Paul Haeder, Author

All Wars are Wars Against Children and Motherhood

by Paul Haeder / March 6th, 2026

One day, March 8, International Women’s Day just doesn’t do justice for most girls on planet earth in the global south who will not reach womanhood.

Example:

The Israeli-American strike on a school that killed at least 180 children, most of them girls aged between 7 and 12, on the first day of the illegal war on Iran was deliberate.

The Shajereh Tayyebeh (The Good Tree) school in the city of Minab, in Hormozgan province of Iran, near the Strait of Hormuz, started as an institution primarily to serve the children of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy personnel.

These children were killed in a “double tap” strike, with the second missile fired killing sheltering survivors, two first responders, and the parent of a child killed.

“When the first bomb hit the school, one of the teachers and the principal moved a group of students to the prayer hall to protect them,” a Red Crescent medic said. “The principal called the parents and told them to come and pick up their children. But the second bomb hit that area as well. Only a small number of those who had taken shelter survived.”

Do you want a new vocabulary dredged from the genocide in Gaza? “Educide” is the systematic destruction of education during genocide.

Planned bombing of not just colleges but primary and high schools by the Israeli apartheid state are designed to create a chilling reality: (1) disruption of schooling; (2) illiteracy and educational decline; (3) lack of resources for learning; (4) decline in academic motivation; (5) psychological and emotional impact; (6) makeshift learning attempts; (7) generational implications of lost education.

How about celebrating this powerful woman who stuck her neck out more than 100 years ago.

The founder of Save the Children, Eglantyne Jebb, understood that wars are wars against children . . . against motherhood . . . against sisterhood . . . against aunthood. In 1919, following the atrocities toward children in the First World War, she created Save the Children. Her aim was to recognize and protect the rights of all children worldwide. For her time, her views were far from mainstream.

Jebb also knew that children are significantly at risk during violent conflicts. She once said, “All wars, whether just or unjust, disastrous or victorious, are waged against the child.”

In 1919, the 35-year-old Eglantyne Jebb began handing out leaflets in Trafalgar Square after seeing horrifying newspaper photos of starving children in Europe. Although a ceasefire was declared on November 11, 1918, Allied troops continued to impose a blockade against enemy ports, restricting their access to essential supplies. As a result, famine threatened more than three million children in Europe.

“The child must be the first to receive relief in times of distress.”

What do we get now in this upside-down world of the US arming and facilitating Israel in their carpet bombing of Tehran and in Gaza?

The Israeli general who headed military intelligence on October 7, 2023, said 50 Palestinians must die for every person killed that day, and “it does not matter now if they are children.” This is what Israelis hear broadcast by Israel’s Channel 12 TV station.

Aharon Haliva said the toll in Gaza, which he put at more than 70,000 dead, was “necessary” as a “message to future generations” of Palestinians.

“They need a Nakba every now and then to feel the price,” he added, referring to the mass expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands after the creation of Israel in 1948. Nakba means catastrophe in Arabic.

You want another word for your genocide crossword puzzle?  Gaza is in ruins. So is its education system. Scholasticide. The Israeli Occupation Forces have destroyed or damaged all schools and education facilities in Gaza.

Today, instead of going back to school, like most children around the world, 660,000 girls and boys in Gaza will be sifting through the rubble, desperate, hungry, traumatized, and mostly bereaved.

As noted above, the longer they stay out of school with their trauma, the higher the risk they become a “lost generation,” sowing the seeds for more hatred and violence.

Even finding solace from religious leaders is impossible. Here, another word for this deadly crime of genocide: epistemicide. This is what I study and read: Epistemicide is being carried out on a vast scale, designed to erase all knowledge originating in Palestine or relating to it, any alternative knowledge to the official war narrative.

This term was coined by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a Portuguese sociologist, as he focused on the annihilation of alternate knowledge forms by dominant, usually Western, paradigms. It is a tool of colonialism that erases culture and erodes the legitimacy of marginalized voices.

Modern science is based on a practice of professional and social technical division of labour and on the infinite technological development of the productive forces, of which capitalism is today the only example. Alternative social practices generate alternative forms of knowledge. Not to recognise these forms of knowledge implies delegitimising the social practices that support them and, in this sense, promoting the social exclusion of those who promote them. The genocide that so often characterises European expansion was also epistemicide: strange peoples were eliminated because they also had strange forms of knowledge, and these strange forms of knowledge were eliminated because they were based on strange social practices and strange peoples. But epistemicide has been much more widespread than genocide because it has always claimed to subalternise, subordinate, marginalise or illegalise social practices and groups that might pose a threat to capitalist expansion, or for much of our century to communist expansion (in this respect as modern as capitalism), and also because it happened in the peripheral and extra-North American space of the world system as well as in the central European and North American space, against workers, indigenous people, black people, women and minorities in general (ethnic, religious, sexual).

The new paradigm considers epistemicide as one of the great crimes against humanity.

Women heroes: League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) is leading campaigns for an immediate ceasefire and a halt to military support for Israel, with a focus on documenting testimonies from Gaza.

Francesca Albanese is the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, who has consistently called for a “suspension of all ties with Israel” until the “Gaza genocide” ends. She has accused the UK and other Western nations of enabling the situation through military and diplomatic support.

This might not be pretty reading, but for the-now-past International Women’s Day, I encourage you all to study: “Femi-genocide,” which is what experts have highlighted based on reports of sexual assault and humiliation of Palestinian women in detention.

And, finally, we have “Reproductive Genocide”: Activists have drawn attention to the specific targeting of pregnant women, the destruction of hospitals, and the lack of access to medical care.

Mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, daughters, and BFF’s stand strong and join in teaching your boys and men in your lives to respect women, to learn about your contributions to humankind, and to respect your vitality as birth-givers. It is a matter of life and death for the planet.