Photograph Source: Jj M Ḥtp – Wall in Bethlehem – CC0

Sumud: an Arabic word, embodies the ability to withstand hardship and maintain a sense of identity and purpose despite the challenges of living under occupation.

A nation that maims, kills and starves men, women and children is unlikely to survive. Also, leaders of nations who have aided in those atrocities will likely face the same fate.
The Gaza Tribunal, newly created to counter the complicity of many Western countries in Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, tells us: “Gaza represents a breaking point in the historical journey of humanity, when a global system based on power, not justice, prevails.” Richard Falk, the tribunal’s president, at its first session in Sarajevo, characterized Gaza as the “moral challenge of our time.”

It is Gaza’s children, Palestine’s future, who have born the brunt of Israel’s atrocities. The United Nations Children’s Fund calls Gaza the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. And the commissioner general of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine, Philipe Lazzarini, concluded about Israel’s war on Gaza, “This is a war on children. It is a war on their childhood and their future.”

Two-thirds of the Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israel’s self-declared “moral army” have been women and children. One in ten children in Gaza are malnourished because of Israel’s engineered blockade of humanitarian aid. And, more than 40,000 have war-related disabilities as a result of its attacks: “Gaza now has the highest number of child amputees per capita anywhere in the world.”

A child psychiatrist with Medicines Sans Frontieres, Doctors Without Borders in Palestine, observes that there’s never a ‘post’ in post-traumatic stress syndrome. It’s ongoing trauma, it’s protracted trauma, it’s one war [Israeli] after the other.”

As I agonize over the unimaginable suffering and trauma of Gaza’s children, the refrain from Billie Holiday’s 1941 mournful........

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