Last Thursday, many Sunni Muslims celebrated the birth of Islam’s founder Muhammad. As the Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh reported, Gaza’s Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh announced during a ceremony to mark this occasion that Hamas was planning to establish a “military academy” that would offer training to children as young as twelve. The children attending the school would be able to “graduate with a diploma or a BA in military affairs.”
However, as a widely quoted Associated Press (AP) report indicates, this was apparently not an entirely new initiative: since last September, Hamas has been offering a military training program as “a weekly elective…in all Gaza high schools,” and the ceremony on Thursday included celebrations of the “graduation” of the first 3600 participants:
“More
than 3,000 Palestinian teenagers on Thursday graduated from the ruling
Hamas terror group’s first high school military training program in the
Gaza Strip, displaying mock weapons, crawling commando-style on the
ground and taking up fighting positions for thousands of cheering
supporters.
Hamas
officials said the Futuwwa, or ‘Youth,’ program is aimed at fostering a
new generation of leaders in the struggle against Israel.”
A fifteen year old graduate of this program quoted in the AP report was enthusiastic:
“My
officer taught me the values of courage, sacrifice and love of jihad,
as well as some battle tactics […] I feel that I can free my energy in a
good way. I can do for real what I do in video games.”
There
may well be a connection between this “educational” initiative by Hamas
and the efforts mentioned by senior Hamas commander Zaher Jabarin in a
recent interview with Hamas’ Al-Quds TV. In the interview, Jabarin boasted that Hamas labors “day and night” to educate Palestinian children to become suicide bombers.
“There
was training of the divine generation, the true generation of
martyrdom-seekers, through which we can participate in the battle.
First, before anything else, before any Jihadi action, before the
transfer of weapons, money, etc., and everything required for action,
first and foremost is the individual person. The Islamic Movement
[Hamas] took care of the education of this youngster who will
participate in this battle […] We labored day and night to build the
person, who will participate in this battle […] The Palestinian
youngsters, the resistance and Jihad warriors, fight and quarrel over
performing a courageous suicide operation.”
Jabarin
emphasized that Hamas was “now preparing for the battle of liberation,
and not just the resistance as we have done in the past” – and
tellingly, the teenagers “graduating” on Muhammad’s birthday were called
“Liberation Vanguards.”
Among
the many questions that should be raised in this context is whether the
claim by AP that Hamas has been offering a military training program as
“a weekly elective…in all Gaza high schools” means that UNRWA – which
runs 245 schools for 225,000 students in Gaza
– cooperates with Hamas in hosting or otherwise facilitating the
military training of teenagers. UNWRA also has a program for donors to “adopt” a Gaza school, and recently, the German government
donated 3 million Euros for the construction of two additional UNRWA
schools in Gaza. No doubt these donations are well-meant, but they
obviously also allow the Hamas-rulers of Gaza to avoid committing
resources to the education of Gaza’s children while leaving them free to
finance instead “jihad” training for teenagers.
It
is perhaps also time that the organizations that are so eager to indict
Israel for any harm that comes to Palestinian teenagers in situations
of conflict take note of the longstanding and prevalent Palestinian
practice to provide children with some sort of military training.
In June 1970, Life Magazine featured a report on “Palestinian Arabs” with a cover photo
that showed a group of boys holding what seems to be real guns; the
photo was captioned: “The ‘Tiger Cubs’ train at a camp in Jordan.”
The report included another similar photo accompanied by a text explaining that it showed “student guerillas in Jordan receiv[ing] weapons instruction in a tent under the stern gaze of Che Guevara. The course is sponsored by the liberation front.”
Or consider this revealing testimony, first published in 1985 and reprinted 1998 for a special Al-Ahram series on “50 years of Arab dispossession”: in an interview, Nagi El-Ali, a prominent cartoonist, decries Israel’s 1982 campaign against Palestinian terror groups in Lebanon, but then he boasts:
“I
saw for myself how afraid the Israeli soldiers were of the children. A
child of ten or eleven had sufficient training to carry and use an RBG
rifle. The situation was simple enough. The Israeli tanks were in front
of them and the weapon was in their hands. The Israelis were afraid to
go into the camps, and if they did, they would only do so in daylight.”
Right:
those cowardly Israeli soldiers, utterly shocked when they encounter
heavily armed children sent by cynical adults to fight for them… And of
course, these adults know very well when to switch from the perverted
pride reflected in El-Ali’s recollection – and countless other similar statements – to a display of abject victimization.
To
be sure, Palestinian youngsters no longer train “under the stern gaze
of Che Guevara,” but otherwise, not all that much has changed: nowadays,
they get trained as “Jihad warriors” who proudly graduate on Muhammad’s
birthday, indoctrinated to regard it as a privilege to perform “a
courageous suicide operation.” The international community makes sure
Hamas won’t have other expenses for education and continues to overlook
the vicious legacy of decades of determined Palestinian efforts to teach children that violence and terrorism are noble and admirable.
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