Crows on the Cradles: Palestinian Mothers at a Frontline Vortex1^,2 Reflections on the Psychology of Occupation

Palestinian mothers living in the friction points in East Jerusalem and the West Bank provide critical windows into the traumas that challenge families ensnarled in the vortex of ongoing political violence and living under occupation. Our paper, using interviews of Palestinian mothers, is a view of the abnormal - the violence that infects childhood and parenting, the fight of some mothers for a “real normal”, and the induction into the “new normal”, in which the night-time incursions, the mapping of communities, the detention of their adolescent sons, the solitary confinements of some, are “accepted” as a rite of passage. Managing terror and its anticipation exhausts and corrodes family functioning and community life. Mothers become inducted into a traumatic vortex, as they struggle to contain the anguish, multiple losses, and the outrage over the dispossession of longings and claims. Our own inescapable countransference, a simultaneous compulsion to understand coupled with an aversion to engage, provided vital information about the stench of violence that permeates these mothers' lives and the terror of losing not only children but one's mind, as well.