“I used to fly, but you broke my wings and locked me back in my
cage.” This was the reproach of a patient who had just recovered from a
manic episode during which he had jumped from the top of the
13-foot-high Israeli separation wall and broken both legs. His mania had
been a temporary release from the social inhibitions, economic
frustrations and political obstructions symbolized by the wall itself.
The pills I had given him ended his colorful euphoric experience and
thrust him back into a gloomy reality. No wonder he was dissatisfied
with my interventions !
In a two-week period in May, seven murders were committed in
Palestine. The victims were women, children and a mentally retarded
youth. In my capacity as a psychiatrist, I have interviewed some of the
accused perpetrators. To my surprise, they do not resemble the
antisocial psychopaths who typically commit such ugly crimes. Most of
those I have interviewed suffer from enduring humiliation and an injured
sense of manhood. They live in conditions of mounting stress,
experiencing the pressure of poverty in a society increasingly obsessed
with material possessions and wealth. Such men lose their sense of honor
and respect when they are unable to provide for their families ; they
struggle to regain the illusion of control through misogyny and acts of
domestic violence as expressions of their manhood.
Humiliation, poverty and low social status have made some people in
Palestine feel like losers and failures at life. They often attempt to
medicate their frustration and anger with alcohol and drugs. And, just
as many seek an altered state of mind through these routes, some try to
soothe their injured dignity by projecting and externalizing their sense
of powerlessness onto members of their families. Such people become
abusive and some commit violent crimes. The structural violence,
economic inequalities, and pervasive injustice that characterize
Palestinian society under occupation have created a fertile
psychological environment for sociopathy to grow.
We don’t yet have organized crime and gangs, but there has been a
dramatic upsurge in violations of the law and in domestic violence. But
policing Palestine more intensively and expanding security forces are
not the answer to a phenomenon brought about mainly by a crisis of the
spirit.
Structural Violence
The establishment of a ruling class, binding social structures, and
oppressive institutions exclude many people from sharing the fruits of
nationhood. These exclusions establish criteria—at once widely
recognized and covertly concealed—that determine who is heard and who is
silenced, who is favored and who deprived. One example is membership in
the right political party. If you belong to the proper political party
and begin work in the proper type of job, your years of party loyalty
will be counted as years of “professional experience.” This illegitimate
arithmetic automatically conveys an advantage in employment and in
promotions compared to those who actually have better credentials and
work harder. The same system that greases loyal wheels will put sticks
in the wheels of anyone who expresses opposition to or protests such a
system.
Strange voices are liable to be heard in support of direct violence
and structural violence, attempting to legitimize it and render it
socially acceptable. We are informed, for example, that a murdered woman
was disloyal to her husband ; lawyers might say, “Of course, you are
right—but you don’t want to get in trouble with the political elite.”
Our context is everything, of course : we experience strong emotions
to our occupation by Israel. The national humiliation and the personal
grievances suffered by the Palestinian people through our political and
economic misery filter down into the conflicts in our daily lives. Our
political parties have provided some people with a sense of belonging,
and thus achieved an unprecedented psychological significance. Intense
loyalty and highly emotionally charged participation in a polarized
society seems to result in an atmosphere of destructive competition,
unfair comparisons, hunger for power, and hatred. These strong emotions
eventually have undercut our capacity for logical reasoning and ethical
judgment.
The murder of the Palestinian soul is taking place, an annihilation
of our spirit, expressed in a hunger to dominate the weak and to inflict
our aggression on those who are smaller. We pass down our humiliation
to a dumping ground of those who are unable to defend themselves,
inducing in them our own sense of shame.
Our inner life is becoming empty. Our dreams are destroyed by
structural violence or melted into a collective trance. Everywhere
apathy and distrust is growing. Palestinians took to the streets to
celebrate the triumph of Mohammed Assaf as the celebrated Arab Idol, but
when we saw the reconciliation agreement sealed with embraces once
again we were not impressed. There were no celebrations in the street.
We Are Born Free
New research in psychology and neuroimaging has revealed that human
beings demonstrate an innate aversive reaction to inequality and
unfairness. In the “ultimatum game,” where responders are given a choice
to approve or to block a particular division of a quantity of money, it
was discovered that people—regardless of age, gender or race—found
unequal divisions to be aversive. It was also found that Blacks are more
sensitive to unfair proposals when these were proposed by other
Blacks !
But long before this psychological research, and the 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights—“All human beings are born free and equal in
dignity and rights”—Umar Ibn Al Khattab, an influential caliph who
earned the title Al-Faruq for his fairness and ability to distinguish
between right and wrong, rebelled against the social structure of his
time by asking : “Since when have you taken people for slaves and they
were born free ?” French philosoper Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that
“Man is born free ; and everywhere he is in chains.” He also stated that
“man’s natural sentiment of self-esteem is coupled with pity, the
dislike of seeing fellow creatures in pain.”
The mildest Qur’anic teaching on the duty to oppose injustice is : “And incline not toward those who do unfairness” (Hud 113).
Thus, apathy toward injustice, crime and human pain is incompatible
with our innate feelings. Apathy deviates from our natural humanitarian
instincts, and is the result of a distorted process of education and
conditioning. The outcome of programmed selfishness and egoism, it
eliminates our capacity for spiritual growth, instead promoting
compliance with injustice and submission to rigid authoritarian systems
of domination.
Searching for Spaciousness Inside
What can we do to escape the bars of our reality ? I have no wings
and will not fly out—not even with a first class ticket ! I remain here
on the ground, searching for a human connection with equals who aim to
nurture relationships of mutual respect and to co-create new forms of
living together. I seek companionship in my long journey to decondition
and deconstruct the forms of oppressions and injustice around me. I will
find myself sometimes at a loss and in despair, but I understand that
there can be a revival of hope even while recognizing disappointment ;
there can be fulfillment in surviving the heat of tyranny, a fulfillment
that makes a person more willing to dedicate oneself to those who are
marginalized and degraded in society.
The spirituality of Palestinian society has been one of the most
important factors in our resilience and steadfastness. Spirituality can
transform one’s sense of worth from unequal to equal, dismissing the
social stratifications where “higher” beings exercise control over
“lesser” beings. The current promotion of materialism and individualism
within Palestine, however, is increasingly limiting the inner
spaciousness that has helped us survive despite the cages imposed on us
from without.
We are in the midst of a process of losing our traditional serenity
and enlightenment, through our participation in this ongoing spiritual
decline. For so long, we found meaning and nourishment in song, poetry,
stories and prayers. Today, however, there is a deeper impoverishment
lying beneath the surface poverty—an impoverishment for which
materialistic answers do not suffice.
Our souls and our spirits are being injured and damaged. People
assess their self-worth using the yardsticks of money, education and
social status. We are imprisoned in our socioeconomic status, forced
into repetition and boredom of the finite and the familiar, not
realizing the great love, outstanding courage and lucid awareness that
can endure in the minds and hearts of simple people. Love for ourselves,
compassion for others, the liberation of our personal sense of agency,
and the freedom to choose and develop sophisticated modalities of
survival will restore our sense of independence and value in spite of
the external cage.
Samah Jabr,
August 2014
Samah Jabr is a Jerusalemite psychiatrist and psychotherapist who
cares about the wellbeing of her community—beyond issues of mental
health.
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