My child is the age of the Gaza genocide
The Ghosts of Israel's Future, Part II
Edit 10 February 2025: a version of this piece was published in German on taz.de under the title „Mein Kind ist so alt wie der Genozid in Gaza“
The Palestinian genocide in Gaza started a week before my child was born.
I was immediately drawn to the footage of premature babies in Gaza who were in incubators at the same time she was. Most of those babies were born later - and therefore less premature - than my child, but the genocidal logic of the Israeli state singles out untermenschen1 children which means that those souls were always at far more risk than she was.2
As our situation was incredibly precarious,3 I had initially intended to shield myself from Gaza-related news in order to preserve my energy for her and also because, in retrospect, I was anticipating some version of this nightmare to befall on Lebanon at some point.4 This was not possible, so I resigned to "I won't look at Gaza footage while in the room with her." This was not possible, so I just minimized it as much as I could.5
Part of the difficulty was precisely because I was by her incubator all the time until she got out of it in December, so I found myself obsessively following the stories of premature babies in Gaza. This preceded any desire to 'understand' the genocide, which is what I would usually do as a coping mechanism. In 'normal' times,6 I would go through as many articles as I could in as many languages as I could, spend hours chatting and exchanging ideas with friends from the region whose reflections I value, and somehow try to synthesize all of that in the form of an essay or podcast episode or both.
I was unable to do that this time around, at least not for several months. I had, however, confidently concluded immediately that any state that does this to premature babies has no 'right to self-defense,' no matter the number of op-eds in The Atlantic or The New York Times seeking to convince their readers otherwise. It was an easy conclusion to reach. Israel lost that supposed right the second they made it policy to enact collective punishment, as their Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced just two days after the October 7 massacre by Hamas:
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
My conviction was based on a simple principle. If your existence requires the punishment of everyone in an area including babies, you do not deserve to exist in your current format. No state has an inherent right to exist, and the fact that states maintain this monopoly on violence remains one of the worst injustices of our world today. Humans have a right to exist, which is why it's called the declaration of human rights and not the "declaration of how a small number of powerful men have the right to impose their will on millions of humans." The more-than-human world has a right to exist as its very existence is both inherently valuable in addition to being a requirement for human existence. States do not that have that right.
Whether as empires, quasi-empires or whatever the f- the US or Russia or China are today, or 'simply' nation states, these social constructs come and go, rarely lasting more than a few centuries, and more often than not barely more than a few decades. Netanyahu's desire to remain in power is not morally superior to a child's right to exist. It should be that simple and yet, due to the unwavering commitment of Israel's allies to allow it to do whatever it wants with our bodies, here we are.
My child is the age of the Gaza genocide.
This is something that I had no say in, but I cannot ignore it, and I don't want to. Every breath she's taken so far in her life has been in a world where Israel murders children exactly like her, and this is a world I am forced to face as her father. Doing anything less would be unfair to her as I would be depriving her of the tools she will need to understand the world she is inheriting.
She will one day learn that she's Lebanese and Palestinian herself and that her great-grandfather, my paternal grandfather, was exiled from the land on which the state killing children like her was built on.7 She will learn that the majority of Gaza's population, nearly half of whom are children today, are themselves refugees from the lands on which the state killing them was built on. The inherent injustice of this reality alone will be, I would hope, sufficient to push her to understand why such arrangements are imposed on millions in the first place.
I want her to be able to have a strong sense of right and wrong, and this starts with having a resilient, foundational knowledge in the recent and distant past. I want her to avoid the pitfalls of older generations, those who have taken the post-WWII or post-cold war world for granted with their associated assumptions of neoliberal capitalism, endless economic growth for the few at the expense of the majority on a finite planet, and the dominance of a handful of governments over everyone else.
In his 2008 book Reappraisals, Tony Judt noted that we were already in the process of forgetting the 20th century even before it was over, and now "its quarrels and its dogmas, its ideals and its fears are slipping into the obscurity of mis-memory." I think this particularly explains the USA, the only 'developed' nation with the capacity to inflict endless wars on others without suffering large numbers of civilian losses, or even its population needing to know what's happening.8
To be a moral person, she will need to sit with a reflection James Baldwin offered four decades before she was born, when he wrote that:
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.
