Opinion Palestinians in Gaza Suffer Enough Without Being Defamed as Sexual Deviants and Mentally Ill
A November 11th Haaretz interview with a psychologist who occasionally visits the Gaza Strip (Gaza Kids Live in Hell: A Psychologist Tells of Rampant Sexual Abuse, Drugs and Despair)
portrays Gazan society as a community that has completely lost its
moral backbone – to the extent even, the interviewee Mohammed Mansour
claims, that there is rampant sexual abuse and drug abuse and that, for
all intents and purposes, everyone is mentally ill.
Our longtime and extensive experience as mental health professionals and researchers in Gaza is very different.
Virtually
all of the assertions made in the article about Gaza’s population as a
whole are speculative, based as they are on either no evidence or merely
the interviewee’s impressions, anecdotes or case examples.
This
is true not just of the wildly exaggerated assertions of sexual abuse
and mental illness, but also of the following claims made by Mansour
that we firmly believe, from our experience, to be false:
- That the mental health community in Gaza is itself complicit in sexual abuse
- That abuse has increased measurably since August of this year
- That married men are constantly looking for extramarital sex
- That younger men sexually abuse their peers or younger children to gain control
- That the well-known abuse of tramadol increases the proportion of sexual assaults
-
That all social conventions in Gaza have broken down, there is no
enjoyment, that Hamas is the only barrier to total societal collapse
(without which there would be nothing but crime), and that everyone is
out for him/herself in Gaza.
It
is acknowledged in the article that there is no systematic research on
sexual abuse in Gaza – which makes all the more curious the willingness
to describe and publish such misinformation.
But
ignored in the article is careful research over decades on large and
representative samples of everyday Gazans – some of which we have ourselves reported on
– that has shown that despite increasingly dire health- and
life-threatening conditions, the large majority of Gazans do not report
high levels of mental illness and that marital and parent-child
relations are remarkably strong.
Ignored
also in the article are the pernicious effects of the continued
occupation, siege, and movement restrictions as the fundamental sources
of the suffering that Gazans do endure.
Yes,
Gazans refer to the narrow strip in which they live as ‘hell’; yes,
economic and health conditions are dreadful; yes, there is rapidly
increasing frustration and despair; and, yes, increasing numbers of
youth ache to exit Gaza for better opportunity elsewhere.
But
depicting Gaza as a society in chaos, unmoored from its historically
strong culture of collective resilience and steadfastness, and in which
everyone only looks for personal interests, is simply incorrect.
At
least three core values have and continue to drive Gazans (and
Palestinians more generally): To achieve the maximum education level
possible, to form families, and to create a livelihood to support those
families.
There
is no evidence that Palestinians’ commitment to these values has
decreased, even though the drastic economic conditions make their
achievement of these values increasingly difficult – something that
causes deep heartache especially for young Gazans.
Nevertheless,
they continue to scrap to fulfill as many as feasible, with their
characteristic attitudes of "there is no option but to continue on" and
"someday we will have a full measure of happiness."
Indeed,
Gazans have outlived all predictions that they would break after each
successive setback across their lifetimes. Thus, after the 2008-9 war it
was predicted that Gazan society would crumble, and even more so after
the 2014 war. That hasn’t happened.
Children
laugh, play, and swarm their way to school. Schools – from elementary
to universities with advanced degrees – overflow with students. Young
women and men seek for every opportunity to further their education in
Gaza and abroad.
Young
Gazans prize marriage as a goal and yearn for the day that they could
afford to begin their families. And they scrap for any and all ways to
earn money – including innovative online initiatives – to support their
families of origin and their own families to come.
Farmers and fishermen
work every day under heavy and threatening restrictions. Countless
civil society organizations, NGOs, mental health facilities, and
hospitals push on with the merest of resources.
Families
meet constantly – to observe holidays, celebrate children’s
achievements, welcome new children, and mourn losses. Whenever
affordable, families go to the beaches to relax in some brief leisure.
These
dynamics are plain to see for any that would spend time among the
population at large, as does one of the authors of this piece, Yasser
Abu Jamei, in the daily course of his life.
In
a month-long visit to Gaza in May of this year, this article’s
co-author, Brian Barber, for example, repeatedly encountered
celebrations of all kinds: graduation ceremonies, distinguished student
performance honors, awards for lifetime civil service to Gaza, and so
on.
The
visit also included endless conversations in the parlors and dining
rooms of families, in and outside of refugee camps, with parents and
their high school children, both eager and anxious about the rigorous,
upcoming tawjihi college-qualifying exams.
It
included living with families and experiencing yes, the frustration,
but also the creative ways in which the families deal with the 20-plus
hour energy blackouts: with arrays of devices at the ready for the few
hours of power when it comes (flashlights, cell phones, chargers of all
kinds), waking at any hour to launder, iron, and bathe, and the
stringing of extension cords across refugee camp alleyways to share
power with neighbors who don’t have those back-up devices.
It also included accompanying the mukhtar
(tribal mayor) of one of Gaza’s largest clans for days as he found time
in his packed schedule as a school principal and doctoral student to
address the needs of his people, resolving conflicts of all kinds by
bringing the parties together, and working seamlessly with the police on
the more serious issues.
This
is the Gaza that we know as a Gazan father and psychiatrist, and as an
American social psychologist who has spent considerable time annually in
Gaza for 23 years.
We’re
not seeking to whitewash the very real difficulties faced by Gaza’s de
facto caged-in population, but we’re not willing either for a groundless
Hobbes-meets-Lord of the Flies-type depiction of life in Gaza to gain
traction that it doesn’t deserve.
Yasser Abu Jamei, MD, MSc is the Director General of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme,
an NGO established by the late Eyad El-Sarraj in 1990. With its three
community centers, it is considered one of the key mental health
services providers in the Gaza Strip.
Brian
K. Barber, PhD is an International Security Program Fellow at New
America and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies, both
in Washington, D.C., and Professor Emeritus, University of Tennessee.
Twitter: @briankbarber
Brian K. Barber
Haaretz Contributor
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