Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

For Israel’s 60th anniversary celebrations next year, a national bird will be chosen for Israel to call its own. According to Israeli officials, “This is part of the culture of nature-loving nations and a tool to generate local identification. It is also a way to raise the issue of environmentalism and animal protection.”

The director of the Jerusalem Bird Observatory has suggested that the Israeli public be a partner in choosing a bird to represent and be identified with the country. The bulbul, a festive songbird that is common in Wadi El Bazan, Wadi Al Qilt and Ein Qeenia, and the Palestine sunbird, a small black bird with glittering iridescent colors prevalent in desert areas, were considered, but its English name kept the latter out of the running, according to Haaretz.

While this discussion on birds was taking place among Israelis there was an internal revolution provoked by some Palestinians on another bird: the one in the title of Speak Bird, Speak Again, an anthology of Palestinian folk tales. The book was ordered pulled from school libraries by an official in the Palestinian Ministry of Education, reportedly over sexual innuendo and “shameful expressions” to which, according to the ministry decree, students should not be exposed.

Although Minister of Education Naser-Al Deen Al Shaer clarified that the book can remain in the hands of teachers but not of schoolchildren, the controversy resulted in several protests and demonstrations on Palestinian streets and was used as an opportunity to describe the government as “the radical Hamas militant government,” “people of darkness” and “the Taliban of Palestine.”

Of course these calls were trumpeted by the mainstream Western media. Although this press reports few if any of Israel’s daily atrocities against all Palestinians, it suddenly is greatly concerned about “Palestinian intellectuals angered, oppressed and worried that Hamas [is using] last year’s election victory to remake the Palestinian territories according to its hard-line interpretation of Islam.”

The Western media fail to mention, however, that this is not the first book banned in Palestine. The late Edward Said’s books were banned throughout Palestine by the same Palestinians who are making such a big fuss today, and their house “intellectuals” remained silent. Nor is it only in Palestine that the Ministry of Education censors what is allowed in the hands and minds of its pupils—similar controversies arise in France and the United States.

In the midst of this foul propaganda, neither the international media, the “Palestinian intellectuals” nor the government on the defensive paid any attention at all to the poor bulbul and the Palestinian sunbird that are being hijacked by Israel for its own use.

Among other things, Palestine is experiencing a crisis between a Western-supported elite class of Palestinians that has its own associations and institutions and is self-identified as the cultural face of Palestine, and ordinary Palestinians, many government employees, who are growing increasingly weary as they struggle to earn a living. Their voice is heard neither locally nor internationally. Although many do not realize it, the distance between the two classes is increasing, and the resulting fragmentation in Palestinian society continues to spread like a plague among our people.

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics’ study of the demographic and socioeconomic status of the Palestinian people at the end of 2006, the Palestinian elite class grew wealthier, despite the embargo and the widespread poverty it has caused. Income distribution in 2006 was reshaped in favor of rich households at the expense of the middle class. In fact, the share of income earned by the richest 10 percent of Palestinian households increased by 24 percent during 2006 (from 25.1 percent in 2005 to 30.6 percent at the end of the second quarter of 2006). On the other hand, middle class income declined by 12 percent, while the share of income earned by poorest 20 percent of households did not change.

Just as Washington, through its punitive embargo, takes away with one hand, however, it also gives with the other to those in its favor. The U.S. State Department has set aside a huge budget to “protect and promote moderation and democratic alternatives to Hamas,” and provides money to NGOs and other groups with ties to Palestinian political parties “not branded as terrorist groups.” The money is used to train politicians and secular parties opposed to Hamas—“to create democratic alternatives to authoritarian or radical Islamist political options”—and also is given to journalists who snipe at the government and manipulate public opinion.

According to reports, private Palestinian schools will receive $5 million in order to offer an alternative to the government-funded public education system—meaning the brainwashing will start from childhood.

Western money is helping create political and civil society elites, walking idols whose souls are enslaved by fear and greed. These domesticated Palestinians bend their language to their masters’ requirements. Acting contrary to our values and our reality, they alienate us—yet are allowed to speak in our names. As long as they are willing to sell out and divert the Palestinian national agenda, the international community is willing to give them every right, and the right to everything.

