Palestinian Kids Quotes

How come a Palestinian child does not live like an Israeli child? Why do Palestinian children have to toil at any manner of hard jobs just to be able to go to school? How is it that when we are sick. we can't get the medical help the Israeli kids take for granted?

I watched the speech backstage on the teleprompter. Obama paused for a moment, and I saw the text freeze. “I’m going off script here for a second,” he said, “but before I came here I met with a group of young Palestinians from the age of fifteen to twenty-two. And talking to them, they weren’t that different from my daughters. They weren’t that different from your daughters or sons. I honestly believe that if any Israeli parent sat down with those kids, they’d say, I want these kids to succeed; I want them to prosper. I want them to have opportunities just like my kids do. I believe that’s what Israeli parents would want for these kids if they had a chance to listen to them and talk to them. I believe that.” His comments were met with rolling applause, and when he dived back into the prepared text it occurred to me that this tribute—this imploring of Israelis to see Palestinians as human beings no different from themselves—might be the most he would be able to do to keep a promise to those Palestinian kids.

The first time I understood the story of the Nativity, I was in a Palestinian village called Yanoun, in the northern West Bank. We got a tour from two shepherds, both young guys who joked and laughed with each other as they shared their day with us. They showed us where they kept their sheep. It was a low, dark cave, noisy and crowded with animals, and smelling like...well...sheep shit. The mangers were a tad rusty, with sheep pushing at each other to find space to eat. It was a good hangout for sheep, but not really the sort of place where you'd want to have a kid. I remember thinking: "Oh. If God can be born here, I guess God can be born anywhere.

The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It’s called the ‘Palestinian refugee problem.’ This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship. After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew-free Middle East. Again you fail and now there are even more refugees living in your countries, and Israel is even larger, with Jerusalem as its capital. Time for more pictures of more camps and suffering children. What is to be done about these poor refugees (that not even the Arabs want)? Then start Middle Eastern student organizations on U.S. college campuses and find some young, idealistic American college kids who have no idea of what has been described here so far, and have them take up the cause. Now enter some power-hungry type like Yasser Arafat who begins to blackmail you and your Arab friends, who created the mess, for guns and bombs and money to fight the Israelis. Then Arafat creates hell for the world starting in the 1970s with his terrorism, and the “Palestinian refugee problem” becomes a worldwide issue and galvanizes all your citizens and the world against Israel. Along come the suicide bombers, so to keep the pot boiling you finance the show by paying every bomber’s family twenty-five thousand dollars. This encourages more crazies to go blow themselves up, killing civilians and children riding buses to school. Saudi Arabia held telethons to raise thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. What a perfect way to turn years of military failure into a public-opinion-campaign success. The perpetuation of lies and uncritical thinking, combined with repetitious anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes, has produced a generation of Arab youth incapable of thinking in a civilized manner. This government-nurtured rage toward the West and the infidels continues today, perpetuating their economic failure and deflecting frustration away from the dictators and regimes that oppress them. This refusal by the Arab regimes to take an honest look at themselves has created a culture of scapegoating that blames western civilization for misery and failure in every aspect of Arab life. So far it seems that Arab leaders don’t mind their people lagging behind, save for King Abdullah’s recent evidence of concern. (The depth of his sincerity remains to be seen.)

...I have a strong gut feeling that God won’t be giving us peace any time soon; we’re going to have to make an effort to achieve it on our own. And if we succeed, neither we nor the Palestinians will receive it free of charge. Peace, by definition, is compromise between sides, and in that kind of compromise, each side has to pay a genuine, heavy price, not just in territories or money but also in a true change of worldview. That’s why the first step might be to stop using the debilitating word “peace,” which has long since taken on transcendental and messianic meanings in both the political left and right wings, and replace it immediately with the word “compromise.” It might be a less rousing word, but at least it reminds us that the solution we are so eager for can’t be found in our prayers to God but in our insistence on a grueling, not always perfect dialogue with the other side. True, it’s more difficult to write songs about compromise, especially the kind my son and other kids can sing in their angelic voices. And it doesn’t have the same cool look on T-shirts. But in contrast to the lovely word that demands nothing of the person saying it, the word “compromise” insists on the same preconditions from all those who use it: They must first agree to concessions, maybe even more — they must be willing to accept the assumption that beyond the just and absolute truth they believe in, another truth may exist. And in the racist and violent part of the world I live in, that’s nothing to scoff at.

At thirteen years old, I knew our whole story, but how do you take someone, especially a middle school kid, down a path of military occupation to explain why he's never heard of your country? How do you tell an eighth grader that the reason he never read about your homeland in the school's history books is because your people's land was stolen in a war in 1948, the year your father was born, the same year Israel declared independence and expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, barring them from returning?

You don’t know whether this is, this is it. We don’t deserve this. We’re not animals like the Israelis think. Our kids deserve better. Israel knows that they want to punish the kids, the civilians. And I have always said this, even before, even from the nineties when young Palestinians praised those valiant fighters. They are to be praised. But if you know them in real life, when you see the pictures of those fighters, they’re very simple people. They’re lightly armed, modestly trained, but they have a weapon that Israel does not have: the weapon of the belief, the faith, that this is your land, that you are fighting a brutal European colonial enterprise that has been brutalizing Palestinians for over seven decades.