I Feel You

From Al-Ahram:

Every once in a while Ibrahim Hawash, 42, calls his wife Noha from his nightshift job to make sure that she has followed the treatment course prescribed by their family doctor for the involuntary urination of their four children, who are in primary school. The doctor says that the four children lost their ability to control urination due to the fear they underwent when Israeli army jets bombed a home near theirs in the Jabalya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip during the "Warm Winter" military campaign three weeks ago. The four children still remember the terrifying night when they woke frightened up to the sound of a thundering explosion in the area and found that the glass of their home's windows had fallen onto their bed...

Thousands of Palestinian children have experienced what Hawash's four children are undergoing. Mohamed Kharsa, 10, lives in the Tufah neighbourhood northeast of Gaza City, which has been subject to severe Israeli attacks. He runs away to his family home whenever he hears the roar of Israeli planes in the sky.

"Whenever I hear the sound of a plane I feel it has come to bomb me," he told Al-Ahram Weekly. Aish Samour, director of the Psychiatric Hospital in Gaza, says that 30 per cent of Palestinian children under 10 years of age suffer from involuntary urination due to deep-seated fear, and mentions other nervous problems such as nail- biting, nightmares, bodily pains of unknown cause, crying and introversion.

Ever since the 9/11 attacks, my entire body seizes up whenever I hear a plane fly low overhead. Looked at rationally this is ridiculous, since I was a mile away, it happened once, and I didn't even hear the hijacked planes; I assume it actually derives from the Air Force jets that flew over Manhattan for several days afterward, which I certainly did hear. However, when planes fly by my spinal cord is not rational, and immediately informs my brain that WE ARE UNDER ATTACK.

In any case, I can easily imagine that if I were one of these Palestinian children, I'd be wetting my pants too. And certainly the fear of omnipresent Death From Above will be encoded in their molecular structure for a long time even if they move to Athens.

I don't think there's much chance the people of the world can create world peace based on mutual love. However, we might be able to build it based on mutual hatred of the violent idiots who've ruled this planet for the past 6,000 years.

—Jonathan Schwarz