It's Hard to Raise Good Children in a Country That Normalizes Killing Children
A paramedic enters the emergency room, carrying an injured and bandaged infant. He says just two words, one in Arabic and one in English: "Hada amputation" – This is an amputation. Only then do you really understand what the eyes are seeing, but the heart denies it and refuses to believe. The baby's two legs are amputated under the knee.
In another video clip, people are walking down the street, and a bomb falls and blows a hole in the middle of the street. The video looks as if it was filmed by a security camera and it has no sound, but you can imagine the shriek of the bomb as if falls according to the response of the people looking up at the sky and running away.
The morning I watched these horrors on Facebook, I went to meet with 150 students in an elementary school auditorium in a well-off town in the center of the country. I spoke with them about life, the not perfect world that nonetheless has happiness, and the literature that teaches us we are not so different from one another – and in the essential things we are all very similar.
These are children and those are children, those in Gaza and these in the air-conditioned auditorium. The war has taught us to live in a broken and divided reality, but the disparity is unbearable.
With the authority that has not been given me, I'm calling you to order – mothers and fathers, teachers, counselors and principles, cool aunts and hilarious uncles, anyone who lives near children and feels responsibility toward them. "They started it" and "Let them free the hostages and everything will be alright" – this is childish talk. It's impossible to cancel the anger and fear, but we are obligated to stand and face reality.
Children are dying now, at this very moment. Children are being seriously wounded, and it's impossible to save them. Children are undergoing medical procedures such as amputations without painkillers, dying from malnutrition. An adult who has a working reality checker is not meant to respond "they deserve it" or "Amalek" to the sights of an infant with amputated limbs. Maybe you think it all goes over the children's heads, they don't understand what is the importance of this loss of compassion? That this brutality doesn't threaten their ability to empathize?
Credit: Hatem Khaled/רויטרס
In the past few months I've visited a few schools, where instead of the bell for recess they play the song "Tamid Ohev Oti" (Always Loves Me), with the words "and even better, and even better." This is the mantra the child hears a number of times a day, and it promises them that their actions don't have repercussions. "The Holy One, Blessed be He," loves me, even if I'm a proud resident of Sodom and Gomorrah, even if I'm indifferent to the abandonment of Matan Zangauker and the incitement against his mother.
How much longer will we be able to protect the children from this information? One day a video on social media will jump out at them, without any advance preparation. Total strangers will attack them with harsh words on the Underground in London. Figure out (You, the adults), when they will reach the age at which they are told to kill children, or to be part of a system that kills defenseless children.
Imagine what will happen if the wheel turns, and the sticker "Together We Will Win" fades and peels away, and the children grow up into a country that discovers strength has limits, that it's impossible to eliminate, destroy and starve whole generations in a world in which the president of the United States is already advancing regional alliances without taking Israel into account.
We must stop these horrors, not just because they threaten the future of our children, and not just because they provide a tailwind to antisemitism and strengthen our international isolation and hatred of Israel, and damage national security. We must stop the war crimes because they are causing terrible suffering for people like us and children, every one of whom are an entire world of their own, who have the right to live exactly like our own children.
But even if this argument doesn't speak to you, if you belong to the parties who are sobering up, not the suckers, if you are on the soft right or sleepy center – you will find it hard to raise good children in an environment that normalizes killing children. You can't protect them without recognizing its existence.