What does it mean for a parent to be a victim of colonial violence and protect their children? Parents around the world work together in unwavering efforts to protect their children and provide the environment they need to thrive. Parents who live in a society built on settler colonialism are constantly deprived of the ability to protect their children.
In the face of Israeli violence, land grabbing, torture, detention, torture, and the dehumanization Palestinians, parents (especially mothers) have to consider the work of parenting inseparable from a wider struggle to defend Palestinian lands and families. Through grassroots collective initiatives like labor strikes and boycotts of Israeli goods, to mobilization of the masses in the streets, to the podium in leadership positions — as scholars and activists in the classrooms, and as protectors and anchors in their homes — mothers creatively and radically organize around the barriers of the colonialist, racist and sexist Zionist project.
As a mother, and as a human rights defender in occupied West Bank I (Manal TamimiIsraeli soldiers have taken a three-time arrest of a coauthor of this article. My first arrest was in January 2010, while I was protesting in my village. The second occurred in December 2017, as I protested for Ahed Tamimi’s release in Ofer Prison, West Bank. The third arrest occurred on International Women’s Day in 2016, when Israeli soldiers raided my home at 3 a.m., accusing me of incitement on social media. In April 2015, I was almost killed by an Israeli sniper’s assassination attempt. I received a Twitter threat that my blood would be drawn in the streets. An Israeli sniper then shot at me as I was participating in a protest in my village and hit my leg.
But the horror I experienced in those moments pales in comparison to the time when my mother and I watched my son shackled in an Israeli military court — part of the two-tier legal system of apartheid Palestinians face. My son was so traumatized after 25 days of torture and interrogation that he could not even remember his grandmother. He told us that the torture tactics committed by the Israeli Security Agency had involved its officers threatening to rape his mother (me) if he didn’t provide the statement that Israeli authorities were looking for. My son, Osama, as well as my nephew Waleed, were brutally attacked by Israeli occupying troops with live ammunition that pierced both their legs and arms during the time it took to create this piece.
In their brief time on this Earth, the glow of youth has abandoned Osama, Waleed, and many other Palestinian youth who have witnessed and survived the merciless edge of Israel’s state violence. This violence works through Israel’s laws and maintains structural racism via the militarized colonization of Palestinian land and the Palestinian people. The “legality” of it all is rarely challenged by Western governments, but frequently abetted by them.
With no external protection for their children — certainly not from President Joe Biden — and no accountability for the crimes Israel commits, Palestinian mothers have had to devise programs that no parent should ever contemplate. They organized workshops with former political prisoners, lawyers, psychologists, and others. These workshops were intended to teach children as young 10 years old how they can survive the various types of psychological abuse, physical violence, and interrogation that the occupying force uses.
Nabi Saleh families initiated the workshops after Israeli soldiers began to deliberately and aggressively arrest Nabi Saleh children.
The workshops are akin to “the talk” that Black parents in the United States are forced to have with their children regarding how to interact with racially charged law enforcement that systematically, intentionally and violently targets them.
The psychological trauma caused by exposure to state-sponsored violence in Israel can cause severe psychological distress. The severe losses and disruptions that have occurred in their lives can traumatize both parents and children from Palestine. They often experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. To ease the psychological suffering of their children, parents in Tamimi’s village, Nabi Saleh, also collaborated with trauma counselors from The Palestine Institute at An-Najah University and the Treatment and Rehabilitation Center for Victims of Torture. The trauma counselors were there to help children with anxiety and high levels of stress process their experiences and give them strategies for managing stress.
With the prevalence of video technology, parents’ efforts to help their children survive settler-colonialism includes training Palestinian children on how to use their cellphone cameras to document the egregious acts committed by the racist state and its apartheid policies in the occupied West Bank. My (Manal Tamimi’s) niece, Janna Jihad, the inimitable teenage Palestinian journalist, uses her phone as a tool to broadcast the Israeli army’s oppressive and often deadly treatment of Palestinians.
Similarly, viral phone videos are used to film U.S. police brutality against Black people: Two years ago, teenager Darnella Frazier captured the final, agonizing moments of George Floyd’s life. People around the world would not have a wider view of how a militarized occupation has impacted the lives of millions of Palestinians and disrupted every aspect of everyday life for Americans of color. These cases would not be recorded without video.
While some tenets of parenting are universal, the tragic reality is that there’s an additional layer for Palestinian parents and parents of color living in the U.S. who are actively dismantling the systems of white supremacy and colonization.
