What my toddler’s fear of fireworks taught me about children in Gaza

The fireworks burst into colour and pierce the air with their shrill screams.

My toddler shrieks, gripping me, her knuckles white. It is the Lunar New Year celebrations once again in Malaysia, with lion dance performances and ear-splitting drums, and of course, fireworks, deafening as they can be.

I think of how vulnerable the nervous systems of children are. I think of the babies and toddlers in Malaysia trembling and bawling during the new year festivities while the sky explodes, in its beauty and horror, all at the same time.

And I can’t help but think about the babies and children in a genocide, like in Gaza. There is no beauty here, just unending suffering.

A nine-year-old, paralysed by a neurological disorder, endures spasms in his family tent in the al-Mawasi displacement camp in Gaza, because Gaza does not have access to the drug, Baclofen, blocked by Israel, along with many medicines and antibiotics.

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump’s administration has unveiled a plan for a “New Gaza” and “New Rafah”, with more than 100,000 homes alongside industrial parks and a new airport to boot. All this on rubble and war debris, where dead bodies remain buried.

It is just the fulfilment of a dream envisioned by the US leader – Trump himself called it the “Riviera of the Middle East” – aiming for the displacement of 2.1 million Palestinians from Gaza, the enclave to be transformed into a luxury destination. There is, however, no acknowledgement of the vulnerability of lives.

The precarity of our lives renders us vulnerable to our inhabitable material conditions – the availability of food, shelter and healthcare – as gender theorist Judith Butler argues. As babies and children, we are born vulnerable and dependent on our environments, born into a system beyond our choosing – a system that imposes meaning on our bodies. Vulnerable to one another, women and children are more often than not exposed to the possibility of violence.

A director of one of Gaza’s main hospitals has said that more than three months into the fragile ‘ceasefire’ between Hamas and Israel, malnourished and traumatised mothers are giving birth to underweight and premature babies. There are numerous miscarriages and premature deliveries.

People – barely perceived as human by the Israeli authorities – struggle to survive bombing and air strikes, and the debris and toxic residue left behind.

Pregnant women with little access to healthcare and less than proper nutrition walk for hours to get to an occasional appointment, their bodies and the babies in them debilitated by constant displacement.

Behind all of this senseless loss has been the role of evangelical Christian Zionism, which affects US policy in West Asia, where the 1948 creation of Israel is said to fulfil biblical prophecy. Palestinians are deemed ‘enemies of God’, being the enemies of the state of Israel. The erasure of Palestinians is seen as the sign of the End Times and the Second Coming.

Postcolonial theology emphasises that both sides in a violent conflict are victims. Israelis are seen as victims of their own system that desensitises them to Palestinian suffering, and the violence inflicted by Hamas on Israelis has been graphic as well.

Liberation theologians assert that violent conflicts produce a spiral of violence where oppressive systems fuel liberationist violence, that in turn intensifies the oppressor’s repression, breeding further resentment and resistance among the oppressed.

Religious Zionists have used violent texts in the Bible to justify their cause. The God of the Old Testament apparently sanctions collective punishment at times and even ethnic cleansing.

In Samson’s story (Judges 13–16), God seems to justify the suicide attack of an Israelite freedom fighter within the context of the Philistines’ oppression of Israel.

Abiding by a postcolonial hermeneutic that questions the validity of biblical texts, Rev Dr Naim Ateek, co-founder of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, explains that these stories are not reflective of the God of love expressed through Christ. They exemplify a primitive understanding of God as a deity who favours just one people, apart from perpetrating the retributive spiral of violent conflicts.

Ateek favours historical criticism as an alternative to Zionist literalism, where biblical texts reveal the plurality of voices and views that sometimes challenge each other and are open to different interpretations, and those that concern Israel reflect the ideals of their later authors.

As ceasefire violations continue, Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ – endorsed by a UN Security Council resolution as part of Trump’s ‘Gaza plan’ – will have Israel join the board.

Trump has also said that the Board of Peace might try to resolve other conflicts and compete with the UN, hence extending the reach of its colonial tentacles.

Palestinian representatives, meanwhile, will form a “technocratic, apolitical, Palestinian committee” designed to fulfil the mandate of the Board of Peace, whose interests will probably be skewed towards the US and Israel.

The peace plan does not guarantee establishing a Palestinian state, the ultimate goal of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and the Palestinian Authority and a goal supported by many UN Security Council resolutions.

Official recognition of Palestinian statehood in the UN General Assembly has received overwhelming support, but full UN membership still remains out of reach due to US opposition in the Security Council.

To put it diplomatically, it would appear that only one side – Israel’s – is being favoured on the Board of Peace.

As people in Malaysia travelled across the country to reunite with their families this Lunar New Year, some Palestinians stranded in Egypt were reunited with their families in southern Gaza through the Rafah Crossing after nearly two years of separation.

Reopening the Rafah Crossing is part of the 20-point peace plan that formed the basis of the ceasefire agreed last October. But only about 50 Palestinians are allowed – by Israel – to exit and enter Gaza each day on foot.

Let us continue to pray for a just and peaceful outcome for the people of Gaza.

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