had helped establish. With the diagnosis of her son, everyday life for her and her children had become much easier. Socially, the countless visits to her son’s doctor were no longer cause for gossip about the whereabouts of a woman with an absent husband, but rather the actions of a concerned mother caring for her child. Nonetheless, autism and other forms of congenital illness, in pariticular mental disorders, fail to attract anywhere near the same attention or funding as do disorders and traumas that are results of the occupation. And despite the historical presence of a language of psychology to acknowledge mental distress, congenital mental disorders are considered a stigma in Palestine. This uneven recognition is evident in the difference between the glitzy premises of the Prisoners’ Support Center and the “clinic” to which Maryam took her autistic son for day care, and where she volunteered three times a week: a small, shabby room adjacent to the nursery for the other children. The contrast reveals how event-based trauma is acknowledged and addressed, as opposed to the lack of recognition afforded what is described by Povinelli as the painstaking uneventfulness of chronic suffering, such as that caused by stigmatizing mental disorders (2011: 146).
Importantly, the contrast between the two is specifically owing to the presence of a violent event that enables the recognition of suffering (for an elaboration, see Mittermaier 2014). This brings to mind Das’s identification of a critical event after which “new modes of action came into being which redefined traditional categories such as codes of purity and honor, the meaning of martyrdom, and the construction of a heroic life” (1997 6). Violent events in occupied Palestine offer precisely that nexus of new modes of action and the acknowledgment that comes with being either a hero of political resistance, a martyr’s widow, or a traumatized victim.
The Force of Eventful Suffering–Immediacy and Immediation
Priority in allocating grants is given to projects providing direct medical, psychological, social, economic, legal, humanitarian, educational or other forms of assistance, to torture victims and members of their family who, due to their close relationship with the victim, were directly affected at the time of the event.
— United Nations Voluntary Fund
for Victims of Torture (2007)
Alongside the European Union, the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture (UNVFVT) is a major global funder for centers that offer assistance to torture victims and their families. In its 2007 round of funding, the UNVFVT had a total budget of USD 9 million. The above excerpt about the criteria for receiving funds forms the basis for the evaluation of applications and, as two members of the UNVFVT staff said during a meeting in Palais Wilson in Geneva, they continuously stressed these criteria when they had meetings or missions to visit or evaluate projects. The UNVFVT workers repeatedly emphasize to beneficiaries that the assistance must be directly allocated to the actual, immediate victims of torture.
During fieldwork in the West Bank, I joined a meeting between the Prisoners’ Support Center and a representative from the UNVFVT. The communications manager of the center initiated the meeting with a PowerPoint presentation that displayed numbers of violations and of people treated at the center during recent years. According to the tables and graphs, a growing number of clients were the relatives of detainees and martyrs. The presentation ended with pictures of the physical wounds on the bodies of torture victims, dead children, and lamenting women. After the presentation, there was a discussion about uncertainties concerning the identity of the organization’s clients. The representative from the UNVFVT said, “I need numbers of how many of your beneficiaries … are actually torture survivors or direct family,” to which the director firmly replied, “All of them are survivors of torture—they are captives in Israel!” This point was ignored for the remainder of the meeting. However, the representative of the fund said again in front of the employees of the organization, “It is important that when you make projects for the families, it has to be families who were directly affected. For example, ordinary domestic violence is not torture or to be directly related to it. It does not count.”
During the meeting with UNVFVT in its European headquarters, I asked the representatives how they identify direct victims affected at the time of the event. One answered, “No one can distinguish between someone who is tortured and the one who witnesses torture.” Both the fund and its beneficiary projects are thus intimately aware of the pitfalls and permeable boundaries of the definitions they constantly draw and redraw. It is interesting here to think in terms of Deleuze’s idea of convergence, described earlier. Within this line of reasoning, there are at least two points of convergence between the language of the European donor and the Palestinian center’s mode of expressing the suffering of its clients, the detainees, and their families within a framework of the Palestinian plight: immediacy and relation.
Immediacy is the first and primary point of convergence. Immediacy saturates the language of the representatives of the fund in their invocation of the terms “direct” and “directness” in the UNVFVT guidelines. “Direct” refers both to those who have undergone an event of torture, limited in time and space, and also to the insistence that the relation to that event must be “direct.” Immediacy was further expressed by the Prisoners’ Support Center through the director’s outburst that imprisonment equals torture, and the graphic portrayal of physical wounds and lost limbs in the PowerPoint presentation. As Allen asserts, a “politics of immediation” currently permeates Palestinian political discourse and social relations as well (2009: 163). The “politics of immediation” is an affect-driven discourse that is embedded in the Palestinians’ call to the world to pay attention to the immediacy of suffering—to the visceral aspects of the conflict—by insisting that images of fragmented bodies be displayed in the Western media, in addition to the Palestinian Maan News, al-Aqsa channel, or pan-Arab channels like al-Jazeera. Allen (2009) underscores that visualization plays a crucial role in the representation of the Palestinians as deserving victims who are worthy of recognition. In late summer 2014, for example, international news and social media were dominated by images of corpses, wounded children, and weeping mothers from Gaza during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge. Displaying the human body, Allen (2009) argues, is a way of sidestepping the mediating elements that are thought to obscure the message of the humanness of the Palestinians. Of particular significance here is that such visual displays are imbued with invocations of violent events as a cause for suffering, and in this way can be seen as an imperative call to action on the part of witnesses.
A focus on immediate suffering also figured at a women’s mosque meeting initiated by the Prisoners’ Support Center. The counselor opened the meeting by introducing the center and its services, after which she said, “I want to start with a new subject today: ’Azme [crisis]. I want to know what sadme [shock] means to you.” Various women quickly responded, “a disaster,” “problems and worries,” and “mašākil fi d-dār” (problems in the home). To these responses the counselor said, “Let me tell you what ’azme or ṣaḍme mean: if I knock on your door, how will you respond to that? You will open the door, right? It’s a reaction to a particular event. When I knock on the door, you will respond to this action by reacting to this event…. Who else has something to say? Imm Amjad, tell us what happened when you got the news that your son had been killed?”
Addressed so directly, Imm Amjad replied, “Oh, you want me to cry now?” The counselor replied that she would feel better if she cried. Imm Amjad began to describe the death of her son:
It was the twentieth day of Ramadan, so I was fasting and praying all the time. So on that day when they killed him, my brother came to tell me about it, he was telling gradually. He told me that my son was in the hospital, so I asked him why, and he told me that the Israelis had shot him. I told him, “Please ask them again, maybe you are not sure, or someone told you that he died, but we are not sure. Let’s wait to be sure,” but he told me, to be sure, and that he saw him. Then I felt like I was unable to stand up, I couldn’t even cry. But at the same time, I was saying that everyone wishes to die as a martyr, so my son got it and I shouldn’t feel bad. Thank God anyway.”
