To Know What They Know
On misapprehending Palestinian children
Yasmin El-Rifae
I am writing to move past the paralysis brought about by so many images of pain, and by the knowledge that no amount of exposure or reporting will stop it. That thousands more will die. I write against the acceptance of them as already dead, even as I know it to be true.
The only reasonable response to these images, which bring with them the inevitability of more to come, a grotesque production line of suffering on view, is shock and rage. In the cities outside of Palestine, watching, the rage gets funneled outwards, but no amount of protest or disruption or organizing can channel it all, no amount of action can keep up with the daily accumulation, the daily knowing, the daily viewing (or even not viewing). So some of this rage will get deflected laterally, or inwardly, will paralyze or obstruct our thought, our ability to function —and this is for those of us without loved ones in the images, near them.
But since this suffering and much of the dissemination of its imagery is produced by self-perpetuating systems —colonial relations that manifest in weapons sales, the editorial lines of legacy media, the algorithms that want to alter our consciousnesses —maybe it’s important to deal with the detritus of this rage, this unchanneled surplus that we all carry around with us, sometimes like a rock in the chest, more than natural grief, more grief than natural. Perhaps if we look at it closely we can avoid its fossilizing, its embitterment, or its transmutation into feelings like guilt or shame, which uselessly burrow inwards.
Maybe it’s time to talk about the children. The most visible, most spoken of among the sufferers. We have passed the peak of public rage corresponding to their death toll. Somewhere around 5,000 dead children, the effect of their rising numbers on the collective psyche of those watching from outside Palestine felt like losing breath. In order to start breathing again, society has to adjust itself to the conditions of this world, and so now there are 13,800 children. The anticipation is that more will be killed, and it is not only today or yesterday’s mass deaths that risk being normalized. Those future deaths have already been metabolized into the production of this present moment, here in London, New York, Paris, Berlin, Cairo.
In the first weeks I thought the visceral, cellular pain and anger I felt, which often peaked or found expression in moments of caring for my own children, would be a shared condition, politically animating thousands or millions of others. And maybe it did. Maybe the lesson is that it doesn’t matter—that even cellular empathy can drop from the sky as aid packages between bombs, both killing children.
We are beyond talking about hypocrisies, about contradictions being revealed. It’s all been revealed, over and over again. The real battle we have to confront is not just—just—Zionism and its narratives, but how to find and maintain a discipline of political work in spite of being entangled in these contradictions, which have become more embedded than ever before. I mean here the entanglements that come with being a conscious person in a capitalist world.[1]
When we are provoked by and move to fight headlines in the passive voice, which un-name the killers of Palestinian children, we need to also think about our own framework for understanding their mass murder. The Israeli army is not killing children because they refuse to be careful, or out of some uncontainable vengeance. They are killing so many children because, as explicitly stated by past and present officials, and as demonstrated by the facts on ground, they intend to.[2] We need to think about why.
We have to confront and refuse the assumption that killing children is aberrant to Israel’s war of elimination. The killing of children is not aberrant. It is central, fundamental, axiomatic. Israel kills Palestinian children because it wants to, it intends to, it calculates how.[3] Only when we see this for what it is, as premeditated murder, can we begin to understand what it means in Gaza, for this world that enables and shares this historical moment, and for those of us trying to meet its demands.
“We have to confront and refuse the assumption that killing children is aberrant to Israel’s war of elimination.”
In “Letter from Gaza,” Ghassan Kanafani’s letter-writer invites his friend to return to Gaza, to take part in the struggle, to be next to the young girl’s amputated leg, to learn from it, so that he might understand “what life is and what existence is worth.” Most of us will not have this privilege. Most of those Gazans who leave will not be able to return. But what can we learn, still, if—to follow the Palestinian scholar Orouba Othman[4]—if we take this pain as a point of departure, rather than a condition to be consumed or rejected?
Children force the future on you. In caring for them you are compelled to think about tomorrow’s administration of life, or next week’s, next month’s. If you are among the lucky of the world, you can consider next year. They force you, too, to consider the future of the world beyond your own lifetime, so that your efforts can extend into theirs—into their natural lifespan. This futurity can be a force for both conservatism and radicalism.
