Just a few hours ago, a group of parents were seen recording their children on video in Gaza but the recording, part of a school nursery function was marked in a different taste and was quite a world away from usual school kiddy functions, truth be told.
In fact, to the untrained eye of the commoners or passerby’s a central question emerged common: how on earth could any parent have possibly happily recorded his child being dressed as a ‘jihadi’ seen killing Israelis?
In that part of the world where perhaps the word peace and Israel-Palestine relationships strangely stand at loggerheads with one another, and continually so, one wonders if parents of innocent nursery-going children have given up on sanity as well?
For the longest time Israel and Palestine have been constantly at war, their backs turned against one another. And particularly, in the recent light of things, one’s only gotten flummoxed seeing some particularly bitter scenes from Israel’s side of the border, the recent military shoot out of a harmless, simple volunteer girl indicating the volatility of human lives and hostility existing between the Jewish and the Arab states.
Still, when one thinks of individuals who have a role to play in the society- such as parents to young, innocent children who’re of an age where they don’t know the difference between good and bad- one expects for some sanity to prevail. Against this backdrop, when news spread quickly like a wild virus about a school’s nursery play in Gaza showing children dressed in as wild Jihadis, dressed accordingly and carrying toy guns to kill ‘Israelis’, one wasn’t particularly pleased with the ensuing drama.
What was shocking on two accounts was first that there was actually a play allowed to happen on such a scary, cold-blooded narrative and second, that parents who were recording their young kids playing the act of Jihadis engaged in killing of Israelis weren’t one bit perturbed or saddened as to what they filmed cheerfully in their hand-held devices.
Video captured of the young kids’ school nursery play actually sees happy and content looking parents recording the sight of Jihadis who are seemingly storming into an area or settlement holding guns and other weapons where the idea is to round up the Israelis and shoot them. Here’s something else that was particularly shocking. For the entirety of the video, a really tense sound of music is played and that’s not all, what’s also played is a speech by the dead former leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Yasser Arafat, is then played while other kids point pistols at the crowd.
Is this really what a parent should be doing to his or her ward? Secondly, is this really the job of an educational hub, such as a school- the first important temple of learning for a child, where he and she learn values and get to know about feelings? If this is what is being imparted to school children who haven’t even reached their adolescent years, then what will they end up learning as they progress to higher classes further up in their academic journey?
Aren’t you uncomfortable and feeling perplexed by such a horrific piece of news?
In case you were wondering just which educational institute would let such a disconsolate play happen, then you don’t have to look everywhere. These disturbing scenes were actually caught in the Al-Hoda nursery in Gaza, according to reports published in Middle East Media Research Institute.
But these dramatic albeit painful-looking scenes aren’t anything new nor should be considered as a sudden surprise if you go by a past instance of the school’s journey. It is shocking but true that back in 2016, some other children at the nursery pretended to plant anti-tank mines, kidnap and kill Israeli soldiers, and launch mortars. What on earth is really going on in this school at Gaza?
While it isn’t our business to take sides and much like everyone else, we too wish that peace were to happen and last between to the two warring states, what’s certain is that even today, none of the news from Israel have ever carried a similar painfully bizarre story, as the one reported straight from the Al-Hoda nursery.
Children are like clay, they say. Young, but capable minds, fragile but honest and sincere to learn, they become what we teach them. But whether you look at parents or you look at any other guiding light for these children, it would distress more people on any given day when someone was told that under the supervision of a school (itself) did some children star in a play-acting the part of Jihadis, ‘taking out’ Israelis wielding deadly weapons. One’s not sure if this is a great instance of education serving its pursuers or practitioners as well.
And that is not all. There’s something completely bizarre and rather telling of the current climate of animosity between Israel and its neighbour, Palestine. The children’s play ends with children, dressed as Jihadis proudly showing a placard that reads, “Israel has fallen”.