I’m teaching a 6-year-old Bahraini girl named Maryam with very limited English skills. It’s our first class together. She wants to tell me about the leader of her country, so I Google him and screen-share the images with her.
Suddenly she sees, among the images, a Palestinian flag.
The conversation, verbatim:
"Palestine! Palestine!" she cries, pronouncing it the original Arabic way, which is Fah-leh-STEEN.
"Falestine is die!"
Quickly searching for a response that won’t traumatize her, invalidate her or get me in trouble with the teaching platform, I say:
"Palestine is sad, right?"
Maryam repeats:
"Falestine is die."
I say, "Inshallah, they won’t die."
She says, "But Israel is doing for Falestine is die."
She means: Israel is killing Palestine. Of course she's right.
I say, "Yes. It’s very bad, right?"
"Yeah. We like Palestine, not Israel," she declares.
"Yeah, I know. Israel is doing bad things, right?"
"Yeah."
"I think they’re going to stop doing bad things soon," I offer weakly. "They have to stop."
Maryam counters: "Yeah, but they are not stop."
"No," I admit. "Now they don’t stop. Now they’re very bad."
"Israel, they very very very very very very very very very very bad!"
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Maryam is only 6 years old but knows exactly what's going on: Israel is killing the Palestinian population. Israel was ordered to stop killing them. Israel refuses to stop.
Israel is very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very bad. Maryam has absorbed this lesson about "The Jewish State" into her little 6-year-old being.
The world’s children who know what’s happening in Palestine are being traumatized.
Though few of my young Asian students shows signs of knowing what’s happening in Palestine, my Middle Eastern students — from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, UAE, or Egypt — do. They tell me.
They know that kids who look just like them, who have the same names as them, who speak the same language and who believe in the same God as them, are being slaughtered. The fact that a 6-year-old can even conceive that children like her -- real children, and not children far back in history, but children right now -- are being slaughtered -- is unfathomable. And heartbreaking.
And they know who’s doing it.
And they won’t forget. Ever.
So, my fellow Jews who continue to say nothing, or who defend this genocide, don’t expect to remain unscathed. If you plan to do any traveling in other parts of the world, especially where there is a Muslim population, do not be surprised if you are met with frostiness, rudeness, or outright hatred.
Because something that dares to call itself “The Jewish State" has been murdering innocent Arab kids by the tens of thousands, along with their mothers, fathers, grandparents, cousins, friends, teachers, and doctors. And when all this is over, the numbers we have today will likely be double that. And ordinary people anywhere in the world, whose sense of morality hasn’t been deformed by the racist, solipsistic, deluded ideology of Zionism, don’t like that. They don’t like that at all.
So when it happens, please, please, pleeeease don’t embarrass yourselves by playing the victim. No one buys it anymore. Don’t start screaming “Anti-Semitism!” Because it won’t be anti-semitism.
It will be the logical result of a murderous, insane country hijacking your religion, committing genocide in its name and in the name of your ancestors murdered in the Holocaust…
…while most of y'all either cheered it on, or cravenly sat silent and let it happen, or performatively wrung your hands to demonstrate that you are not complete monsters... but still sat by, refusing to say what needed to be said, and letting it happen.
And then you will see that “The Jewish State” not only put a target on the backs of the Palestinians, they put one on yours as well.
And Hallelujah! Maybe then you will care. 👏