Sumud and the Children of Palestine

The Refusal to Be Uprooted by British, Zionist and American Imperialists

Screenshot of the Gaza Tribunal’s Channel. Photo credit: Gaza Tribunal

A nation that maims, kills and starves men, women and children is unlikely to survive. Also, leaders of nations who have aided in those atrocities will likely face the same fate.

The Gaza Tribunal, newly created to counter the complicity of many Western countries in Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, tells us: “Gaza represents a breaking point in the historical journey of humanity, when a global system based on power, not justice, prevails.” Richard Falk, the tribunal’s president, at its first session in Sarajevo, characterized Gaza as the “moral challenge of our time.”

It is Gaza’s children, Palestine’s future, who have borne the brunt of Israel’s atrocities. The United Nations Children’s Fund calls Gaza the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. And the commissioner general of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine, Philipe Lazzarini, concluded about Israel’s war on Gaza, “This is a war on children. It is a war on their childhood and their future.”

Two-thirds of the Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israel’s self-declared “moral army” have been women and children. One in ten children in Gaza are malnourished because of Israel’s engineered blockade of humanitarian aid. And, more than 40,000 have war-related disabilities as a result of its attacks: “Gaza now has the highest number of child amputees per capita anywhere in the world.”

A child psychiatrist with Medicines Sans Frontieres, Doctors Without Borders in Palestine, observes that there’s never a ‘post’ in post-traumatic stress syndrome. It’s ongoing trauma, it’s protracted trauma, it’s one war [Israeli] after the other.”

As I agonize over the unimaginable suffering and trauma of Gaza’s children, the refrain from Billie Holiday’s 1941 mournful song, “God Bless the Child,” keeps coming back to me: “God bless the child that’s got his own.”

The soulful lament is tailored for all who experience physical and mental pain. Its lyrics seem as if they were written with Palestinians in mind.

The poem encourages reliance on one’s strength and resourcefulness to survive the painful inequalities and harsh realities of life. Despite its melancholic tone, it makes a powerful statement about self-determination and defiance in the face of adversity. With time, it has become an anthem of independence and self-reliance.

Generations of Palestinians have experienced countless injustices and have had to struggle for survival on their own. Sumud, a core value in Palestinian society, has been their lodestar.

For decades, US-financed Israeli regimes have resorted to systematic cruelty and overwhelming force to crush Palestinian resistance. Their ruthlessness, however, has made Palestinians stronger and more inventive in resisting Zionist oppression.

The Palestinian struggle for freedom has begun to bring the world together and across generations. Palestine has come to mean freedom, especially to the disposed and disenfranchised.

Despite the ready availability of the US military arsenal, Israel has been unable to defeat a guerrilla force, with no real means of defense. The Israeli military has murdered countless Palestinian leaders, relentlessly bombed their country from the air, turned historical Gaza into rubble, but they have not succeeded to crush the spirit of sumud.

Significantly, the image of a democratic, civilized and moral Israel has been exposed for the sham it is. The global community has come to recognize the Zionist entity for what it has always been: a brutal lawless settler-colonial project in the heart of the Islamic world, striving to be the undisputed regional hegemon. While engaged in unbridled barbarism in occupied Gaza and the West Bank, Israel has attacked Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

Unfortunately, Washington has committed itself financially, militarily and politically to Israel’s genocide. The Arab regimes, 23 of them (excepting Yemen), with a combined population of nearly 500 million, are weak, corrupt and dependent on the United States.

There is much the entire Arab world can and should learn from Palestinian sumud. Their liberation energy and persistence bear witness to what is possible: a new unified regional order that says NO to US-Israel hegemony.

Interestingly, after World War I and II, Arab leaders of those years understood the necessity of forcefully opposing the implantation of Western imperialism in the region generally and in Palestine particularly.

For example, Egyptian diplomat and first secretary-general of the newly established Arab League, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, known also as Azzam Pasha, explained the League’s position regarding Palestine and the Zionist claim during a 1946 public hearing of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in Cairo. The commission, assembled at the end of World War II, was tasked with investigating the impact of settling 100,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors in Palestine.

At the Cairo hearings, Azzam Pasha advanced an independent way forward:

The Zionist, the new Jew [European], wants to dominate and he pretends that he has got a particular civilizing mission with which he returns to a backward degenerate race in order to put the elements of progress into an area which wants no progress. Well, that has been the pretension of every power that wanted to colonize and aimed at domination… The Arabs simply stand and say NO. We are not reactionary and we are not backward… We have a heritage of civilization and of spiritual life. We are not going to allow ourselves to be controlled…

Azzam Pasha, like other Arab leaders of his time, rejected the establishment of an exclusive Jewish state, proposing instead an autonomous Palestine that respected the will of the Arab majority while safeguarding the equality of all inhabitants, regardless of religion. It is regrettable that the current leadership in the Arab world is deaf to it.

Palestine is not the native land of the Zionists and their progeny, who have for 77 years illegally occupied stolen land and sustained themselves on pilfered resources. It explains the Israeli regime’s complete absence of regret or reservations about destroying 5,000-year-old Gaza.

Since October 2023, the Israeli Occupation Forces have systematically leveled Gaza, a war crime under Article 53 of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the destruction of already occupied land by an occupying power. Since it withdrew from the March 2025 ceasefire, Israel has carried out planned controlled demolitions across bombed-out Gaza and has virtually flattened Rafah, whose history spans thousands of years.

Palestinians, like their cherished olive trees, have lives deeply rooted in the soil of Palestine. And like them, they have refused to be uprooted by British, Zionist and American imperialists.

The October rebellion has internationalized the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe). Palestine can no longer be ignored. The survival of international order and the rule of law is linked to the viability of the Palestinian nation.

Support of the global community for the Palestinian struggle is more crucial today than ever. That passive support must be transformed into concrete action has finally been deemed vital by some nations. Increased concern has led to the formation of a number of international groups: the Gaza Tribunal, the Hague Group and Madrid Group, among them.

The Gaza Tribunal, also known as the People’s Tribunal, a civil society initiative, draws on the expertise of a broad group of intellectuals, academics, lawyers, human rights activists, moral and cultural figures and civil organizations to serve as a “court of humanity and conscience,” specifically regarding Gaza.

At the Emergency Conference of the Hague Group in Bogota, Colombia on 15 July 2025, for example, all 30 countries agreed that “the era of impunity [of Israel] must end—and that international law must be enforced.”

The stated aim of the Madrid Group, a coalition of over 20 European and Arab countries, is to end Israel’s war and blockade of Gaza.

After 22 months of barbarism, the foreign ministers of Britain and 27 other countries finally “sharply criticized” Israel for its conduct in Gaza. As hard as they have tried, they could no longer ignore the daily slaughter of starving Gazans desperately trying to get food. Over 1,054 have been killed in the area of the aid sites since the Gaza “Humanitarian” Foundation—an Israeli-backed US contractor—seized control and militarized aid distribution on 26 May 2025.

On Tuesday (22 July 2025), UN humanitarians warned that the lifelines keeping people in Gaza alive are collapsing. And on the same day, the last functioning hospitals there reported that 21 children had died in the past three days due to malnutrition and starvation. Israel’s cruelty has no end.

Billie Holiday’s lamentation about resilience and the endurance of the human spirit—“God bless the child that’s got his own…that’s got his own”—is urgently felt for everyone in Palestine, especially for the children.