This means that the children in that concentration camp of two million people are being terrorised by a nation that is incapable of morality. Indeed, I think it's fair to say that any nation that has reached the stage of genocide does not know how to go back from it, which is why Israel could not stop at Gaza and have since aimed their weapons of mass destruction at my home country.
In other words, once the perceived enemy is 'defeated', and the possibility of life reproducing itself made nearly impossible, that ideology must set its vision on more places. If it doesn't, it consumes itself.
This is why she will also have to reckon with the fact that Israel came for Lebanon next, the country where her father grew up, where her great-grandfather was exiled to, where both of her grandparents survived fifteen years of civil war as members of the Lebanese Red Cross.
What this also means, and perhaps more importantly, is that she will have to, as difficult as it will be, remember that those committing the genocide are themselves very human. They may be 'moral monsters,' to use a Baldwinian terminology again, but they are very much fully human.9 There is nothing that they're capable of that she isn't also herself capable of. She must choose not to become that person every time.
This often makes it more difficult to understand, which is why there are no shortages of conspiracy theories in the Middle East. It is much easier to imagine a calculated grand plan that explains your suffering than to view it as more likely the 'simple' result of power being wielded by a handful of men and women who face no consequences for their actions.
Understanding this reality means reckoning with the infrastructure of our world that allows someone like Netanyahu, another mere mortal like anyone else, to inflict so much suffering on so many people and still be in power (or Putin, Assad, Biden, Xi Jinping - take your pick). It means going into the commodification of human existence itself,10 how we ended up here, and how we might get out of it.
Being in that NICU by her side allowed me to understand Baldwin's reflections in my bones. I knew what it was like to let your child in a hospital overnight, so how must it feel to let your child in a hospital indefinitely? With Gaza in mind, this question gets an added layer: How must it feel let your child in a hospital indefinitely with Israel as your neighbor? One more layer: How must it feel let your child in a hospital indefinitely with Israel as your neighbor given that you know how the Israeli state views children like yours? These were my children too, and I couldn't do anything to save them.
This precious life that you barely had the time to experience, the things you want to show them, the ways you want to protect them and nurture them. What happens to one's mind when you realize that the world you live in has no space in its impoverished imagination for you or your child? Do you force yourself to accept that you may never see them reach their first birthday, and let alone watch them grow healthy into a well-surrounded and loved adult?
What does that do to you as a parent?
Video: "Not In Our Name" Jewish protests against the genocide in Gaza inspired by the James Baldwin quote. October 2023:
Her great-grandfather, my paternal grandfather, was among the over 700,000 Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed to make way for the ethno-supremacist state of Israel in 1948, the same one coming for those fragile babies in their incubators today. They will never meet one another as he passed away in 2020, but I feel his haunting presence and she likely will too. There was a man who lived to his 80s in permanent exile until death,11 and why? Because grander narratives that were forged in Europe - European antisemitism, the European Holocaust, European Zionism - came for him, his house, his entire world in Palestine.
To sit with that brutal fact, she may one day realise, is to sit with a world that is able to function without self-reflection, without the mere whiff of a serious thought. The so-called international community is as mediocre as it is destructive, and this can make it all more unbearable. It's one thing to know you're in danger. It's one thing to know that a more powerful army can destroy your world. It's another to realize that those with such capabilities do not even have to think about it too much, let alone face consequences.12
This is a video of one the Al-Nasr NICU mentioned below.
Content warning: the images are blurred, but it is still footage of dead babies.
At the end of November 2023, a Palestinian journalist was able to enter Al-Nasr Hospital in northern Gaza. The most moral army in the world had forced its doctors, nurses and other medical workers to evacuate with 30 minutes notice, and they were forced to leave five babies behind in the hope that they'd be protected by the incubators long enough for their return. The parents were forced by the IDF at gunpoint to abandon their children as well, with the IDF blocking the hospital with tanks. The IDF never allowed them to go back, and their babies were left to die of thirst or because they were unable to regulate their body temperatures without the incubators, whichever came first.
As I was learning back then, babies need to be fed via tube. Ideally they'd get their parent's breast milk immediately, including (especially) if it's still at the colostrum stage. The breast milk naturally gets richer the more the baby grows to meet their needs. If this is not possible, donated milk is an option or, if unavailable or insufficient, formula will be used. Depending on the formula it may need to be fortified according to the needs of the baby. For that to be assessed, the baby is monitored 24/7 by medical workers with the aid of monitoring devices. If the baby gets sick, there may be a need to isolate them in a separate room to avoid passing whatever they have to other babies.
