“What is your name?” “Zaki.” “How old are you?” “Seven.” “Does your father live?” “He died.” “What was your father?” “A Fedai (a warrior).” “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “A Fedai.”

That is how Rodolfo Walsh transcribed -- in an interview for Noticias Newspaper published in 1974 -- his dialogue with a Palestinian boy who was being sheltered in an orphan school in the south of Beirut.
Anyone would think that the profile and expectations of Palestinian children 35 years after Walsh’s report have not changed.
But they have. They have changed terribly. Because, today, Palestine’s children -- especially those who live in the besieged and devastated Gaza Strip -- do not have any expectations they will reach adulthood. They know they will die very soon, victims of bombs or snipers, starvation, or the plagues that proliferate in besieged and collapsed cities. At best -- they think -- they will die fighting. Fighting the same enemy their parents and grandparents fought. To join them in heaven.
Dr. Abdel Aziz Mousa Thabet, the most important child psychiatrist based in Gaza, who has been studying the effects of violence and the post-traumatic implications of war in Palestinian children for 20 years, says that 65% of those children present severe behavioral disorders and alterations.
“There are many other traumatic symptoms, like headaches and abdominal pain and vomiting. There’s an inability to concentrate, panic, anxiety, irritability,"" the January 7, 2009 edition of The Guardian quoted him as saying.
“I've observed much change in the children. They are more anxious, more fearful. Children are panicky because of the explosions. Children want to leave. You hear it. They feel there is no hope, that the world can’t do anything for them and they can’t do anything for themselves.”
This traumatic experience, the psychiatrist concluded, combined with others, pushes them to show extreme behavior.
The photograph, which traveled around the world, of 13-year-old Mohammed al-Dura -- who was shot to death by Israeli soldiers while his father futilely tried to protect him -- has been written in stone in the Palestinians’ conscience. Adults see all the inhumanity of the Israeli killing machine reflected in that picture. The children, however, see it differently, say the psychologists. In their eyes, what the picture shows is that their parents are not capable of protecting them.
Another psychiatrist from the Gaza Strip --that enormous laboratory of pain and despair -- Eyad Sarraj, said last Sunday that the hundreds of orphan children left by the bombings will soon become, in these days of truce, Hamas militia members. “The children who have witnessed their parents being killed or being incapable to defend them,” Sarraj says, “will look for someone else to become their protector, in this case another armed faction, which will provide them with safety, money, and the possibility to take revenge. The circle of violence will be enlarged.”
This is the state of things in the Near East, where the life of Palestinian children, women and workers without a home, land or future is barely a red drop of blood, despised, a thousand times erased, systematically ignored by those who are in charge.
The real deal… there is no future
Andrea Gentile -- an Argentine documentary director and producer who resides in Mexico -- presented in 1987 a 26-minute-long short film called “The Real Deal… There is No Future.”
Gentile took a group of poor children who wiped car windshields in the streets of Mexico City in exchange for a few coins. Five or six years later, she wondered what had happened to each of those children in their teenage years or youth. The answer --which constitutes the nucleus of the documentary -- was that most of them, after a few years, were already dead or insane, crushed by the system’s injustice.
Andrea Gentile’s documentary could have been shot in the streets of the outskirts of Buenos Aires or of the city of Cordoba or Rosario with an identical result and an identical message.
Because the real deal -- what is concrete, the truth -- is that our children, the same as those from Mexico City or the Palestinian children of Gaza, have no future. They do not have a future if we understand it as the development of the personality and potentialities of a human being. They have no future if we understand it as the progress of life at the heart of a community.
In 2008, the results of a survey ordered by the Ministry of Social Development among young people between 15 and 20 years old in the outskirts of Buenos Aires left government officials speechless.
35% of those children -- as it was published on the front page of some newspapers -- thought that in the next five years they would be “dead or excluded”; 30% thought they would have a “precarious job”. Only the remaining 35% expected to “fulfill their vocation”.
There are no double meanings in this survey. Poverty’s children clearly perceive the reality police and jail statistics and human rights organization reports and condemnations will later demonstrate, with verifiable facts.
An invisible thread, a silent and secret net, unites hungers and sobs, agonies and deep desires among most of humanity.
Within that net, those who are most invisible, imperceptible, a lament buried by the noise of bombs and the power’s discourse, are the children.
They have no future because it has been stolen. They are not included in official measures. They are not included in the files or in the imagination of government employees.
But they are the owners of Hope. All of them, together, the massacred and the ignored, the rebellious and the imperceptible, those who resist bombings with phosphorus or with hunger or with indifference, they are the owners of Hope.
They, the fighting children -- who should have never been -- the rainbow warriors, are capable of kneading, for humanity, bread we still do not know, sparkles we do not suspect, a great epic that has not been written yet.
Let’s greet those children, terrible angels. If there is ever peace -- lasting and fair -- it will be because of them. If there is ever bread and caresses on everyone’s table, it will be because of them.
The Spanish language original version of this article can be viewed at the web site www.pelotadetrapo.org.ar.