My daughter’s father is Egyptian. She lived in Cairo with us and extended family from the age of five until she was 11. She always knew her birthday was on a special day, on the 6th of October. The October War with Israel in 1973 and when Egypt won that war on the 6th of October. I wondered if she knew why it was so special in Egypt. Probably not. She was happy it was a national holiday which meant a day off school.
Only recently did she really understand how important the 6th of October was. Aljazeera news was on. My daughter came down and saw the news and asked me what’s happened. That’s when the real opportunity came to explain what was going on. I wondered where to start in my response to her question. This wasn’t an explanation about what’s happened today on 7th October 2023. It was important to explain the historical context to fully understand what has happened today. I sat her down and asked her. Do you know why your birthday is a national holiday in Egypt? She said because Egypt won against Israel. I nodded and agreed. But do you know what happened? Why Egypt and Israel fought? She said she didn’t know. I explained that 6th October was a significant day because Egypt was victorious in the second war against Israel in getting Sinai back which they had lost in the 1967 War to Israel. Wars between Israel and neighbouring Arab nations began in the Nakba of 1948 when Zionists with the help of the West drove out over 700,000 Palestinians from their land into refugee camps into neighbouring Arab countries. Of course, without going into all the details I explained that was the beginning.
‘What’s going on now’ she asked. I thought about my reply for a few minutes. Children don’t have patience. She kept asking. I asked her to wait a minute while I thought of the best description. As an adult, I know what’s happened. I know hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed since 1948, sent into refugee camps and expelled from Palestine and been taken as prisoners of war. I know journalists have been killed for just reporting the truth. I know the IDF kill innocent children, women, and men. This has been going on for over 75 years. But what is the best description of what’s going on for a child? Do we over complicate this kind of answer? I had to draw an analogy to make it simple. I replied.
Imagine this, one day someone knocks on our door. I open the door and a person says hello and says, ‘you need to leave this house, it’s my house now’. And we are forced to leave our house. She said, ‘how can someone make you leave your house?’ I replied ‘well, they force you out at gun point, they don’t give you a choice’. Then the same happens to our neighbours, our friends, our family, all of a sudden, all our Palestinian brothers and sister have been evicted from their houses. My daughter couldn’t believe the injustice and audacity of it all.
I went on to explain. During the past 75 years Palestinians have been living in the West Bank and Gaza. Gaza is an open-air cage. Gazans can only enter or leave with Israeli permission. I don’t want to call it a prison, because in prison at least prisoners get daily meals and clean water and a bed to sleep on. In Gaza they don’t. Every movement is monitored, restrictions to where they can and can’t go. Water, food, aid controlled by Israelis to the minimum. Gazans have been making the best out of a terrible situation. On the 7th October Hamas soldiers entered into Israel. They killed Israelis. Israel has responded disproportionately by carrying out collective punishment. That’s what happened. What is going on today in Gaza, is a violation against international law. The images, the videos we see. This isn’t Israel defending itself, it’s genocide. It’s ethnic cleansing. There were a lot of new words for her to learn here. But that’s when I saw she had a passion to learn more. She was interested. She was sadly engrossed with what’s going on. She was shocked. Very shocked in fact. She couldn’t believe that there was something called injustice. How could the USA and Europe defend Israel so one-sidedly? Most of her favourite pop singers come from and the UK and USA. She was born in UK and home to her. How could that association with US and UK explain the cart blanche permission from them to Israel to bomb the hell out of civilians in Gaza and killing of Palestinians in West Bank? With this new information that she realises that Israel stole the Palestinian’s land continues to do so through settlers. And it seems Israel and its western sponsors never had the intention to follow international laws on war or the two state solutions. What lesson should my daughter learn from this. That there is no justice or that might is always right?
The first thing she asked me the next day when waking her up to go to school was, how’s Palestine?
Leila Taha
