 Israel is afraid of kitesFor decades, Gaza’s children have filled the sky with kites. Israel now calls them an “act of war.”Resistance Archives and N. Dhakara   READ IN APP For decades, the children of Gaza have flown kites.In 2009, thousands of Palestinian children gathered on a beach in northern Gaza and broke the world record for simultaneous kite flying. They did it again in 2010.In 2011, 12,350 kites filled Gaza’s sky, breaking the Guinness World Record once again. Palestinian children attend a kite festival organized by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in which they attempt to break the Guinness world record for the largest number of kites flown simultaneously, July 28, 2011.For children growing up under genocide, kite flying became an extraordinary expression of an extremely ordinary thing: childhood.During the 2018 Great March of Return, the kite took on another meaning. As Palestinians marched toward the fences that confined them to Gaza and demanded their right to return to the lands from which their families had been expelled, some transformed kites and balloons into tools of resistance.Against one of the most technologically advanced militaries on earth, Palestinians used paper, string, cloth, and fire.Now, Israel is threatening military force over kites. This weekend, four kites crossed from Gaza. Israel’s own military acknowledged that nothing “suspicious” was attached to them and that they posed no danger.Zionist Defence Minister Israel Katz ordered the military to “act immediately and forcefully,” declaring every launch an “act of war.” He said, “A balloon is treated like a kite, and a kite is treated like a drone — with or without explosives.” This is the logic of Zionist domination laid bare.When a population has been dispossessed, blockaded, bombed, and confined for generations, even the most ordinary expressions of life become reimagined as security threats: A march becomes an invasion. A fence approached by indigenous refugees becomes a border under attack. A child becomes a combatant. A paper kite becomes a drone.There could hardly be a more grotesque image of the relationship between colonizer and colonized: one side possesses fighter jets, drones and one of the world’s most sophisticated surveillance systems; the other flies paper into the sky.The children of Gaza have been flying kites for generations.Perhaps what frightens a colonial state is not the kite itself, but the insistence of Palestinians, even among the rubble, on continuing to live beneath it.The Resistance Archives is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Upgrade to paid |
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