Video: dozens of premature babies at Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza were visited by Al Jazeera before being moved to Rafah and then Egypt. As far as I know, of the 28 who made it to Egypt 11 were fighting serious infections at the time and were in critical conditions. I don't know what happened to them or the remaining babies or their parents.
Content warning: some of these babies are clearly struggling to feed and you can see their emaciated bodies.
All of this happened to us, from needing donated milk at first and then needing to fortify the breastmilk and then using fortified formula while also adding vitamins and medicines. We also had to use extra-protective equipment when she got a virus. The machines allowed us to know when she was desaturating (a drop in blood oxygen levels) or when her heart rate drops below the normal range (bradycardia). Our access to healthcare also allowed doctors to assess her risk of retinopathy of prematurity and whether she was in need of regular fundoscopies to prevent complications that can lead to blindness. She was, and after a year she's nearly done with them today.
The stable environment she was in meant that her body was able to slowly learn how to self-regulate even after she got out of the incubator. It meant her learning to drink milk, which is particularly difficult for premature babies as they experience nasogastric and/or orogastric discomfort due to the feeding tube. We quite literally spent weeks, multiple times a day, doing oral stimulation therapy encouraging her to take milk, first with cotton buds (q-tips) and eventually with the bottle itself. This was touch and go for some time. The feeding tubes meant that she was more likely to throw up, either because her digestive system was too immature and/or because the tubes themselves triggered vomiting. When that happened, which was often, doctors had to re-assess when to feed her again, and how much. The oral stimulation therapy allowed her to eventually enjoy feeding time and dissociate feeding from tube-induced discomfort.
At the same time, skin-to-skin contact (kangaroo care) is important and we got to do it from day 2, first one parent at a time, once a day, and eventually more frequently. This is the photo I used at the top of this article. This meant her getting out of the incubator for short periods of time and being placed on our bare chests. The body temperature of the parent kept her warm as she couldn't yet self-regulate her body temperature otherwise. We did it every day for 4.5 months. Skin-to-skin meant not just warmth but stress relief, better breathing, better sleeping, and so on. It makes it easier for the premature baby who 'should' have been in the womb to get the closest approximation in care outside of it. The more premature the baby is, the more crucial it is. In our case, she was born at 25 weeks,13 so it was extremely important from the start that all of these protocols are put in place.
We had the privilege of being in a stable environment in a well-resourced hospital. We also had the privilege of her racialisation as an Arab being (mostly) 'compensated' by her white-passing Italian-ness. I avoided bringing up her Palestinian-ness to any member of the hospital staff. I am not suggesting that it would have necessarily meant different treatment, but Switzerland's stance in support of Israel's 'right to self-defence' led me to conclude that it's better if this premature child didn't have to deal with the consequences of White supremacy just yet. She will have to eventually anyway.
But this was the extent of the danger I was in. Besides a few racist comments from a couple of staff members, I did not feel uncomfortable there.14 To avoid the worst of it, I essentially refreshed my code-switching muscles to make sure my racialised identity in Europe didn't bring her any additional risks to what she already had to face. No keffyehs outside of the house and no shirts with Arabic written on it, just in case. Having sufficient skills in masking from existing as an Arab man for over three decades, as well as speaking french, was all I needed in those moments.
None of that is of any use if you're faced with the footsoldiers of an ethno-supremacist state that views your baby's very existence as a demographic threat. Your baby's death is a desired outcome for the state that just sent its tanks to the hospital's doorsteps. What would one do in such a situation? You cannot rescue your baby, especially if they're very premature, as they would not be able to breathe or drink or eat or even regulate their body temperature without the incubator for too long. After all, the incubator serves to replace the womb until the baby is strong enough to do at least some of these on their own.
As you can imagine, having a premature baby is usually unexpected15 but there are certain conditions that the mother may have that might make it more likely. Having endometriosis is one example, being forced to drink polluted water because Isreal bombed all of Gaza's clean water reserves is another.16 If you do suspect a premature birth, you need to think of a c-section. This has to be done with anaesthesia and in a sterile environment, obviously. That is, unless you're in Gaza and Israel blocked essential medical equipment from entering the strip, let alone the hospital where your baby is. So now not only are you terrified for your own child, you also don't know whether you will survive birthing them or, if you do, how long it would take you to recover from what is essentially major surgery, if ever.
