When the Child Becomes a "Saboteur"

As the world watches the events of the great war in the Gulf and the Israeli-American aggression against Iran, discussing thousands of tons of bombs, airstrikes, and ballistic missiles, military budgets, international alliances, an energy crisis, and conditions to end the fighting, smaller wars are taking place on the ground in Palestinian villages in the West Bank. Away from the screens of strategic analysis, villages are subjected to attacks by settlers and incursions by the army, with casualties arising, some of which are reported and others that remain without media coverage, due to the large number of these crimes that have become a daily routine.

Just before dawn on this Sunday, while the eyes of the world were focused on the Gulf and Tel Aviv, a special force from the occupation army killed four members of one family.

Each time such a crime is committed, the same question arises: To what extent can the occupation go in its barbarity when it becomes a daily reality in which a person loses the ability to see the humanity of others?

A whole family from the village of Tamoun in Nablus district: father Ali Khaled Bani Odeh, his wife, and their two children, ages five and seven, while two other children survived. In the first few minutes after the incident, the usual narrative emerged in some Israeli media: a special unit killed four "saboteurs." A single word is quickly said as if it explains everything. These media outlets do not apologize for describing the children as saboteurs after the truth is revealed, but instead continue to publish their news and analyses as usual.

This was a conversation about a family returning in their car from a recreational outing in Nablus. According to one of the two children who survived the massacre, the head of the family and his wife had postponed buying holiday clothes for their children until the next day.

The manipulation of language turns into a cover for the crime. Once the victims are defined as "saboteurs," accountability for the perpetrators of the crime disappears. The only justification for these soldiers is that the vehicle carrying the victims did not stop or that it moved towards them. The surviving child of the massacre testified that the soldiers beat him and his surviving brother, hearing them describe his family members who were martyred as dogs, while the occupation forces prevented medical teams from reaching the car with the martyr family until after a delay.

At that moment, the discussion is no longer about ambiguity or mistakes in target identification, but about a complete doctrine that strips the victims of their humanity.

The narrative of the occupation has been exposed and cannot be "wrapped up" because among the victims are children, a wife, and a husband. But what if there had been four young men in the car who had gone out for recreation in Nablus and were killed on their return to their village in an ambush? Of course, the crime would be passed off as if they were, apparently, armed or were about to do something against the occupation forces, and when the truth emerged, perhaps the soldiers would appear as if they had performed a heroic act.

For decades, the names of Palestinian children have become tragic human symbols, and the examples are more than can be counted. The most brutal among them took place during the last genocide in the Gaza Strip, with the immense numbers of child victims.

The language of numbers hides the scale of the humanitarian tragedy behind it. When one child is killed, it is a tragedy, but when thousands are killed, it turns into a cold statistic in political discourse. When the killing of Palestinians en masse, entering their homes and farms to kill them there, becomes a daily habit, the event turns into something taken for granted, coexisting with the majority of Israeli public opinion, which is subjugated to the poisons of the media and extremist fascist incitement.

In the case of Tamoun, the story returns to its simple and harsh beginning: children were killed, and other children remained alive carrying the memory of that horrific night. These stories have repeated since the year of the Nakba until today, but in more brutal and savage forms. We still hear from elderly survivors of the massacres when they were children, recounting their testimonies to the generations that followed.

The occupation does not only mean control over land and properties, nor does it only mean committing barbaric murders, but also what it leaves in the souls of humiliation, fear, anger, and indelible scars, as well as grudges and desires for revenge. And when it reaches the point where a child is viewed as a "saboteur," the problem is not in a single incident, but in a whole reality infected with the dirtiest racial and racist theories that strip the other of his humanity, making his killing something easily justified in discourse. When the child becomes a "saboteur," the crime becomes a fleeting news item, and human conscience becomes the last victim.