This is the text of a talk I gave at the Peace Forum in Cooma organised by the Monaro People for Peace on Friday 21st March, 2003, 8pm. The other speaker was Andrew Wilkie. (March 2003)

I was born and raised in Israel. During the first 27 years of my life I experienced 4 major wars, 1967, 1973, 1982 and 1991. Each one of these wars has its particular name and its story as do wars of other countries. Regardless of what we call them all wars are one and the same. People get killed and those who stay alive suffer from psychological damage. Wars damage the environment and billions of dollars that can and should be used to help the vulnerable and fix our ever increasing social problems literally go up in smoke.

In 1991, the Gulf War, our apartment block near Tel-Aviv was severely damaged by a scud missile that came from Northern Iraq. I was lucky to come out of it unharmed but that experience has made me appreciate what happens when war comes to our cities, our streets and our homes. The fear and anxiety are hard to describe to those who haven’t experienced it. I still suffer from quite a bit of discomfort whenever I hear fireworks. What I experienced in 1991 was nothing compared with what hundreds of thousands of Iraqis will have to go through if they are attacked by the US and its allies. An attack on Iraq is a crime against humanity.

I sometimes think that there is no real need for long speeches. It should suffice to say that war is bad for everyone and needs to be abolished for our leaders to abandon the idea for good. Unfortunately, they seem to think otherwise and we seem to need to explain to them very slowly and patiently why war is wrong. I am sure that you who are here tonight do not need convincing but for the sake of our politicians I will discuss the effects of war specifically on soldiers, children and on the Palestinian people.

The soldiers

War is not nice, neat or well organised as politicians would like us to think. Even if it is quick, war is messy and soldiers get hurt. My father was injured during his military service in Israel and suffers from a mild disability. As part of his military disability benefits we were allowed to use a special kind of country club run by the defense department. It included state of the art sports and recreation facilities for the use of men and women who have become disabled during their military service, and their families. I remember being surrounded by men with no arms or legs, some in wheel chairs, blind men or men with serious burn scars in different parts of their bodies. I got used to this more or less after a while but my brother who is four years younger than me told me recently that he was quite traumatised by these experiences. He apparently grew up terrified that he will end up like one of these men. The men I saw there were the lucky ones who somehow got out alive. Many didn’t and left behind grieving families and friends. Many school friends of mine died in the 1982 war.

Some soldiers manage to escape physical injuries but become scarred emotionally by trauma. I personally believe that all soldiers are emotionally scarred by war. Some more severely than others. Even those who do their job well, who manage to kill enemy soldiers and who perform their duties faithfully- they too end up with some degree of war trauma.

In the early days of the state of Israel when soldiers suffered from shell shock they were seen as cowards. In battle they were considered a liability and a waste of resource. When they were sent back from the front they would be locked up away from the public eye for long periods of time for treatment. This tended to contribute to their sense of shame and failure. Many of them didn’t realise that they had nothing to be ashamed of. It is a sign of humanity and of emotional health, not illness, to become traumatised by the experience of war.

Now we call shell shock, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD is a very serious condition that can take years of expert therapy to heal. Some people never recover. People who suffer from PTSD undergo what can look like a personality change. Many attempt to deal with PTSD by trying to get on with it but it usually doesn’t work. Some resort to alcohol to help them cope, many become abusive and violent or withdrawn and emotionally unavailable. Nightmares, flashbacks and anxiety attacks tend to make these men disturbed, weak and unavailable as parents and partners. War trauma has an enormous effect on the structure of the family. It compromises the parenting that children receive. If the father suffers from PTSD his needs are so overwhelming that children often become marginalised. If the father is angry, irritable or violent the effects are even more obvious. War trauma has a devastating effect on marital relationships and can cause years of anguish and suffering. In my work I have seen the effects of war running in families sometimes for generations. People whose grandfathers were war veterans can still suffer from the effect that the trauma had on the family.

Armies train their soldiers to act automatically and obey orders. Feeling is an indulgence and it is dangerous during battle. Soldiers are trained to shut down emotionally. Psychologically this in itself is damaging.

In his book On Killing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman argues that the chances of becoming a psychiatric casualty of war are greater than the chances of being killed by enemy fire. In the war of 1973, 30% of all Israeli casualties were due to psychiatric causes and in the war of 1982 Israeli psychiatric casualties were twice as high as the number of dead. There is a tendency to think that those who suffer from PTSD during battle are somehow weaker psychologically, or maybe they did not learn properly what the army was trying to teach. The reality is that even those who are good soldiers and continue to function well in battle get damaged too.

John Howard needs to realise that Australian soldiers will be killed and maimed, and that those who come back alive will all suffer from psychological wounds that will affect them and their families and children for a long, long time. Medals, speeches and ceremonies will not undo the damage.

