The children of Palestine bear no responsibility for the presumed crimes of the struggle for liberation, just as the children of Israel bear no responsibility for the crimes of the occupation and its machine of death. But as in all other wars, in this one too, childhood itself is a casualty. The images of Israeli children inscribing bombs destined to the death of civilians in Palestine or Lebanon, cheerfully parroting the aspirations of the erasure of Palestinians or celebrating the destruction of Palestine and Palestinian life are not mere aberrations, steadily emerging from the dark corners of the Israeli public life, they are the necessary result of a society that has turned its children into ideological soldiers long before they are drafted into its military ranks to become soldiers of the occupation.
Since the beginning of the Slughter of Gaza, these images have become considerably more common than the oft-cited photographs of Palestinian children brandishing model weapons or marching through schoolyards cladded in Hamas regalia—both of which have long been used to justify Israeli wanton violence against them and their parents.
No expression of the Israeli ideological abuse of its children is more sinister than the video aired on Israeli state TV in November 2023 which shows children singing joyfully about the destruction of Gaza. The childish candor and the charming gestures of youth singing songs of hope for the the “total annihilation of Gaza” offered a hellish picture of what the Israeli occupation has done to its children.
The voices turned into clarions of destruction, suffering and genocidal mass murder and the children into instruments of war before they are old enough to understand the song of death that they have been made to sing. This is a stark example of the ideological abuse of children—of a society that molds them into participants in its violence before they can question it. While Palestinian children are condemned for merely growing up under the symbols of resistance to a brutal occupation, Israeli children are shaped by a culture that feeds them the language of annihilation as though it were a nursery rhyme.
The construction of an Israeli national childhood rooted in a segregationist agenda of religious particularism, national superiority, and ethnic exclusivity is an ideological framework that shapes children not as citizens of the world but as members of a cult of cruelty and self-righteous violence. From an early age, they are taught that their belonging is not universal but conditional on the exclusion and domination of the other. To see themselves as chosen is to see others as undesirable, unrelatable, and ultimately expendable. This is the foundation upon which they are educated, where songs of destruction become acts of self-assertion, and where the celebration of another’s suffering is framed not as cruelty but as destiny.
Justice for Palestine
Justice for the children of Gaza would have to mean at least three things. First, the trial and punishment of those responsible for the genocidal destruction of Palestine in an international court. Second, the reconstruction of Gaza and the West Bank, funded with Israeli assets—either seized or ceded voluntarily by Israel—alongside reparations for Palestinian victims. But that alone would not suffice. Justice for Palestine must mean the end of the occupation, ensuring that the children of Gaza have the right to be free, to dream, and to hope beyond the borders of Jabaliya or Jenin. Beyond the borders of Israel. Beyond the shadows of an oppression designed not only to strip them of their rights and aspirations but to deny them the very essence of childhood: the expectations of becoming men and women not of Palestine but of the world. Perhaps curiously, this is also what justice for the children of Israel ought to be.
The children of Israel, too, should have the right to hope for a future where they are recognized as righteous and just individuals by their neighbors, free from the ideological turpitude of their parents, exempt of the guilt of having sung songs of death and destruction and innocent of the crimes committed by their government. They should have the right to grow up and be citizens of a tolerant and democratic society where not only their own rights but the rights of their neighbors are enshrined in a collective identity that values humanity over religious, national, or ethnic pedigrees. The children of Israel deserve a childhood that is not shaped by the ideological demands of a national narrative that makes them ideological child soldiers.
The children of Israel should be free from the burden of the zionist narratives that demands them to look at themselves as eternal victims and forces them to live in constant fear. They, too, deserve a childhood unshackled from the demand to conform to a collective national trauma. They should have the right to grow up imagining a world beyond conflict, where they need not lay down their life to defend the state and some caricaturesque version of judaism. The children of Israel should be allowed to become men and women committed to ensuring the dignity and rights of all people, regardless of where they were born, what religion they profess, what language they speak. These children of Israel, like all children, deserve the hope that their future will be defined by their own actions and values, not by the cycles of violence and retribution that have plagued their past.
The right to a one state solution from the river to the sea
There is only one condition that can guarantee these rights: a single, secular, and democratic state where the children of Israel can learn to be democratic, tolerant, and just. A state where every individual, from the river to the sea, has one vote—where citizenship is not determined by religion or ethnicity but by the simple and inviolable principle of equality. A state where rights and obligations are shared equally, where administrative detention does not exist, and where no child is dragged away in shackles to disappear into the machinery of repression. In short, a state in which the other is ourselves, where responsibility is not just a legal obligation but a moral commitment to one’s neighbor and to a shared humanity as the fundamental form of identity.
The children of Palestine and the children of Israel deserve each other. They deserve a childhood in which friendships are not foreclosed by guns and walls, where play is not interrupted by air raid sirens, and where neither siblings, parents or friends need to be mourned in premature encounters with death. No novel solution is needed—the world has long known the political model that best allows for this and that is a secular, democratic society, where rights are not granted at birth to some and denied to others. It is only there that justice, peace, and dignity can offer what no wall and gun can ever do. They can offer children a childhood.
Israel must cease to be a Jewish state and perhaps even cease to be called Israel. Instead of a state for the Jews, it would become a state of all its citizens, where membership in the state is not a priviledge of pedigree but a democratic principle based on equal rights and obligations. To abandon the structures and the ideas of national exclusivity at the core of the state that have made the murder of 20,000 children possible, that have enabled the sniping of toddlers in the West Bank, that have justified the incarceration of scores of Palestinian children in Israeli detention camps—this is not just a moral obligation; it is the necessary condition for any future that does not condemn the children (who, as James Baldwin once famously explained, are always ours) to be proud murderers or heroic martyrs.
It is too late to save the children who have already been made to sing songs of genocide and destruction. They will grow into adults who must one day look back on the sinister words they once unwittingly pronounced. But it is not too late to dismantle the system that has recruited them. It is not too late to end the conditions that turn children into ideological soldiers and their future adults selves into perpetrators. A state built on segregation and repression can only sustain itself through violence and that violence needs agents to exercise it. A state built on equality and justice is the only path forward—not only for the many past generations of Palestinian children who have suffered under the ferocity of the Israeli occupation but also for the Israelis who deserve to be freed from the moral decay to which their own delirium of supremacy condemns them.
Thank you for writing about this important topic. Really horrible what is happening
That “children’s song” is the foulest evidence of the full depravity of Israeli society. The adults of that society are absolutely despicable. In a few years, those young children will be old enough to no longer be considered innocent. Israel is a satanic state.