How Can We Not?

Is there a difference between their children and our children? Do the photos of the dead children in Jabalia shock us less than the photos of the children in Be'eri? Should the pictures of dead children in Jabalia shock us at all? Is it legitimate for these images to disturb our being? Our children are the most precious things in existence. The children of the Israelis who were killed break the heart of every Israeli, more than any other child.

This is human and understandable. But it is difficult not to express our shock at the mass killing of boys in Gaza, just because our children were killed too. The killing in Gaza must be painful, especially if we remember who these children are, and who caused this catastrophe for them (the answer: Israel and Hamas); What was their life like, and what was their death like? (The answer: Children of poverty, destitution, siege, and asylum, without a present or future, and all of that is because of Israel.)

A good friend and left-wing figure, she wrote over the weekend: "In war, I cannot sympathize with both sides in the same way. Maybe in Ukraine, but not here. Gideon Levy describes a child with burns. I see the child they killed in the yoke of Oz." The child in the yoke of Oz was killed by “the scoundrels of Hamas with a brutality” that is difficult to describe. Children in Jabalia were killed by the Israeli army in cold blood, without intentional bad intentions, but in frightening numbers. But to see only the child of Nir Oz, and not the children of Jabalia, is a moral distortion, especially when the number of children killed in Gaza reaches a peak the likes of which we have never mentioned before: 3,900 dead as of yesterday, according to the Hamas Ministry of Health.

It was a bloody weekend in Gaza, and the videos that arrived from there were some of the most frightening scenes we have seen in this war. The mutilated corpses of eight children hugged in two white nylon bags, each four of them in one bag, are zipped shut forever, and taken to the mass grave. These are Gazan children. Someone killed them. It is true that it is war, but limits must be set in this war.

In clips from another video, huge rubble, screams, and dozens of bodies were distributed, including the bodies of a large number of children. Areas near hospitals in Gaza are being bombed non-stop. Yesterday, it was the turn of the Al-Nasser Children's Hospital, which houses children with cancer, where five people were killed. It is not difficult to imagine the horror felt by sick children in the hospital. This hospital has been told to evacuate, but there is nowhere they can go. Even ambulances that were on their way to the Rafah crossing were bombed by the Israeli Air Force, under the pretext that they were transporting “saboteurs.” The coastal road, along which the displaced were trying to escape towards the south, on orders from Israel, was littered with corpses, including many corpses of children. Every bombing of Gaza kills children.

All of this should not shock any Israeli, because Israel is mourning its dead. Not only should we not be shocked, but expressing our shock is forbidden. Anyone who does so is arrested, especially if he is an Arab citizen. Expressing our shock at the killing in Gaza is forbidden, even at the killing of innocent and good children, without any controversy; Protesting their killing is treason. They are the children of Gaza, and for Israel, they are not children, and they are not human beings, just like their parents, who brutally killed our children.

“How We Can Not,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked as he looked at photos of dead Gazan children pulled from the rubble. Blinken spoke of his shock at seeing Israeli children killed. Then, he spoke of the children being killed in Gaza, asking: “When I look into their eyes, I see my children. How can we not see that?”

When we look into the eyes of the dead children of Gaza, we do not see our own children. There is no doubt that we see them as children.

How Can We Not?