Image: IDF soldiers with prints on their shirts showing a pregnant woman followed by “1 Shot 2 Kills" and another one showing a mourning mother of a child who was just sniped with “better use Durex” (the condom brand). This is from 2009 and was first exposed by Haaretz journalist Uri Blau. It gets worse btw. Here's the original story.
Again, you're in Gaza, the place with the highest percentage of child amputees in the world because long ago Israel gave itself the right to maim as part of 'self-defence.’
You know what's awaiting you. Given how young Gaza's population is,17 you likely already know other parents who are forced to use the same cloth to change their babies as diapers are unavailable, parents who have to prepare formula because they are themselves suffering from malnutrition and are physically unable to produce breast milk.
Video: a malnutritioned child in Gaza filmed by UNHCR end of August 2024 (archived here). The boy was born at 3kg and is now 2.7kg. For comparison, my child was born at 640g and is now over 6kg. Losing weight at this young age is dangerous.
Content warning: the preview shows it, the child is emaciated.
You'd also know that those same parents can't purify the water to use for the formula unless they're lucky enough to find a fire (and/or gas) somewhere to boil it first, or if they got lucky with sterilising tablets. If they do, they need to also plan ahead because the baby will need regular feeding18 even if you are forced to be on the move once again because Israel has decided to force you out of a zone they told you was a safe zone. Again, and again, and again, and then one more time after that. If you're unlucky, Israel will just bomb the safe zone without telling you. Or they may bomb it, wait for the rescue workers to come, and then bomb them.
This is what awaits a parent of any child in Gaza, let alone the parent of a premature child after surviving the ordeal of a NICU surrounded by Israeli tanks, where the sound of the machines' beeps - which were my hell for 4.5 months - are complemented by the constant buzzing of drones and the terrifying sound of war planes breaking the sound barrier all around you, courtesy of American, German, Italian and other Western taxes.
Day after day you are confronted with the possibility that this small machine, this incubator serving as an imperfect substitute for your own womb, may have to face the might of American bombs dropped on top of the hospital where your little life needs to grow at its own pace. There are no iron dome for premature babies, no infrastructure by the civilized world for the untermenschen wretched of the Earth.
And because this is Israel, you cannot even sacrifice yourself to save your child as they will come for your entire family tree.
Refaat Alareer was murdered by Israel on 6 December 2023 with his brother Salah and Salah's son Mohammed, sister Asmaa and Asmaa's three children Alaa, Yahia, and Mohammed.
Alareer, a brilliant writer and poet that I had the privilege to get to know since Israel's last major war on Gaza in 2014, was sheltering in an UNRWA school with his wife and children when he received a threat via phone call, forcing him to move to his sister's appartment. The Israelis waited for him to be inside with his family to strike them.
But again, this is Israel, so they did not stop there: on 26 April 2024, they bombed where his eldest daughter Shaimaa was living, killing her along with her husband Mohammed Siyam as well as their newborn baby Abd al-Rahman.
Video: Jehad Abusalim on DN talking about Refaat and his family.
Podast: Refaat was interviewed on Popular Front shortly before being murdered
Before being murdered along with her partner and child, Shaimaa had written this to her father:
I have beautiful news for you, I wish I could convey it to you while you are in front of me, I present to you your first grandchild. Do you know, my father, that you have become a grandfather? This is your grandson Abd al-Rahman whom I have long imagined you carrying, but I never imagined that I would lose you early even before you see him.
Image: this is what the Israelis left of Shaimaa, Mohammed and baby Abd al-Rahman's home.
After all is said and done, after this Israeli-made hell on Earth is over for the Palestinians and now for the Lebanese too, there will be one thing that the Israelis will never be able to do. They will never be able to repeat Golda Meir's proclamation that “we can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children” without it being exposed as the last resort of a cowardly society incapable of morality.
This haunting is now Israel's and Israel's alone. It is up to Israeli society to decide whether they are able to live up to the moral consequences of the genocide they have been inflicting on the children of Gaza. They cannot claim not to know. It is already the most documented genocide in the world and it has been ongoing for an entire year, and counting. At the same time, we musn't stop putting pressure wherever we can to end this genocidal and apartheid state.
I'll end on this note, or rather a poem by Primo Levi.
