Trauma and destruction of family
Veronese, Guido et al. “Modelling Life Satisfaction and Adjustment to Trauma in Children Exposed to Ongoing Military Violence: An Exploratory Study in Palestine.” Child abuse & neglect 63 (2016): 61–72. Web.
Is about how exposure to war and ongoing political violence increases children’s mental health risks, notably in terms of posttraumatic stress disorder and depressive somatic symptoms.
Personal traumatic event experiences play a large role in the severity of post-traumatic stress disorder. War trauma is defined as exposure to extremely traumatic situations in the setting of a war. Directly experiencing, seeing, or knowing about occurrences involving real or threatened death, significant injury, or other bodily threat is characterized as extreme trauma. This understanding of war trauma corresponds to the realities of Palestinian children’s daily life. Children living in chronic warzones, such as Palestine, are subjected to a complex and ongoing kind of trauma that impacts every part of their lives and subjects them to degrading and abnormal living conditions. Palestinian children, in particular, are constantly and directly exposed to a dangerous and unpredictable environment characterized by poverty, war-related damage, and
times of military and political violence such as drone strikes, military invasions, and intra-family and faction conflict.
Perdigon, Sylvain. “For Us, It Is Otherwise: Three Sketches on Making Poverty Sensible in the Palestinian Refugee Camps of Lebanon.” Current anthropology 56.S11 (2015): S88–S96. Web.
Is about how an estimated 300,000 Palestinian refugees are currently living in Lebanon. Most of these refugees’ origins lie in the galilee and the areas surrounding and including northern coastal cities captured by Israel in 1948 at the end of the British Mandate on Palestine. 66.4% of Palestinian men and women lived below the poverty line. A vast majority of these refugees live in 12 overcrowded camps under the nominal responsibility of the United Nations Relief and Work Agency as a temporary measure to alleviate the refugee crisis.
Kanafani, Ghassān. Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1991.
The book is about three Palestinian living as refugees in Iraq. They wanted to travel to Kuwait in search of work. So they can come from poverty and start a new life and improve the lives of their family. A man promises to smuggle them to Kuwait in a water tank in the stifling heat of noon. In the last checkpoint the while it delayed in arranging paperwork when he goes back he
finds their dead bodies. The last sentence that was repeated in the novel was “why didn’t they bang on the walls?”
Yizhar, S., et al. Khirbet Khizeh. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
It describes the evacuation of Palestinian villagers from their homes and lands during the 1948 conflict. The story begins with an unknown soldier and his unit landing in the village and waiting for orders. The village is almost deserted because most of the residents have departed and crossed the border. The military was given orders to dig and demolish the place so that the inhabitants would not return. Everyone was evicted from their homes, and their belongings were dumped in the midst of the village. While some inhabitants decried their destiny as inevitable, the majority are cooperative and passively followed commands. as he considers how the village will be changed into a collection of resources that will no longer be used, such as water that will no longer be pumped and fields that will no longer be planted.
