Infanticides kill the future

Jan 3, 2025
Palestinian children play in a slum on the outskirts of Khan Younis Refugee Camp, in the southern Gaza Strip, on October 23, 2021. Alamy/ Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto)

While self-described experts might express surprise about the results of the elections in the USA, the signs of a likely swing to the right have been plain enough. Among many sickening images in 2024, the sight of Congress standing to applaud an Israeli leader responsible for the genocide in Gaza symbolised fascist sympathies.

Predictions about frightening developments in foreign policy now that Trump Republicans have control not only of the White House but also of both houses of Congress are rather meaningless. The rhetoric might be more extreme but the Biden Administration has already implemented policies which threaten a bleak future for all but powerful and ruthless allies.

Even if Australian apologists for the USA try to explain away the genocide in Gaza, surely they must be given pause by the statistics which include the deaths of children. Whether Netanyahu and Biden should be considered war criminals for the ethnic cleansing and collective punishment they are carrying out in Gaza, surely no objective observer can ignore the horrible infanticide included in their war. Republicans show considerable angst about pregnancy termination but seem content with the role their country plays in the deaths of thousands of Palestinian children.

We know that it is perhaps easier to focus on one death than on many. It is possible that as death tolls mount – and in Gaza the statistics run into five figures just for child fatalities – the numbers becoming numbing. We stagger to think how foreign policy objectives can justify the death of one child. We see the parents mourning and yet we are not moved enough to take a strong stance on a ceasefire and prosecution of the infanticidal war criminals.

Consider for a moment the anguish of those parents. Not only are they mourning the suffering and death of a baby so precious and innocent but they are also staring into a future which is no longer theirs. Parents place their hopes in their children. Everything that they do aims to build a better world for them. Now their lives and their futures are stolen from them.

In the Robert Browning poem which is one version of the story, the ‘Pied Piper of Hamelin’ offers to save the town from a plague of rats. The mayor and corporation agree to pay him a thousand guilders. When he plays his pipe the rats follow him to the river where they drown but when he asks for his fee, the mayor says that the offer was only in jest and challenges him to get the rats back if he can.

The Piper goes again into the streets and plays a different tune. This time all the children of the town follow him and he leads them into a cave where they disappear forever. One child who is lame could not keep up with the parade and he is left without playmates to have a lonely life.

This allegory is not about Hamelin alone, nor does it apply only to Gaza. When the children of the USA and Israel grow to adulthood, they will face the emptiness and loneliness of a generation. They will have to confront some sort of memorial, whether visual or in some other way symbolic, showing what their parents’ generation did, supposedly in their names. This will be a terrible burden to bear.

It is no surprise that the infanticides can ignore the suffering they inflict on the people of Gaza through their children. They must have no idea of the future they are building for their own children. Their insensitivity is consistent with their attitude to climate change – they can ignore the pleas of the young.

Justifying infanticide removes one of the universal taboos. How could anyone take the side of the Israeli soccer hooligans chanting the reason for Palestinian schools being empty? The joke apparently was that ‘all the children are dead’. Some joke. We cannot in conscience blame children for the ills we create. But do any taboos remain? Would infanticides hesitate about using nuclear weapons? Infanticides kill the future. They also kill all morality. We must never accept their evil actions and their hypocritical arguments.

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