How Israelis and Palestinians View Their Own Children
One party goes to such lengths to protect their children, while the other so readily sacrifices their lives.
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This is a guest essay written by John Matthews, a journalist and author of 24 books.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
I was reminded of the stark difference between how Israelis and Palestinians viewed their own children when I watched the film “One Life” with Anthony Hopkins, about the life of Nicholas Winton, who saved several hundred Jewish children from the holocaust in Czechoslovakia — often referred to as “The English Schindler.”
I had in fact seen a documentary on Winton years previous. There were many poignant moments in the film, but one that stuck strongly in my mind was how these Jewish parents had sacrificed everything to save their children: queuing for countless hours, filling in forms, getting papers stamped, raising the necessary money, then finally the tearful goodbyes — knowing that they’d probably never see their children again and their own lives would soon be lost.
The ultimate sacrifice.
When I’d first viewed the documentary on Winton, I was involved in debates regarding the growing number of knife attacks in Jerusalem and the West Bank during 2015 and 2016, with defences and retaliations leading to a number of teen deaths, with the father of one 16-year-old Palestinian boy who murdered a young Israeli mother boldly proclaiming, “I am proud of him.”
The stark contrast stuck in my mind — that one party would go to such lengths to protect their children, while the other would so readily sacrifice their lives. If it was just one isolated incident, it could be put down to the strange aberrations of one parent, but there are numerous videos online of fathers at Hamas rallies proclaiming how they’d happily sacrifice their children for “martyr” actions against Israel.
Thankfully, that isn’t the entire picture, with the Palestinian father of the gunman who killed two in a Tel Aviv bar expressing his horror at the incident: “I am an Israeli citizen, a law-abiding citizen. I heard what my son has done, and I am sorry. I did not educate him to act in that way.”
The father was no doubt aiming to be the voice of the 1.78 million Arab citizens of Israel — largely ignored when anti-Israel protestors try to portray a purely them-and-us situation and dishonestly sell the “apartheid” tag — who are peaceful and support unity rather than conflict.
But we hear in his voice a sense of plea, in the same way that many parents in the West, upon learning that their kids have become drug addicts, decry that they’d always warned them strongly against drugs, yet in the end the prevailing influences — the streets, pop and rock culture, fellow teens and peer groups — had won out.
The prevailing influences in this instance come from the countless Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad leaders praising the attacks, with even the usually moderate Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, lending his support: “We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem. This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah. With the help of Allah, every martyr will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward.”
Only weeks later when an Israeli couple was killed, Palestine Liberation Organization official Mahmoud Ismail went on official Palestinian television, PBC, proclaiming their murder to be a fulfilment of Palestinian “national duty.” Faced with that level of encouragement and incitement — running all the way to the top of Palestinian leadership — it’s easy to understand the despair of any parent trying to push back against that tide.
It brought to mind that classic quote from past Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir: “We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”
Surely the last thing Palestinian leaders would want is to make the words of Golda Meir bear fruit and appear glaringly true 40 years after the event. Surely, too, Palestinian supporters in the West, realizing that much of the current wave of attacks involves incitement of under-age Palestinian teens to attack innocent civilians and in the process often lose their own lives, would shy away from lending their support to such actions. But, sadly, that hasn’t been the case.
Roll forward to the current day and we see many Palestinians in the West Bank praising the massacre of October 7th, despite the terrible repercussions it has brought with the increasing death toll in Gaza.
Go on social media and you’ll see any number of sites glorifying the deaths of teens as “martyrs” — though all too often the full details of them being involved in knife attacks prior to being shot and “martyred” are conveniently avoided. The picture painted is that the IDF or Israeli checkpoint security killed these teens in unprovoked assaults. Predictably, this then gives rise to righteous outrage and further chants of “evil Israelis” and calls for their destruction.
So, while on the face of it, Palestinian teen lives lost will have served little purpose, by the time they’ve been put through the Al-Jazeera-Electronic-intifada-Palestine-free-river-to-sea-one-way-view editorial machine, they will at least serve a purpose in propaganda terms: Israel will have been further demonized and another victim chalked up on the hate-wall of “Palestinian children killed by Israel.”
No thought given to the fact that it was various Palestinian leaders — safe in their villas or hotel rooms, their own children safely at school — who incited these teens in the first place to take such drastic actions.
But neglecting to mention that fact, along with painting a one-way picture of Israeli aggression and Palestinian victimhood, also serves a purpose: The next Palestinian teen to read these accounts might be sufficiently outraged to take the same action, thereby providing useful cannon fodder for yet another Israel-evil-Palestinian-victim incident report, and the cycle continues.
