Henry A. Giroux
In November,
over a year into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a report by the Gaza-based
Community Training Center for Crisis Management produced a grim statistic:
“Nearly all children in the embattled Palestinian enclave believe their death
is imminent — and nearly half of them want to die.”
Palestinian children flee from Israeli bombardment in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on November 6, 2023. MOHAMMED ABED /AFP via Getty Images
It is no wonder
why the statistic, which came from a survey of families with disabled, injured
or unaccompanied children, is so bleak. Amnesty International’s recent report
lays bare the magnitude of the crisis: “Israel’s actions … have brought Gaza’s
population to the brink of collapse. Its brutal military offensive had killed
more than 42,000 Palestinians, including over 13,300 children, and injured over
97,000 more, by 7 October 2024, many of them in direct or deliberately
indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families.”
This
unfathomable suffering — inflicted disproportionately on women and children —
represents a moral abomination, a political travesty, and a militaristic
cruelty of the highest order. The destruction of lives, institutions and
essential humanitarian infrastructure goes beyond the annihilation of a people;
it constitutes an assault on future generations and the very fabric of our
shared humanity. Genocidal language dehumanizes and legitimizes the
unthinkable: an indiscriminate war waged against the most defenseless —
children.
Israel’s war on
Palestinian youth is genocidal — not only in the starvation, maiming and
unimaginable killing of children but in its relentless assault on any viable
notion of what it means for these young people to be valued, human and alive
with hope. It seeks to strip them of their dignity, rendering them invisible
and unworthy in the eyes of the world, as if their lives are expendable, their
dreams inconsequential. This overpowering violence amounts to what we may term
childcide, which is the deliberate or systematic destruction of children,
whether through direct violence, neglect, or the conditions of war and
oppression that render them uniquely vulnerable. It is a traumatic
manifestation of collective failure — a war against innocence, in which the fragile
promise of childhood is extinguished before it can bloom. In Gaza, where
children face relentless bombings, displacement and deprivation, childcide
becomes not just an act of violence but a moral collapse: the erasure of
futures, dreams and entire generations. It is a crime not only against the
child but against humanity itself, leaving behind a void that no words can fill
and no justice can fully repair.
In the U.S., the
violence of childcide manifests more covertly in the censorship and repression
of free speech driven by right-wing politicians, neoliberal educators and a
reactionary billionaire donor class. This assault seeks to stifle the
imagination and critical capacities of young people, eroding their ability to
envision a more just future.
In Gaza,
childcide takes on an overt and devastating form. The violence there kills and
maims children, denies them lifesaving medical treatment, and robs them of
their futures — sometimes their very limbs. The scale of this horror is
staggering, matched only by the indifference or active complicity of nations
like the United States, whose silence or direct support fuels this mass
atrocity.
Under the
incoming Trump administration, these forms of childcide in both the U.S. and
Gaza are likely to intensify.
The War on
Children
In October,
close to 100 U.S. health care providers who have volunteered in the Gaza Strip
over the past year sent a letter to President Joe Biden and Vice President
Kamala Harris detailing “every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive
care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head
or chest on a regular or even a daily basis. It is impossible that such
widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the
course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli
civilian and military authorities.” Put differently, many of these children
were deliberately killed by Israeli snipers and other troops.
This violence is
not merely an attack on bodies but on the spirit, denying Palestinians the
right to be seen as fully human, to belong to a community that nurtures their
future, and to inhabit a world where intimacy and compassion prevail over
violence and despair. Such cruelty is not just a crime against a people — it is
a wound to the very essence of our shared existence.
The face of
childcide was on full display for the world to see when news reports and videos
circulated revealing a teenage boy, Sha’ban al-Dalou, burning alive in a tent
in a refugee camp which had been hit by an Israeli airstrike. Zak Witus,
writing in The Guardian describes what he saw:
I clicked on the accompanying video and I could not
believe what I saw: an inferno blazing, people running around screaming, and
there, amidst the flame, a body writhing, crackling; a raised arm, reaching out
for help, still attached to an IV. I waited for the following morning to share
the video, until the event had been reported by reputable news outlets, because
the images appeared too gruesome to be real — like they were something out of a
movie — but they were real: an Israeli airstrike hit near the grounds of
al-Aqsa Martyrs’ hospital in the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah and killed
at least four people. The man that we saw burning alive? His name was Sha’ban
al-Dalou, a 19-year-old software engineering student.
The killing of
Sha’ban al-Dalou is not an isolated act — it is part of a war of annihilation.
How can any nation continue to support Israel, a rogue state pursuing a policy
of extermination? How can the U.S., with full knowledge of this genocidal war
waged with impunity, not act to oppose it? This is not just a war of brutality
— it is also a damning indictment of Western European nations, who pride
themselves on being democracies yet remain complicit through their refusal to
condemn or obstruct the mass killing and extermination of Palestinian women and
children. The evil of fascism lies not only in its acts of systemic violence
but also in the silence of those who enable, justify and profit from it.
As Iain Overton,
executive director of the United Kingdom-based group Action on Armed Violence,
notes, “The world’s failure to protect Gaza’s children is a moral failing on a
monumental scale. We must act decisively and compassionately to ensure that these
children’s voices are heard and their futures protected.” Parliament member
Jeremy Corbyn goes further, stating that, “Every single supplier of arms to
Israel has blood on its hands — and the world will never forgive them.”
Of all those
complicit, the Biden administration has the most blood on its hands. Even as
Biden’s presidency comes to an end and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has
been declared a war criminal by the International Court of Justice, Biden
refuses to end the U.S.’s complicity in Israel’s war crimes. As Jeffrey D.
