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During
the first and second intifada, more than 700 Palestinian children were
killed, and a further 313 children died in the Israeli shelling of
Gaza in December 2008-July 2009 [GALLO/GETTY] |
What is it about Jewish and Arab children that privileges
the first and spurns the second in the speeches of President Barack
Obama, let alone in the Western media more generally? Are Jewish
children smarter, prettier, whiter? Are they deserving of sympathy and
solidarity, denied to Arab children, because they are innocent and
unsullied by the guilt of their parents, themselves often referred to
as "the children of Israel"? Or, is it that Arab children are
dangerous, threatening, guilty, even dark and ugly, a situation that
can only lead to Arabopaedophobia - the Western fear of Arab children?
Innocence and childhood are common themes in Western
political discourse, official and unofficial. While it is a truism to
state that since the end of European colonialism the US and Europe have
been, at the official and unofficial levels, friendly to and
supportive of the Zionist colonial project and hostile to Palestinians
and Arabs in their resistance to Zionism, the expectation would be that
a West that insists rhetorically on the "universalism" of its values
would show at least a rhetorical commitment to the equality of Arab and
Jewish children as victims of the violence visited on the region by
Zionist colonialism and the resistance to it. Yet, the only Western
sympathy manifest is to Jewish children as symbols of Zionist and
Israeli innocence. This Western sympathy is deployed primarily to
denounce Arab guilt, including the guilt of Arab children.
Indeed, the only time Arab children received any sympathy
at all in the West was a few years ago when Israeli and US propaganda
outlets, official and unofficial alike, mounted a major propaganda
campaign to save these children from their barbaric Arab and
Palestinian parents, who allegedly trained them to commit violent acts,
or who unlovingly placed them in the middle of danger, sacrificing
them for their violent political goals. It was not Israel who was to
blame for killing Palestinian children, but the children's own uncaring
and cruel parents who placed them in the path of Israeli Jewish
bullets, which left Israeli Jews no choice but to kill them. This of
course is an old Israeli casuistry used to justify Israel's carnage of
Palestinians. Golda Meir had famously articulated the workings of
Israel's Jewish conscience thus: "We can forgive you for killing our
sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours."
In the official discourse of post-World War II US power,
Jewish children have been often invoked to illustrate the innocence of
Israel, a tradition carried faithfully by Barack Obama's rhetoric.
Refusing to even acknowledge Arab children as victims of Israel, on
June 4, 2009, Obama told Arabs in his Cairo speech: "It is a sign of
neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to
blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed;
that is how it is surrendered." He reiterated this in his May 19, 2011
"winds of change" speech, declaring: "For decades, the conflict
between Israelis and Arabs has cast a shadow over the region. For
Israelis, it has meant living with the fear that their children could
get blown up on a bus or by rockets fired at their homes, as well as
the pain of knowing that other children in the region are taught to
hate them."
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A Gazan boy sells vegetables in the rain after the Israeli blockade crushed the economy in the coastal territory [GALLO/GETTY] |
Later that week, in his speech to the American-Israeli
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on May 22, Obama expressed sympathy
with the hardship colonising Jews experience while appropriating the
lands of the Palestinians: "I saw the daily struggle to survive in the
eyes of an eight-year old [Jewish] boy who lost his leg to a Hamas
rocket." He averred that the US and Israel, presumably unlike
Palestinians or Arabs more generally, "both seek a region where
families and their children can live free from the threat of violence".
Endorsing Israel's illegal occupation of East Jerusalem,
he asserted: "We also know how difficult that search for security can
be, especially for a small nation like Israel in a tough neighbourhood.
I've seen it firsthand. When I touched my hand against the Western
Wall and placed my prayer between its ancient stones, I thought of all
the centuries that the children of Israel had longed to return to their
ancient homeland." Aside from borrowing anti-Black American white
racism with the use of terms like "tough neighbourhood" - a term first
borrowed by Binyamin Netanyahu to refer to the Middle East over a
decade ago - wherein Arabs are the "violent blacks" of the Middle East
and Jews are the "peaceful white folks", Obama's endorsement of the
Israeli claim that East Jerusalem is part of the Jewish homeland is the
first such official US endorsement of Israel's illegal occupation of
the city.
Nonetheless, Obama's attention lay elsewhere, in the fear
he expresses of Arab children. He first articulated this fear in his
May 19 speech: "The fact is, a growing number of Palestinians live west
of the Jordan River." In his speech to AIPAC three days later, Obama
reiterated his fear once more, as the first "fact" and threat that
Israel, Jews, and the US must face: "Here are the facts we all must
confront. First, the number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan
River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic
realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories." This is
hardly a new fear, as Israelis have annual conferences, and have
developed all kinds of political and military strategies, to deal with
their fear of Palestinian children, whom Israel's President Shimon Peres
calls a "demographic bomb" that he wants to defuse. Golda Meir herself
once revealed in the early seventies that she could not sleep worrying
about the number of Palestinian children being conceived every night.