Israel has bent this world into one in which it can wage a war on children because they represent the future and contain the past, and those are two elements it denies Palestinians. For Israel, Palestinians can only exist in the present, the tense and temporality of domination.
We have watched hundreds, thousands of children in Gaza, we have watched and heard them grieve, die, call for help, play, beg for food, insist they will never leave the land, wish for home, sing, cry, be unable to cry, tremble, shake, or watch the adults around them lose their minds, tell cameras they wished their own children would die quickly rather than starve. Many people have watched children undergo amputations without pain medication. Now, today, we watch children dying of hunger.
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If we cannot go to Gaza, what do they still teach us? What is there to be learned from being close to them and their severed limbs—to their perspective and their knowledge, if not to their physical presence? To those surviving the loss, or not surviving, and to the homes and body parts and loved ones—to all that they have lost?
The anger and pain felt by the world for and on behalf of the children often gets attached to the idea of innocence. Children are protected as a category because they are presumed to be innocent of the crimes and misdeeds of adults; more than this, they are somehow presumed to be innocent of our world. This category, as it has been used, fails Palestinian children when applied from the outside to their situation as members of an occupied, besieged population. For Israel, all Palestinian life is terrifying, and killable. Israel has shown the world what every genocide has shown before: that when men are killable, so too are children and women. That is the logic of eliminatory violence, which is what Zionist force enacts: killing, terrorizing, and dominating in order to eliminate Palestinians from their land.
“From the perspective of the colonizer, innocence is impossible for colonized children, because innocence would mean innocence of knowledge of the domination that has already conditioned their lives.”
From the perspective of the colonizer, innocence is impossible for colonized children, because innocence would mean innocence of knowledge of the domination that has already conditioned their lives. Think of the young child facing the gun while sheltering in a school, about to be killed, that child’s terror. That terror is not innocent—that is a terror with knowledge, as is the terror of the child watching their father executed or their home collapse. Or the child who knows they can’t travel because of Zionism, that their family are refugees because of Zionism, that they don’t have enough food because of Zionism. This knowledge refutes the kind of unknowing innocence the world seems to require of children: they are already more than that. They are political subjects, subjects with agency and within historical time. Even the babies in the incubator, innocent of language, contain the political potency of time, of the future, and so are made killable.
Among the many killed and suffering, children evoke sharper and clearer and more dramatic feelings than adults because they are more clearly and more dramatically powerful in how they summon us around them in society. Watch the effect of a baby at a social gathering, or an eight-year-old child on a stage. They summon us because they need us, and because of how much we project onto them: innocence, mischief, tenderness and our need for it, fantasies of the future, of what we can do and what we can control. The Israeli masterminds and inspirations of this genocide knew this, and perhaps this is what they meant when they said they could only have peace when the Arabs knew how to love their children.[5] They meant: love them with a different vision of the future, love them without a relationship to the land, love them without Palestine, love them in acceptance of domination or love them somewhere else.
A recent photo from Gaza showed a boy in pajamas embracing another child, both dead in the rubble, the boy’s pajamas blue, covered in parachutes or spaceships, something belonging to the sky. The childishness and the innocence of those blue pajamas made the cruelty of the scene more shocking, more painful.
Meanwhile, teenagers in the West Bank take up armed resistance and younger children tell cameras that they want to fight their occupiers.[6] Israel, accelerating its gruesome violence throughout the land, will say look, they were never innocent—and they were never going to be. Occupation forces shoot children dead and refuse to release their bodies from their refrigerators, where they are kept unwashed, unmournable.
But these are all children: the ones being killed in their pajamas and the ones holding a gun or attempting to attack an occupying soldier at a checkpoint. Why do we continue to require innocence of life anywhere, but especially in a place that knows such violence? What does this category of innocence conceal? What does it prevent us from learning, in a world where such scenes are possible? What kinds of solidarities does it foreclose, and what further violence does it enable?