Of course, I recommend reading Refaat Al-Areer's poem “If I Must Die” (or listen to one of many recitations of it) as well, but I wish to end on If This Is A Man (Stuart Woolf translation).
You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find on returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.
May the children of this genocidal generation of Israelis turn their faces from their elders.
Literally ‘sub-human’ in German, it's what the Nazis used to describe Jews and other non-Aryans they viewed as inferior to them (Roma, Slavs etc). I'm using it here due to how Israelis often talk about Palestinians.
I mentioned this story on the first episode recorded after October 7th: Special Episode: Roundtable on Israel-Palestine w/ Dana El Kurd, Orly Noy, and Yair Wallach recorded on October 28th 2023. Also relevant is this episode recorded in May 2024: Raising a Brown Child in a Time of Genocide w/ Nikesh Shukla, Dana El Kurd and Fabien Goa.
She spent her first 4.5 months at the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), having been born at 640g (1.41 pounds) and 26 cm (10.24 inches)
There is a concept called the anticipation of violence (by Sami Hermez) which is useful to keep in mind to understand post-1990 Lebanese thinking. I won't get into it here, but the quick TLDR is that it means what you probably think it does: people who live in post-1990 Lebanon expect violence to occur in the near future. When, we don't know, but it is expected. Therefore, the present is experience as just being 'in the meanwhile', as something to survive until the next round of violence puts everything in question once more.
Some hard rules were: no videos of dying or dead children while I was in the NICU. I did my best to stick to that rule religiously, although a few times simply scrolling through social media made it impossible to avoid. I sometimes put my phone in the locker to avoid that risk.
Whatever that means for someone like me.
She will also have to reckon with the fact that her country of citizenship, Italy, was among those furnishing that state with the means to kill children like her.
At the very least, it goes a long way in explaining how its people can be so oblivious to how fast their government can destroy entire worlds, and how long-lasting or even permanent the effects can be, like when an American bomb is dropped on Palestinian hospitals. Even if we include 9/11, the number of American civilians killed in wars or 'conflicts' in the past century remains lower than the number of Palestinian children alone in just a few months, if not a few weeks.
To bring back Baldwin again here, is a society capable of tolerating and even celebrating this capable of morality? The ongoing popularity of the genocide among Israeli Jews suggests otherwise. This means that after all of this is done, after the Israeli state kills as many people as they manage to kill, maim as many as they manage to maim, and/or permanently traumatise as many people as they manage to traumatise, Israeli society will be left with its own moral ruins. No society withstands this level of hatred, one that is so thoroughly widespread it's indoctrinated the minds of children chanting 'we don't want Arabs in school.' If Israeli Jewish parents tell their children they don't want your Arab child in Israeli schools, what hope is left for your Arab child born at the bottom of the ethno-supremacist hierarchy built by the Israelis between the river and the sea?
Anecdotally, I have been watching the bombing of my city, Beirut, on Al Jazeera's live YouTube channel. As I don't have YouTube premium, this means that before tuning in to know which neighborhoods Israel is currently obliterating, I am forced to sit through ads of smiling people being very excited about some shampoo or life insurance or something.
So scared was he to identify as a Palestinian in a deeply xenophobic Lebanon that I did not even find out until I was already an adult that no, he was not a Roman Catholic from Zahleh but in fact a Melkite (Greek Catholic) from Haifa. Also: It is a deeply bizarre experience to drive to the Israeli-Lebanon border, open a Map application and realise that you're currently closer to Haifa than you are to Beirut. This gave me an appreciation of just how traumatising it must be to be a Palestinian refugee living near that border as you could, in theory (I say in theory because it is usually very difficult for non-citizens to go to the border areas as you need to get permission from the Lebanese army) drive up and see where your grandmother's from with your own eyes.
I don't know what's worse to be honest with you, but one person who comes to mind is Antony Blinken, a man so profoundly mediocre he is able to publish an op-ed praising his own record despite it being diametrically opposed to what it is in the real world.
Which is just one week after viability.
Besides it being a NICU I mean.
We thought it was going to be end of January 2024 and instead it was October 2023.
I suspect that there are higher-than-average premature births in Gaza for that reason.
70% under the age of 30, 48% under the age of 18
Every three/four hours or so.
To "like" these words feels impossible. Breathing slowly as I read. Taking my time. Thank you. 💔