Content area
Full text
I am the Palestinian David child wielding a single stone
Against the Israeli Goliath.
I am not afraid,
For truth is with me and God is on my side.
IfI die,
A choir of angels will honor me
And later, my parents will grasp my outstretched hand
And join me in Heaven.
Palestinian A ml, Edna Yaghi (November 13,2002)
Popular Palestinian website poem
INTRODUCTION
Adult conceptualizations of young Palestinian minds range from celebrating the indomitable little spirit to rebuke of the destructive deviance resulting from a shattered or manipulated childhood. The phenomenon of children trapped in a hopeless political quagmire desperately seeking family, societal and religious approval with reckless defiance is complex. These "children of the stones", as popularized by the Arab media, have been perhaps the single most important factor in sustaining the Palestinian resistance of the Israeli occupation of their lands. With the Palestinians Authority or militants unable to counter the overwhelming military superiority of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), it is the child protestors who continue to engage and frustrate the occupiers. Stirring images of children on the frontline do more than the confused strategies of the Arab politicians to keep international attention on the smoldering dispute despite international apathy. Yet, these children with stones are not made of stone and pay a disproportionately heavy price (Mansour, 1990; Kuttab, 1988; El Sarraj, 1996), particularly with calls for withdrawal of their entitlement to basic rights as children.
The children of the Al- Nakba ('major catastrophe') among the estimated 750,000 Palestinians expelled from their homelands during 1947-48, are now among the disconcerted grandparents watching the continuing conflict consume yet another generation. Throughout the Palestinian struggle, children have played a range of roles in resistance, though it was the first intifada or uprising (1987-1993) which exposed to the Western world the scale of participation and suffering amongst Palestinian children (Aruri, 1984:250-254; Nixon, 1990). The beginning of the Al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000, however, marks a further escalation not only in the body count of the hundreds of Palestinian children killed and thousands injured but also in the levels of violence children are apparently willing to engage in.
Labeled as irregular child combatants in everyday crossfire, these children are easily relegated as regrettable but largely avoidable...