The Palestinian Boy Who Hated Israeli Soldiers Dies at Their Hands
Mundar al-Raee stands before the fresh new portrait of Milad, his late 15-year-old son, painted by a cousin ont his home’s outer wall.
He wasn’t an ordinary boy, taking after his father in that regard. He dreamed of becoming a musician, like his dad, or a soccer player, like Ronaldo. But above all, he couldn’t abide the presence of the Israeli soldiers who invaded the refugee camp that was his home; day and night they were there, maintaining a siege of the camp 24/7 from a fortified tower at its entrance. At some point early this year he even wrote a letter to the Israeli soldiers, which now reads like the last will and testament of a youth who knew he was going to die. He asked that the letter not be shown to his parents in his lifetime – and he was just 15. Last week, his father framed the letter, which is in the boy’s handwriting and filled with erasures and corrections. It now serves as a memorial for the boy who hated the soldiers.
The father is also a special person. A Palestinian singer who performs around the world, he makes no attempt to conceal the hatred his son bore for the soldiers. He also says that it’s definitely possible that his son threw a Molotov cocktail at the wall of the tower, as the army maintains. While most bereaved Palestinian parents try to blur the actions of their children and present them as having done nothing, Mundar al-Raee obscures nothing.
Milad may have thrown a firebomb at the tower, but there is definitely no doubt that he didn’t endanger the life and security of the armored soldiers high up in the looming tower. The walls of the private homes next to the tower, and the tower wall itself, are scorched from Molotov cocktails that were thrown here in the past, hurting no one and causing no material damage. This is also the protest routine in the densely crowded refugee camp, to which the soldiers lay siege from the tower and sometimes snipe at boys, killing them in cold blood, the way they killed Milad.
The façade of his father’s home, in the heart of the Al-Arroub refugee camp between Bethlehem and Hebron, is now adorned with a huge, bleak close-up painting of Milad’s face. The wall painting, the work of Milad’s cousin, Mohammed al-Raee, 25, isn’t finished; it lacks the text that will be inserted below it, which will be taken from Milad’s letter.