Open Minds and Warm But Troubled Hearts in Closed Gaza (II), Day 6
December 20, 2009
Day 6
Dear friends,
If Gaza is saturated with tradition, and blessed with generous impulses, it is galvanized by politics. Until several years ago, when we developed a high level of skill and firmness in directing our trainees back to their own present feelings, simple declarative statements often threatened to veer off into impassioned political narratives. The Palestinian faculty we have trained now recognizes the hazards, and has become adept at forestalling rhetoric, foreclosing budding arguments, redirecting attention inward, and calling for immediate feelings as well as the historical conditions that may have provoked them. Inevitably, however, politics and the devastating consequences of political decisions are not far from the minds and speech and feelings of Gaza’s men, women and children.
In the small groups we see and hear that the consequences of history are inscribed in our participants’ pain and fears. Remember the hurt that the young psychologists whom I described in the previous blog carry from childhoods shadowed by loss and deprivation and squeezed by self-righteous brutality. And anxiety about present safety and future survival is absolutely, understandably universal: Gaza is closed off from the rest of the world, vulnerable to unpredictable attack from Israelis who control its borders and airspace and to violent schisms and reprisals within. Inevitably there are symptoms: One stocky young male psychologist from a distinguished family of Gazan warriors admits, embarrassed but eager for help, to “panic attacks” when his toddler daughter develops a cold or returns late from a babysitting relative; several other mental health professionals speak of waking abruptly, hearts racing at innocent sounds that evoke body-memories of Israeli shells landing or Fatah and Hamas fighting under their windows.
Six months ago, Gaza, though deeply wounded, seemed far more hopeful. Crumbled buildings – large public and small private ones – punctuated the streets of Gaza City and Rafah; blasted orchards and fields torn by shells tolled a loss of innocence as well as income; memories of the 1400 who died in the fighting in December and January filled the eyes of families we visited and appeared, often briefly, modestly, but with head-shaking sadness, in conversation. Still, there was a sense that things might, even that they likely would, finally change for the better.
One of Hamas’ top officials, Deputy Foreign Minister Ahmed Yousef, spoke of the renewed faith in American idealism that Barack Obama’s election and his speech in Cairo had inspired in him and others; of his hope for reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas; and of a future in which a regional partnership “of the world’s three great monotheistic religions” would bring peace, tourism and industry to Gaza and the West Bank as well as Israel. “Soon, inshallah, (god willing)” our Gaza faculty estimated, “we will be able to go with you to Israel, the West Bank, maybe even America.”
The current “situation” – the word is an all-purpose one that Israelis as well as Palestinians regularly use – seems by contrast dispiriting, even desperate, to the Gazans I meet outside of as well as in our training. Now Ahmed Yousef reminds me that “we have not fired on Israel for a year,” and asks, sadly, rhetorically, “and what has been our reward?” Young people wonder whether a world that will not open Gaza’s borders to trade that is necessary for rebuilding or to the free passage that will overcome their punishing isolation, understands or cares about or even notices their plight. Several speak, with resignation but chilling firmness, of the inevitability, in the absence of progress, of resuming “resistance”:
I do not feel that the vast majority of Gazans whom I meet – and I have worked closely with several hundred and met many hundreds more over the last seven years – want to return to fighting; it is that they do not know what else to do, how else to lift the crushing weight of the occupation, to signal, amid what appears to them colossal indifference, if not hostility, that they are “human,” and deserve the basic rights that the rest of us assume. “Don’t the Israelis understand we are just like them” one young woman, a well educated “political independent” asks me. “I have parents and children I love. I want to help my people. Yes, I hate what the Israeli government has done to us, but I do not hate Israelis.”
There are to be sure fanatics in Gaza, people chained to an unchanging allegiance to past wounds, committed to a holy war that will wipe Israel from the landscape. They are, however, very few among the very many I have met. Hamas has been a resistance movement and has committed terrorist acts, as, I would add, have other movements in this region. However, many of its leaders and many of the young who have been drawn to it now aspire, in spite of their current distress, frustration, and discouragement, to becoming partners in leading a state, productive members of a tolerant regional and world community. A burly young man, a high ranking government functionary who speaks with resignation about the possibility of resuming resistance, sounds a few moments later exactly like an American graduate student. He is particularly glad to talk with me, he says, because he wants my advice on framing a topic for the PhD thesis he hopes to write.
