Palestinian Children: Art Therapy and Intergenerational Trauma
- Rehab Nazzal
We were sleeping in my parents’ bedroom, I, and my sisters [Joury, three years old, and Mila, four months old], when I woke up to the sound of screaming and glass and debris falling on our beds. My mom fell to the ground. My father carried Joury, my mom carried Mila and held my hand and we rushed through the hallway, barefooted. We passed by the apartment of my uncle Mohammed. I saw him laying on the ground, I tried to wake him up, but he wouldn’t respond. His shoulder was burnt. We rushed to the street. There was lots of smoke, broken bricks, and scattered clothes. I saw the blanket of my cousin Zeid hanging from their destroyed apartment. Boom, boom… they kept bombing us. Ali [taxi driver] drove us to the house of my grandfather Jamal.
These are the words of four-year-old Sham, from Gaza City, describing what happened when Israeli war jets bombed her house in May 2021. The attack killed her uncle Mohammed, his wife Eman, and their two children Zeid and Mariam.
I met Sham in her grandfather Jamal’s house in Nuseirat refugee camp, upon arriving in Gaza in June 2021, days after Israel’s latest atrocity on the Strip. Sham’s aunt Mai, my companion on the long journey from Cairo to Gaza, invited me to share a meal with her family. The overcrowded Nuseirat camp, located in the middle of the Gaza Strip, is one of sixty-one refugee camps that were established by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in 1948.1 These camps were built for Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed during the First Nakba,2 when the state of Israel was established over their seized lands and homes. The 9.8 km² Nuseirat camp is currently home to 70,000 Palestinians.3
In Sham’s grandfather’s house, the Palestinian catastrophe is fully manifested—three generations living under one roof, embodying a history of struggle, resilience, and survival. The grandparents, forcefully expelled from their homes in south Palestine during the First Nakba; their children, who have been enduring the Second Nakba—Israel’s military occupation since 1967; and their grandchildren, including Sham, whose lives are shattered by Israel’s continued military occupation, frequent bombardment, and blockade. While I was observing the children, Sham and her sister Joury stood out. She had black circles around her visibly tired eyes, and appeared irritated, often staring suddenly into the distance or biting her nails. Meanwhile, her sister was withdrawn and silent. It does not require much expertise to recognize that these two little girls had just endured a horrific experience. Indeed, talking to Sham revealed her family’s ordeal facing and surviving death. But also, I can understand and relate to these horrific experiences, which I went through in my childhood under Israel’s military occupation in the West Bank.
Being a Palestinian educator and artist, who worked intensively with children, I started my first unplanned art therapy session with Sham, her sister, and the other six children in the house, followed by another session a week later with Sham alone. Sham and Joury are among tens of thousands of traumatized children who survived Israel’s latest attack that killed sixty-six children, injured another 610, and displaced thousands of others. The children had not yet recovered from the fifty-one days of continued bombing in Gaza in 2014, that claimed the lives of over 500 children and babies. According to UNICEF, one in three children in Gaza has suffered a traumatic experience and needs urgent support.4
The urgent need for help and my rage at the continued targeting of Palestinian children brought me to Gaza to assist through my knowledge in art therapy. When I arrived, the scenes of destruction revealed the severity and scale of Israel’s attack. Towers and houses were flattened to the ground. Schools, hospitals, offices, shops, cemeteries, animal shelters, and public facilities were severely damaged. This bombing was more fatal than the previous attack: Israel deployed new American war jets and tested new weapons on the besieged population.
Throughout the four weeks that I spent in Gaza, I worked with over fifty children aged three to fourteen in the Sick Kids Hospital in Gaza City, in community centres, in refugee camps, and in children’s homes. The art therapy sessions were held in a supportive environment—including the presence of a parent or relative, and with minimal instructions—and were intended to assist children with breaking any barriers and expressing their feelings freely. The first stage of the art sessions was the most difficult for the children themselves—and for the therapists, including myself, and others as part of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program. Children poured their feelings inside a circle they were instructed to draw. Their drawings mirrored their inner struggles, anger, grief, and fear. In the children’s hospital, Ahmad, a thirteen-year-old with severe cancer—who relies on the use of a wheelchair and lives with medical tubes attached to his body—picked up a bunch of colouring pencils and angrily filled the circle with random lines. Another child with cancer, aged four, pressed an orange colouring pencil slowly but firmly until he ripped the paper. These children, among a larger number of other children with cancer, cannot cross Israel’s checkpoint for treatment in specialized and better-equipped Palestinian hospitals in the West Bank.
