Children as canon and media fodder

Someone, day after day, is killing the children. We see them die, amid blood and grief. Yet in part, as we watch, we are killing them, too...

Someone, day after day, is killing the children. We see them die, amid blood and grief. Yet in part, as we watch, we are killing them, too. That is the damnable thing about Ramallah and Nablus and Gaza.

Consider our children, the children of Britain. They come wrapped, by public consent, in special status: they are minors, kids who aren’t responsible and thus the ultimate responsibility of society itself. When their parents abuse or neglect them, they are taken away to a place of protection. The law adopts exceptional measures to hide their identities if they are involved — directly or indirectly — in crime. Schoolteachers can’t raise a hand to them on pain of dismissal. Children come first.

Press and television, in their own codes of conduct, echo that concern. No identification under the age of 18; no photographs or interviews without parental approval; no invasions of privacy. And not just for Euan Blair or Prince Harry Windsor. If children perish, as they perished at Dunblane, we do not want to see the bodies in the playground nor the parents, engulfed in emotion, talking unwillingly to a prying camera. These children are our children; and their tragedy is our tragedy. Children, in the purest sense, are innocents. Children come first.

But on the West Bank or Gaza, children come first in a different way. They are the first to die — from the 12-year-old who died in his father’s arms almost three weeks ago to 13-year-old Mohammed al-Najjar, shot in the head this weekend. Try to compute the victims of this latest uprising, this supposed war, and most of the 130 or so dead already are Palestinians — and, overwhelmingly, most of them are kids, teenage lads well short of their legal majority.

Thus mothers sob and fathers choke before our eyes. Schoolteachers talk sadly about empty desks. Women pallbearers at the endless funerals chant that “Israeli peace means killing the children”. Mourning crowds take upthe refrains to these teenage “martyrs”. “Oh Arabs, pay attention — the Palestinians are getting killed.”

And here is the damnable thing. None of this is an accident, a happenstance, a contrivance of fate. The children are first in the firing line by design. They have become cannon and media fodder.

Dr Stephen Males, a former assistant chief constable with a commission from Amnesty International, reportedly directly the other day on the course of the carnage. “The key point .. is that Israel is using military tactics and not establishing policing practices.” This means that the army — and yes, thousands of young conscripts — is bent on winning a conflict of retribution and domination the way armies do. “They are simply trying to wipe out or dominate the enemy” — while police officers, who know all about crowd control, stand idly by.

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An appalling verdict, compendiously documented. Israel indicted. And the charge is not just sickening brutality, but imbecile strategy as well. For this, if it is war at all, has turned into a war for hearts and minds. “One side waits for violence; the other side obligingly shoots them.”

The Palestinians, in turn, actively invite casualties. There’s a “ritual pattern” to their demonstrations. Their police are not on hand to protect life or defuse tension. “They make no attempt to stop children and youngsters let out of school for the day from running alongside,” Males told Michael Binyon of the Times. “There is a cynical allowance of the enormous risk to their lives.”…

Excerpted from The Guardian’, October 23