Excerpt: The killing of children is the point.
It’s a familiar headline, any time Israel launches yet another attack: “Several children killed as Israel pounds Gaza refugee camp.” Elsewhere, UNICEF tells us about “Eight Palestinian children killed in the Gaza Strip last night.” Even NBC, a mainstream American news outlet, feels compelled to note that “Israel airstrikes kill 8 children” in a headline that includes news of the destruction of a building that housed the AP and Al Jazeera offices.
In war and peace, the death of children always incites the most sympathy. In war-like states of being, as in the United States where Black and brown people are always under attack from a surveillant and punitive state that hunts them down through policing, the murder of a child is considered especially egregious. When Adam Toledo was gunned down by a police officer, public outrage came swiftly and even Chicago’s mayor—who hectored Black teens for not masking while ignoring the white adults walking around doing the same—felt compelled to simulate weeping in public.
Of course, the child-ness of children in such circumstances is entirely contingent upon their perceived innocence. Toledo dropped his gun seconds before he was shot. If he had been killed with a gun in his hand, there would have been little outrage over his death which would have been dismissed as yet another moment in the “war against crime.” Twenty minutes before the Derek Chauvin verdict, Ma’Khia Bryant was gunned down, with four shots, by a policeman. Her murder was justified on the grounds that she was threatening others with a knife. She was 16, but there was not much sympathy for her. Despite being a foster child (which, in the United States, means a life of insecurity and, often, abuse, leading to ungovernable and usually untreated rage and depression), Bryant was, in the eyes of her murderer and the public, simply a monstrous animal that needed to be put down.
When it comes to Israel and the killing of children, it makes sense for those bringing attention to that country’s brutality to draw attention to the killing of children, a seemingly irrational and particularly heartless act. But that doesn’t mean we should continue to uncritically engage this familiar narrative without considering the costs. Pointing to the deaths of children has the short-term benefit of inciting shock and anger against Israel, sure, but such a move also obfuscates the real brutality of the Israeli project against Palestinians: genocide.
The point of genocide is simple: exterminate and wipe out an entire people from the earth. Native Americans were subjected to this force during and after first encounters and we could argue that the current system of reservations deprived of resources continues that political agenda. In Germany, the Nazis were bent on the genocide of Jews and this meant the wiping out of millions of men, women, and children. But slavery was different, because it depended not on anhilation but on creating a massive labour force that could literally reproduce itself, often through the rape of female slaves. Slavery was brought about by immense and crushing brutality against the enslaved and even pregnant women were not spared the whip. But because their offspring were needed to continue creating a labour force, pregnant women were whipped while lying on their stomachs which were accommodated by holes dug in the ground.
Once slavery ended, formally, Black Americans were no longer needed and therefore no longer compelled to reproduce: they became, instead, a population that needed to be exterminated. Everything in American culture and politics—from redlining to job discrimination to prisons and surveillance and policing and more—is based on a genocidal impulse towards Black people. The goal is not to to preserve or enable but to exterminate. The trial of Derek Chauvin is a relief to liberals and progressives who might see this as some kind of a turn towards the end of racism, but racism barely describes the unrelenting and genocidal force that sustains and motivates policing, as in the case of George Floyd, Bryant, and thousands of others.
I don’t write this to make connections between the attempted genocide of Black Americans and Palestinians. Unlike many, I don’t find it useful to make parallels between what is happening in the U.S to people of colour under policing and what is happening in Gaza: as leftists, we have to commit ourselves to understanding, diagnosing, and confronting the long and complicated histories of oppressions everywhere. Planing and smoothing all that down into easily understood and supposedly similar fables is a useless strategy and only prevents us from ending brutality everywhere: ending systems of killing requires us to understand how complicated they are in the first place. “From Ferguson to Gaza” is a nice soundbite, but it gets us no closer to ending the violence in both.
Rather, I write this to highlight the issue of genocide and to emphasise that invoking the innocence of children gets us nowhere. If the world’s aversion to Israel is contingent upon the idea of the death of innocents (and innocence itself)1 Edited April 22, 2024: from “the death of innocence” to “the death of innocents (and innocence itself)”, we have lost before we begin. Israel has been unashamedly enacting a genocidal project against Palestinians for a very long time: censure for the death of children is not going to stop it in its tracks. What Israel wants is an end to Palestinians, and killing Palestinian children is part of that project.
The killing of children is not an aberration. The killing of children is the point.
See also: “On Adam Toledo As a Child” and “Against Humanity: Ma’Khia Bryant and George Floyd.”
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Image: Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937.