I encounter those people every day. I hear their bragging and watch them talking to the rest of us from on high, as if we know nothing and they know everything. Yet they espouse the same dogma of the people they criticize; the same fractional, tribal, and regional mentality; and run the same one-man show, with a central person in the position of power regardless of others’ education or level of professionalism. They have a monopoly on the job market and the power to hire and fire. Those they hire come from the same political and ideological background. And, yet, unlike most of us, some of those Palestinians working for the NGO’s have special cards and papers to let them pass through checkpoints and take certain lanes that we are not allowed to take.

They see their mission as being to civilize the jungle dwellers called Palestinians and to teach us about ideals that sell very well abroad: peace and democracy education (in theory only), gender issues and women’s rights (as if all other Palestinians enjoy their human rights), and dialogue and partnership (a de rigeur subject these days).

Western donors are most unlikely to fund a Jerusalem-based Palestinian NGO, or one working for Palestinian prisoners’ and refugees’ rights.

When I attend workshops and conferences on mental health in Palestine, I hear too many talks on incest—which is extremely rare in Palestine, and when it does happens it is the result of a psychologically pathological situation—much more than I hear about the problem of mental retardation which is so tragically prevalent and for which we have no decent institutions. But demonizing our men and condemning Palestinian patriarchy is a good cause for those seeking funds and the donors who want to reinforce our stereotypes. Yes, there is patriarchy in Palestine—a patriarchy that protects women and provides a resolution for disputes in the total absence of a state. If my car has a flat tire, 10 men I don’t know will come to help fix it. In Paris, on the other hand, a woman was raped in the Metro and no one intervened; abhorrent things can happen everywhere. Let’s be fair to our community, focus on the norm rather than the exception, and learn how to prioritize instead of always competing for foreign funds. Between Western donors and their favored recipient organizations, many local birds find no nests in Palestine.

Finally, a Palestinian National Unity Government has been realized, but aid and international goodwill have not been showered over the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinians are still starved, haunted, isolated and abandoned by the world.

Not even the latest Arab League adoption of the "pan-Arab initiative" of “A Land for Peace” peace plan could relieve Palestinians from their collective suffering due to the imposed economic blockade and the withholding of tax money, in addition to daily Israeli military strikes against Palestinian civilians.

To any Palestinian gesture, the Israeli response is always ready: “Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni called on the international community to ensure that Israel's right to exist is respected by any Palestinian government.”

In response to the summit, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres demanded free-of-charge normalization: "We propose that we meet without setting pre-conditions and negotiate," he said.

Israel and its American friends demand that the Saudis drop from their peace plan any mention of the refugee problem, a major issue in the conflict that has a mental and emotional significance that is affecting all Palestinians in the Diaspora as well as in the occupied land; and that the Palestinians respond to the Quartet’s demands, “recognizing Israel” on the top of the list.

The Arab peace plan, as it is, is already problematic in the eyes of the Palestinians; it says that there must be an "agreed upon" solution for the refugees. Agreed by whom? Why not, instead, enforce the already agreed upon United Nations resolution 194, which involves “the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible?”

The language used in this plan tends to treat the Palestinian refugee situation as a mere humanitarian problem rather that a major political issue.

We should have no more illusions about peace through mere negotiations. Both Israel and the United States are not interested in peace; the peace plan is a bargain for them; they are only interested in crushing Palestinians to pieces so that they will have both the land and the peace only for themselves.

In response to the proposition of the one-State solution, Israel sighs in horror: “That will be the extermination of Jews.” In response to the two-State solution, Israel offered the answer pre-emptively by creating the wall inside the Palestinian territories and tearing the West Bank and Gaza into cantons, while always holding its grip on Jerusalem. Facts on the ground leave no possibility for a viable Palestinian State to ever emerge.

What the Arab peace plan suggests fails to restore justice or fairness to Palestinians in the vision of the majority of the people; and if it will ever be accomplished, then it should be a cold peace running counter to what politicians and ruling leaders have been advocating. Until then, civil society’s organizational, intellectual and cultural means and abilities available to them should campaign against normalization with Israel in all its political, social and economic dimensions and raise public awareness to the adverse effects that it will have on the Palestinian national and cultural interests.

But it seems that Arab leaders are willing to accept less than the lousy Arab summit’s peace plan. In April, King Abdullah II, while meeting with Israeli members of Parliament, spoke of the rights of compensation instead of the right to return. He said that the plan offers points for negotiation and Israel has the right to veto any point (this means that Israel can accept normalization with Arab countries and at the same time veto the withdrawal from the lands of 1967, for example). In response to Mr. Amr Mousa’s comment on the plan that this is a one package deal, and Israel should take it or leave it as a whole, King Abdullah told Israel’s MP’s, “Leave Amr Mousa to me!” We’ll see what the King will bring with him to Israel when he speaks at the Knesset end-April; he also believes the Palestinians should recognize Israel.

