The meaning of 'The Stockholm Sydrome'
has changed a lot over the fifty years
since the phrase was first coined.
It was once a byword for the feelings
hostages have for the men who confine them
where the hostage were said to identify more
with causes of the men who held them
than with the authorities trying to free them.
As an explanation for perverse values
it came from the police and the authorities,
Where else could such an idea come from?
Who else could speak with authority?
Only in more recent times has the story
been re-examined and the lack of empathy
from the police for both the bank robbers
and their captives, alike, been recognised.
The original captive, bank clerk, Christine,
had her own reasoning and her own way
of surviving being captive. Over time
ideas like 'battered wife syndrome'
and other ideas nestled in around it.
But captives everywhere
have to find their own way
of surviving both their captors,
and the often hostile treatment
of their rescuers after.
Presently Gaza is in ruins,
more than 20,000 Gazans are dead
many more refugees, displaced abroad.
A presently unhappy story can only get worse.
In Gaza there is not a single hospital,
or more practically a mortuary,
and the living, told to leave places
that Israel says it plans to flatten
to places where Israel then searches,
and does not find, even the ghost of Hamas.
Hamas or Israel are tied together in a Gordian knot,
both accuse the other, and accusations, backed by arms,
only tighten that knot; We don't have to side with,
or against either, we should side with the non-combatants,
the ordinary Palestinian people as they struggle towards
picking their exit from the purgatory that traps them.
