How Gaza’s kids face life without education or safety

You don’t have to be a parent to know that nothing tops the excitement grade school and high school students feel on that day in September when it is time for them to be in class again after summer break.

For these kids, the day represents a fresh start. They are a year older and a grade higher. They will reconnect with old friends and meet new ones. And, Oh, the joy they had at that stationery store where they were taken by a parent to shop for back-to-school supplies, including that cool cartable and illustrated lunch box.

It is September, a month when the wind carries a slight chill and the leaves take on a crimson hue. A month when kids begin an academic year during which they learn new concepts, reinvent their young selves and feel, as the poet W.B. Yeats put it, that “the world is full of magical things waiting for your senses to grow sharper”.

True, but not if you’re a Palestinian student living in Gaza this year, where 80 per cent of schools have been turned into rubble and all universities were deliberately blown up by dynamite or taken over as bases by Israel’s invading forces — an act known in international law as “scholasticide”, a variant of genocide whose aim to deny a community its right to an education through the structural destruction of its educational system.

New norms of a post-war world

This represents no less than a disaster to a people like the Palestinians in whose culture educational attainment is seen as having a leading positional value in the community, where 97 per cent of kids between the ages of 5 and 12 attend grade school and, upon graduating, 94 per cent head on to high school.

Kids under the age of 18, who make up 43 per cent of the Strip’s population of 2.3 million, have already missed one academic year and are on their way to missing yet another — and likely yet another still.

Call them Palestine’s “lost generation”, a term that Ernest Hemingway first used as an epigraph in his 1925 debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, to describe that group of alienated men and women who came of age during the First World War, bore witness to its savageries and later found themselves, traumatised as they were, unable to adjust to the new norms of a post-war world.

Look, denying Palestinian children their right to an education is the least of all the catastrophes this lost generation will find itself having to deal with in the future. In the future, this generation will deal with war-trauma that will dog them for the rest of their lives.

How do you, later in life, internalise your experiences as a child or a young adult who had lived in a place that had been turned into a land of open graves and mass slaughter, where life had reached such an extreme pitch of brutality that people had before their eyes the calendar of their own death?

One cannot imagine, let alone give active belief to the enormity of the carnage, for to do so is to yield to the illogic of nightmares that at times haunt our minds in sleep.

That enormity will forever haunt the consciousness of this lost generation of Gazans — and in particular the consciousness of those thousands upon thousands of “unaccompanied children”, those kids separated from their parents and left to fend for themselves, roaming the Strip without once having a hand to hold when the terrors from the skies begin to rain death on those impudent enough to be alive still.

Like barnacles cling to a ship

That enormity will haunt them as they daily experience its anguish in the form of post-traumatic stress, a disorder that includes flashbacks and constant feelings of pronounced anxiety, along with other abnormalities, such as a bent for aggressive, antisocial behaviour, abnormalities that will go on to cling to them like barnacles cling to a ship.

Consider what Dr. Selma Bacevac, who experienced her own share of war-related trauma as a seven-year old in Sarajevo, told the BBC in February, now as a 38-year-old therapist living in the US who specialised in — predictably — trauma.

Bacevac knew her subject well because she had lived through the siege of Sarajevo, the longest siege of any city in the history of modern warfare — a total of 1,425 days, between April 1992 and February 1996, when close to to 1,400 people were killed during the harrowing bombardment unleashed against Muslim Bosniaks.

“As a child, when you don’t experience safety, it affects your ability to trust your environment”, she said. “It affects your ability to trust adults. [Those of us who suffer from war-trauma] have a fear of commitment, fear of setting boundaries, fear of speaking up and fear even of being seen. It’s not something you just get rid of. It’s something that stays with you forever”.

One wonders, after it’s all over, after the dust had settled, after the rubble had been cleared, what the world will say to this lost generation of Palestinians, and what in turn this generation will do to the world — that one part of it that had loosed unimaginable carnage on their ancestral land and unspeakable pain on their national soul.

— Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile