The pain is excruciating. Beyond bearing.
You could see it in their faces. Their hands…
Their hands touching…
Touching their lifeless child, or the coffin that encloses them. The tears falling…
A barren moisture, presaging no hope of future growth.
Surely, it’s universal, a parent’s anguish in the face of their child’s life cut short. The ultimate grief-soaked equality of any child killed.
And if there is but one universal value, common to all, that disallows weighing the worth of one child’s life against another’s, how comes it that when a Palestinian child’s life is ripped out of existence by Israel – by their ‘security’ forces, and by their, in effect, para-military Settlers – they become merely a statistic. A number, added to other numbers, that make still more numbers, but seem to signify nothing other than the fact of those accumulating numbers.
The mourning rites for Palestinian children killed are barely shown on mainstream media, no eulogies reach our ears, hardly a politician denouncing the ‘waste of a life’, as Labour Party Leader, Keir Starmer, put it in response to the killing of sisters Lucy and Maia and mother Rina Dee, British citizens who, with their Rabbi father, made the decision to move from the UK to live in the West Bank Settlement of Efrat, located on stolen, illegally occupied Palestinian land.
And no, that is not to endorse the killings, but surely the wider – malign – context must, at the very least, begin to explain them. The Efrat settlement, for example, enables the enrichment of its – Jewish only – residents, supported by all the modern infrastructure one expects in, say, the London suburb of Hendon whilst beyond the Settlement boundaries, Palestinians are systematically impoverished, traumatised, injured and killed. And their land appropriated to serve state-induced theft.
As you sow, so shall you reap.
Bernard Spiegal 
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