This terrible outcome of war is also our saving grace. Knowing that such risks exist might discourage people from joining armies and participating in wars. Soldiers are people who were brought up in societies where killing is considered wrong. In earlier wars, many soldiers refused to kill, refused to fire their weapons. Unfortunately, the development of long range weapons threatens to take this away from us. Long range is a range at which the killer is unable to perceive his individual victims without using some form of mechanical assistance such as binoculars, radar, remote TV camera, etc.

A childhood friend of mine was a naval officer. His job included operating complicated electronic equipment inside a battle ship. In 1982 he participated in the massive bombardments of the coastal cities of Lebanon. These were not directed at military targets but were aimed at the civilian population. This friend said to me that it was not so bad to do it because he could not see who he was hitting. My own boyfriend at the time, who was a commander of a tank battalion, boasted to me once during the war about shooting and killing a small group of Palestinian soldiers from kilometers away with the help of a sophisticated long range heat detector that was able to detect human body heat from great distances. Not only was he not traumatised in any obvious way by the experience, but he was able to feel proud for doing his job well without having to feel guilty. He did not see these men’s faces, he did not look into their eyes. He did not know who they were, if they were married, had children, what they did for a living. He did not have to face their humanity. He did not have to see their mutilated bodies.

Grossman says that during his years of research he has not found one instance of individuals who refused to kill the enemy in long range conditions. He also did not find a single instance of psychiatric trauma associated with this type of killing.

This to me is chilling. It makes me wonder what kind of people our armies are breeding. How do we feel as a society to know that some of us are trained to kill anyone from long range, and will do so without question because they do not feel guilty? Are these soldiers really not damaged psychologically? I believe that the high levels of anxiety, anger and frustration in Israeli society have a lot to do with the fact that almost everyone is a soldier there. Psychological damage can take many shapes and forms but whatever it is we cannot escape its effects.

I call on John Howard to talk to trauma therapists and to the excellent counsellors at the Government-funded Vietnam Veterans’ counselling service, before he dares to commit so many lives to the horrors of war.

The Children

50% of the Iraqi population is under 15. It doesn’t take a great statistician to realise that many children will die as a result of an attack on Iraq. Children will be killed, maimed, burned and mutilated. Most if not all will suffer psychological scars for life. Parents will not be able to do much to protect their children against overwhelming US weapons of mass destruction. As we know so well from Holocaust research, parents who couldn’t help their children and had to see them die or become injured, become so traumatised, that even with excellent therapy they often never recover. Whichever way I look at it, war to me is a serious mental health issue.

I would like to read to you a speech by Charlotte Aldebron, a 12 year old from Maine in the USA:

When people think about bombing Iraq, they see a picture in their heads of Saddam Hussein in a military uniform, or maybe soldiers with big black mustaches carrying guns, or the mosaic of George Bush Sr. on the lobby floor of the Al-Rashid Hotel with the word criminal. But guess what? More than half of Iraq’s 24 million people are children under the age of 15. That’s 12 million kids. Kids like me. Well, I’m almost 13, so some are a little older, and some a lot younger, some boys instead of girls, some with brown hair, not red. But kids who are pretty much like me just the same. So take a look at me, a good long look. Because I am what you should see in your head when you think about bombing Iraq. I am what you are going to destroy.

If I am lucky, I will be killed instantly, like the three hundred children murdered by your smart bombs in a Baghdad bomb shelter on February 16, 1991. The blast caused a fire so intense that it flash-burned outlines of those children and their mothers on the walls; you can still peel strips of blackened skin souvenirs of your victory from the stones.

But maybe I won’t be lucky and I’ll die slowly, like 14-year-old Ali Faisal, who right now is on the death ward of the Baghdad children’s hospital. He has malignant lymphoma cancer caused by the depleted uranium in your Gulf War missiles.

Or maybe I will die painfully and needlessly like 18-month-old Mustafa, whose vital organs are being devoured by sand fly parasites. I know it’s hard to believe, but Mustafa could be totally cured with just $25 worth of medicine, but there is none of this medicine because of your sanctions.

Or maybe I won’t die at all but will live for years with the psychological damage that you can’t see from the outside, like Salman Mohammed, who even now can’t forget the terror he lived through with his little sisters when you bombed Iraq in 1991. Salman’s father made the whole family sleep in the same room so that they would all survive together, or die together. He still has nightmares about the air raid sirens.

Or maybe I will be orphaned like Ali, who was three when you killed his father in the Gulf War. Ali scraped at the dirt covering his fathers grave every day for three years calling out to him, It’s all right Daddy, you can come out now, the men who put you here have gone away. Well, Ali, you’re wrong. It looks like those men are coming back.

