I don’t know about you, but as a child I loved drawing sunsets on the sea, bees with funny smiley smins, seagulls in flight in the clouds. Simple and carefree scenes. Just as the childhood of each of us should be. Too bad that not very far from Italy, in a strip of earth tormented and forgotten by the world, children no longer draw butterflies or fluttering bees or fairy tales or clear skies.
On the sheets of Children and girls from Gaza There are tanks, rubble houses, lifeless bodies wrapped in sheets. To the children of Gaza, childhood was torn away, annihilated by bombs and hunger (yet another weapon used by Israel). On those sheets There is the chronicle of a genocide that world leaders are continuing to look live with a disconcerting hypocrisy And without moving a finger (indeed making himself complicit in the genocide by continuing to do business and sell weapons to the Israeli state).
Last weekend I visited the itinerant exhibition “Heart of Gaza – Children’s Art From The Genocide”, Organized in Riposto, in the hamlet of Torre Archirafi (in the province of Catania), on the initiative of the Giarre/Ripostina Committee for Palestine together with other local associations (the Agorà Cultural Association, Article 1, new voices, Coordination of women Ionian area Etnea, Convention of the Mediterranean Rights, Anpi Section Giarre/Riposto, CGIL, nobody is a foreigner, Gru, another story APS, Parish of the Archirafi Torre. Nicuzza). And I was displaced by crudeness, mixed with the poetry, of the 40 designs protagonists of the exhibition born from an idea of the Palestinian Mohammed Timraz and the Irish Féile Butler, who gave birth to the Artists’ tent, A space that has become a refuge for the children of Gaza and a place to express their emotions through art.
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As I walked to admire those drawings, I felt helpless, but above all lucky to have had a happy childhood and not to have been born from the wrong part of the world. Those designs are a silent cry: of anger, fear, anguish, desolation. But what unites them is a visceral love towards their land and their people. And the strength to resist, despite everything.
“Those, those who have neither right nor name and an entity, try to occupy what is not them, but will never be able to take our land. Palestine is for the Palestinians only and will remain for eternity” writes Basent, 12 years old, in the caption of his design that shows the Israeli soldiers who devastate Palestine with bombs and tanks.
“Surrounded by tanks from every corner … my father, my relatives killed … I was left alone. I called my mother and the red cross. Don’t forget Hind in this war.” The 15 -year -old Misk tells, referring to the desolate story of the little Hind Rajab, the 6 -year -old Palestinian girl, who tried to ask for help from the car gone by the shots of an Israeli tank and who was then found lifeless.
These drawings are a punch in the stomach and leave speechless. But we cannot remain silent while those children and girls shout help.
