The last time I carried a life, I got to hear her heartbeat exactly three times before it stopped. It was my fifth pregnancy. After the final appointment, the one where the surgeon furrowed her brow as she looked at the ultrasound, I walked down First Avenue. It was winter. It was the year after the pandemic had begun. I was feral with grief. I snapped at strangers, cried in the bodega, etc. I’d spent a year getting pregnant, then unpregnant. I’d wake in the middle of the night and remember: heartbeat, heartbeat. At times, I felt absurd for my grief. I couldn’t ascertain what the metric of a mother was, what goalpost had to be met. Had I met it? Surely grief like this – love like this – had to be more deeply earned?
Three years later, I went under anesthesia again for another egg retrieval. At this point, I had a baby, nearly 18 months old. The surgery was on 6 October. The fertility doctor was cheery at my bedside when I woke; I now had a new crew of eggs on ice. I took a Lyft home. That afternoon, dazed on the couch, I watched sitcoms. The next day, I watched the news break: one urgent report after the other, in English, in Arabic, repeating the same details in different order: surprise attack, dawn, rockets, metal fence bulldozed, hostages taken, raids, combatants, dozens killed, no, hundreds killed, 16-year siege. Then I watched a city go dark. I watched water get cut. I watched the first bombs fall. I watched the mothers.
In late 2023, Palestinian children held a press conference in their second language, asking the world to stop killing them. Towards the end, a child says: “We invite you to protect us.” I was a relatively new mother, clunky and unsure, griefstruck at the rising death toll. The invitation was as generous as it was devastating. I see the nurturing principle as also one of the saviors of the human race, Audre Lorde once said, whether it occurs in women or whether it occurs in men. I think we are all mothers in that sense … that we do help each other, that we do respond in terms of survival and teaching. The invitation is a portal, a beckoning: to our mother selves.
The measure of any society is how it handles its most vulnerable. Arguably, a child on a strip of land without electricity, water, aid, access to border crossings, is as vulnerable as they come. But rather than being shielded by power – or, at minimum, international law – the children of Gaza have been killed, burned alive and starved. They account for the highest number of pediatric amputees. They live in “the most dangerous to place to be a child” on this planet. We’ve seen X-rays of their sniped brains. We’ve heard them plead for their life on emergency calls. We’ve watched them make their way through burning classrooms after a school-turned-shelter was bombed.
Even thousands of miles away: Palestinian children are the target. A woman in Texas was charged with trying to drown a three-year-old Palestinian American girl. A Texas landlord stabbed Wadee Alfayoumi, a six-year-old Palestinian American boy, 26 times. In Brooklyn, a woman threw hot coffee at a man and his 18-month-old child, because the man was wearing a keffiyeh.
The project of dehumanization is to make people unworthy of defense, so that when they suffer, onlookers are primed for disregard: they must have deserved it. They must have chosen it. Or, simply: they must not feel what I feel. Such acts are made possible only through decades-long propaganda and rhetoric about Palestinian children, media coverage that ages them up, policies that criminalize them, that position them as terrorists-in-the-making, inherently complicit. Embedded in the discourse against Palestinian children is that they are disposable to those who love them.
In a 1969 press conference, Golda Meir memorably said: “[W]e will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.” This rhetoric enacts two clever maneuvers: the racist trope of Palestinians as inhuman, and the release of accountability from the ones doing the actual murdering so that, even in their murdering, they are victimized. It is what enables, nearly two years into a genocide, as Gaza has entered a forced famine, for American commentators not to “put too much stock in images coming out of Gaza” of starving children.
In 2014, Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked posted a quote from the journalist Uri Elitzur. It read: “They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
What should “go”? The mothers, the homes, the children.
Years later, in response to a Palestinian Knesset member saying: “A child is a child is a child,” another, Meirav Ben-Ari, responded: “The children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves.”
Here is the greatest fiction of all: of children over there and children over here. The fiction that there is a difference. The fiction of someone – anyone – else’s child when, as James Baldwin once wrote, The children are always ours.
***
In the end, my daughter is carried in another body for the better part of a year. She is birthed by another body. The day she is born, I feel time stop. The sun streaming through the windows while I hold the surrogate’s hand, her knee, this woman who has given life for its own sake. When the doctor tells me to look, I look. There: my daughter. There: life. A decade in the making. Her skeptical gaze. The sweet protest of her first cry. Language fails me in the most glorious way. I hold her in the morning-lit room for hours, her mouth next to my cheek. She already knows how to breathe, I keep thinking. The miracle is everywhere.
