works in this area. I have couched the problem in the metaphor of women living in a prison within a prison - the prison of a stubborn male-dominated society within the prison of the occupation. Therefore I have chosen as the main character for discussion in my paper a woman I shall call Sahar, an ex-prisoner whom I interviewed lately.
In 1978, Sahar was arrested by the Israel Security Forces for political activity. She was 17 years old and had been married for seven months. She was pregnant at the time and had her first child while in prison. Sahar told me that when she was pregnant with her first child, she hardly ever thought about her physical or emotional condition- her thoughts were full of the plight of the Palestinian people and how she could help them. Now, out of prison since 1985, remarried and with four new children, she continues to be active, both economically and politically, living in daily fear of a new arrest.
It seems to me that Sahar suffers from a condition one might call "the Palestinian Super-Woman" (I shall use the abbreviation "PSW"). The Palestinian woman is still tied to her traditional role - mother, protector and unifier of the home, raiser of children. But the enormous political and social pressures in Palestinian society have forced her to add new responsabilities without relinquishing old roles. From the little I have told you so far about Sahar, we can see some of the symptoms of this syndrome. Married early and quickly pregnant, she had no life space to be in touch with the changes in her life, as the new burdon of the pressures of the occupation took up all her concern. Nevertheless, the society and her husband expected her to fulfill all her traditional responsabilities as a woman. Many Palestinian women have also been torn by similar conflicts - the common cause versus the role of mother and protector. Women have told me of being torn apart by the feeling that they must send their children to the streets to demonstrate with their blessing, as opposed to the feeling that they are sending them to be killed or maimed.
The real-life Israeli prison is off limits to Palestinian women. The Palestinian woman to choose to be active in the cause of her people faces risk of double imprisonment and torture by the Israelis. One ex-prisoner I talked to suffers from depression and self destructive behaviour. Sahar too was a female prisoner who stood alone facing in a man's world within a man's world. She was able to deal with the PSW syndrome with strenght and resourcefulness, raising a family, while continuing her political activity.
During curfews, the husband is forced to spend time in his wife's territory - the home. In istances of long curfews (at times going on for weeks), the tension passes the unbearable. Israeli women reported similar trauma during the Gulf War, where they and their husbands stayed home from work and had to stay together in sealed rooms during the scud attacks. In these si-tuations they had to cope with their own feelings of terror, their children, and their husband's feeling of helplessness which he often vented on her.
Metaphorically, Palestinian women out of jail face the threat of abuse as well. Their house may be penetrated at any time by soldiers seeking suspects or forbidden materials. Often the soldiers do not knock, and immediately violate the privacy of the couple, as well as leaving them helpless to defend their children. The only difference between woman's reactions to the continuous threat of searches and post-traumatic stress disorder is that the trauma continues. This situation may be the cause of severe behavior problems in children, who have been exposed to the fear of the searches and have seen that their parents cannot protect them. They then act out their fear with disruptive behavior in the home testing the parents' strenght again and again.
Women are hypervigilant because of the extra effort needed to protect their children. One woman told me that she does not leave the house at all, and will not allow her children to do so, for fear that they will be accidently hurt if there is political activity nearby. This hypervigilence effects the children and is sometimes seen expressing itself as a pathological coping style with trauma. One instance is of a ten-year-old girl who witnessedsoldiers chasing and beating children during a demonstration. She now refuses to go to school and cannot even walk without support.
The continuing crisis of the occupation is often juxtapposed on crisis of normal human development. One woman told me of her teen-aged son who was severely wounded during a demonstration. His wound has caused recurring infections and the loss of both legs. He does not attend school, and has stopped his political activity, the major factor which gave him meaning in life. As an adolescent who values his independence and looks to the future, the wound has actually struck the heart of his developmental stage and has created a crisis within a crisis - the crisis of his detereorating health within the crisis of his threatened adolescent development. He has become impossible to live with, making irrational demands and blaming his mother for minor problems. She cannot bear to live with him anymore, and has grown to hate him. Of course she hates herself more for feeling this way, andhas become chronically depressed. As women are the primary caretakers and are responsible for the welfare of every family member, they are especially vulnerable to depression, anxiety attacks and panic disorders.
Sahar too had to grapple with her responsabilities as the caretaker, even in prison. She was allowed to keep her son for the first two years of his life, but could not bear him growing up under prison conditions. She finally relinquished him to her own mother, who has raised him ever since. Now fifteen, she has lost all maternal feelings for him, and now relates to him more as a younger brother.