While Palestinians have always tended to their crops, and cultivated their orange groves and olive trees, Palestinian mothers accelerated their home gardening during the first intifada as a means to boycott Israeli products, resist occupation and raise awareness of Israel’s oppressive actions. In Beit Sahour, Palestinian families refused tax payments to Israel to slow down the economy that would fuel the annexation. Intifada made education illegal, and Israeli officials closed universities and schools indefinitely. Parents created innovative routes by creating their own educational institutions. underground education programsA mind-saving movement.
Despite the shootings and brutal beatings that were encouraged by then-Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who ordered Israeli forces to “break the bones” of Palestinian protesters, mothers were also massively represented in the streets directly confronting belligerent Israeli soldiers.
We would be remiss if we didn’t recognize the mothers of Gaza, one the most difficult places to be mothered and mothered on Earth. For the past 15 years, they have been held captive by a devastating land siege and naval blockade which leaves mothers with insufficient resources to meet the basic needs of their loved ones — food insecurity, clean water and limited access to health care and medical supplies. We see mothers and community caregivers like Rouzan Al-Najjar, a paramedic who was killed and shot while providing life-saving medical assistance during the Great March of Return 2018. We took notice of Al-Najjar’s mother who amid her grief donned a medic’s vest and joined the protests to complete her daughter’s mission of attending to the injured.
These fundamental and essential acts are mothering and have enormous power. They also form effective political strategies to resist the settler-colonial occupation. They are based on a proud past of exerting international and economic pressure on Israel to recognize Palestinian freedom and equal rights.
Despite the failures of the administration, Palestinian mothers are still fighting for their rights. Oslo Accords. These negotiation efforts were largely determined by Israel’s political ambitions of complete and total domination rather than freedom for Palestinians. Despite their flaws, the Palestinians refused to give up their right to return or their rights to self-determination.
Israel insists today on advancing its political ambitions through escalating its repression of parenting with an assault on it aggressive removal campaign in East Jerusalem neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah. Parents raise their children in the most oppressive circumstances, but they also face the expansionist project of displacement and displacement of their families in courts and on streets. Their deliberate actions are a symbol of our people’s insistence on complete liberation, and 74 years later, they continue to resist settler-colonialism in both visible and invisible ways — they resist as matriarchs, community organizers, scholars, artists, writers, and more.
Consequently, when we talk about justice for Palestine we must reinforce and uphold that the liberation of Palestine is a feminist and reproductive justice issue by acknowledging Israel’s assault on Palestinian women and children. Despite the devastating toll occupation has on the physical and emotional health of parents, they continue to engage in the struggle for the right of return, self-determination and an end to apartheid Israel’s occupation and colonization of Palestine. This cannot be achieved without the political intervention, sacrifices and wisdom of Palestinian mothers.
The U.S. continues its assault on Palestinians and ancestral lands. It is absurd that members of Congress such as Jan Schakowsky refuses to sign the Palestinian Children and Families Act, House Resolution 2590. With the stroke of a pen, U.S. lawmakers can fundamentally change this country’s relationship to the apartheid state. This life-affirming law could save the lives and livelihoods of children like Ahmad Manasra if it is passed. Ahmad Manasra’s mental condition has been deteriorating and he remains in solitary confinement despite being in grave danger. abuse perpetrated against him by Israeli prison authorities.
Palestinians’ lives are being stolen and kidnapped. They are constantly under threat of being expelled their homes and lands in areas such as Masafer Jarrah and Sheikh Jarrah. Journalists such as Shireen Ab Akleh are targeted for reporting on the atrocities perpetrated by the racist state. The U.S. government is complicit by not standing up to these abuses even when U.S. citizens are fatally killed by Israeli forces — as was also the case this year with Palestinian American grandfather Omar Assad.
Despite the spectacle of inhumanity, Palestinians refuse to submit to Israel’s escalation in violence. They will not sit idly by as U.S. lawmakers debate — or ignore — the merits of HR 2590. They will respond to Zionism or apartheid with popular resistance.
Living under Israeli colonization and facing massive human rights violations requires resistance and direct-action campaigns from exiles, refugees, and those under Israeli occupation. Mothers and fathers of Palestinian children are rising up to meet this challenge, especially mothers. President Joe Biden’s recent trip to the region, however, makes clear that not only will his administration not help such efforts, it will directly stand in the way of Palestinian liberation. Biden and his predecessor are united in this. The parents and young Palestinians who want to both protect and advance their liberation will bear the terrible consequences.
