A month ago, I kissed my children goodnight–then watched five-year-old Ward al-Sheikh Khalil walk through an inferno. That hellish orange glow of childhood cremated alive is still seared behind my eyelids. Ward’s resemblance to my own daughter shattered me. I see it every time I blink: her ponytail bouncing with each step, a warped reflection of my child’s carefree walk.
The fact that the entire world saw what happened to Ward with barely any consequence led me to a conclusion: the world professes reverence for childhood until the child is Palestinian.
We are fed hollow platitudes about universal children’s rights, tender developmental stages, and inviolable innocence, while simultaneously witnessing the systematic erasure of these very principles in Gaza. We enshrine ashes behind museum glass, whispering “never again” in one breath as our tax dollars fan the flames of “right now.” We weep at archival photos of gas chambers, while live streaming Palestinian toddlers suffocating under concrete.
We’ve reached the nadir of liberal hypocrisy, where performative grief and genocidal complicity are indistinguishable. The same hands that sign billion-dollar arms contracts dab at staged tears for “children’s futures.” Their declarations of “universal rights” are meticulously worded to exclude Palestinian children, reducing them to ledger entries labeled “collateral damage.”
Last month, the world’s hollow pageantry continued with the gilded observances of “International Children’s Day”–the choreographed spectacles of concern–all while Gaza’s children were burned alive. This isn’t hyperbole; it’s extermination broadcast in real time as the world debates “proportionality” over melting flesh.
The numbers scream what the world refuses to acknowledge: a Palestinian child slaughtered every 45 minutes, 18,000+ souls extinguished in 20 months, zero accountability for their murderers. What makes this type of erasure of Palestinian children’s humanity so easy? And why do we so callously accept their fate as a tragic consequence of war when we would never countenance even a fraction of their fate to befall our children?
Palestinian children exist as living contradictions to this hypocrisy: their “inviolable innocence” framed in sniper scopes, their “developmental milestones” marked in emergency amputations, their “protected status” voided by every Western-made bomb. These hollow commemorations were never meant for the colonized. Their emptiness echoes in the abandoned strollers piling up in Rafah, their futility evaporating faster than blood dries on arms contracts.
Israeli massacres leave no whole bodies—only torsos without faces, tiny hands clutching air, scraps of fabric melted into flesh. Gaza’s parents have mastered the grotesque ritual, crawling through rubble and assembling fragments of infants like macabre jigsaw puzzles. They no longer bury children–only possibilities: a foot that might have scored a goal, a wrist that might have worn a birthday bracelet. They sort through sackfuls of flesh like archaeologists of their own extinction. Genocide systematically unravels every thread of human connection. This is the industrialized dismantling of kinship itself, where even grief is denied its rightful shape.
The mere thought of our own child’s severed limb in a mass grave unravels us–yet we expect Palestinian parents to endure this tormenting daily reality with quiet resignation, while our tax dollars fund the weapons that reduce their children to ash and bone fragments.
What we dismiss as “unimaginable” is Palestine’s unrelenting normal–where “before” and “after” have collapsed into an endless now, where the world’s performative “never again” chokes on Gaza’s exhausted “again this morning.”
There are no “sides” to a father reassembling his child from ash and bone, no “complexity” in a mother sifting through slaughter for any shard of the future she once held. One headline breaks us, but they endure an entire archive of horror.
Crocodile tears and calculated carnage
The manufactured outrage over Ms. Rachel exposed the colonial algorithm of childhood: some children deserve lullabies and trauma counseling; others are reduced to “human shield” propaganda. Some children learn belly breathing to calm their anxiety; others choke on clouds of white phosphorus. Some trauma is pathologized as “adverse childhood experiences,” while others are itemized as “acceptable losses.”
This is no accident. It’s the global machinery of grief-apartheid, where compassion follows ethnicity like a shadow. Palestinian suffering isn’t ignored; it’s precisely calculated into every arms deal and strategic briefing. Their deaths aren’t oversights; they’re line items.
When the world mourns a Ukrainian child but demands “context” for a Palestinian one, the hierarchy of human value stands exposed. This isn’t just indifference; it’s childhood weaponized.
The Ms. Rachel controversy laid bare the truth: trauma only matters when it happens to the “right” victims. We cannot preach emotional literacy while denying its universality.
Teaching “kind hands” while funding the bombs that dismember them isn’t hypocrisy–it’s moral arson. Either all children are sacred, or none are. Either all burning flesh horrifies us, or our ethics are ash. Either we believe all trauma demands healing, or our compassion is curated cruelty.
For far too long, Zionists have wielded the shield of perpetual victimhood, a status they claim, assert, and demand from the very world they devastate on an hourly basis. This carefully cultivated narrative has sheltered them from accountability, allowing them to get away with murder, funded by our tax dollars.
This genocide is the latest iteration of a death machine that has been grinding Palestinian children into dust for nearly a century, then demands we mourn the boot that crushes them. The Zionist settlers dancing on the ruins, the generals calibrating slaughter, the politicians laundering bloodshed as “self-defense”–all claim victimhood from their throne of bones.
Indeed, trauma can perpetuate cycles of violence—hurt people hurt others. But Zionism has weaponized this dynamic beyond recognition. They’re not merely traumatized individuals lashing out; they’re architects of a predatory system that controls the narrative, dictates who qualifies as human, who deserves compassion, and who is reduced to “necessary collateral.” All of this serves one purpose: to entrench their impunity while hollowing out words like “trauma” until they mean nothing at all.
They conjure outrage from thin air—distracting, deflecting, and reframing their bruised egos as the real crime, even as they burn children alive and call it righteousness. Zionism’s psychopathic narrative has thrived unchecked for decades, armored by hysterical victimhood and geopolitical might.
But the tide is turning. The world is no longer buying the act or subscribing to the script. The crocodile tears no longer blur the truth. Of course, Zionists are panicking. They’ve spent a century committing atrocities with impunity, only to feel the ground finally shifting beneath their feet.
From bubblegum-sweet children’s entertainers like Ms. Rachel, to raw punk provocateurs like Bob Vylan–when voices dare to speak Palestinian truths, Zionists suddenly discover their fragility. The same regime that shrugs at dead Palestinian children theatrically gasps at a protest chant or Instagram post.
The audacity of equating words—words that name resistance, words that refuse complicity—with the actual, ongoing holocaust in Gaza is grotesque. The “IDF” burns babies alive. It snipes mothers holding white flags. And yet, the moral hysteria is reserved for those who talk about it too loudly?
This is colonialism’s oldest playbook: Demand silence, then criminalize the breaking of it. The goal is never debate—it’s exhaustion and deflection. It’s making the world fixate on the “tone” of dissent rather than the corpses piling up in real time.
As someone who works with trauma, I can’t reconcile healing the pain of some children while sanitizing Palestine’s suffering for my own children’s comfort. Because when infants in Gaza learn the acrid sting of phosphorus before the sweetness of milk, when toddlers recognize the whir of drones before the rhythm of lullabies–then my own children are old enough to understand why such evil persists, and why it must end
Dina Elmuti is a trauma social worker and clinician, with a background in developmental trauma, early childhood adversity, and generational trauma. She has worked with NGOs serving children in Palestine and refugee and immigrant communities in Chicago.