If children are the future - except that Arab children are a negation
of it - then the crux of the argument is simple: Israel can only have a
future with more Jewish children and fewer Arab children.
Murdering Arab children
The story of Arab children, and especially Palestinian
ones, is not only tragic in the context of Israeli violence, but one
that also remains ignored, deliberately marginalised, and purposely
suppressed in the US and Western media - and in Western political
discourse. When Zionist terrorists began to attack Palestinian
civilians in the 1930s and 1940s, Palestinian children fell victims.
The most famous of these attacks include the Zionist blowing up of
Palestinian cafes with grenades (such as occurred in Jerusalem on March
17, 1937) and placing electrically timed mines in crowded market
places (first used against Palestinians in Haifa on July 6, 1938).
While the violence of the 1930s was the first
introduction to the Middle East of such horrific terrorist violence, it
is in the 1947-48 Zionist invasion of Palestinian villages and towns
that Palestinian children were deliberately not spared. In December
1947, one of the first attacks by the Haganah (the pre-Israel Zionist
paramilitary army) first attacks - which would become typical in this
period - targeted the Palestinian village of Khisas in the Galilee and
killed four Palestinian children. This proved to be a small number
compared with the subsequent mass murders awaiting the Palestinians. In
the village of Al-Dawayimah, where the Haganah committed a massacre in
October 1948, an Israeli army soldier, quoted by Israeli historian
Benny Morris, described the scene as such:
The first [wave] of conquerors killed about
80 to 100 [male] Arabs, women, and children. The children they killed
by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without
dead... One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in a
certain house... and to blow up the house with them. The sapper
refused... The commander then ordered his men to put in the old women
and the evil deed was done. One soldier boasted that he had raped a
woman and then shot her. One woman, with a newborn baby in her arms,
was employed to clean the courtyard where the soldiers ate. She worked a
day or two. In the end they shot her and her baby. |
Palestinian children were murdered along with adults in
April 1948 in the Deir Yassin massacre, to name the most well known
slaughter of 1948. This would continue not only during Israel's wars
against Arabs in 1956, 1967, 1973, 1978, 1982, 1996, 2006, and 2008,
when thousands of children fell victim to indiscriminate Israeli
bombardment, but also in more outright massacres: in Qibya in 1953
where even the school was not spared Israel's destruction; in Kafr
Kassem in 1956 where the Israeli army massacred 46 unarmed Palestinian
citizens of Israel, 23 of whom were children. This trend would
continue. In April 1970, during the War of Attrition with Egypt, Israel
bombed an Egyptian elementary school in Bahr al-Baqar. Of the 130
school children in attendance, 46 were killed, and over 50 wounded,
many of them maimed for life. The school was completely demolished. The
first Israeli massacre at Qana in Lebanon in 1996 spared no child or
adult, and the second massacre in the same village in 2006 did the same
- adults aside, 16 children were killed that year.
The number of Palestinian children killed by Israeli
soldiers in the first intifada (1987-1993) was 213, not counting the
hundreds of induced miscarriages from tear gas grenades thrown inside
closed areas targeting pregnant women, and aside from the number of the
injured. The Swedish branch of Save the Children
estimated that "23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment
for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada", one
third of whom were children under the age of ten years old. In the same
period, Palestinian attacks resulted in the death of five Israeli
children. In the second intifada (2000-2004), Israeli soldiers killed
more than 500 children with at least 10,000 injured, and 2,200 children
arrested. The televised murder of the Palestinian child Muhammad al-Durra
shook the world - but not Israeli Jews, whose government concocted the
most outrageous and criminal of stories to exonerate Israel. In the
Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2008, 1,400 Palestinians were killed,
of whom 313 were children.
This exhibition of atrocity is not simply about
regurgitating the history and present of Israel's murder of Arab
children for the past six decades and beyond - a history well-known
across the Arab world - but to demonstrate how obscene Obama's
references to Jewish children are when he insists to Arabs that they
must show sympathy with Jewish children, without ever enjoining Jews to
show sympathy with the far larger number of Arab children killed by
Jews. But Obama himself shows no sympathy with Arab children. Had he
attempted to mourn the Arab children who fell and fall victim to
Israeli violence at the rate of hundreds, if not thousands, of Arab
children to one Jewish child, Arabs might have forgiven him this
indiscretion.
Alas, Obama has no place in his heart for Arab children,
only for Jewish ones. He even manages to infantilise Israeli Jewish
soldiers who kill Palestinians, as nothing short of innocent children
whose families miss them. In his AIPAC speech, Obama calls on Hamas "to
release Gilad Shalit, who has been kept from his family for five long
years", but not on Israel to release the 6,000 Palestinian political
prisoners, who include 300 Palestinian children, languishing in
Israel's dungeons for many more years. Perhaps Obama could have at
least mentioned the reports of Israeli soldiers' torture of detained
Palestinian children issued in late 2010 by Israeli human rights
groups. In the case of detained Palestinian sixth graders, in addition
to being beaten up and deprived of sleep by Israeli soldiers, two
thirteen-year old children testified that "the most awful thing that
happened, was when the soldiers went to the bathroom, they peed on us
and did not use the toilet. One of them videotaped it." But Obama was
not moved by their plight, for they were not Jewish children.