Or I maybe I will make it in one piece, like Luay Majed, who remembers that the Gulf War meant he didn’t have to go to school and could stay up as late as he wanted. But today, with no education, he tries to live by selling newspapers on the street.

Imagine that these are your children or nieces or nephews or neighbors. Imagine your son screaming from the agony of a severed limb, but you can’t do anything to ease the pain or comfort him. Imagine your daughter crying out from under the rubble of a collapsed building, but you can’t get to her. Imagine your children wandering the streets, hungry and alone, after having watched you die before their eyes.

This is not an adventure movie or a fantasy or a video game. This is reality for children in Iraq. Recently, an international group of researchers went to Iraq to find out how children there are being affected by the possibility of war. Half the children they talked to said they saw no point in living any more. Even really young kids knew about war and worried about it. One 5-year-old, Assem, described it as guns and bombs and the air will be cold and hot and we will burn very much. Ten-year-old Aesar had a message for President Bush: he wanted him to know that a lot of Iraqi children will die. You will see it on TV and then you will regret.

Back in elementary school I was taught to solve problems with other kids not by hitting or name-calling, but by talking and using “I” messages. The idea of an “I” message was to make the other person understand how bad his or her actions made you feel, so that the person would sympathize with you and stop it. Now I am going to give you an “I message.” Only it’s going to be a We message. We as in all the children in Iraq who are waiting helplessly for something bad to happen. We as in the children of the world who don’t make any of the decisions but have to suffer all the consequences. We as in those whose voices are too small and too far away to be heard.

We feel scared when we don’t know if we’ll live another day. We feel angry when people want to kill us or injure us or steal our future. We feel sad because all we want is a mom and a dad who we know will be there the next day. And, finally, we feel confused because we don’t even know what we did wrong.

There is no doubt that the children of Iraq will be hit the worst but let us not forget all the children of the world. They will all be damaged by this war. They are very likely to feel that if grownups can do things like that they obviously do not care about children. What sense of betrayal will they carry into their adulthood and what will it do to their self-esteem and sense of respect for the world?

The Palestinians

I can say a lot about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. To me this is a personal matter but I cannot cover it properly tonight. If you are interested you can find many of my writings on this topic on my website ( http://www.avigailabarbanel.me.uk/). Tonight I simply want to draw your attention to the fact that the Palestinian people are facing a grave danger if there is a war on Iraq. Genocides in modern history have always been committed behind the smokescreen of war, and it is highly likely that the Palestinian people will become another casualty in the war on Iraq.

I believe the mindset in Israel at the moment is ripe for some kind of a final action against the Palestinians in order resolve the problem they pose for Israel once and for all. By action I mean a combination of expulsion and mass killings. Palestinians cities and villages are already being destroyed a little bit at a time while illegal Israeli settlements and infrastructure are spreading and expanding systematically and persistently. I believe that Israel will attempt to finish what it wasn’t able to finish in 1948 and 1967. The US, British and Australian governments have already called on all their citizens who are in Israel and Palestine to leave. Without the presence of overseas witnesses Israel can do almost anything and get away with it.

In Conclusion

This insane push for war makes me think that as a race, we are not very far from our cave ancestors. They were tribal and so are we. The world is still dominated by the powerful who seem to dictate to all of us how things are going to be.

I believe that humanity is on a continuum of evolution from tribalism to a more inclusive way of being. We already know that the consequences of focusing on narrow interests, whether they are political, economic or military, are disastrous to the health of our planet and all its in habitants. In order to move beyond that we need to be calm and not traumatised. Trauma, insecurity and anxiety cause us all to become survival focused and tribal. Instead of helping humanity evolve to something beyond tribalism our present day leaders seem to be only pushing us backwards by insisting on creating more trauma and insecurity the effects of which will last for a very long time. To move from tribalism to a more mature stage what we need is a global healing program but what we are getting instead is war.

Having said that, I also see that times like this awaken something in people. Our present world peace movement has no precedent in human history. The internet has given people a lot more power than ever before, to reach one another and get organised. We question the leaders of our countries as well as world leadership in ways we have not done before. We question the power of corporations, their values and their actions. Humanity, or at least growing sections of it, is evolving. We are moving from the equivalent of a childhood where we simply accepted the authority of those in power, to a more autonomous and mature existence where we realise that each one of us has something to say, and we insist on being heard.

Growing up is not easy. It usually involves a great deal of turmoil, confusion and grief. But I do not believe anyone can stop this process now.

This war demonstrates without doubt that our metaphorical parents have gone too far and can no longer be trusted. This war is also a wake up call to all of us to question our political systems and the kind of leaders that they breed. It challenges us to search for a leadership that is more suitable for a humanity that wishes to move to the next step in our collective evolution.

Thank you.

Page content last modified: 5 Jun 2004