Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
31 July
MASS KIDNAP OF YEMENI JEWISH CHILDREN
On this day in 2016, Israeli Minister Hanegbi admits “hundreds” of Yemeni infants have been stolen from their mothers, who were told their children had died so that the infants could be given to European Ashkenazi Jewish parents for adoption. 5,000 children of Arab and Balkan Jews disappeared during 1948-54. Hanegbi told Israeli TV, "They took the children and gave them away. I don't know where." "Forcible transfer" of children from one ethnic group to another meets one UN criterion for the crime of genocide.
اختطاف أعداد هائلة من الأطفال اليهود اليمنيين
٣١ يوليو
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام ٢٠١٦ ، اعترف الوزير الإسرائيلي هنغبي "مئات" الاطفال اليمنيين الذين سُرقوا من أمهاتهم ، واللاتي قيل لهن أن أطفالهن قد ماتوا حتى يمكن إعطاء الرضّع لليهود الأشكناز الأوروبيين للتبني. اختفى ٥٠٠٠ طفل من اليهود العرب والبلقان خلال ١٩٤٨-٥٤. وقال هنغبي للتلفزيون الإسرائيلي "أخذوا الأطفال وارسلوهم. لا أعرف الى اين". "النقل القسري" للأطفال من مجموعة عرقية لأخرى يتفق مع تعريف الأمم المتحدة لجريمة الإبادة الجماعية.
The Yemenite, Mizrahi and Balkan Children Affair is the kidnapping and disappearance of thousands of toddlers from families of new immigrants, mostly from Yemen, but also from Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco, The Balkans and other countries, mostly in the 1950’s. The parents were told that their children had died, but they never saw a body nor grave.
The facts behind the Yemenite children’s affair are clear for all to see. Hundreds of testimonies by parents of children who disappeared tell a similar story: the children were taken away from their parents, often by force, and some of them never returned. Parents were not allowed to make decisions or receive medical information regarding their children. The death notices they received from hospitals were never backed by medical explanations, documents, or bodies. Parents who demanded to see their dead child were aggressively sent away.
Two sisters have just reunited after 67 years. They were separated in the Yemenite Children Affair...a scandal that has ripped apart thousands of Israeli families. From 1948 to 1954, hundreds of newborn babies and toddlers began to disappear. They were the children of Yemenite and Mizrahi immigrants. More than 1 thousand families all report nearly identical stories...that they went to the hospital to either give birth or do a check-up on their children, and then their babies disappeared. At the time, state authorities claimed the babies had died and had already been buried, but until today, these families believe their children are still alive, and were either given or sold to Ashkenazi Jewish families- many of which were Holocaust survivors that couldn’t have children of their own.
"Whitening" children was common in all settler colonial projects, for example in Canada
Canada’s centuries-long drive to eradicate its native peoples - children forcibly taken from their families on reserves and sent to the government-sponsored boarding school the Sisters of Charity staffed for close to four decades. Former students of the Shubenacadie Residential School tell of being beaten, physically scarred for speaking their native language, forbidden from communicating with siblings, humiliated for wetting the bed and whipped with leather cat tails if they attempted to escape.
Trauma of Australia’s Indigenous ‘Stolen Generations’ is still affecting children today
Indigenous children in Australia who live in families that experienced forced separations in much of the twentieth century are more likely than other Indigenous children to have poor health and negative school experiences, according to a landmark government report.
As many as one in three Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were taken from their families and communities between 1910 and the 1970s, under racist government policies that tried to force Aboriginal people to assimilate with white Australians. The children were brought up in institutions or foster homes, or were adopted by white families. The Australian government formally apologized to members of these ‘Stolen Generations’ in 2008.
US's Indian boarding schools “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
That was the mindset under which the U.S. government forced tens of thousands of Native American children to attend “assimilation” boarding schools in the late 19th century. Decades later, those words—delivered in a speech by U.S. cavalry captain Richard Henry Pratt, who opened the first such school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania—have come to symbolize the brutality of the boarding school system.
Since there was no more Western territory to push them towards, the U.S. decided to remove Native Americans by assimilating them. In 1885, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price explained the logic: “it is cheaper to give them education than to fight them.”
