All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?
– Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 3
One of the hardest truths to understand about Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is the deliberate targeting of children. Children and babies have been bombed, burned, mutilated—killed in homes, in schools, in hospitals, in tents, in UN safe places. Shot in the head and heart by Israeli snipers while scavenging for food in the desolate, apocalyptic streets. Over 20,000 children have been murdered in Gaza; many thousands more horribly injured.
The hunting and massacre of children is deliberate. But who would do that, and what message does it send? To kill an enemy’s children is to kill their future, kill the possibility of their hope. Killing an enemy’s children tells them that nothing is sacred, tells them that no ruthlessness, no hatred is forbidden. Tells them that eradication is the goal, that no law, no morality, no decency will protect the most vulnerable of them. No cruelty is out of bounds. Tells them that neither God nor man can protect them. Tells them that their sacred rage at the murdering of their children will end in hopelessness because they have no ability to stop the slaughter. Such is the ethic of genocidal power. It inflicts a deep, guilty shame on the adults because they cannot protect their children.
One of our deepest primal fears is to be attacked by the ogre who eats children, the all powerful monster that thrives on consuming innocence. And an essential aspect of that fear is that we are helpless to stop it.
It comes, then, as no surprise that one of Israel’s first targets in Iran was the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls elementary school. At least 148 young girls were killed and over 100 more injured. Israel may claim this was an unfortunate mistake. That would be a lie.
The United States and Israel have the most sophisticated targeting systems in the world. These little girls were killed at the same time as Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Many Iranians despised this old religious despot and were not surprised to have their country, so to speak, decapitated. But what purpose to cut off the tail?
Whatever excuses are professed for the just cause of a war, all are made obscene when the ogre’s jaws are dripping with the blood of children.
Many commentators have speculated—undoubtedly correctly—that one of Trump’s motivations for attacking Iran was to get the subject of the Epstein files out of the headlines. The official reasons for the attack—just like the war on Iraq in 2003—were lies. Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. Iran was not making a nuclear bomb, nor did they have missiles capable of reaching the U.S. What is true is that Israel wanted Iran to be rendered powerless, and Trump was happy to assist.
And, ironically, the damning revelations in the Epstein files are about the trafficking and raping of girls by powerful men, girls just a little bit older than the ones in the obliterated elementary school. Those revelations expose a ruthless, willing indulgence by powerful, immoral men to injure children. Some of those same men are blowing up children in Gaza and Iran. So murdering Muslim children in the Middle East, rather than diverting our attention from Epstein, is reinforcing it.