If it was only Western journalists who had picked up on this, I daresay it would hold less credence for Palestinian supporters.
But tellingly this is an issue which has also raised concerns in Palestinian circles, with a number of leading intellectuals and journalists speaking out, including Hafez Al-Barghouti, former editor of the Palestinian Authority daily and a Fatah Revolutionary Council member. He voiced that these teens were a particularly vulnerable and easily influenced age group, and that their childhood should be protected. He accused a number of Palestinian leaders of “trading in the blood of children” by praising and glorifying these attacks.
Palestinian journalist Ihab Al-Jariri of Radio 24 held a similar view: “Those who write theories on Facebook, from behind the safety of a computer monitor, supporting the idea of children carrying out stabbing attacks and encouraging them to do so — should first do it themselves and only then ask the young ones to follow in their footsteps.”
The fact that this wave of knife attacks was largely fuelled by social media has also been commented on by many newspapers, from Haaretz to The Guardian and The New York Times. While four local dailies and eight TV stations gave a blow-by-blow account of Israeli-Palestinian violence, the main source of news for Palestinian teens is via Facebook groups that pump out a continuous stream of bloody images and pro-violence slogans.
As this cycle of life reflecting-social-media-distorted art/death reached its zenith, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented, “We are seeing a situation in which Osama bin Laden meets Mark Zuckerberg. The incitement on social networks is what is causing the wave of terror.”
Israeli citizens too have taken this issue to heart, with more than 20,000 Israelis suing Facebook for “facilitating and encouraging” violence against Jews by allowing Palestinian users to post and share how-to videos on stabbing attacks, as well as violent messages and videos glorifying killers as martyrs.
Certainly, the power of the internet and social media should not be underestimated, with it being cited as playing a major part in the “Arab Spring” uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria. But its value then was for militia groups to organize and coordinate — some of it using the “dark web” — not to inspire teens to carry out “lone wolf” attacks.
And in the “March of Return” in Gaza, young teens were openly encouraged to run close to the fence, with the full knowledge they risked drawing Israeli sniper fire. In the current Gaza war, there is not enough newsreel footage to determine how much young people feature on the front line; we just see them evident in high casualty figures, even though these are likely falsely inflated.
But with no bomb shelters built in the past 20 years, this makes them more vulnerable at times of war and increases their death toll. Even if these were just built by schools or United Nations centres, we could judge that this was not a purposeful negligence.
So, how and why did this use of young people and teens as a useful and valued spearhead take root in Palestinian society?
To get the answer to this, you have to go back over 40 years — to the attack by the Palestine Liberation Organization on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. While this certainly gained the Palestinian cause worldwide media attention, it was not in the way they wished. They learned from this that killing non-involved athletes was considered an abhorrent act and as a result had lost them international sympathy.
The second series of actions which alerted them to what would gain or lose sympathy in the international arena was the wave of suicide bombings launched against Israel between 1995 and 2006. These targeted mainly civilians, blowing apart men, women, and children in cafes, hotels, shopping malls, and on buses.
Particular horror was attached to the number of children killed, with one bombing at the Dolphinarium Disco in Tel Aviv specifically targeting young teens; of the 22 killed, the youngest were 13 and 14. These bombings caused outrage in Israel and internationally, alienating many to the Palestinian cause, and shortly after the dividing security wall was built.
Possibly this action was the main kickstart for the largely media-led Palestinian propaganda war that followed; after all, with the divide built and conventional terrorist and suicide-bomber attacks thwarted, what other option was there?
Also, since the main banner headline of that propaganda campaign often read, “They’re killing our children!”, they could hardly voice that protest — at least with a straight face or without appearing grossly ironic — when their own bombing campaigns were proportionally killing far more children the Israeli side.
But the international outrage caused by the Israeli children killed in these bombing campaigns — even though, out of respect for the dead, Israel rarely if ever showed photos of these corpses — had obviously gone deep into the Palestinian psyche, because it then often played at the forefront of their own propaganda campaigns.
Alongside the prerequisite “killing our children” headlines, gory photos of the victims were displayed, and if the horror of these wasn’t enough, often a blood coated teddy-bear or doll would be strategically placed by the bodies. And as this one-way Israel-demonizing campaign gained momentum, “apartheid” started to be used as a tag for the security divide — even though the suicide bombing campaign had not long finished and so its main purpose should still have been blatantly clear — and the terms “Nazis” and genocide, as well as comparisons to the Holocaust, quickly followed.
It was almost as if a conversation had taken place in some electronic intifada or Hamas-central backroom whereby it was felt that labelling Israeli-Jews as “child killers” might not on its own be enough.