She is 18 months old on 7 October. I’d envisioned many things for my first years as a new mother: tantrums, the fear that accompanies love, helicoptering. What I didn’t envision was becoming acquainted with the horrific things that could be done to a child’s body. To watch a girl hang like meat from a building. To watch a child burn alive. To see a decapitated toddler. It goes without saying that witnessing isn’t the same as experiencing. No matter that some part of the nervous system doesn’t understand the difference. No matter that every time I wake to my daughter crying, I shoot through the apartment like the city is burning. No matter that when I wake one night soon after 7 October – alone in the apartment with my daughter – to the shouts of a random argument between two men, men screaming about Hamas and Israel, my first thought, simple and unscripted: they’ve come for us.
Palestine is not a metaphor. And yet – every experience of mothering these last months has been superimposed on to Palestine. My daughter in the emergency room. My daughter’s bright, scraped knee in the backyard. My daughter’s antibiotics in the fridge. My daughter’s sunny classroom. My daughter’s favorite YouTube entertainer, singsonging: Good job, friends!
In Gaza, a woman says: I tried to have her for a decade. She holds her dead baby in her arms. In Gaza, twins are born after 10 years of trying and three rounds of IVF treatments. They are killed during an airstrike on their home. They are five months old. In Gaza, a toddler eats sand, a boy is sniped getting flour, a baby dies weighing less than she did when she was born. In Gaza, a pediatrician leaves her 10 children at home to treat others’ injured children in the hospital. Hours later, the bodies of nine of them are brought in, charred and disfigured beyond recognition, lost in the span of a heartbeat. In Gaza, an Israeli shell hits the Al-Basma Center, the largest fertility clinic in Gaza. Four thousand embryos are destroyed, the only hope for hundreds of Palestinians yearning to parent, to mother. Think not only of the speculums, the shots, the blood draws, but the triumphant phone calls, the numbers, the cells dividing and dividing and dividing, all that life insisting upon itself.
What claim do I have to their grief? Ask the nightmares. Ask the mirror I knock from the hinges after I read the news.
***
They must not feel what I feel. One of the most foundational aspects of parenting is expanding a child’s theory of mind. Most of my days are spent explaining to my child that other creatures feel things too: the dog, the child at the playground, even me. Do you like that? No? Do you think they like that? This Socratic merry-go-round is maddening enough with a child. It is outrageous with nuke-strapped adults.
Entities – like toddlers – will get away with what you permit them. Especially deeply militarized ones. Especially profoundly afraid ones.
One day, my daughter’s favorite YouTube entertainer posts about Gaza. Ms Rachel: a childhood development specialist, a musician, a woman whose vocal fry and tonal tilt I can mimic in my sleep. Ms Rachel sings about sleepy bunnies with a toddler amputee from Gaza. Ms Rachel lists numbers, names. Ms Rachel posts a video of herself crying as she says please, please, it must stop. “They’ve given me this career and I’m also willing to risk it for them,” she posts. Ms Rachel, mascot for ornery babies and delirious parents everywhere, says children should not starve. Children should not be murdered. Children should keep their limbs. Predictably, she is accused of being on Hamas’s payroll, a proxy terrorist. She has done the unforgivable: calling a child a child.
The world we sanction is the world we get. The world you make unsafe for other people’s children, ultimately, is the same one your own are living in. The most profound propaganda is that what happens to other children is different, removed, deserved. It is the convenient, short-lived fiction of the privileged.
I will admit it: I don’t even want to mention my daughter among such horror. I don’t want her among such stories. I want to shield her eyes even in prose. But I have to remember: my daughter is no more my daughter than anyone else’s.
Mothering hasn’t hardened me or turned me into an apex predator. It has broken me open. It makes me see children even where there were none: politicians, soldiers, armies. Sometimes, watching the jeering soldiers, the hearts signed on bombs, I think, with fury and sour pity: who taught you how to live? Where is your mother?
There is nothing special about a Palestinian mother. She loves and fears and wants the same as any other. She is made extraordinary not by her possession of some magical endurance, but by the relentlessness of horrors inflicted upon her. She cares beyond what is bearable because that is the quintessential task of mothering: to attend beyond reason, to stretch, to become unrecognizable by what you can take.
Everywhere I look, I see children.
Everywhere I look, I see mothers. Professors protecting their students at encampments. Activists boarding flotillas with baby formula and medication. “I see my children and every child in the children of Gaza,” says the woman who teaches my daughter nursery rhymes.
Later, she posts: “No exceptions.”
