Professor Jawad Fatayer, University President Assistant for Graduate Affairs at An-Najah, participated in the Seventh SAWA Conference which was held at the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in Ramallah under the title “Stockholm Syndrome”. Participants came from the different universities and institutions operating in the field of combating violence. The Conference consisted of three sessions in which a number of papers were presented.

In his paper titled “Stockholm Syndrome among some Palestinians under the Occupation”; Stockholm Syndrome is a paradoxical psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and have positive feelings towards their captors which can be sometimes to the point of defending them.

The new thing that this paper brought was the applicability of this concept to the general societal level in Palestine and the social and psychological pain that the Palestinians are experiencing because of the Israeli practices. Professor Fatayer explained that there is an attempt to provide a new and healthier image of the victim so that the victim does not surrender to the cruelty and oppression of the occupation.

Moreover, he explained that there are many psychological aspects of this issue that eventually make the victim deny the cruelty of the oppressor and even start to look for excuses for him and defend him sometimes.

Uhaila Shoumer, General Director at SAWA, said that there have been many documented cases in which the victim expressed empathy with the oppressor and it is more common among women than others. Therefore, what the staff at SAWA is doing is to try to defend those people and take their hands to new levels of thinking where they can start to understand what is going on around them so that this phenomenon will hopefully be eliminated.