The day before our training ends, I speak, at Ahmed Yousef’s invitation, at The House of Wisdom, an independent Swiss funded Gaza City “think tank” that he helped found. “Everyone has to speak English here,” he tells me. “We want to be part of the world community.” Thirty earnest young intellectuals – political scientists, environmentalists, government officials – gather on short notice: Some are affiliated with Hamas, others with Fatah; many are unaffiliated with any political party.
I sit at the intersection of long polished seminar tables – it could be Georgetown or Harvard- and talk about the work we are doing in Gaza, the research that demonstrates its efficacy in reducing stress, improving mood, and enhancing hope for the future. I discuss the resilience of the people and the community that supports them; the central role of self-care and mutual help in all health and mental health care; the necessity of knowing and caring for and changing oneself as a prelude to helping others do the same; the dangers of fixed ideological positions that force people to deny or suppress their true and changing needs; and the importance of meaning and purpose in sustaining all of us. There are nods of heads and some smiles. The questions and comments are thoughtful, balancing appreciation for and curiosity about our work – “Yes, I and others in politics could use that,” remarks one man – with reminders of the challenges to safety and survival as well as sanity that continue to confront all Gazans.
As the seminar draws to a close, the House of Wisdom executive director Mahmoud El Madhour, a wavy haired, urbane PhD engineer and MBA who has studied Greek philosophy in Greece, and is a proud independent, thanks me. He ends the afternoon with a few words of reflection: “Without communication,” he begins in easy but urgent English, “we have nothing.” He pauses for a moment. “We stand here in Gaza, with no other place to go. This is my resistance. Gaza is a lovely place. And I want you to know I do not mind sharing it.”
Progress in Gaza
I said that I would write more about our work in Israel and Gaza, but the work-and trying to find funding so that we can continue it-is taking up so much time (joyous, exciting time, to be sure) that I haven’t been able to write.
Still, I thought I would send along this very brief summary that I forwarded to our US Mind-Body Medicine faculty.
Hi everyone,
Just a couple of words from Gaza City: overwhelming, amazing, touching. That’s three words.
We (Jim, Amy, Afrim, Yusuf, Dan and Lee-Ann) had a great visit with our Israeli faculty. They are doing many interesting and exciting projects including groups that combine mind-body skills and Jewish spirituality, joint Israeli Jewish and Arab groups, and many groups for traumatized children and adults in Sderot. In fact, we made a visit to Sderot and had a chance to talk with teachers who are using mind-body skills in wonderfully creative ways with children in the SCIENCE AND RELIGION SCHOOL. The kids have experienced shelling on and off for eight years and are having all kinds of problems with concentration, bed-wetting and anger.
Naftali who heads up our Israeli program, is on the track of a major initiative in the South which will build on the work that he and his team have already done. We are working together on developing cooperative relationships and future funding.
Thanks to Danny Grossman, a friend to whom Aaron and Debbie Kaplan introduced us some years ago, (with able assists from Naftali and Smadar who handle the administrative work in Israel), we were all able to get into Gaza. It took a couple of extra days for Afrim and Yusuf, but Naftali and Tami and Ayelet from our Israeli faculty kept their spirits high while they waited. Once in Gaza, we began with visits with grieving families. There are whole sections of Gaza that have been completely destroyed and many thousands of people who are without homes. “I am very small,” one ten year old girl told us, “but the tent the 20 of us are staying in is even smaller.”
We went on for a day of meetings with our Gaza faculty. The next day, we had more site visits including one to Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, whose three daughters were killed. He’s an amazing man, an OBGYN who works in Israel as well as Gaza and through some miracle of wisdom and compassion, has managed to transform his suffering into a visionary project for the education of girls in Gaza-“not just so they will think, but so they will think freely”-and a mission to promote greater Israeli-Palestinian understanding.
We’re now about to start the 4th day of our PTP. Our Gaza faculty, which Jamil heads up, is doing virtually all the lectures and leading all the groups and our international team is consulting/supervising. The Gaza group is doing an absolutely wonderful job. They are so open-hearted and skillful-I’d say over the last 18 months, they’ve each lead anywhere between 6 and 20 groups and it shows.
