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Aires, Thursday, August 9 of 1990
Palestinian children’s Itaipu (view)
By Suhail Hani Daher Akel *
The biggest river dam in the world is located in the Paraguayan Latin-American territory and it is known as Itaipu, which means “The sound of the stones” in the indigenous language. Maybe, in that Paraguayan-Argentine-Brazilian region that was the name used by the natives to construct the opposition against those who came to colonize them, keep their land and enjoy its profit.
Without doubt, it is the same Itaipu used by the Palestinian natives to instrument their defense against those who one day defied humanity and decided that we should not exist any more.
At present, around 2,250,000 Palestinians – from which 800,000 are children – are under the Israeli occupation, which commits the worst atrocities and human violations against these people; maybe, a majority of these Palestinian people were victims of the atrocities in the Nazis camps during their childhood.
But our people took part in the challenge. From his own gestation period, the Palestinian child fights against death. Every child who is born has already managed to evade the first fence imposed by Herods. Dr. Jenniffer Leaning from the School of Medicine in Harvard said the following after visiting our occupied Land in February of 1988: “Palestinian pregnant women exposed to tear gas suffer from a sudden cease of fetal movement. The figures we know maybe represent only a 50 per cent of the real number, since many women bury the dead fetus and they do not go to hospital or clinic to take medicines in fear of being arrested”. Different sources from international bodies indicate a total of 3,500 miscarriages as a result of beatings and tear gases from the beginning of Intifada –8/12/87- to these days.
In youth, the Palestinian child had the necessity of appealing to his popular impishness to be able to confront the gigantic Goliath: apart from stones, potatoes with nails thrown with catapults .
But he has to pay a high price for his freedom. Taking advantage of his naive childhood, the Israeli army and the Jewish settlers carry out their ethnic terrorism and children are deceived with sweets and chocolate bars which become small and ferocious chemical weapons. The weapons explode when they are lifted up. With regard to this, Mohammed Miari, a member of the Israeli Parliament at the moment for the Progressive Movement for Peace, denounced several cases, but he emphasized this one: “The ten-year-old-child Mahmoud Abu Jawad was in charge of looking after a flock of sheep on the outskirts of the village Tamoun when an Israeli squad threw him sweets. As the boy lifted up the sweets, they exploded causing him burns on hands, face and chest”. The member of Parliament Miari emphasized before the Israeli Defense Minister that the explosive candies are highly mortal chemical weapons which infringe the Geneva conventions – Al Fajr Newspaper, Jerusalem, November 5 of 1988.
The violations suffered by the civil Palestinians have to be added to this sad reality. The perfect mouthful is the defenseless childhood: broken bones, tortures, prison, house demolition, destroyed families, exiled people, et cetera... These unpleasant life experiences have been penetrating in the retina of childhood for years, perforating his psychic structure with the clear objective of decomposing the future generations.
Nevertheless, the zionist occupant was not able to upset his national conscience, his love for the land of his ancestors and future children, his roots...his people. Therefore, from the most deep offense of the Palestine Land arose Itaipu, “the sound of the stones of the Palestinian children, swearing over their rocks that this will be the last Intifada...the last gift to the land of honey, orange and olive trees....to the land of Prophets”.
I conclude with the thinking of the Palestine State President, engineer Yasser Arafat: “Our oppressed People only desire that their children possess a place, under the sun in their country, a place in which they can be free as other children in the world”.
* Director of the Palestine Information Office in the Argentine Republic