There are Tens of Thousands of Hind Rajabs

The UN has now found that Israel deliberately targeted Palestinian children. I read the report as a mother, against the speed with which we are already forgetting.

I am a mother. I am Palestinian. I am a psychoanalyst, which means I spend my days with people learning to survive what should have destroyed them.

Start with the child we have already been allowed to forget.

On January 29, 2024, a six-year-old named Hind Rajab sat in a car in Gaza City, packed in against the bodies of her aunt, her uncle, and her cousins, all of them killed around her by Israeli fire. For hours she stayed on the phone with the Palestine Red Crescent and begged, in the voice of a small child who still trusts that grown-ups come when you call, for someone to come. The soldiers killed the two paramedics sent to save her. They killed the ambulance. Hind was found nearly two weeks later. Investigators counted more than three hundred bullets in the car.

The world heard her, because someone recorded the call. A film was made from her voice, and at its first screening a theater full of people stood and wept and clapped for twenty-three minutes, the longest ovation anyone could remember. I wept too. Then the lights came up, everyone went home, and the checks to the army that killed her did not stop. Not for one day. Not for one dollar.

We will grieve a Palestinian child once she has been turned into ninety minutes of cinema, and we will keep paying the people who turned her into a body in a car. There are tens of thousands of Hind Rajabs in Palestine. Children whose last hour no one recorded. Children with no film, no ovation, no name you will ever learn. The money that bought the tank beside her car has never wept, never forgotten, never paused. Only we pause. Only we forget. And our forgetting is not innocent. It is the thing the killing needs from us, and it is being counted on.

This week the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel published what should end the argument. In a hundred-page report, the first a UN body has ever devoted to crimes against Palestinian children, it found that Israeli forces have deliberately targeted and killed those children, and that this is genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Gaza, and war crimes in the West Bank. Not collateral. Not tragic excess. The deliberate killing of children, the inquiry said, is itself one of the clearest signs of the intent to destroy a people. “Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,” the chair of the Commission said.

More than 20,000 children killed in two years. More than 44,000 wounded. Almost one in three of all the dead, a child. The Commission found the wounds were not random. Children were shot in the head and the chest, hunted by drones and snipers, and one soldier called the work a game. A fourteen-year-old in the West Bank was left to bleed to death over forty-five minutes while soldiers watched him die. When he pushed out his cap to show he was still breathing, a soldier kicked it back at him. They shot at his mother when she ran for him. They have never returned his body. A twelve-year-old girl with a treatable illness starved to death under the siege, and her evacuation was approved two weeks after she was already dead. A baby was shot through the head by a drone while he nursed at his mother’s breast, and he lives now, paralyzed. In one stretch of three months, more than a thousand children had an arm or a leg cut off, many of them babies, many with nothing for the pain. I am a mother. I do not have to imagine the table, the child, the saw.

The children of Gaza have been asking questions, and the people who sit with them have written the questions down. When the missile falls, will it hurt? When they bomb the tent, will we burn? Do children whose legs are cut off grow new ones? Do the pilots who bomb children have children? I don’t want to die in pieces. These are not poems. They are the working minds of small children trying to draw a map of a world that has decided they should not exist. The Commission gave the damage a name. It said the freedom to play, to imagine, to hope, to become a person, has been taken from these children, and that what was done to them cannot be undone. I have spent my whole working life inside that sentence. To occupy a people is not only to take their land and ration their water. It is to climb inside a child and turn the sky into the place the bombs come from, and to leave a six-year-old asking whether she will feel it when it lands.

None of this is weather. None of this is fate. It is made by people, and it is bought by people, and a great deal of the buying is ours. American tax dollars, and the European money behind them, the imperial subsidy that keeps the bombs falling. The United States is Israel’s largest weapons supplier, the arms dealer to a genocide the UN has now named twice. A Brown University accounting puts US military aid to Israel at more than $21.7 billion since October 2023 alone, on top of more than a quarter of a trillion dollars since 1959, more than this country has handed any nation on earth. Your taxes bought the bomb that fell on the tent. Your taxes paid the wage of the sniper who chose the child’s head. Two years of these weapons is more than 80,000 homes we did not build, a year of after-school care for 14 million children we did not fund. We chose the missile instead. We are choosing it again this week.

And we are breaking our own laws to do it. The Leahy Law forbids US aid to any military unit credibly found to have committed gross human rights violations, among them torture, rape, and the unlawful killing of civilians. Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act forbids security assistance to any government that commits a consistent pattern of those violations. Section 620I of the same Act forbids military aid to any government that blocks the delivery of US humanitarian aid, which Israel has done in Gaza for months at a time, with children starving on the other side of the gate. The Arms Export Control Act allows American weapons to be used for self-defense, not for what the Commission has just finished describing. These laws are not obscure. They are not ambiguous. Our government breaks them in daylight, on purpose, and dares us not to notice. The Commission asked every government to stop arming a state it has twice found to be committing genocide. For an American there is no distance in that sentence. The body that approves the money is Congress, and Congress answers to you.

That is why the Palestine-Global and Shatāt-USA Palestine Mental Health Networks started a campaign called If This Were Your Child. It sets the questions of Gaza’s children beside the record of who pays for their killing, and it asks one thing of the people paying the bill. Write to your representatives and your senators, and do not stop there. Call them. Call the next day again, and the day after that, until your name is a weight they carry into every vote. Stop arming Israel. Make this government obey the laws it wrote. A phone call is a small thing to set against a slaughter. It is also one of the few things a person in Ohio or Lyon or Leeds can actually do, and the killing goes on because we keep deciding it is not worth the trouble.

You, reading this, are the only thing the people doing this have to fear. Not the courts, which look away. Not the governments, which sign the checks. You. The ones who profit are betting that you will feel this for the length of an article and then file it next to Hind Rajab and move on. Prove them wrong.

I cannot make you keep feeling it. The mind is built to set down what it cannot carry, and a whole government and arms industry sit on top of that to make sure you set this down too. But I will tell you what I tell myself, as a mother who raised two children of her own and got to watch them grow. The applause ends. The lights come up. The only question that has ever mattered is what you do once you can no longer hear the child’s voice. Hind Rajab asked for someone to come. Tens of thousands asked, and no one came, and they are asking still. Do the pilots who bomb children have children? It is a question about whether you still recognize a child when you see one, and whether you will keep paying not to.

If you are a US citizen, do not only write to Congress. Call. The Capitol switchboard is (202) 224-3121. Call today, and call again tomorrow, and keep calling.  

Write to Congress here: Your Taxes, Their Children: Tell Congress to Enforce the Law. Follow this link.
Follow @if_this_were_your_child for more ways to act.

You are the only hope. Do not stop.

 Keep talking about Palestine. Keep posting. Keep sharing.  Keep disrupting and never stop believing that Palestine will be free.