Laura S. Brown, following the Stone Center school, has contended that women tend to define themselves interpersonally, called self-in relation. Instead of seeing development as Mahler does, evolvement of agency, by means of the mechanism of separation and individuation, this school sees woman's normal development as continual redefinition of the self in relation to other people who are significant to her. Many clinicians have received new insights from this theory in their work with traumatised women, allowing them to tell their stories in a relational context to a sympathetic listner. Many of the disorders seen in my work may be characterized as relational disorders. One ex- prisoner, sentenced to life inprisonment, but released after 15 years, told me of the growing depression triggered by the continual welcoming and parting with women who had shorter sentences than she did. Some women define the ontological meaning of their trauma as one of loneliness, such as the woman whose 4 sons were arrested and brother was killed.
To ricapitulate, the Palestinian woman today lives and functions within concentric prisons of emotional stress. The occupation has left its mark on all walks of Palestinian life. The stress of the occupation has forced the women to take up the burdens of a man's world in addition to their traditional burdens, and has placed them in direct conflict with the man's world of the Israeli army and the man's world of traditional society. The occupation has created another area of conflict - the fight for freedom as opposed to the traditional protector of her young. The real casualty of the occupation has been the Palestinian family. The family, in an occupied country struggling for independence, has the challenge of bringing up the next generation as an emotionally free people. At this stage in time, this is the primary responsability of women. But now, at its best, the mother can only bring up her children to continually cope with stress.
The chronicle of this inprisonment is recorded in the grotesque pages of the DSM-IV: anxiety disorders, panic disorder, major depression, the paranoid and schizotypal disorders, and the various psychoses. New disorders with western cousins, such as the PSW - the Palestinian Super-Woman Syndrome and esistential loneliness, would fill our clinics if we had enough for them. It has created a social situation characterized by existential psychologist Rollo May, as "aching hearts in every home".
In the past 3 years, I have seen these women through volunteer work in Nablus and the vicinity. My work has mostly been individual therapy sessions with women and children, and group discussions with teen-age girls. In my individual work, I have used my training, which has mostly been in psychodynamic psychotherapy, to listen empathetically to my clients and help them analyze their situation in a constructive way, to see which part of their life is within control and which part mast be lived with. An instance of this approach is that of a woman whose husband works in Israel and is frequently at home because of curfews and closures. She felt and expressed constant tension and was repeatedly beaten by her husband. Since there are no crisis centres or battered women shelters in the area where I work, I encouraged her to analyze her problem and try to see which part of her life she could control. She has come to realise that she can stop the beatings by talking with her husband about his problems and being sympathetic to his plight, talking with him about her problems in this context, therefore creating a feeling of togetherness, rather than one against the other.
Another example of the way i have dealt with these problems is to work in groups to raise women's self-esteem. I was once asked to work with a group of young village women who were not interested in self-improvement programs conducted by a local organization. The women were shy and I first invested my energies in breaking the ice, talking about myself and getting the women to do the same. The women, intheir early 20's, were all single and were beginning to wonder if something was wrong with them - in this village women marry at about the age of 15. We talked about staying single as an option, not as a punishment. This discussion triggered reactions of frustration and anger about their place as women. In this discussion I did my best to encourage the participants to respect and listen to each other on a human level, and slowly they began to work together to think how can improve their life.
The most important thing I learned during the last 3 years is that the work of one person is not enough. A comprehensive, independent center is needed, which will be able to deal with problems of Palestinian women and families in their fully complexity. Therefore I am now in the process of finding a way to set up a concelling center for women and families in Nablus and the Northern West Bank, which will be more effective in coping with the problems discussed above. As it is important to have an integrated, community-based service that networks all the areas of human services, the proposed center will have four modules - prevention and early treatment, individual and goup psychotherapy, human development, and crisis intervention. The following are the goals of the program:
1 - To help women to carry out their day-to-day functional duties in all aspects through:
a. Developing positive self-esteem and self concept in changing the view of women in the family and society.
b. Integrating women into the social professional and educational sectors.
c. Achieving of good physical and psychological health.
2 - To provide pratical support to women facing life difficulties.
3 - To enable women to examine their strenghts and weakness, and to explore appropriate change.
4 - To assist women to participate fully in the economic, social and political developments of Palestinian society.
The 4 modules will accomplish these goals by different means - by targeting specific problem populations, as well as population at risk and populations with specific developmental challenges, such as teen-agers and young parents.
Staff development will be a mejor part of the program, as we will utilize non-professional natural leaders, as well as professionals at various professional levels. Staff development is part of the community-based philosophy of the program, where women will be recruited from the target populations and be trained as lay counsellor.
Research and evaluation will be built in to each module, helping us learn about improving the services. A public relations department will network us with similar organizations outside the Nablus area, and with other organizations working with us. Material will be desseminated through schools, well-baby clinics, women's organizations, and the media.
In conclusion, I hope I have helped you see the complexity of the problems dealt with by Palestinian women, and the urgency of setting up such a comprehensive program for women in my area.
