While children in all corners of the United States are beginning their school year, excitedly meeting their new teachers, reconnecting with friends and making new ones, getting used to new routines, new classes, new learning, it is a far different story for the children of Palestine, especially in Gaza.
One week ago, Tuesday, September 1, classes in all of Jerusalem’s Christian schools were suspended after Israel, without warning, denied entry permits for more than 70 teachers and staff, preventing them from reaching their schools.
The schools were ready to open, anticipating the new school year, but this injustice is one more example of Israel exercising its “matrix of control” over the lives of Palestinians. This is no minor inconvenience; in addition to the threat of violence at every turn visited by the Israeli military on Palestinian children, and the increasing violence by Israeli settlers on Palestinian Christians, you can only imagine the negative impact on a child’s psycho-social development, the kind of ongoing, visceral, invisible trauma and loss of innocence this inflicts on a young life.
Some of the children are the sole survivors of their families; sometimes they have to make hard choices between time spent on learning and otherwise searching for food, for shelter, for the basic things one needs to live.
Our friend, pastor Munther Isaac, Lutheran Church of Hope in Ramallah, condemned this egregious and unnecessary provocation by Israel. “Israel’s pressure on the Christian presence in Jerusalem continues. Christian schools are going on strike because Israel refuses to issue permits to their West Bank teachers.”
And lest one think that this impacts Christians alone, the fact is that most of the students in Christian schools throughout the West Bank and in Israel are Muslim students.
Meanwhile in Gaza this past Sunday, September 6, a mass funeral was held in Gaza City in northern Gaza, burying a hundred people, including 70 children, their remains recovered from under the rubble of homes destroyed by Israel in the city. A hundred more people to add to the 75,000 murdered by Israel, another 70 children to add to the 21,000 children murdered by Israel, as part of their genocide in Gaza.
Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Gaza, Ghazi al-Aloul, reported that the shrouded remains that looked like intact bodies, were often only fragments. “These are bone remains and remnants of belongings that may have been found on the bodies, especially the children’s,” he said, adding that no complete bodies had been recovered from the site because “the Israeli occupation has prolonged this process, and continues to prolong it and prevent it from being completed quickly.”
According to UNICEF, 97% of Gaza’s school buildings have been destroyed, leveled by Israel with bombs made in the United States, while “most of the 658,000 school age children have had limited access to face to face learning for over two academic years.”
And yet, education is happening in Gaza, despite the destruction and death. Makeshift tents, open-air classes taught on top of the rubble of homes, schools, churches and mosques.
HEAL Palestine, the wonderful organization that Indiana Center for Middle East supports; UNRWA; UNICEF; American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA), and others are on the ground providing education for Gaza’s children the best they can.
Yet we know that there are thousands and tens of thousands more remains buried under the rubble in Gaza as the genocide approaches its three-year anniversary, with full criminal backing, support, and weapons provided by the United States, and little being said or done by a complicit, mostly (with some exceptions) silent western Christian church.
As I said recently, enough already of the West disingenuously preaching human rights and democratic principles to the Global South, including the people of Palestine. F#%#ing hypocrites – our government, the church. And we twiddle our thumbs while another hundred, another 70 children – numbers, just numbers, we can’t see their faces, we don’t know their stories, we don’t care – another bunch of Gazans are murdered, murdered in our name, with our bombs, by the Israeli tail that wags America’s dog.
Just last week, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, boasted about how, “I’ve been against Iran for almost 40 years… it took a long time to bring the United States to its senses… [I’ve had] close to 1,000 hours on American television with the ability to influence the United States — with the intimate knowledge of all its leaders, both those who support us and those who don’t support us — the ability to navigate this field, through it.” And although he was speaking about Iran, given the US pre-existing predilection to kiss Israel’s ass, he might as well have been speaking about its genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, too.
A reminder: an 18-year-year-old teenager in Gaza today has grown up knowing nothing but continuous Israeli bombardment, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. And the West and its churches sanctimoniously ask, “Where’s the Palestinian Gandhi?” and wonder why Palestinians are so angry. Hell, the Palestinians have been more patient than most of us reading this blog, as well as most of the damn Republican and Democrat politicians and churchgoers who are supporting Israel’s murderous spree.
Mourners light candles by the bodies of Palestinians recovered from the rubble of homes demolished during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza [Jehad Alshrafi/AP]