Israel fostering the next generation of hatred against itself
A bereaved father, whose 8-year-old son was shot dead by soldiers, stood this week at the entrance to his home at the border of the Jenin refugee camp and stated the simple truth: “These children will never forgive the soldiers. You’re raising another generation of resistance. Now our children want Israeli children to be killed too.”
I visited the home of the father, Samer al-Ghoul, after a visit to the Jenin camp where the Israel Defence Forces once again sowed destruction in recent days, to a horrifying extent. About 80 homes were demolished, all the roads in the camp were uprooted from their place and the sewage, whose infrastructure was destroyed, is flowing in the streets and raising a stench. The children of the Jenin camp wallow in it.
At the other end of the realms of the occupation, children are now being killed by the thousands. The recent pictures from Jabalya showed that neither God nor the IDF has mercy on the little children. Every 15 minutes, a child is killed in Gaza. Every few minutes, a child is rushed to what remains of a hospital, tossed onto the filthy floor, sometimes without anyone accompanying him.
Sometimes nobody knows if anyone is left from his family, and the child casts an uncomprehending, glassy-eyed glance at what’s happening around him. His body and face are covered with dust; he was pulled out of the ruins. These sights are broadcast continuously on all the television channels that know the meaning of journalism, with the exception of Israeli television, which shows nothing of that, after becoming fully mobilized in the service of the war.
All these children – the dead, dying, bleeding, groaning, wounded, disabled, the orphans, the terrified, the homeless and penniless, have siblings and friends who grow up with them. They’re the next generation, and they’ll never forget. While Israel is preoccupied with its terrible and justified rage at what
Hamas did to it, and with healing its wounds and its wounded, almost nobody is upset at what the IDF is doing to Gaza and Jenin.
Nobody thinks about the trauma in whose shadow the children of Gaza will grow up, about the inconceivable suffering of tens of thousands of children who are now walking around helpless, in existential fear, in the ruined streets. They have no bomb shelter and no resilience center, no psychological consultation and not even a home.
Maybe it’s permissible and natural for a nation to focus solely on its own pain and to ignore the far greater pain that it is causing another nation. That’s very doubtful. But this ignoring will also have a price that the Israelis will be forced to pay some day, and the price — at least that —must disturb them.
An unbridled and terribly cruel attack
against Gaza creates hatred of Israel at levels we’ve never seen before, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in the Palestinian diaspora, in the Arab world and everywhere in the world where people are seeing what the Israelis don’t see and don’t want to see. And what’s even more terrible is this hatred will be justified. Nothing will be more justified.
Look what hatred was sown in the hearts of almost all Israelis by one barbaric attack. It destroyed the vestiges of the peace camp, it turned the cry “death to the Arabs” into something anachronistic and moderate. Now it’s “death to all the Arabs.” Some say it aloud, some only think it. Imagine what seeds of hatred are budding in every place that’s now being exposed to the horrors, from Shujaiya to Manhattan to Amman.
Can one see the horrors in Gaza and not hate those who are inflicting them?
Experience what’s happening in Gaza and not dream of revenge? Generations of Palestinians bequeathed hatred for Israel as a result of the first Nakba, and other generations will now bequeath even greater hatred, as a result of the second Nakba that’s promised to them.
“The next generation is sleeping in the next room / I hear him breathing / The next generation is dreaming in the next room / and murmuring fears in his sleep,” sings Hanan Yovel to the words of Ehud Manor; the next Palestinian generation is murmuring fear in its sleep, but it isn’t in the next room — it has no room.
And in a few months from now, good Israelis will once again travel to Paris and London, Dubai and New York, and will be shocked by how they hate us. Why? What did we do wrong?