Palestinians have a habit of calling children “mama” or “baba.” To address the small child in the same way that they address you gestures towards a flattening of the power dynamic between adult and child, the carer and the cared-for. Children do not live and die in separate categories. They are bound up in our own killability, colonizability. The children know this, and we must know it too.
The pain of children in Gaza must be understood as part of the broader condition of Palestinian society in which they are systematically “unchilded,” as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian writes.[7] Those of us outside of Palestine also need to think about our own gaze, our own interpretive position of children, which is largely shaped by ideas of them as subjects of private care and private property in the bourgeois sense: children as belonging to nuclear or extended families, families that live privately, at least in economic terms. Families as self-sustaining, discrete networks that feed and perpetuate themselves autonomously, through lineages of blood and property. Children are the nodes of that perpetuation, and are therefore magnets for our delight (there will be a future) and the application of our various powers over them (we will shape, mold, discipline the children so that the future is acceptable to us/our interests/our investments).
This proprietary view, which feminists from all over the world have argued is a lubricant[8] for capitalist processes through its gendered, private organization of reproductive labor, shapes us into thinking of children as passive, and of not being our concern unless they are “ours” in the familial sense.
Images from Gaza strike out from places of intimate love and care: the teenage boy carrying his brother’s body parts in a backpack, the father carrying his children in a plastic bag. The boy who shakes as he stands in the rain, in the dark, calling his friend beneath the rubble.
To feel the pain of these scenes is only part of how we might regard and interpret the people in them: the humanity of these acts of love is that they say I will not abandon you. Even in your dismemberment, I will dignify with you with burial in this genocide. As Zionism enforces a deathscape, these are acts that carry the force of life and put it back into human, that is political, time: a grave to be visited or at least thought of in the future, in which we will remember the past.
There is a mismatch in frames for understanding children that serves this genocide: the frame of a self-perpetuating capitalist society, and the reality of occupied Palestinians. By not perceiving their status as targets of the genocide and of Zionist colonial violence in general, and by not comprehending them as active, living members of a resisting society (a society that resists by its very existence), we subsume them into our own imposed category of the child: one who is innocent, passive, yet-to-be-shaped. This category fails them—it does not fit. This in turn allows western societies to continue to distance them, and their pain, as falling outside of their world, outside of their influence, outside of their ability, even when it is this very world that enables their suffering.
[1] For example, the phones that allow us to receive reports from Palestinian journalists also tie us in to some of the world’s biggest and arguably most politically influential corporations.
[2] Countless reports and testimonies from the current assault that demonstrate this, as well as decades of documented killing and abuse of Palestinian children by Israeli forces. A few recent reports:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestinian-children-killed-idf-israel-war
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/04/09/gaza-israels-imposed-starvation-deadly-children
[3] https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6152/Gaza:-Initial-findings-show-Israeli-army-purposefully-kills-a-child,-uses-an-American-made-missile-to-target-her-rescue-crew#:~:text=Geneva%20%2D%20According%20to%20preliminary%20investigations,Gaza%20City%20in%20broad%20daylight.
[4] Orouba Othman speaking at “Except Palestine: Gender and Genocide” cohosted by Bir Zeit University and Birkbeck University, London. March 6, 2024. Translated from Arabic.
[5] One of the most famous and frequently referenced statements by a politician in post-1948 Zionist history is attributed to Golda Meir: “We can forgive them for killing our children; we cannot forgive them for making us kill their children. Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.” Reportedly spoken at the National Press Club in Washington DC in 1957, and published on the last page of Meir’s autobiography “A Land of our own: An Oral Autobiography” (G.P Putnam’s Sons, 1973).
[6] See Mohamed Bakri’s 2002 film Jenin, Jenin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJmUryVKQrU Recent reporting: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/26/west-bank-armed-youths-palestinian-militants-fight Recent work by photographer and film director Sakir Khader in the West Bank: https://www.instagram.com/p/C5O_ABFtYZL/?img_index=3
[7] “Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding” Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Cambridge University Press, 2019
[8] The use of this specific term here is borrowed from Sophie Lewis, speaking on The Ordinary Unhappiness podcast, “The Fantasy of Family and the Meaning of Family Abolition” March 16, 2024