In a recent poll by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), some 66 per cent of Palestinians think that the government should not accept international demands to “recognize Israel’s right to exist.”

This seemingly little concession that the world is asking of Palestinians entails the complete and eternal execution of the Palestinian national rights. Israel defines itself as a Jewish State and, yet, knows no borders for itself. Remember the famous "borders are determined by where Jews live, not where there is a line on a map?" Thus, the Palestinians' recognition of the right of such a State to exist entails approving the expanding nature of this colonial State, accepting all racist measures that favour Jews over the Palestinian natives (like the 2003 law on marriage and citizenship and the latest systematic expulsion of Palestinians holding foreign passports from the land). It also brings about giving up our right to return once we already agreed on the Jewish characteristics of the State and abandoning our right and duty to struggling to create a Palestinian State. In brief, this recognition is as stupid as signing a blank check!

Not only for political and pragmatic reasons Palestinians should never recognize ‘Israel’s right to exist,' but for moral and psychological reasons as well. Recognizing that right for Israel while all our national and human rights are being violated every day is, simply put, incompatible with Palestinian well-being and mental health. The world is asking of us to surrender at the most profound levels: the mental and spiritual ones. We are asked to accept, reconcile ourselves with and bless the Israeli violations of our life. The fact that our homeland is occupied does not, by itself, mean that we are not free people as far as we reject the occupation in our minds, as far as we learn how to live in spite of the occupation, rather than accepting it and getting adjusted to it. But, if we recognize Israel, we are mentally occupied. Resistance to the occupation, however, is very important for our psychological health at the individual as well as the communal levels. Its practice can be a protective exercise against depression and despair.

With the awful facts put by Israel on the ground, what remains for us of Palestine is a thought, an idea that becomes a conviction of our right to a free life and a homeland. When Palestinians are asked to ‘recognize’ Israel, we are asked to give up that thought, and to renounce everything we have and are. This will only sink us deeper into an eternal collective depression.

In order to stop this upcoming Nakba, Palestinians should never recognize Israel; those who suppose themselves to be anti-war advocates should support the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination and push for an immediate lifting of all sanctions, embargoes and financial restrictions on the Palestinian society under occupation. This includes releasing the Palestinian tax money illegally held by Israel, that, in addition to supporting the Palestinian Civil Society’s call to action, which includes boycotts, divestment and sanctions on Israel until it complies with human rights and international law. For those who insist on putting conditions on Palestinians under occupation, Palestinians call upon you to demand at least the same conditions from the occupiers: renouncing State-sponsored violence against Palestinian civilians, accepting previous agreements which Israel signed but did not implement, and recognizing Palestine as a people and a nation; until this happens, there will be no peace, for anyone, in this land.

As I was specializing in psychiatry in Paris, I became familiar with the work of the ex-French-actress Brigitte Bardot and her foundation, which works for animal rights across the world. Bardot is especially famous or infamous for her annual denunciation of the Islamic ritual of slaughtering of sheep during the Muslim feast of Eid Al-Adha.

But, this story is neither about Bardot and her animals’ rights nor about the avian flu. It is about where my heart is: with the well-being of the children, especially in Palestine.

The other day a young man came to my clinic with a frown on his forehead: “Doctor, he did it again; he killed one more chicken in the same cruel way. Do something for him, please, doctor, we want him back to a normal mind,” said the uncle pointing at the boy that I later understood to be his nephew.

The uncle reported that this might be the sixth time they found a strangled, mutilated chicken in their backyard over the last three years. While they did not know who killed the chickens in such an awfully cruel way at first, Khaled was seen in an olive grove, far from the sight of people, with a chicken in his hands. Both, the chicken and Khaled were crying loudly; but Khaled cried louder and louder as he was holding the head of the chicken and turning it rapidly in a circular movement as if he was attempting to separate it from its body as the chicken’s cries gradually disappeared. Then Khaled took the silent chicken by its neck and kept beating the trees, the rocks and the ground with its body. When he finally finished, feathers, blood and a mutilated animal were left in the grove.

