There are no children here
By 
The last time Gazans tried resistance on a large scale, it was during the Great March of Return, which began in 2018. Every Friday for over a year, demonstrators walked to the Israel-Gaza border to protest the blockade and demand their land back. In response the Israeli military killed 223 of them and injured nearly 8,000 more. One IDF sniper, speaking to Haaretz, said that he shot 42 Palestinians in the knee over the course of one day of protests. Journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh was fatally shot by Israeli forces in 2022 while doing her job; the IDF denied responsibility before reluctantly admitting it could have been one of its soldiers, then declined to identify or hold anyone accountable for her killing. At Abu Aqleh’s funeral, Israeli police kicked and beat the mourners carrying her casket. Look beyond the flashpoints that reach the international news cycle, and every day there is another instance of someone being beaten, maimed, or murdered in order to maintain the Palestinian population’s status as subordinate. “The world would be better off if it had more actual, committed, principled pacifists,” the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò wrote. “But I suspect that what we have instead are mostly people who believe that violence is only the legitimate province of some people, and what is morally required of everyone else is submission.”
The bulk of the Western media has consistently presented this occupation as a fairly matched conflict, ignoring the stark ratio of Israeli to Palestinian casualties and injuries in the past 15 years. In news coverage, the Israeli’s life is considered infinitely more valuable than the Palestinian’s: when Israelis are described as “killed,” while Palestinians are “dead”; when a headline reports that a protestor was shot without identifying who fired the gun; when a CNN host allows a sitting U.S. senator to call for genocide. Mainstream media takes no interest in framing the Palestinian as an equal human, only as an equal combatant. The irony is rich when a clueless celebrity shares a photo of who they think are vulnerable Israelis, then deletes it when it turns out they are actually frightened Gazan children. It becomes a choking hazard when another prays for Israel while sharing a photo of a bombed-out section of Gaza.
I have Jewish friends who have close family in Israel. Their rage and grief is overwhelming. They are shocked, understandably, that the people around them, including their friends, can go on with their daily lives as if nothing has happened, as if today is just another day.
Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.