A Few words About
The Children of PalestineBy Max Kantar
04 April, 2004
Countercurrents.org
What will become of the children of Palestine?They will remember the thundering of Israeli tanks and gunfire, rampaging and ripping through their joyous cries of play and the still of night as they lay awake in bed. They will remember their fathers, many of whom were killed indiscriminately by the occupying power. They will also listen to stories of their mothers, which they never grew to know, who died at military checkpoints giving birth to their stillborn brother or sister. They won't forget their 9 year old schoolmate and friend, Raghda Alassar who endured a fatal bullet in her little head while studying in her Gazan classroom. The children of Palestine won't soon forget Rachel Corrie or Tom Hurndall either, and how they sacrificed their lives resisting home demolitions and killings of innocent women and children.
The children of Palestine haven't forgotten the Intifada, or their peers in Israeli prisons. They won't soon be free of the nightmares, or free from the everlasting image of their strong parents weeping in despair over a heap of rubble that was once, their proud home. They won't look back fondly either, at their bruises from the settlers' stones. They'll remember not to forget the pain of hunger in their empty stomachs and their friends, whose feet will never touch the ground again.
But will the rest of us remember?
While childhood is supposed to represent the blissful innocence of experiencing everything for the first time and the absence of serious thought and responsibility, the children of Palestine know nothing of this western fairy tale. For Palestinian children, going to school and playing outside constantly prove to be life threatening activities. Learning this lesson was little Iman al-Hams, who took 17 brutal bullets into her thirteen year old body as her crime was carrying a back pack home from school near the Gaza/Egyptian border.
The world may never learn their names, meet their families, or even hear what they wanted to be when they grew up. Most will never shed a tear for the young Palestinian boys, dead, who never kissed a girl or the shy, self conscious little girls; gone, who never met their fathers.
And for the children of Palestine who make it to see adulthood, the ones who have seen and lived it all; will they be conditioned to resist oppression and occupation nonviolently and diplomatically? Will they be concerned about Israel's right to exist and the next generation of Israeli children? Or perhaps, these former children of Palestine, will have no more room for compromise in their hearts.
The Israeli government and its political allies are molding a generation of Palestinian youth into fighters whose wide eyes will never lose sight of the trouble they've seen and the people they've buried. Yes, another generation of Palestinians, alienated from the world, to whom 'justice' is only a word found in books, and 'peace' was never meant for them.
Max Kantar is an undergraduate of Sociology at Ferris State University. He can be contacted at [email protected]
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