Young Palestinians despair as social fabric unravels

12 Mar 2007 17:22:00 GMT
Blogged by: Megan Rowling

REUTERS/Mohammed Salem
It's common knowledge that life for ordinary Palestinians has got tougher since the election victory of the Islamist group Hamas a year ago pushed Israel to tighten security and Western donors to freeze aid. But just how bad have things become?

"Over the past 12 months, living conditions and personal dignity have declined considerably," Karen Koning AbuZayd, the Commissioner General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), said in a speech at Chatham House think tank in London last week.

She backed up her observation with some concrete examples. Kids are going without shoes. School canteens are shut. Weddings are being postponed. Donkey carts are increasingly being used to transport goods. Jewellers are buying jewellery from their customers rather than the other way round.

Koning AbuZayd also told a depressing story about Palestinian children acting out funeral scenes during their school break-time, complete with a mini "martyr".

The rising violence and restrictions on the movement of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are causing the social fabric to unravel, said the UNRWA head. That's reflected partly in a rise in violent crimes, with more recorded in 2006 than throughout the whole period from 1948 to 2005, she noted.

NO PLACE TO GO

Another sign of the fallout is that more and more Palestinians are trying to leave. According to Koning AbuZayd, some 10,000 headed abroad between July and November last year.

But it's not that easy to find a place to go, reports Steven Erlanger in a feature in the International Herald Tribune revealing the extent of despair among Palestinian children and youth growing up under the second intifada, which began in 2000.

Nader Said, a political scientist at Birzeit University in the West Bank, tells the newspaper that 35 percent of Palestinians over the age of 18 want to emigrate and nearly 50 percent of those between 18 and 30 would leave if they could. "That's a huge indicator...In the worst times here, when Israeli troops were everywhere, the figure in the population was less than 20 percent," he's quoted as saying.

But, according to the paper, it's hard for Palestinians to get permission to go and work in Jordan or the Gulf these days, and though they can seek asylum in Europe, they need a visa to get there first. Cuba and China are a bit more welcoming it appears, but the paper reports that, with many travel agents willing to sell fake documents, some end up getting sent back before they reach their destinations.

The IHT article documents how a lack of jobs and a loss of faith in the prospect of a political settlement are pushing more and more young people to become militants. And children are internalising violence at a very early age.

During an interview Erlanger carries out with a family living in a refugee camp in Gaza, six-year-old Mustafa and his little brother Ahmed suddenly unfurl the new umbrellas they're playing with and shout "Qassams!", referring to the bombs launched by militants into Israel.

Mustafa's mum tells Erlanger that, after watching the news of a family killed by shelling on a Gaza beach last summer, her son said, "I want to be fat, mommy." But why? "Because I want to put on a suicide belt and not have the Israelis see it."

KILLINGS OF WOMEN

Women are also suffering from the brutalisation of Palestinian society. In a recent story from the U.N. news agency IRIN, researchers say the number of killings specifically targeting women (femicide) is on the rise, though getting exact statistics is very difficult.

The article says that in 2006 17 Palestinian women were reported to have been the victims of so-called honour killings, when women are murdered because they're thought to have shamed their families by activities such as sex before marriage.

"The general atmosphere here in Gaza is encouraging this - there is no respect for law, no punishment of criminals and everyone has a gun," Mona Shawa, director of the women's unit at the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza, told IRIN.

UNRWA's Koning AbuZayd believes that a bigger focus on the human rights of Palestinians would help emphasise their worsening plight.

At the meeting in London, she recommended that the international community keep a body of rights observers and fact-finders resident in the Palestinian territories, rather than just sending in occasional missions. Their work could lay the foundations for judicial processes to stop the abuses, she suggested.

"The discourse on Palestine is about security, borders and the war on terror," she said. "The discourse on human rights hasn't received the attention it deserves."
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