The generation that "doesn't know Joseph"
by Gideon Levy
Ha'aretz
August 23, 2003 TEL AVIV-Israel's contact with the next generation of Palestinians-those who grew up under the occupation-and its attempts to achieve peace with them, will be far more problematic than with the generation that preceded it. This is something we need to be aware of and take into account. No past generation grew up in conditions as severe as those that afflicted the members of the current generation in the territories. Indeed, there is no place in the Western world where children live in comparable conditions. A year ago, a report by USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, found that about a quarter of the children in the territories suffer from malnutrition, either prolonged or passing. A United Nations agency found at the time that 62 percent of the Palestinians did not have sufficient access to food. Since then, the situation has only been aggravated.
A similar state of affairs exists in the health system, in which all medical treatment, including vaccinations and first aid, is a complicated, and at times impossible, bureaucratic process. One need only participate in one of the events held by Physicians for Human Rights to see the health conditions in which children are growing up in Israel's backyard.
It is not only food and physical health that these children lack. From Jenin to Rafah, hundreds of thousands of children are suffering from psychological traumas whose impact is difficult to gauge. These are children who, in the past three years, have been exposed to death in truly frightening dosages, to destruction, shooting, tanks in the streets, soldiers invading their homes in the middle of the night, arrests, beatings and multiple forms of humiliation. Some of them lost their friends, in some cases before their eyes: 230 Palestinian children under the age of 15 and another 208 aged 15-18 have been killed since September 2000. Many others have been rendered paralyzed or disabled, and their friends have been exposed to horrors. One doesn't have to be a psychologist to understand that children who live with deep anxiety for such a lengthy period will suffer mental problems. And, of course, hardly any of them are getting professional assistance.
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