There is an old colonizer adage that “the old will die and the young will forget.” In fact, Israel built its future wagering that the Palestinians violently displaced and expelled in the Nakba would eventually move on, assimilate, forget the depravity that ripped them from their land. But now, the occupation seems to tremble before Palestinian children holding paper and string.
Khaled Al Khateeb and his siblings spent seven days crafting a kite from scraps found at home, and when it finally caught the wind, it felt as if Khaled himself was rising above the clouds, above the drones and the bombs that loomed over his entire life. That kite, like all Palestinians, suddenly became an existential threat to the colonizers.
Last month, Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz said that kites would be treated like drones; Benjamin Netanyahu threatened that the people launching them could be killed. Everything but paper and string had already been stolen from Khaled and his friends, yet Israel, after vaporizing thousands of children and burying thousands more beneath the homes it leveled, declared itself endangered by kites. Why? Because colonial powers have always feared the child who survives its violence and continues to imagine a sky beyond its rule.
Hope is rebellion in its youngest form; it is the guileless expectation of a tomorrow the colonizer has already claimed for itself.
Khaled’s kite frightens Israel because Khaled himself does. A Palestinian does not need to take up arms (although they would be within their legally recognized right to do so) to threaten a state built on their disappearance. It is enough that he grows old, remembers, and inherits a right to the land—a right that cannot be erased by the passage of time or by displacement to wherever Israel deems proper.
Hope is rebellion in its youngest form; it is the guileless expectation of a tomorrow the colonizer has already claimed for itself. At the height of Israel’s assault on Gaza, women and children accounted for close to seventy percent of those murdered, proportionally more than any other recorded genocide in the last century. A school bus of children every day. I will never forget the first time I saw a father collect the parts of his child in a plastic bag. What were their crimes? I wondered, I continue to wonder.
In the West Bank, bombs were replaced by bullets and clubs. The IDF shot seven-month-old Sam Fahd Abu Haikal through the head inside his family’s car and murdered fourteen-year-old Amer Rabee as he picked almonds with his friends. Earlier this month, settlers killed two teenagers in the raid on the village of al-Mughayyir. A Palestinian child is Palestine in the future tense. Israel wages war against Palestinian children because it cannot tolerate Palestinian adulthood. Israel wages war on childhood because a Palestinian child at play is already trespassing upon the future Israel has reserved for itself. Israel robs children of their smallest joys because joy is the seed of hope, and that is how the body learns that captivity is not the natural condition of life. That they too are born free, even inside a cage.
Israel wages war against Palestinian children because it cannot tolerate Palestinian adulthood.
Fifteen years ago, more than 13,000 Palestinian children who gathered on Al Waha Beach filled Gaza’s sky with enough kites to claim a world record. Long before those children reached upward, Palestinians had already learned to build freedom from whatever the occupation could not confiscate. When Israel closed schools and universities during the First Intifada, lessons moved into homes, mosques, and churches. Popular committees stored food for curfews, set up clinics, and planted backyard gardens (until Israel outlawed them in 1988). Two decades later, the IDF would storm Palestinian community centers, confiscating flags and shutting down celebrations. In 2018, during the Great March of Return, Gazans peacefully protested, baked bread, danced Dabke, and celebrated marriages. Israel responded by killing hundreds and injuring thousands.
This attempt by Israel to muzzle hope and stifle joy keeps repeating itself in all aspects of Palestinian life. During the 2026 FIFA world cup, Israel killed the primary organizer of watch parties in Gaza; in 2014, children were bombed while playing soccer by the beach. Recently, the IDF stormed a wedding in Al Eizariya. In 2013, a bride wearing a white dress and kufiyah traveled from Nazareth toward her groom in the West Bank until soldiers stopped her bus at an illegal checkpoint. In Gaza, last December, Mustafa and Nesma Al Borsh married after waiting two years, then Israel bombed the school shelter where they were expected to live—Mustafa’s eight-year-old nephew was killed in the blast. The groom spent his wedding night wearing his family’s blood.