Participants (there are over 140 of them) are speaking of issues that they have never before discussed and beginning to solve problems that have troubled them for years-not to mention finding practical ways to ease their high levels of anxiety and deal with nightmares, flashbacks, etc. All of them-faculty and participants-are so eager to learn and to share what they are learning. They are an inspiration to all of us.
There is much more to tell and I will when I have more time. For now, I send all of you my love as well as my gratitude for being with us on this and many other adventures.
Jim
Healing in Israel
March 2, 2009
I’m returning to the Middle East after 9 months away, in the wake of the War in Gaza and the ongoing shelling of the south of Israel by Hamas. Read about our mission here.
Our team is in Israel for 4 days: Amy, who runs our program of clinical supervision for our Israeli and Palestinian faculty. Dan and Lee-Ann, who coordinate both programs on the US side and Afrim and Jusuf, psychiatrists from Kosovo, whom I first met when they we’re refugees in Macedonia during the 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo. Amy and I have worked together for 10 years. Afrim and Jusuf are like brothers. It seems that Dan and I have been everywhere together, and Lee-Ann, our newest member, has done a fabulous job with logistics for the trip.
We hit the ground running, heading to Sderot, which has been shelled from Gaza for 8 years, as soon as we wake up on the first morning after our arrival. Naftali, our Israel program director, (we’ve trained some 300 health and mental health professionals in Israel over the last 5 years), is doing the driving, and will be introducing us to colleagues who are dealing with the ongoing trauma in Israel’s south.
First stop: the SCIENCE AND RELIGIOUS ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, a meeting with the principal, Dina Chouri as well as Miri Asoulin, a teacher who has come through part of our training program and heads up the “Havens of Calm” program. “Havens of Calm” is a room apart from the school with bean bag chairs, crayons, games, a place for kids to come express their feelings and simply hang out when they need to. Miri is exactly the kind of teacher you wish your children had-or wish you might have had yourself. She has the kind of smile that erases all the doubts you have about your own worthiness, that makes you feel that everything you do is not just alright, but really really interesting.
Over the last 7 years, while shells fell in and around Sderot, perhaps 60 percent of the kids used the “Havens of Calm” room. During the recent war, and in its aftermath, everyone does.”
“For a long time,” Miri tells us, “the children have been nervous and angry; they have trouble sleeping and are wetting their beds. Now, from the time the war began, there are new symptoms. Now the children tend to find scapegoats. One class had an election for what classmate they wanted to most to be dead. They cannot fight against the rockets, so the anger has to go somewhere,” she says.
“In the beginning,” a psychologist who consults with the school, added, “the children were crying and anxious. Now, sometimes, they go into a total freeze when the red alert (the signal that a Qassam rocket is about to fall). One eight year old girl’s body was like a stone. She couldn’t move her hands or feet for four hours.”
Miri and a number of the other teachers and counselors in this and other Sderot schools find the techniques they learned from The Center for Mind-Body Medicine to be enormously helpful for themselves-for they too work, and often live, amidst the falling rockets-and for the kids. She shows us pictures that the children have done of huge rockets falling on their town and of Gaza burning.
The children seem more hopeful, but their parents are not. In Sderot, and in nearby Shaar Ha Negev, we hear voices of distress and disillusionment. “The people felt strong during the war,” one psychologist tells us. “They thought the rocket attacks from Gaza would be over. But now the war is finished, and still we have Qassams almost every day. What was the point?”
More to come.
Going to Israel and Gaza
Dear Friends,
I’m getting ready to get on the plane for Tel Aviv, and begin this round of work in Israel and Gaza. (Read about our current work in the middle east here.) You can get more info on the work we’ve done in psychological trauma relief in Kosovo, Israel, Gaza, and in the US here.
We plan to spend a few days working in Israel with our team of CMBM-trained professionals there, then (hopefully) make our way into Gaza to train 150 more professionals (on top of the 90 already trained) in mind-body skills that will help them to help heal the widespread terrible anxiety, anger, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and grief resulting from the latest conflict. We believe this work will eventually reach hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza, not to mention Israel–we believe we’re the only program working in both Israel and Gaza.
Right now, we’re just hoping to get in and start making a difference to the people who have suffered so much from this conflict. This work is so difficult, and so necessary. We hope you’ll hold the safety of our team and the success of our mission in your minds and hearts—
Sending all my best,
Jim