Khaled is today a 12-year-old boy. In May 2003, he lived in Hebron at the border of the Kiryat-Arbaa settler colony, and it was there that he lived through a horrible calamity that has affected his life from that moment on and that has changed him from a normally developing playful, friendly child to a withdrawn, rigid, inflexible, impatient, dependent, impulsive and aggressive one.

According to the uncle of the child, Khaled was playing with three of his friends as a military vehicle carrying a huge quantity of barbed wire passed by them. The wires swayed left and right with the movement of the vehicle and, accidentally, caught hold of the four children. The vehicle continued on its way until the wire was accidentally detached from the vehicle; the children were found approximately 500 metres away from their original place of play. The uncle provided me with photos, medical reports and news reports documenting that story.

All the kids were seriously wounded and hospitalized for their wounds at the governmental hospital of Hebron. Khaled had a serious head trauma and multiple cut wounds and abrasions on his back, arms and legs. According to the family, during that period, nobody spoke with Khaled about what happened to him because they were all worried about his physical health and overwhelmed by the incident.

When Khaled was finally discharged from the hospital and returned back to his home, it became obvious that his suffering was not over. The boy seemed socially withdrawn from his family and friends; he started wetting his bed every night and suffered from sleep disturbances. He has nightmares and wakes up agitated, crying and aggressively scratching his face with his nails. His shouts are incomprehensible; his words are gibberish, according to his family. “Other than that, the boy almost does not speak; if he talks, he complains about headaches,” adds the uncle.

At home, Khaled is destructive. He breaks all the toys and he often becomes aggressive with his younger siblings. He is particularly hostile when others ask him questions or speak about the incident he went through several years ago.

At school, they complain that he lacks discipline and concentration on any task. He is very slow and his learning performance is quite low. The family also reported a reduction in the personal level of cleanliness of the child.

According to the family, there were several periods of slight improvement of the general functioning of Khaled, but, every time, that improvement was soon aborted by other incidents involving violence with the soldiers, at which point the symptoms would recur more intensely than before. In July 2004, one of Khaled’s schoolmates was shot dead by the soldiers. In February 2005, the family house of Muhammad was invaded by soldiers of the army for routine reasons of investigation, and several months ago he was caught in the middle of confrontations between the settlers and soldiers on the one hand and the citizens of the Old City of Hebron on the other hand.

Khaled lives in a modest house with his family. He is the third child among eight siblings. The father is a 44-year-old schoolteacher; the mother is a 34-year-old housewife. Like many other Palestinian children, he is being taken care of by the extended family: grandparents, uncles and aunts, in addition to his parents. The uncle reports that since the incident, the mother became very protective, at the same time, very permissive. The relation of the child with his father has also changed. The father was severe in the past, now he is ambivalent; he is hesitating between showing an intrusive interest in Khaled and completely ignoring him.

During the interview, the boy was clinging to his uncle, refusing to speak or to play. He refused to remain alone with me. I explained why I was there. He almost did not speak during the interview except that occasionally he nodded in approval to some of what I told him; nor did he establish any spontaneous eye contact with me. He hid his face with his hands, especially when the uncle spoke about the enuresis. I invited him to draw. He started to put lines on paper and then proceeded to tear them apart. He looked sad and seemed tired. I told him that there seems to be a problem but I cannot help him if he does not want me to do so. He nodded his head in approval when I invited him to come back, and he pressed my hand in response to my initiative to shake his hand.

Upon physical examination of the child, I could see the large scars on his body as I could see the scratch marks on his face due to the auto-mutilation, but I could not measure the dimensions of the hidden scars beneath. The uncle tells me Khaled is perverse; he has no empathy whatsoever. I do not agree, and I do not know what is in the mind of that young boy.

To treat the root cause of the pathology of Khaled and others like him is not within my hands. But I hope to give him some support and treatment to ease his symptoms and to get him to speak, to draw and to express himself in order to communicate his inner feelings in a healthier way than mutilating the chickens.

Until those who are responsible for the war on our people stop their military machines, I can’t help but think about Khaled and other children like him in Iraq, in Lebanon, etc., wherever they are, inside or outside Palestine. In the meanwhile, I ask of you, who have on your supermarket shelves more animal food than baby food, to lend us some of your attention, if not for the children, then for the chickens of Palestine.

Samah Jabr is a psychiatrist living and working in occupied Palestine.