Bahraini children will take part in a festival on July 25 featuring seven Palestinian children. The fest is designed to support the Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, against 34 years of Israeli occupation, in which nearly 100 Palestinian children have been killed.
The Palestinian youngsters will be visiting Bahrain to express their appreciation for a heartfelt booklet, entitled A Letter to a Palestinian Child, which was written by Bahraini children and sent to them earlier, according to Gulf Daily News.
The gathering, under the patronage of the National Committee for the Support of the Intifada, will be jointly conducted by Alumni Clubs Future Kid Committee and the Isa Town Club.
Their visit will include the festival, which will feature plays and meetings between the children of Bahrain and Palestine, as well as fun and educational trips around Bahrain.
Committee member Badriya Ali said the festival would be a huge support for the suffering children of Palestine.
The meeting will bring together Bahraini children and their Palestinian siblings to discuss one of the most horrendous stories of suffering Arab children are going through, she said.
They will come together to show their support for their strength and bravery and strong will to resist an enemy which is oppressing them and threatening their existence and that of their parents every day, she added.
At the festival, the Palestinian children will perform a play and show a movie, which they will bring with them from Palestine, featuring scenes of their people’s plight.
Amnesty International reported this spring that Israeli troops had killed nearly 100 Palestinian children.
Although the Israeli military and diplomatic corps have repeatedly tried to label the children a “smokescreen” for armed Palestinian adults in demonstrations, the UN commission that probed the origins of the uprising concluded that “The insistence of the [Israel Defense Forces] that the Palestinian demonstrators, humiliated by years of military occupation which has become part of their culture and upbringing, have been organized and orchestrated by the Palestinian Authority, either shows an ignorance of history or cynical disregard for the overwhelming weight of the evidence.”
NGO worker Monica Tarazi earlier told Albawaba.com that Palestinian refugee children “have never played on grass; their playgrounds are the alleyways of their refugee camps. They have witnessed their older siblings and cousins being hauled off to…prisons, not to return for months or years, and they have heard about the torture they endured there.”
Moreover, according to another NGO worker, Catherine Cook, “First, it is imperative to note, that while children do participate in demonstrations, the actual percentage of children who participate regularly is around one percent of the population, according to UNICEF.
“The phenomenon of children’s participation has been inflated and inflamed by the international media,” said Cook, the public relations officer for Defence for Children International’s Palestine Section (DCI/PS).
“According to DCI/PS documentation, approximately 1/3 of the children killed in the first three months of the Intifada were not participating in any confrontation with Israeli military sources at the time of their death.”
“Children are not physically forced to take to the streets in protest, she told Albawaba.com. “It is the logical outcome of coupling the energy of youth with being part of an oppressed population.”
“They see their parents unemployed, family members in jail, they face travel restrictions. Going to school or work each day is often difficult. They are part of a larger community that is suffering and like most people in that community, they feel they need to do something to end the cause of that suffering.” – Albawaba.com
