So imagine coming of age in Gaza (or the West Bank) where the threats are entirely real–where Israeli bombers hunt & target children; where they’ve seen family, neighbors, playmates perish in one of Israel’s bombing attacks; where there is no safe place to sleep or live nor enough food to eat? Where families worry about protecting children from ethnic cleansing?

According to UNICEF, over 373,000 children in Gaza require intensive psychological treatment for shell-shock & PTSD after Israel’s carpet bombing binge in 2014. Small children suffer crying spells, nightmares, became mute, act out hysteria, are left paralyzed with terror. Surely that is one of the greatest human rights crimes of all: depriving thousands of little children of peace of mind, of a sense of security, of a childhood filled with love & play. The only thing more criminal is disabling & killing them with bombs.

These wee girls in Gaza are protesting to demand the release of prisoners in the Israeli gulag. Close to 200 children are in Israeli prisons & it is reported 75 percent have sustained physical assaults & other torture during interrogation or detention; 40 percent are sexually abused. Now with stone-throwing ruled a felonious offense by Israeli authorities, the number of incarcerated children will surely grow. When Israel’s political strategy is ethnic cleansing, children are a primary target & not just caught up in events.

Children have a right to a childhood free of such terrors. Building the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel is what Palestinians ask of international solidarity. It is the strongest way to stand with Palestinian children. Solidarity cannot give them back their childhoods but it can assure their future. Build BDS (Barcode beginning 729).

(Photo by Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto/Corbis)

To expose the utter hypocrisy of the crocodile tears, most of them have been recently cited, some repeatedly cited by human rights groups for bombing hospitals in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Gaza, & elsewhere. The 1949 Geneva Conventions define human rights protections for civilians in a war zone. According to clearly defined provisions in the Conventions, hospitals have special protected status. It is illegal under international law to attack a hospital or other medical unit, whether civilian or military.

Doctors Without Borders/(MSF) are still sifting through the carnage of hospitals bombed in Afghanistan, Yemen, & Syria. Assad is accused by MSF of using barrel bombs on hospitals in Syria. Israel not only bombed hospitals in Gaza but ambulances, schools, refugee centers, apartment buildings, & public markets.

This photo from last week is documentation of Israeli war crimes & flagrant violations of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. It’s from last Friday when Israeli commandoes entered a Palestinian hospital in Hebron, West Bank disguised as Palestinians, including one impersonating a pregnant woman in a wheelchair. They were looking for 20-year-old Azzam Shalaldeh, being treated in the hospital for gunshot wounds–who they accused of stabbing & “moderately wounding” an illegal Israeli settler. They handcuffed his sleeping brother Bilal (keeping vigil) to the next bed, yanked Azzam out of bed & arrested him, & shot dead his 27-year-old cousin Abdallah Shalaldeh as he came out of the bathroom. This is the scene when the commandoes left. If raiding a hospital, dragging a man out of a hospital bed, shooting down a man visiting his cousin isn’t “an attack on all of humanity”, then what the hell is!?

So where are the condolences? Is there a law of superior military might that renders those with bombers & AK-47s exempt from international humanitarian law? That gives Israel the right to eliminate due process, occupy & expropriate territory, bomb hospitals in Gaza & raid them in Hebron?

The need to rebuild the international antiwar movement remains imperative. The need to build BDS, the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel is a central part of that historic mission.

(Photo by Abed Al Hashlamoun/EPA)

This is the same distinction Zionism plays on when it insists the Jewish holocaust was the most atrocious crime ever visited on humanity. It was beyond atrocious but it was a seamless whole with European & US colonialism whose crimes for centuries against colonized humanity, including the slave trade, cannot be studied without gut-wrenching horror. The Nazi holocaust of Jews, disabled, Roma, liberals, socialists, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses was colonial violence perpetrated in the metropolitan centers of Europe.

Those pointing out this ugly distinction are not trying to minimize horror at what happened in Paris. They are striking at the ideological roots of colonialism & war, at the racism that rules this world–& they are challenging us to recognize it & oppose it & thus to end it.

Hopefully we will channel that horror & outrage into rebuilding the international antiwar movement to stop the state terrorism that only begets more terrorism & human suffering. There is no other way to stop it.

May all victims of terrorism from Paris to Kashmir to Palestine to Afghanistan & elsewhere Rest In Peace.