Poets Speak of Impact of War on the Youth

For Gaza’s Children: Black, Brown, and Jewish Writers and Poets Speak Out
Marc Lamont Hill, Haki R. Madhubuti and Keith Gilyard, Editors
Third World Press Foundation, 196 pages, 2025.

What they don’t tell you
What’s not recorded for news
Is the screaming drowned
Out by bombs that rattle bones
Burst eardrums steal parent’s breath.

• -From “Gaza Suite” by Tony Medina

The words from Medina’s poem “Gaza Suite” make clear how the sounds of war remain etched in the minds of parents who have lost their children in the Gaza War. Marc Lamont Hill, Haki R. Madhubuti, and Keith Gilyard, editors of For Gaza’s Children: Black, Brown, and Jewish Writers and Poets Speak Out (Third World Press Foundation, 2025), have compiled a powerful collection of essays and poems that provide personal stories, observations, and historical documentation of the impact of the war in Gaza on its children.

As Haki Madhubuti states in his opening essay, “Dare to Accurately Name the Horror of Gaza,”, “. .. it is often the poets who bring clarity, who warn us to think beyond the possibility of one’s own life and death.”
For Gaza’s Children is divided into three sections, each section containing approximately twelve essays and poems depicting the complexity, history, impact, and harrowing details of the war on the children of both Israel and Palestine.

As of May 25, 2025, more than 50,000 children have reportedly been killed or injured since October 2023. Images and videos of burned and dismembered children are part of a list of unimaginable horrors that we continue to witness as we view the effects of this war. ‘Unimaginable horrors’: more than 50,000 children reportedly killed or injured in the Gaza Strip.

Hill’s essay “The Denial of Palestinian Childhood,” reminds readers that the attacks on Gaza’s children must be measured in trauma as well as in death and injury. He adds that schools, universities, libraries, museums, and monuments have all been destroyed in what is in essence a conscious attempt to erase the history and culture of the Palestinian people.

Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP) opens her essay by describing how in July 2014, an Israeli gunboat fired at a group of Palestinian boys playing soccer on a beach outside of the hotel where she was staying. She notes that the Israeli response following the investigation of this attack was “the attack process in question accorded with Israeli domestic law and international law requirements.”

Award-winning novelist, short story writer, poet, and activist Alice Walker reminds us that women are very much a part of the resistance in the Gaza War. The speaker in her poem “Talking to Hamas” expresses surprise upon learning that the dreaded terrorist that she has been told to fear is actually Huda Naim, a woman with whom she has spoken with about wanting a sane world for the children. Brian Gilmore, a poet and public interest lawyer posits the complicity of the United States in prolonging the war.

He points out that the last 75 years of Palestinian history would have been different if America had pulled back its support.

After being called an anti-Semite by a Jewish person for comparing the situation in Israel to the Native Americans in the United States and citing it as settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing, Gilmore conducted research by academic historians and scholars who knew the history of the conflict.

His findings and his friendships with Palestinians, Jewish people, and others affirmed his belief that many young people from various backgrounds: Jewish, Palestinian, Arab American, Asian, and Latino were in support of the Palestinian struggle for equal justice, peace, and human rights in the world.

A major outcome of this book is that support of the struggle in Palestine does not mean that one is anti-Semitic. Hip hop activist and writer Talib Kweli Greene reiterates this in his essay, “The Sin of Neutrality or the Tail of the Mouse.” He states:
As hate crimes against Jewish people to continue to rise, I will continue to stand in solidarity with Jewish communities against all anti-Jewish ideology and action. I also continue to support a free Palestine and I always will. These are not mutually exclusive concepts.

Scholar, poet, and short story writer Keith Gilyard also emphasizes this in the Addendum of For Gaza’s Children. He argues that we must recognize anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism as false equivalents. Expressing opposition to the Zionist project espoused by people such as Herzl and Ben-Gurion is to reject a policy and proposal of conquest.

This is not anti-Semitism. Speaking out against mass deportation of immigrants who have followed the rules of law, denying free speech to immigrants and all Americans, and critiquing Islamophobia, and xenophobia does not equate to anti-Semitism. People who speak for the children and against the war in Gaza have refused to be silent and are human rights advocates for peace and social justice throughout the world.

For Gaza’s Children: Black, Brown, and Jewish Writers and Poets Speak Out is a poignant reminder of our responsibility for the children from a diverse range of scholars, poets, and public intellectuals.

Dr. Brenda M. Greene is Professor of English and Founder and Executive Director Emeritus of the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, CUNY.