After pouring their feelings out, the children then drew themselves, their friends, their dreams, and they created various forms with clay. Children with kidney failure go through dialysis at least twice a week for a few hours in the same Gaza City hospital that lacks medical supplies due to the blockade. For these children, art therapy sessions helped take their minds off the tubes and needles attached to their bodies and eased the difficult time they must spend in beds. The nurses were delighted to see the children engaged in activities that relieved their suffering.
Despite the difference in setting, health conditions, and the severity of traumas, almost all the art created by participating children was innocent and intuitive, devoid of rules, regulations, and judgment. Their expressions can be classified into two categories. The first depicted the horrors they experienced or witnessed, such as drawings of destroyed homes, dead bodies, falling rockets, or warplanes in the sky. Some children depicted not only rockets coming down, but also rockets going up. They referred to the latter as Palestinian rockets. The second category included drawings of the imaginative lives that the children aspire to live, where they seem free, happy, smiling, playing in gardens with flowers and bees, swimming in clean water, travelling, climbing trees, and flying. One child flew to Istanbul; for her, that was the limit of the world. Another child with an amputated leg drew himself above trees with his crutches. “Home” was expressed in a great number of drawings, which points to the children’s witnessing of the destruction of their homes, their frequent displacement, and their aspirations for stability.
During this latest Israeli atrocity, the Palestinian resistance movement responded strongly for the first time since the deadly attacks on Gaza in 2008–2009 and 2014, despite how inequitable their rockets were against the most fatal US-made weaponry. The Palestinian armed resistance developed missiles that defied Israel’s American-financed “Iron Dome” and reached deep into Israel. Since Israel prohibits any raw construction materials, including steel and other metals, from entering the Strip, the resistance movement recycled and developed rockets from weapons dropped on the Strip. They also managed to locate “wrecks of British warships which were sunk off the coast of Gaza during World War One” and recycle shells found on them.5
Top right: Drawing by And Hamdan, twelve years old. Text reads “Turkey, Palestine, taxi, friend Rasha.”
Bottom left: Drawing by Layla Mohammed Abdullah Judeh, twelve years old.
Sumud (steadfast perseverance) is what characterizes Palestinian life under the colonial military occupation, apartheid, and siege, empowering one generation after another to heal and persist in reclaiming rights and achieving justice. This sumud manifests through collective solidarity and communal support in surviving Western-Zionists’ continued violation of international and humanitarian law, as they deny both Palestinians’ right to resist their occupiers and colonizers and the refugees’ right of return to their homes.
“To be able to resist your oppressors is significant for the well-being of our children,” Manal, 35 years old, mother of two daughters said to me during a community event we both attended in Gaza City:
My daughters’ behaviour [five and seven years old] was different during this assault, despite the severity of the attacks and the fear and uncertainty we faced. When they hear a missile striking, they ask us: Is it up or down? Is it them or us? It was different than the 2014 onslaught when we were just receiving missiles, this time we defended ourselves, we resisted. Even though we have no place to hide, and we slept in the hallway or under the kitchen counter, our children’s self-respect and dignity was high.
My approach to working with the children was based on my own experience growing up in the West Bank as well as on my understanding of the root cause of the continued suffering of Palestinian children and the violence inflicted on the Palestinian people. The Israeli settler colonial policies and practices have been, for over seven decades, systematically targeting Palestinian children through dispossession, ethnic cleansing, imprisonment and torture, discrimination, control of movement, denial of family connectivity, deprivation of medical treatment, and the infliction of a blockade on Gaza, which deprives children from access to life essentials and subjects them to frequent military attacks that leave no space or time for healing or coping.6
The terror inflicted on children by settler colonial and apartheid states, whether in Palestine, across Turtle Island, South Africa, Algeria, or other colonized territories, in the past or in the present, targets the future of colonized peoples and attempts to crush their resilience and their will to resist. Targeting children obstructs the possibility of a radically different future—particularly the right to reclaim stolen lands and homes. Settler entities rely on the adage that “the old will die and the young will forget.” But how can children forget a history that shapes their everyday reality? Does history not teach us that trauma and difficult experiences are passed on, silently, from one generation to the next?
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