The only thing that protects the Children of Gaza - a video that everyone must watch

Their beauty and our failure encompassed in one short conversation

Today I watched this and I could not breathe. It was the most heart-breaking and yet the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. A woman speaking to a terrified child in the softest tones, explaining to her that her fear is not to be feared. It is there to protect her; that she too, feels fear.

I could listen to this woman all day long. I believe she is an angel. In the chaos of the murder of Gaza, she is soothing the children around her, helping them to navigate through the hell they live in. Children in Gaza live every single day running from adults intent on murdering them. Every single day they are chased by murderers, and they are terrified. Their hair is turning white and falling out. Their tiny bodies are shattered. Their minds are unrested; confused and afraid. Children are dying from heart attacks in Gaza; the stress of fear is killing them. Children in Palestine have died in fear from being chased by IOF murderers and criminals. Their little hearts explode.

How can you not weep at how she helped this child deal with the bombs raining around her? How can you not weep that there are bombs raining around them both? That this is their daily life. Fear, there to protect them, because we have not.

One of my friends escaped from Gaza earlier this year. I spoke to her recently. She told me with not a shred of anger, “We don’t need anyone to help us. We will help ourselves.”

They do help themselves. Even the terror they experience, they use it as their strength. They recognise it for the survival instinct it is. They use it to run from the murderers and their monstrous bombs.

Imagine such a world. A world where a city of children is slaughtered and they must calmly learn that their terror is their cloak of protection. It is their superpower. No-one is coming to help them, so they will help themselves. Their hearts beat a rapid pace non-stop, day and night in abject fear; they barely sleep they are so afraid, the drones above remind them continuously that they are being chased and hunted, picked off one by one. Imagine the job of the adults around them: to reassure them that their perpetual fear is good; it helps them to run from bombs and keeps them safe. Because no-one else in the world will keep them safe.

You don’t need to imagine such a world. You are in it.

I don’t know why this is the one clip, out of all the thousands of videos that have come out of Gaza, that signals our failure so completely, and bears witness that the people of Palestine are indeed nothing like the rest of us. They have superpowers we cannot understand nor even imagine.

We humans have failed to protect the children of Gaza.

So they are given the gift of fear instead.