Zionists and their Western backers tell us they regret the deaths of women and, especially, children during operations against Hamas. They mourn these deaths—solemnly, responsibly—and urge us to understand that such tragedies are, sadly, unavoidable.
But make no mistake: they are asserting a right. A right to kill children.
They do not deny the killing. They justify it. They call it tragic, yes—but righteous. Necessary. Moral.
So let us be clear. Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Yoav Gallant, Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, Donald Trump—to name only the most prominent—all claim this right. They need not pull the trigger or press the button that releases the 2,000-pound bomb that rips apart and burns a child. They command, fund, arm, and shield those who do. They are child killers not by hand, but by policy and government. That is more than enough to make them child killers on a scale dwarfing the vilest abusers and killers of children in society at large.
But they are righteous child killers. Let us not forget that.
To question their righteousness is to invite comparison with terrorists, Nazis, and the monsters that stalk society—those who kill children wrongly.
Because the world, it seems, is now divided into two kinds of child killers: the righteous, and the wicked.
Golda Meir once said:
“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”
It was a line of great pathos—and of monstrous moral inversion. The coloniser mourns not the children they have killed, but the burden of having to kill them. They do not ask why they were resisted; they ask only that we recognise their suffering as they slaughter the children of the colonised.
But let us turn the lens.
Perhaps one of the worst evils that Zionists have visited upon Palestinians is not only that they have killed their children by the tens of thousands over the decades of colonisation, but that they have forced Palestinians to kill Israeli children.
Not because Palestinians wished it. Not because their cause requires it, as with Zionism. But because their resistance, made necessary by dispossession, is condemned to operate under the brutal logic Zionism has imposed—where violence begets violence, and the humanity of the oppressed must claw for breath in a world that denies its legitimacy.
There is no righteousness in the killing of children. Not by resistance movements. Not by states. It is a moral catastrophe. But when it happens, we must be honest about where responsibility lies. The crime is not only the act—it is the system that makes the act seem inevitable.
And that is Zionism’s greatest sin:
Not only to kill the children of the people it oppresses,
but to make the oppressed kill in return—
and then to weep louder than the dead.
David Ben-Gurion, the founding father of the Zionist state, once said:
“If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.”
What kind of politics begins with the willingness to sacrifice half of Jewish children to establish a state? What kind of ethics does such a state produce?
It produces one in which child killing is accepted as righteous—so long as it serves the national project.
And what of the resistance? Hamas and other Palestinian movements have killed Israeli children. They must be held accountable for those acts. There is no resistance so righteous that it can sanctify the death of a child.
Yet that accountability must be precise: it does not negate the justice of the cause they serve, nor does it align them morally with the states and empires they resist. It holds them to the ethical demands that all just struggles must honour. To betray those demands is not to betray the cause itself, but to betray the moral terms under which that cause must be fought.
When resistance movements kill children, they commit a wrong. But the greater crime lies with those who made the resistance necessary. The death of an Israeli child at the hands of a Palestinian fighter is not righteous. But it is not born of hatred or doctrine. It is born of Zionism.
There is no moral symmetry between occupier and occupied, coloniser and colonised. And yet we must insist on moral clarity: the killing of children must be condemned, especially by those who fight for freedom. But we must also condemn—even more forcefully—the systems that drive people to the point where such acts are imaginable. Because in the end, when the measure of morality becomes whether child killing is intentional or merely necessary, we have already abandoned the children.