Helping Palestinian Children Confront their Trauma of the Occupation

Iqbal Tamimi

September 13, 2009

Romi Elnagar: Art therapy enables children to deal in nonverbal ways with traumatic events in their lives.

Many who work with children who have experienced traumatic events, such as child psychologists, believe it is crucial for children to express their feelings about those events if they are to recover from their suffering. Art is a way for children to communicate the full range of emotions, and one of the most important ways to express feelings of anger, pain and fear. Child psychologists have found that art therapy works to enable children to show in nonverbal ways what they have experienced and to deal with traumatic events in their lives.

For example, the organization Darkness to Light, which deals with child sexual abuse, uses art therapy in its work, and says, "Anyone who has experienced psychological trauma may have difficulty expressing their experience directly or effectively in words…Art is a non-threatening way to visually communicate anything that is too painful to put into words."

People working with child survivors of the horrendous civil war in Sierra Leone also used art as part of the healing process. Children can show in pictures events that are too traumatic to be even brought to the surface of consciousness. Often, it is only when a child begins to draw that he can even remember what he has suffered, as painful events are brought to consciousness in the pictures he makes. Elsewhere in Africa, children's drawings of torture, rape and murder have been so detailed and so powerful that they have been used to bring a case in the International Criminal Court against janjaweed groups in Darfur.

I am more concerned, however, with helping children to deal with and overcome their terrible experiences through their art, and in particular, those children who have suffered the devastating and brutal Israeli Occupation of Palestine.

There are some organizations and individuals working on the West Bank and Gaza to help children overcome the traumas caused by seeing the helplessness of parents and caretakers in the face of vicious genocidal oppression, the hopelessness of poverty, starvation and incarceration in Gaza, which has been called the largest open-air prison on the planet and the brutality of daily beatings, violence and murder. While art therapy cannot be expected to right these wrongs, it may help to make young victims able to achieve a humanity that their oppressors can only envy, if they were even able to comprehend it.

Giving these children in the Occupied Territories and Gaza the tools to show what they have witnessed furthermore enables adults in their lives to understand and to validate their experiences. Artistic expression can nurture dignity and self-respect when individuals feel powerless in the face of oppression and violence. Helping children to regain a lost sense of safety and peace is what art therapy is all about, for Palestinian children and for the young victims of war, genocide and oppression everywhere.

These are the goals of organizations like the Palestinian Child Arts Center in Hebron, and Hope and Play.org (a British organization that works with refugee children worldwide). Another organization, the Arab Resource Center for Popular Arts in Lebanon (al-Jana) says, "…the belief of Al-Jana [is] that the challenges that face these so called "marginalized communities" have enriched their existence and as such have contributed to a stronger sense of community building; creative problem solving; and communal initiative and resiliency. Their vibrant culture reflects this resourcefulness and deep human spirit."

In Jenin, a Freedom Theater provides a refuge for children from a world of Israeli raids and harassment. The director of the theater, Juliano Khamis, says, "Art cannot free you from your chains, but art can generate and mobilize discourse of freedom. Art can create debate. Art can expose."

Most of all, children's art can expose the ordeals they have suffered, and by doing so, pave the way for healing.