These were the children to whom Ang decided she would commit her life. In the massacre’s aftermath, some days she roamed the camp looking for familiar faces; one afternoon, “someone small threw his arms around” her. It was Mahmoud, a boy she had treated for a wrist broken while helping his father rebuild their home, weeks prior. Now, Mahmoud was crying. He had, from his hiding place, watched the soldiers take Ang away. They had killed his father. And he’d worried they’d killed her, too.
The back cover of From Beirut to Jerusalem includes a photograph of children with messy hair and goofy smiles, one’s head mischievously poking through a pair of touching, tanned arms. They had gathered around Ang, asking for a picture. As she focused her camera, “they all held up their hands and made victory signs, right in front of their destroyed homes, where many had been killed.” Theirs was a learned response. The world beyond the camps showed these children a future that refused their place in it. So, these children refused this world. In a letter to her husband that evening, Ang wrote, “I looked into the face of death and have seen its power and ugliness, but I have also looked into its eyes, and seen its fear. For our children are coming, and they are not afraid.”
“Our children.” I have seen in the past many months these words circulating from James Baldwin, that “the children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe.” (Baldwin was writing for The Nation about a selection of presidential candidates—Reagan and Carter—“as well equipped to run the world as [he was] to run a post office.”) His paragraph about children continues, “we, the elders, are the only models children have. What we see in the children is . . . what they see in us.” The children of the camps saw modeled, in the adults who loved them, how a person might be, and the beginning of a different world. And Ang, watching these children, understood what they had seen, what and whom Palestine was for. {read}