How 8-year-old Lebanese child Fawaz shattered Ben Gurion’s 76-year-old fallacy

By Lama Al-Makhour

"This is War" was the title of a translated book I read during my second year at university.

It was a gray book about the Middle Ages, detailing the wars of the Romans, Italians, Carthaginians, and others. It explored the art of bitter sarcasm in political, human, and social thought—a history of wars stripped of their bloodshed.

In these tales, it doesn’t matter how or why you kill, loot, or destroy. What truly matters is the outcome of your hurricane, aimed at anyone who dares to stand in your way. The world becomes a mass of megalomania, consumed by the usurpation of rights and lands.

This is what we studied in history books, in Historical Conquests and the Art of Changing Geography. Yet, I am not here to write about historical philosophies cloaked under lofty names, taught in universities, and shelved as what the "world reads to become cultured."

What we witness today—what nearly splits the heavens and earth with its horror—is the so-called "holiness" of Zionism’s wars, purportedly sanctioned by the “Lord.”

The extreme right-wingers, in particular, do not need the "Holy Book" to justify the numerous victims—children and women alike—laid on the altar of their so-called "glorious Sabbath."

David Ben-Gurion, less than a decade after the illegitimate Israeli entity was established, during his stint as the Israeli prime minister in 1948, led the Nakba (what Zionist cheerleaders call the “War of Independence”). He said: "The old die and the young forget."

The Zionist entity embraced this belief as a philosophical and political tenet, later weaponizing it as a religious doctrine to lure Jews worldwide into the quagmire of these genocides.

Meanwhile, our elders surrendered their memories only after their souls. Our children, however, learn from the cradle that the memory of the land rests firmly in their hands.

In the middle of the night of September 29, an Israeli air raid targeted the house of Ali al-Jawhari in Hermel, Lebanon, claiming his life along with his wife, Sahar, and their two sons, Mohammed and Shadi, as well as their youngest child, Fawaz.

Only Hussein, the eldest family member, and Qamar, the family’s only daughter and my childhood friend, survived the attack.

Or perhaps it is the martyrs who truly survived—the war of consciousness, the consciousness of blood. I write for Fawaz, the eight-year-old boy whose life was brutally and abruptly cut short.

Since the beginning of the ‘support front’ for Gaza in Lebanon, the Israeli entity repeatedly threatened to extend the genocidal war to Lebanon if the Hezbollah resistance movement did not separate the arenas of Palestine and Lebanon, knowing well the capability of Hezbollah.

Despite these threats, we, the people of Lebanon, raised no white flag. We stood for Gaza, enduring bloodshed and attempts to erase our memories and homeland. We refused to pledge allegiance to shame or its Arab and Western promoters.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah knew his men as well as he knew his children. He knew Fawaz, just as he knew every man in southern Lebanon, ready with a finger on the trigger.

This truth was evident in a video clip where Fawaz’s sister asked him if he was afraid of Israel’s bombing of Hermel in retaliation for Lebanon’s support of Gaza. Smiling, Fawaz responded, "We will not stop the war from Lebanon until the war on Gaza stops. This is what Sayyed said."

However, both Sayyed and Fawaz left holding the banner of truth – advancing, not retreating.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s tons of explosives could not silence Fawaz's powerful voice. The hatred and oppression meant to destroy the resistance and its leaders failed to extinguish their cause.

Did Ben-Gurion ever imagine that a Lebanese child would shatter his flimsy theory 75 years after the establishment of the illegitimate Zionist entity? His vision of Saturdays used to justify criminal military orders now falters before the memory that cannot be erased by catastrophes from the sea to the river.

Fawaz may never have read Ben-Gurion's theory, but he embodies the consciousness of blood—a legacy of resistance that no ash of destruction can smother.

As Tamim Al-Barghouti writes in his poem My Soul is a Sacrifice: "I know that you do not fear a living child, but I truly call upon you to fear the dead children."

Our children know you, Zionists. They frighten you in life and haunt you in death. Fawaz, the Lebanese child, shattered decades of Zionist beliefs and fallacies. 

Most importantly, Fawaz died as a martyr, like all free souls. He carried the thorns of injustice, cast them into the fire, and surrendered his spirit, untainted by the vulgarity of this world.

Lama Al-Makhour is a Lebanese writer who lost several family members and friends in the recent Israeli aggression against her country.

This article was originally written in Arabic and translated into English by Roya Pour Bagher.

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