Zionism and Jewish children
Interestingly and unlike Obama, Zionism did not always
show similar love towards Jewish children, whom it never flinched from
sacrificing for its colonial goals. In the Nazi period, Zionist
leaders, for example, protested strongly against granting European Jews
refuge in any country other than Palestine. In December 1938, David
Ben-Gurion responded to a British offer, in the aftermath of Kristallnacht,
to take thousands of German Jewish children directly to Britain by
saying: "If I knew it would be possible to save all the children in
Germany by bringing them to England, and only half of them by
transporting them to Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel), then I would
opt for the second alternative, for we must weigh not only the life of
these children but also the history of the people of Israel." In
November 1940, the Zionists responded to the British-imposed
restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine, long demanded by the
Palestinian people, by blowing up a ship with Jewish civilian passengers
in Haifa - killing 242 Jews, including scores of children. For
Zionism, Jewish children are as expendable as Palestinian and Arab
children, unless they serve its colonial goals. In light of this, it
becomes clear that it is not simply the Jewishness or Arabness of
children that makes them expendable or not, but their insertion into a
political project as figures that can advance its goals or constitute
obstacles to them.
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Israeli
girls write messages on a shell at a heavy artillery position near
Kiryat Shmona, in northern Israel, next to the Lebanese border, Monday,
July 17, 2006 [AP] |
Israel's recruitment of Jewish children in paramilitary
organisations, which began in 1948, continues apace, and is perhaps best
exemplified in its Gadna ["Youth Battalions"] programme,
where young Jewish boys and girls are prepared early for their future
military service in the most militarised state on earth. The most
outrageous use of Jewish children, however, would be illustrated when
the Israeli army invited them to write messages of hate on the missiles
about to be launched against Lebanese children during Israel's July
2006 invasion of Lebanon. Captured by an Associated Press cameraman,
the picture of blond Jewish girls near the Israeli town of Kiryat
Shmona writing messages of death to Lebanese children circulated the
globe - though it remains unclear if they ever made their way to
Obama's desk. It is important to note that Obama might have met these
same blond girls when he visited Kiryat Shmona a few months earlier, in
January 2006. He recalled later that the town resembled an ordinary
suburb in the US, where he could imagine the sounds of Israeli children
"at joyful play just like my own daughters".
Teaching children to hate
Given this history, not only are Palestinian children
guilty of hating Israeli Jews, but also, Obama insists, they have no
reason to hate Jews unless their evil elders indoctrinate them to do
so. Binyamin Netanyahu himself, in his speech before Congress last
week, reiterated Obama's condemnation of Palestinians who allegedly
"continue to educate their children to hate". But what about Israeli
Jewish children's hatred of Arabs? A March 2010 poll by Tel Aviv
University found that 49.5 per cent of Israeli Jewish high school
students believe Palestinian citizens of Israel should not be entitled
to the same rights as Jews in Israel; 56 per cent believe they should
not be eligible for election to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.
According to a report in January 2011 in the largest Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot,
Jewish teachers in Israel stated that anti-Arab racism among Jewish
students reached alarming levels, advocating killing Palestinians. The
teachers found graffiti written on school walls and even on exam papers
stating "Death To Arabs". According to the report, a student at a
school in Tel Aviv told his teacher during class that his dream is to
become a soldier so he can exterminate all Arabs; several students in
his class applauded in support of him. This, in no small amount, is the
direct result of the racist Israeli school curricula with which Jewish
children are regularly indoctrinated.
In his speech to Congress, Prime Minister Netanyahu
correctly diagnosed the situation on the ground. He declared: "Our
conflict has never been about the establishment of a Palestinian state.
It has always been about the existence of the Jewish state." It is the
establishment of a Jewish settler colony that the Palestinians must
accept to ensure a future for Jewish children and terminate a future
for Palestinian children. Indeed it is precisely the refusal of Arabs
to adopt Arabopedophobia that is the biggest impediment to peace in the
region. Obama hopes that a Palestinian bantustan could limit the
threat that Palestinian children constitute to the nightmare that is
"the Jewish and democratic state". He recognises that the world can no
longer claim to support universalism while endorsing Israel's right to
discriminate against non-Jews. In his AIPAC speech, he said as much
when he told Israel's lobby that the entire world, including Asia,
Latin America, Europe (and he could have added Africa, which he
inexplicably excluded) and the Arab World can no longer tolerate
Israel's institutionalised racism; that America in fact stands alone
with Israel today. Clearly, Obama's love for Jewish children knows no
limits. His Arabopaedophobic views, however, are not accidental, but
are motivated by his great love for the "children of Israel", a love
that can only be realised through continued hatred and containment of
all Arabs, children and adults alike.
Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of
Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University.
He is author of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (Routledge,
2006).
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy. |