Genocide Blog 22 – Suffer the Little Children
22.12.2023
The faces of a big group of Palestinian refugee children in Khan Younis in Gaza sit transfixed, if wan, as traditional story tellers have come together, as an association, to offer them, in their suffering, stories. Words and songs.
In Palestine, the story-tellers are called “Hakawati”, and they don a special costume to tell their tales, and there is music intertwined. One told Al Jazeera that when, during a story, he accidentally dropped his microphone, the children all thought the noise it made was a bomb. I guess they jumped and some screamed and other took to shaking from the post-traumatic shock.
As you watch that audience, those pale little children, thin, haggard, their eyes a bit too wide, you cannot believe what is happening before the eyes of the world. You know, in your heart, as you watch them that they have all lost a mother, a father, a granny, granddad, or sibling. Or more than one. You know they are hungry, maybe even thirsty – Israel promised to deprive them of food and water, and is carrying out its promise in cold blood. The USA continues to veto any Resolution for a proper ceasefire. Imagine that nice American woman at the UN Security Council putting up her hand in public, before the whole world, to say Israel must continue bombing or shooting these children gathered around the Hakawati. Sometimes she can’t, then she sends her traumatized assistant to put his hand up. The USA’s representative, and her assistant, have to do this in turn. The two of them are all but executioners. Employed by Biden. Biden who runs Netanyahu – funds him, runs him, protects him, pays him, arms him, aids him, abets him.
And still Mauritius has not suspended diplomatic relations?
As if for Christmas, the Israeli Defense Force shot two Catholic ladies dead, as they left the church building they are sheltering in, in North Gaza, to go to the toilet. The Pope phones the little Catholic congregation every day. The Mauritian church hierarchy, as far as we know, has made no public condemnation of Israel. The Pope has twice, with reason, called the IDF “terrorists”, and long called for a ceasefire. The former Anglican Church head, Rev. Donat, has called for a ceasefire, at the request of his son.
As if for Hannukah, the Israeli Defense Force shot dead three of Israel’s own citizens stripped from the waist up, escaped from captivity with Hamas, even when one was carrying a white flag, the symbol in international law of “Don’t shoot, I am handing myself up.” And then the IDF maintains that they try to avoid killing civilians? The lies are not for us. They are for Joe Biden – to give him a ragged disintegrating fig-leaf. So he can give instructions to his UN representatives to let Israel continue killing the children.
As if for New Year, the IDF has reached the hideous total of 20,000 people assassinated. And it continues to slaughter the innocents. The IDF has reached 2 million people intentionally displaced – by threat to bomb them and then bombing them anyway, by dropping thousands of pounds of explosives on them. Destruction of Biblical proportions, just as Netanyahu promised. The hospitals of the Palestinians of Gaza laid waste. One by one. At first the IDF denied it, made up lies about Hamas using one as headquarters. Then they were found out. So, they just bomb the hospitals anyway. The Gazans mosques and churches are attacked by missiles. Their schools bombarded as if education was the danger. Their roads dug up so when the IDF gives orders to flee, you flee by foot. If you can walk miles through rubble. Water supplies are down. Electricity off. Sewerage completely collapsed. And the IDF now starves Palestinians to death, Netanyahu’s ministers all the while praying for epidemics to kill them in numbers. That is what religion has come to.
And the crimes against humanity continue.
Words begin to fail us all.
Except for the Hakawati. They have gathered the children to tell them stories.
And this reminds me that in a Fim-K-lib I am in, which meets over a movie once a month, will be seeing “The Travelling Players”, a 4-hour film – in some people’s Top 10 of all films ever made – in January. It is about a drama group that goes around Greece in World War II putting on traditional ancient Greek plays for war refugees, as Greece is taken over by the right-wing fascists just as Israel has been. The film is slow, and multi-layered – the play being put on, the situation in Greece and in the world during the war, visiting Greece with them, and the relationships between the players, and between players and the roles they are playing.
At the viewing of the film, Ram will give an introduction to “The Travelling Players” to tell about how in 1962, he and five or six friends, bought and made road-worthy an old van, borrowed a few tents, and set off around Germany and Austria giving children in all the refugee camps still there and full of children, 15 years after the end of the war, puppet shows – with puppets they had made themselves, finger-puppets and also string puppets, along with a recordings they had prepared in German of different stories. The children’s faces in the photographs Ram has and that he will dig out to show us, are just like the faces of the children in Gaza – wan, yet transfixed. By the art of the story. And we will be viewing this Greek movie masterpiece on the same subject. And remembering the gift of the Hakawati in Gaza to the children there – even as they continue to be traumatized.
Lindsey Collen
for LALIT