What probably amazed this back-room bunch was that this rather obvious and infantile name-tagging exercise would ever gain wings outside. Many Western journalists, academics, and students might see through it and won’t be stupid enough to repeat it, but not all.
Go on any social media site on any given day and you’ll see countless students and supposed academics repeating the same trite name-tags with abandon, not far different to kids — and with the same required intellect level — hurling playground insults. And on some choice days, you’ll even find some politicians stupid enough to repeat the same.
But the final component which aided this “child-killer” labelling campaign came from an unlikely source: the United Nations. In the eyes of the UN, a “child” is someone under 18 years of age, and it was probably not lost on both Hamas and Fatah that in a number of conflict showdowns, many of those on the front-line jeering and throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers were in the 12-to-18 range.
It’s one of the by-products of disaffected youth, particularly in an area of high unemployment in an on/off conflict zone. All that was needed was a tilt on that rudder for those teens to become more involved and aggressive, and they’d become a useful component in the war against Israel.
Hamas would never admit to recruiting under-age militants, but there are numerous accounts of youths making up a jeering and rock-throwing front line while adult snipers shoot past them at Israeli soldiers. This provides a dual purpose: cover for their main militants and snipers, and if the young teens got caught in the crossfire, they added to the child-kill statistics aiding the propaganda campaign.
Bassem Eid, a leading Palestinian human rights activist, in an editorial towards the end of the “Knife Intifada,” lamented about the lack of good Palestinian leadership in inciting this wave of violence. And an op-ed tagged to Amnesty International went a step further by looking deeper into the history of child-recruitment for the Palestinian cause, even going as far back as a LIFE magazine cover depicting tiger cubs of 8-to-11 in full assault gear and armed with automatic weapons at a Jordanian training camp, with a supporting explanation from a leading Palestinian newspaper-illustrator:
“I saw for myself how afraid the Israeli soldiers were of the children. A child of 10 or 11 had sufficient training to carry and use an RBG rifle. The situation was simple enough. The Israeli tanks were in front of them and the weapon was in their hands. The Israelis were afraid to go into the camps, and if they did, they would only do so in daylight.”
I’m sure that Hamas and the harder-line elements within Fatah1 might argue that if male youths between 11 and 18 are keen to be out on the streets at the forefront of conflicts, what can they do to stop them?
But the lack of leadership voices urging them to desist — in fact, quite the opposite, urging them to partake and become “martyrs” — tells a different story. And the reverse side of that coin is equally disturbing: If this is largely as a result of disaffected youth in an on/off conflict zone, what incentive is there to improve the lot of that youth, particularly when they can be used as such a worthwhile tool in the conflict against Israel, direct cannon fodder on one level, child-kill statistics to further demonize Israel on another?
And where does the Western Left stand on all of this? That bastion of protection for the innocent and underprivileged, with children — and with good reason — at the pinnacle. If these observations and linked accusations were coming only from Western journalists, you might expect them to do the usual of sticking their fingers in their ears while chanting a repetitive mantra of “Hasbara.”
But many of these accusations are coming from the core of Palestinian society itself. So now, keenly aware of that fact, are they shrinking back from the fray: “I’ll support many things in the name of the Palestinian cause, but I won’t support the use of children in conflict … particularly when it might lead to the death of those children.”
I daresay that true Palestinian supporters, concerned about the impact of their messages, would pause for thought or at least temper their words. But the problem is that amongst this number are a collection of die-hard antisemites.
And, with many Palestinian leaders having made use of this under-age army in their fight against Israel for so long, and with the additional benefit of being able to use their “martyr” deaths in their “child-killers” demonization of Israel — I see any change slow in coming.
The Palestinian political party that runs the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank
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These bombings were not popular in the West, and indeed Israel was very heavily supported during the 1960s through to the 1980s. A popular pastime of British students then was to spend summer breaks on a kibbutz, whereas now you'll find them marching against Israel in street demos.
That change has come about. There has always been fringe support for the Palestinians... but it was just that, an extreme fringe, and these bombings did cause outrage years ago. But we're talking 20-40 years ago... and that fringe in support of the Palestinians has grown, mainly with the advent of social media and Al-Jazeera's birth not long after the milennium.
But I suppose it's so long ago that it's hard to remember that swing in support from the left-wing from pro-Israel to anti-Israel.
But one encouraging statistic recently. Despite the street demos in London, sometimes a 100,000 strong - which might give the impression that most Brits were Palestinian supporters - polls of the mainsteram gave a different story. On a Sky TV poll, 64% said they were against the demos and on GB news it was 71% against.
Golda’s quip sums it up.