There are Tens of Thousands of Hind Rajabs |
CounterPunch Exclusives
CounterPunch Exclusives
There are Tens of Thousands of Hind Rajabs
Five year old Hind Rajab after her graduation from kindergarten.
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........