The soldiers and settlers can be relied upon to stifle joy, waiting at the olive harvests, along the coasts, and at checkpoints where women are forced to give birth on the sides of the road. A settler shot Bilal Saleh while he picked olives beside his wife and children. Israeli forces killed Mohammed Bakr while he fished with his family. Soldiers held back Nahil Ridah’s ambulance until she delivered her stillborn child at a checkpoint. Israel destroyed a desalination plant that supplied ten million liters of water each day, left only three percent of Gaza’s cropland accessible and undamaged, and diverted a West Bank spring for Palestinian watermelons into a swimming pool for Israeli settlers.
The defining feature of Israeli apartheid is to make Palestinian life unbearable until our removal can be recorded as an act of free will. Colonizers call it voluntary emigration, but there is nothing voluntary about fleeing after your home has been bombed, your fields poisoned, your water cut off and your child buried. Israel offers Palestinians exile or death and expects to preserve its innocence, but innocence is buried with our martyrs.
Who might we become when survival no longer consumes the entire imagination? What lives have been postponed by the labor of remaining alive? Colonialism cannot permit such questions because each assumes that its rule will end, that the people it has confined to grief will one day have the freedom to desire beyond it. Joy asks those questions anyway, allowing us to encounter parts of ourselves that occupation did not author and cannot explain. Our grief keeps the stolen world from disappearing, and our joy keeps the thief from determining the world that follows. What should come after the colonizer? People who have lived even fragments of freedom together are harder to persuade that domination is eternal.
Palestinians possess no natural gift for grief and there is nothing beautiful about enduring destruction and death.
After Israel destroyed Jenin refugee camp during the Second Intifada in 2002, a young girl looked into Mohammad Bakri’s camera and said that Palestinians would live proudly as eagles and die standing like lions. Twenty-four years after that girl spoke from Jenin, Palestinians in Gaza are still refusing to kneel. During the genocide, children gathered outside Al Shifa and organized their own press conference to tell the world they wanted to live, mothers found ways to feed their families after Israeli forces killed Palestinians waiting for flour, and fathers raised tents again after Israel burned down the place it had called a safe zone. Now workers are crushing concrete and twisted metal into roads, shelter floors, and spaces for community kitchens. In Al Mawasi, wood, sheet metal, and solar panels have become six university halls serving hundreds of students each day. At the Great Omari Mosque, volunteers use paintbrushes to lift dust and gunpowder from the few thousand books that survived from a collection of twenty thousand. Hanadi Muhanna and her father are rebuilding the Al Qarara seed bank, gathering indigenous wheat, spinach and barley. Foreign leaders continue debating who should be entrusted to rebuild Gaza, as though Palestinians will not reclaim freedom with our own hands and rebuild it ourselves.
But do not mistake this with resilience, a convenience that admires the survivor without accusing the person who made survival necessary. Palestinians possess no natural gift for grief and there is nothing beautiful about enduring destruction and death. Admiration is cheaper than respecting Palestinian life. Sumud (steadfastness) is more demanding. Sumud denies the colonizer their desire to record history in our blood. Hope amid genocide makes no prediction that our killers will one day discover mercy; rather, it begs us to remember that mercy ourselves, to prevent the violence and blood and ghosts from consuming our ability to imagine and fight for liberation.
So please do not celebrate Palestinian steadfastness as though we were placed on this earth to provide inspiring images of survival between massacres. End the siege, impose sanctions and an arms embargo, dismantle occupation and apartheid, and return the land and political power Israel has taken.
In another life, Gaza was never besieged, AI-guided guns were never mounted in Al Khalil to lock onto Palestinian bodies, Jaffa was never turned onto a mass grave, and those murdered at Deir Yassin grew old in their homes. In another life, Khalid could fly his kite. Palestinian children could be ordinary children—bored, mischievous, happy, alive. But another life is too generous to those who stole this one. We were entitled to the life they destroyed. What can joy give a child inside a cage? The first knowledge that the cage is not the world. The will of the occupied will always outlive the will of the occupier. A child at play has already imagined a life beyond violence and, for a moment, begun to live there.
The sky is still larger than those occupying it, and Palestine remains larger than the violence devoted to emptying it of Palestinians. We have hope because a child in Gaza can look past their cage and still see the sky. In this life, we will be free, from the river to the sea, and kites will fly again.
