This is not normal

Israel's desecration of humanity

It was my birthday yesterday. As I’ve done every year on my birthday since having a child myself, I spent the morning thinking about my mother. I was her third pregnancy, classically unplanned and almost certainly experienced with a huge amount of anxiety. She’d almost died giving birth to my older brother, and it must have felt like a kind of hubris to tempt fate again. But she did it anyway, scarred and courageous, setting out into the mystery to bring her child home.

I was born with jaundice, which isn’t uncommon for babies and is thankfully usually mild. Mine was severe enough to warrant putting me in an incubator and under a UV light for 24 hours, which meant my eyes had to be bandaged for protection. My mother was worried they would slip and that no one would notice, so she did the only thing she could after spending hours in labor and wrestling a baby into the world; she sat next to me for the duration, exhausted but awake, keeping vigil over the small creature whose blood, bones and beating heart had grown right there inside her.

I knew this story back to front when I was growing up. I loved to hear her tell it, starting with the moment her water broke while they were all playing cards to the doctor sending my father home early because “it’ll be hours yet” (consequently missing what happened only a short time later.) I loved hearing about the midwife, who had (miraculously, it seemed to me) also been there at the time of my father’s birth, and had apparently taken one look at me and exclaimed, “My god, she looks just like Steve!” I loved hearing how this strange fact of genetics had them all agog, before the doctor quickly snapped out of it to check that I was breathing.

But more than anything, I loved to hear my mother - my strange, beautiful, frequently distracted mother, with her impenetrable depths and keen longing for something I couldn’t yet understand - tell the story of that vigil. Amidst the daily grind of motherhood and the slights it inflicts both against child and endures because of them, I held onto her testimony as proof that she loved me. That I was hers.

Since becoming a mother myself, that belief in what it means to claim and be claimed by love has only been fortified. When my son was only a few hours old, I heard what sounded like a mucousy choking coming from the bassinet by the hospital bed. Unlike my mother, I’d never really held a newborn before and I was sure my clumsy hands would break him if I tried. I was a hapless idiot who had stupidly gone and had a baby, and now this poor little thing had to rely on me to keep him safe. The magnitude of the responsibility was terrifying, and so I just repeatedly jammed on the buzzer for the midwife and decided panicking was the only option. A few seconds later, the midwife on call came in, all calm reassurance. He gently picked up my baby, pressed him against his shoulder and rubbed his back.

He’s just clearing out his lungs, he said. This is normal.

It is normal for mothers to love their babies. It is normal for mothers to protect their babies. It is normal for mothers to expect that others will see their babies as worth protecting.

I woke up yesterday morning and thought about my mother, whose baby was born with a very normal condition that required a little bit of additional care. I thought about how, in the grand scheme of things, none of what she faced that day was particularly out of the ordinary…and yet how, to her, it felt like the first task in what would be a series of extraordinary obstacles and challenges she needed to tackle in order to protect her baby.

It is normal for mothers to love their babies.

What we are allowing Israel to do to the Palestinian people is not normal. What we are allowing them to do to Palestinian babies and children is so far beyond not normal that we will never come back from it. Not as a world, and not as a collective species. We will never return from the abject torture that Israel - with the express permission of savage western governments - has inflicted on Palestinian mothers, on fathers, on families and on entire ancestral lines.

For almost two years, Israel has escalated the simmering genocide they waged against Palestinians for decades and turned it into an all-out commitment to annihilation. Israel’s livestreamed, televised genocide has documented in real time their infliction of one of the worst statistics a normal human being could imagine for a place overwhelmingly comprised of children - that it is now also home to the world’s largest population of child amputees. Those of us with even a semblance of a heart have watched as child after child is maimed, traumatised, brutalised, desecrated in the name of maintaining western imperialist interests and the dominance of a Zionist ideology intent on wreaking the most inhumane and abnormal of punishments.

The deliberate murder via airstrikes of four children playing soccer in Gaza almost ten years prior to October 7.

The deliberate murder of children seeking shelter with their family in schools and hospitals.

The deliberate murder of children celebrating birthdays in a cafe on the beach.

The deliberate murder of babies via forced starvation, because Israel’s psychopathy runs so deep that it - the self proclaimed victim in all of this - has the power to deny entry of fucking BABY FORMULA to a population under siege. At the time of writing this, there are almost 600 premature babies being forcibly starved across Gaza. Because Israel, a psychopathic nation filled with psychopaths and supported by foreign psychopathic interests, is waging a genocide not just of physical brutality but of psychological torture.

And outside of Gaza, the deliberate murder of Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank - the number of which had already exceeded the highest on record by September of 2023, with the number still growing.

What we are seeing is not fucking normal. We are not fucking normal to be allowing this to happen.

As James Baldwin so perfectly put it, “the children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

Hind Rajab was ours, and we let her languish in a car for six hours surrounded by dead family members killed by Israeli warmongers who returned to shred her six year old body with more than 300 bullets.

Sidra Hassouna was ours, and we let her be murdered by an Israeli bomb, her dismembered body left to hang on a wall like she were nothing.

Massa Abed was ours, and we let her die with nothing but a doll and a green ball in her four year old hands after an Israeli airstrike targeted the tent she was playing next to.

And yes, I saw we. Because we will all bear the collective stain on our soul for what we have allowed to be done to the children of Palestine, over and over and over for the last 76 years.

The children are always ours, and we have failed them. Utterly, entirely, unforgivably. We have failed their mothers, who sang to them, talked to them, and grew their blood, bones and beating hearts right there inside them, who brought them into this world with the very normal desire to love them and protect them, and who deserved to believe that they would be supported in that goal because this is what should be considered normal.

Why do we - and by that I mean those of us who live in comfortably western imperialist states and who have been brainwashed to believe ‘civilisation’ and ‘necessity’ and ‘self defence’ belong to us far more than the world’s children do or should - why do we get to see our children as more important and worthy of protection than anyone else’s?

Why is our love for them considered different? More human? More normal?

This is not fucking normal. None of it is normal. It will never be normal.

Israel must be dismantled, and all war criminals responsible for upholding its terrorist regime tried for their crimes against humanity.

Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea, and what is normal will once again be.

Image via the Hind Rajab Foundation.