The Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Effects on youth adjustment, available interventions, and future research directions

- Most studies on conflict and child adjustment in this context are cross-sectional, limiting the evaluation of risk and protective processes.
- Few studies attend to the multiple, integrated systems (e.g., family, community) that influence children's adjustment.
- High levels of distress in children exposed to political violence are evident but very few treatment programs have been rigorously evaluated.
- Future work should aim to evaluate emerging theoretical models to understand the processes which influence child development in this context.

A large number of children are exposed to on-going political violence around the world. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the longest on-going conflicts in the world and its documented negative effects on the health, development, and well-being of children and youth are profound. The aim of the present manuscript is to provide an updated review of research on children and youth in Israel and Palestine including both basic and treatment research. Results indicated that rates of psychopathology in children exposed to political violence are high, but fluctuate greatly depending on the sample and timing of data collection. Palestinians and Palestinian-Israelis evidence higher rates of exposure and distress, indicating that considerations of elements of the social context (e.g., stigma, access to resources) are important to evaluate in conceptualizing children's reactions to political violence. Identified gaps include a lack of focus on resilient outcomes, a dearth of longitudinal work resulting in an incomplete assessment of mediators and moderators of change, and a relatively small number of treatment studies. Suggested future directions include longitudinal studies that incorporate contextual (e.g., social ecological) and theoretically-based (e.g., emotional security theory) directions for understanding children's functioning after exposure to political violence and the development of translational treatment paradigms also including these elements.