Faith Anderson

Abuse so systematic a 3 year old boy is sure being slapped is how he should be put to sleep. A mother in Ariel, an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, has just discovered something about her little boy. He has been attending the same daycare for three years. He apparently thinks that getting slapped is part of being put to sleep. He doesn't know it's wrong. Why would he? He has been learning about the world from the very people who were supposed to protect him. Three women working at the daycare, including its director, have been arrested. Police investigators examining security footage suspect one employee of 187 separate incidents of abuse, another of 77, and the director herself of 18. Children allegedly slapped, shaken, thrown around, tied up, their mouths and noses covered. In one single day investigators identified 36 suspected incidents of violence. One day. Imagine what it must be like to be so small that you cannot defend yourself, cannot explain what is happening to you, and have absolutely no way of understanding why the grown-ups are hurting you. The daycare was called Luchi. Rays of Light. Parents entrusted their children to these women every morning. Some of them for years. They are now discovering that things they had accepted as ordinary childhood accidents may have been something else entirely. And I keep thinking about that little boy who apparently believes a slap is how you put someone to sleep. How do you begin to teach a child that what he has always known as normal was actually cruelty? How do you explain tenderness to someone who learned to expect pain from the hands that held him? The women are suspects, not convicted criminals. But the evidence described by investigators is horrifying enough. And whatever happens in court, those children will need something much harder to obtain than a conviction: the chance to discover that the world is not necessarily the place they were taught it was.

In 1929, Palestinian women organised a convoy of 70 cars to confront the British in Jerusalem. On 26 October 1929, more than 200 Palestinian women gathered in Jerusalem for the first Palestine Arab Women's Congress. They had had enough of British colonial rule and the policies encouraging Zionist immigration to Palestine. A delegation went to confront the British High Commissioner with their demands. Then the women climbed into approximately 70 cars and drove through Jerusalem, sounding their horns and stopping at foreign consulates to deliver their resolutions. This was 1929. Women from different towns and religious communities had come together to organise a national political movement, and they intended to make themselves heard. Look at the photograph. These aren't anonymous women. Among them was Nabiha Nasir, who founded Birzeit College, the institution that would eventually become Birzeit University. There was also Basma Faris, the principal of a girls' school, and Matiel Mughannam, a prominent Palestinian activist. They were educators, organisers and political thinkers, challenging one of the world's most powerful empires. The photograph was preserved by the American Colony photographers in Jerusalem and is now held by the US Library of Congress. It is a remarkable little piece of Palestinian history, almost a century old, showing women who refused to leave their country's future entirely in the hands of men.

No violence is so obsessed with harm to genitals than Israeli violence. Israeli violence is unique in several ways: 1. The perpetrators gloat about it in public and their fans deny it for them. 2. It's often aimed at sexual organs, pointing to terror in the perpetrator of being sexually inadequate 3. The joy involved is off the charts 4. It's meant to compensate for the insecurities of the offending side. Torture is almost always done by a small person hating the small in himself and taking that out on someone else, but in the case of Israeli violence that characteristic is unusually important. How small Israelis feel. How scared they are of their own worthlessness. They will never beat someone so hard they beat their own self-loathing away.

25 times Israel massacred Palestinians before Hamas existed