To the question “What makes you scared?” children said things like, “I get scared when my dad tells me we are safe, and I know we are not safe” because they could hear nearby explosions or whirring drones. Most answered the question “What makes you feel safe?” with versions of “being close to other people.” Some children defined safety in a negative sense, as the absence of violence or simply as distance from it, with statements like, “just when there’s no one dying,” or when “they are striking far away.” One child, asked who protected them, said, “God and Mom.” More often children responded “Hezbollah”—the people, they elaborated, “who defend me” or “who defend us.” (In the manuscript, the epidemiologist translated “Hezbollah” as “the resistance,” to avoid inevitable censorship by academic journals.) Several older children took pictures of their bedrooms, where photos of martyrs, some famous and others ordinary, decorated their walls. To the question “What makes you happy?” several of the younger children responded, “resistance against Israel.”
The epidemiologist told me that one child used the word baaqoon to describe his commitment to staying on his family’s land. Baaqoon means, literally, we are staying. It is different from saamidoun, the Arabic word for we remain steadfast, in that the line it draws from present to both past and future is explicitly tied to place. The child, no more than seven years old, she said, spoke on behalf of a “we” many times his size. She was taken aback by the gravity of this word coming out of his mouth. Where did he learn to speak like this—and to mean it?
I recently came across a video on X showing the child of a martyred paramedic in the south of Lebanon. The boy, who looks to be about nine or ten years old, sits on the lap of one of his father’s colleagues, a leader of the political group Amal, which oversees Al-Risala, one of the main medical rescue organizations currently serving this part of the country. The man tells the boy, “One day we’re all going to go. You? They took your dad. And me, they took my friend.” He does not have to say who “they” are. The boy knows. “I want to defeat”—bidde kassir, literally “break”—“all the Israelis,” the child says. “We’ll continue on this path,” the man responds. “Me, my son was martyred, and my brother was martyred, and my uncle was martyred. We’re in this together [Mitli mitlak]. But this path, we need to continue on it [Bidnan kamlo].” I interviewed paramedics in the south who repeated this same phrase, have heard many men and women, in the face of loss, speak it. The boy responds with words that belong to someone much older: “My heart burns knowing my dad is gone [Hara2it albi inno bayyi fal].” I wonder where he learned this phrase.
While I was in Beirut another doctor told me the story of a child from Gaza who, after coming to Lebanon, learned that a man had died a natural death. The child did not understand. He did not know that death could come this way. It had to be explained to him, that people die of old age. The only cause of death the child knew was Israel. And he knew it well.
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