Two decades ago the mother of nine-year-old Abdul Rahman Jadallah described to me how she twice lost her child. Once to a worship of death and then to death itself.
Living in southern Gaza, the Palestinian boy had come to accept destruction and killing as normal, and to admire the men attacking Israel and what he saw as the heroic circumstances of their deaths.
The family called Rahman by his middle name and his mother, Haniya Abed Atallah, said that whenever Palestinians were killed he would race to the morgue to see the dead and tag along with funerals.
One day an Israeli soldier shot a shy eight-year-old who lived on Rahman’s street, Haneen Suliaman, as she walked back from the shops with her mother.
“Rahman went to the morgue and kissed Haneen,” Attalah said. “He came home and told us he had promised the dead girl he would die too. I made him apologise to his father.”
Rahman was in school a few weeks later when an Israeli bullet apparently fired randomly from a watchtower crashed into a classroom and hit a Palestinian girl in the head. Lessons were cancelled and Rahman defied his mother to join yet another funeral. As he hung a Palestinian flag on the fence enclosing Gaza, an Israeli bullet caught Rahman under his left eye and killed him instantly. The family wondered if Rahman knew that a soldier might target him because of the flag.
Palestinian boys in Gaza who were Rahman’s age in 2003 are now adults. Some will have become teachers or builders or have no work at all. Many will live perfectly peaceable lives.
But it is no surprise to Palestinian child psychologists and social workers watching children like Rahman at the time that others grew up to join Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Or that some would care so little for human life that they would delight in murdering more than 1,200 Israelis, including young children, and be willing to die doing it.
In response to those killings, Israel has launched a huge assault on Gaza as prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledges “to eradicate Hamas”. The Israeli military has warned more than a million Palestinians to get out of their homes ahead of an expected ground invasion. Yet experience shows that Israel’s assaults have proved less successful at crushing its enemies than creating another generation of new ones.
Through the early 2000s, I watched in Gaza as Israel launched one assault and assassination after another that the military said was going to cripple Hamas and put an end to its suicide bombing campaign during the second intifada. Missiles killed the armed Islamist group’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in 2004 and then his replacement, Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, a few weeks later. But Hamas did not crumble.
Repeated military assaults on Gaza did little to weaken Hamas either. In 2004, tanks and bombs flattened a large part of Rafah on the southern tip of the enclave, just the latest of repeated invasions. Then came the Gaza Wars of 2008 and 2014 that left thousands of Palestinians dead.Yet a decade later Hamas was able to launch the most effective if terrible attack in its history, and have no problem recruiting men to carry it through.
Israel always claimed to minimise civilian deaths in its periodic attacks and yet somehow they made up most of the casualties with entire families wiped out. In between the military assaults, shooting was part of daily life and death. Gaza’s leading child psychiatrist, Dr Abdel Aziz Mousa Thabet, was despairing of the consequences of the violence on young minds. He estimated that two-thirds of children were traumatised by violence with profound consequences on Gaza’s future.
“They become fighters. I warned about this 15 years ago, that in 15 years these traumatised children will be more aggressive, they will want to fight, there will be more violence in the community,” he said. “It’s a cycle of aggression.” “So now we will have another generation of more aggressive behaviour. They will go to more extremes because they have no future… It’s a cycle of aggression. Children see their parents killed in front of them. What do you expect?” That was in 2009 and the cycle has not been broken.
Khitam abu Shawarib was the only social worker on the southern tip of Gaza during the repeated assaults on the enclave in the early 2000s. She watched the collapse of parental authority as children came to admire the men with guns. Abu Shawarib also told me that many children came to welcome the prospect of being “martyred”.
“The martyr is in paradise. He has glory here and in the afterlife where it is so much better than life in Rafah,” she said. “The children see many people killed, so they come to expect to be killed.”
High on Israel’s wanted list today is Mohammed Deif, the Hamas commander who planned the attack that unleashed Israel’s fury against Gaza. Israel has tried and failed to assassinate him but it did succeed in killing his wife and two young children.
Deif is a hero to many in Gaza. Young Palestinians, with little hope under the Israeli blockade of the enclave while they watch the occupation tighten its grip on the West Bank and Jewish settlers are given free rein to attack Palestinians there, find a perverse self-respect in supporting those they call the resistance.
The coming days are not likely to do anything to change that.
Chris McGreal is a former Jerusalem correspondent for the Guardian and Observer