Sachs notes, Biden has turned “the U.S. military and federal budget over to
Netanyahu for his disastrous wars … which have been an unmitigated disaster for
the American people, bleeding the U.S. Treasury of trillions of dollars,
squandering America’s standing in the world, making the U.S. Complicit in his
genocidal policies, and bringing the world closer to World War III.”
Gaza Is a
Warning
The elimination
of the Palestinian people and the genocidal war against its children are not
merely a campaign of death; they are a calculated assault on history, heritage
and memory, systematically erasing an entire generation and leaving behind a
void where lives, dreams and the promise of a future once flourished. This
assault is being committed by an authoritarian state sustained by a cruelty so
profound it extinguishes any semblance of morality, justice or freedom, leaving
only the desolation of unchecked cruelty. James Baldwin once wrote, “The
children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I
am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be
incapable of morality.” Today, this form of immorality is everywhere — it has
become a signifier of power, a weapon wielded by those who conflate might with
right.
The dream of
democracy, once a beacon of hope, has been hollowed out by the militarized
machinery of death. In Gaza, this machinery lays bare its darkest truth:
Children are not only expendable but deliberately targeted, their deaths a
chilling symbol of a deeper intent. Here, the global war on youth reaches its
most grotesque conclusion. The bodies of Palestinian children litter the ruins
of Gaza, serving as grim declarations — a warning that not only fighters and
militants must be extinguished, but the very possibility of a Palestinian
future must be annihilated.
What is
unfolding in Gaza is not an isolated atrocity; it is a preview of the insidious
fascism colonizing the globe. The deliberate targeting of the most vulnerable
reveals a chilling calculus of power, one that sees children not as the bearers
of hope but as obstacles to a supremacist vision of conquest. Their destruction
is meant to erase not only their lives but also the memory and resilience of
their people, ensuring that the very idea of Palestine is consigned to
oblivion.
This is the
bitter lesson of our time: the war on youth, waged in countless ways across the
world, finds its endpoint in Gaza. There, children are not merely collateral
damage; they are the targets of a brutal ideology that seeks to eradicate the
possibility of a Palestinian tomorrow. If we cannot rise to this moment, if we
cannot defend the sanctity of childhood and the universality of human rights,
we risk forfeiting what it means to be human — as well as the ideals, promises
and hopes for a radical democracy.
How We Resist
Resistance must
begin by exposing the fascist threat for what it truly is — a systemic and
calculated assault on democracy, justice and human dignity. This is not simply
a matter of defending the rule of law; it demands a mobilization of collective
passions and civic courage to fight repression and ignite mass resistance. The
fight for justice can only commence with a clear recognition of the state of
injustice that grips the U.S. today. This is both a political and pedagogical
imperative.
For resistance
to be lasting and meaningful, people must grasp not only how these violations
shape their own lives but also how they harm their neighbors and erode the
broader social fabric. This recognition fosters solidarity, building the
foundation for resistance that is rooted in shared purpose and mutual
accountability.
When the
political and the personal intersect, thinking becomes a form of action. It is
this interplay — between the intimate realities of individual lives and the
structural conditions of the social order — that fuels movements capable of
transformative change. Only then can resistance transcend fleeting gestures and
ignite a sustained fight for justice and democracy.
We must create
spaces and strategies that enable people to question, think critically and
reclaim their agency. This means investing not only in direct action but also
in educational efforts that cultivate a collective understanding of how
capitalism and imperialism dehumanize and divide, eroding both social
responsibility and democratic ideals. Resistance requires not just acts of
defiance but the formation of a new language, a new imaginary, and new
institutions capable of inspiring solidarity and sustaining a culture of
resistance.
The intertwined
crises of scholasticide and childcide represent not merely a breakdown in
politics and morality but a failure of ideas and critical consciousness. What
is needed is an ongoing struggle over ideas — a battle for radical imagination
and awareness as the foundation for mass resistance. The staggering
inequalities of wealth and power must not only be named and addressed but
systematically dismantled. The stakes are too high to ignore: democracy itself,
the lives of the marginalized, the futures of young people, and the survival of
the planet are all at risk.
Palestine
exemplifies the resilience and power of such resistance, where education under
siege becomes a weapon against erasure, and the act of learning transforms into
a form of defiance.
Popular
education initiatives, underground schools and steadfast communities refusing
to abandon their heritage are living testimonies to the unyielding Palestinian
character. The spirit of Palestinian resistance embodies the moral and
political essence of collective courage, unwavering determination and an
unrelenting struggle for freedom, justice and sovereignty against overwhelming
odds. Their struggle reveals that even in the face of unrelenting oppression,
the collective imagination for justice and freedom can thrive.
In her poem, “We
Teach Life, Sir,” Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah touches on these themes,
refuting a common refrain from U.S. pundits that Palestinians “teach their
children to hate.” Instead, Ziadah asserts, “We Palestinians teach life after
they have occupied the last sky. We teach life after they have built their
settlements and apartheid walls, after the last skies.” A multiracial,
multi-class movement must absorb these lessons of life. We must draw
inspiration from this steadfastness, transcending its divisions, and uniting
around a shared commitment to confronting and defeating both Trumpism and the
neoliberal fascism that made it possible.
As I have argued
before, under these circumstances and at this juncture in history, resistance
is not optional — it is an absolute necessity. To resist is to reclaim hope,
justice and the possibility of a radically better future, drawing strength from
the enduring examples of those who, like Palestinians, refuse to relinquish
their humanity or their dreams for liberation.
No comments:
Post a Comment