There is an old colonizer adage that “the old will die and the young will forget.” In fact, Israel built its future wagering that the Palestinians violently displaced and expelled in the Nakba would eventually move on, assimilate, forget the depravity that ripped them from their land. But now, the occupation seems to tremble before Palestinian children holding paper and string. Khaled Al Khateeb and his siblings spent a week making a kite from scraps they found at home, and when it finally flew, it was as if Khaled himself was soaring above the clouds, above the drones and the bombs that loomed over his entire life.
This kite, like all Palestinians, suddenly became an existential threat to the colonizers. Last month, Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz said that kites would be treated like drones; Benjamin Netanyahu threatened that the people launching them could be killed. Everything but paper and string had already been stolen from Khaled and his friends, yet Israel, after vaporizing thousands of children and burying thousands more beneath the homes it leveled, declared itself endangered by kites.
Because colonial powers have always feared the child who survives its violence and continues to imagine a sky beyond its rule. Hope is rebellion in its youngest form; it is the guileless expectation of a tomorrow the colonizer has already claimed for itself. Khalid’s kite frightens Israel because Khalid himself does.
A Palestinian does not need to take up arms (although they would be within their legally recognized right to do so) to threaten a state built on their disappearance. It is enough that he grows old, remembers, and inherits a right to the land—a right that cannot be erased by the passage of time or by displacement to wherever Israel deems proper. In the West Bank, bombs were replaced by bullets and clubs.
The IDF shot seven-month-old Sam Fahd Abu Haikal through the head inside his family’s car and murdered fourteen-year-old Amer Rabee as he picked almonds with his friends. Earlier this month, settlers killed two teenagers in a raid on the village of al-Mughayyir. A Palestinian child is Palestine in the future tense.
Israel wages war against Palestinian children because it cannot tolerate Palestinian adulthood. Israel wages war on childhood because a Palestinian child at play is already trespassing upon the future Israel has reserved for itself. Israel robs children of their smallest joys because joy is the seed of hope, and that is how the body learns that captivity is not the natural condition of life.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
