The mother in our story didn’t just look away; she said nothing when her precious children hijacked planes, over and over throughout the sixties and seventies, forcing pilots at gunpoint to land in the desert while the world watched as hostages were paraded on television. She did nothing when they walked into the 1972 Munich Olympics and murdered eleven athletes on live television, or when they massacred dozens of civilians at Lod Airport that same year.
She cheered and showered them with applause and money the first time they spilled blood, and instead of pulling back, she leaned in closer. So they escalated. A hijacking became mass hostage-taking, hostages became dead children, and she still didn’t flinch; she just found a bigger stage to applaud from. So they escalated again. A bus became buses, a bombing became a rhythm, weekly, monthly, a new city every time the last one stopped making headlines, and instead of drawing a line, she handed out bigger rewards to match the bigger crimes, as if atrocity and prize were meant to grow together. So they escalated. Stabbings, ramming, bombs, rockets, restaurants, discotheques, hotels, buses, cafes, decade after decade, and every single time the violence scaled up, so did the reward. She never once reached for punishment. She reached, every single time, for something bigger to give.
(photo credit: REUTERS/Ahmed Jadallah)