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In the Shadow of Genocide: what future for our children?

3/7/2024

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​Since this genocide started, I've been having regular nightmares about losing my children. In my dreams, they fall off cliffs, down stairs, and I wake up in panic. However, the worst nightmares are those I see with my own eyes on my cellphone every day. Children are being murdered daily, fathers are carrying the lifeless bodies of their children. Many times, I've pondered how death might be an easier price to pay for such a father.

Over 15,000 Palestinian children have been slaughtered. I think people stopped counting, as it's impossible to document all the deaths on the ground and sort out those under the rubble.
There is numbness induced by such figures, a numbness without which one would go crazy. It is a blessing to become numb, but it also feels like a betrayal. I must admit that I am watching the European championship football games and feeling excited about the goals again. It took me almost nine months to reach a level of numbness that allows me to watch football in the middle of this genocide and to check my phone for news during halftime. Checking the score of dead children before returning to the football score.
These nightmares I am having are my true state of mind, they resist the numbess. That induced panic is what I truly feel underneath. That pain of losing my children echoes all these fathers who look like me and speak my language, losing their children.

Today, I read something about intergenerational trauma. I don't know if I inherited some of that, but I know these scenes trigger memories of me as a 5-year-old dodging Israeli bullets in Lebanon, then at 11, then at 14, and again and again. As a child we had to flee three times and lost three houses, we were displaced, and all that comes back. But it is all manageable, I must say.
The emotions and the fear are directed towards children. The children in Palestine, Lebanon, everywhere. But also, our children here in Europe. How safe are we here? With the rise of political parties glorifying Israel and its genocide. Parties who do not see any problem with the thousands of slaughtered children. Politicians who tell you that Israel is legitimately defending itself.
How long will it be before they come knocking on our doors here, saying Muslims out, Arabs out?
Will they only deport us, or will they act like the Israelis they so admire and look up to as the example of their dreamed ethnostate? The Israelis whom they defend in murdering thousands of children who look like my children.
How can we trust them if they come to power not to apply here what they applaud there?
We have children here, and we cannot leave them to the wolves. We cannot leave them to a world where genocide is normalised.
This would be the worst nightmare.
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